In this paper we carry out a review to the notion of man as a deficient being, an idea that can be located back in Plato, but one that had an important upsurge in the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of the emergency in Germany of the Philosophical Anthropology. In the first place, we will expose the interpretation of this notion by Ortega and Gehlen, to then turn, in the second place, to Sloterdijk´s critique of this idea. We will finish with a proposal that harmonizes these reflections with the last data provided by paleoanthropology.