Arnold Gehlen (29 January 1904 in
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...
,
German Empire
The German Empire (),Herbert Tuttle wrote in September 1881 that the term "Reich" does not literally connote an empire as has been commonly assumed by English-speaking people. The term literally denotes an empire – particularly a hereditary ...
– 30 January 1976 in
Hamburg
(male), (female) en, Hamburger(s),
Hamburgian(s)
, timezone1 = Central (CET)
, utc_offset1 = +1
, timezone1_DST = Central (CEST)
, utc_offset1_DST = +2
, postal ...
,
West Germany
West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...
) was an influential
conservative
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization i ...
German philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist.
Biography
Gehlen's major influences while studying philosophy were
Hans Driesch
Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch (28 October 1867 – 17 April 1941) was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach. He is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy. He has also ...
,
Nicolai Hartmann
Paul Nicolai Hartmann (; 20 February 1882 – 9 October 1950) was a Baltic German philosopher. He is regarded as a key representative of critical realism and as one of the most important twentieth-century metaphysicians.
Biography
Hartmann was ...
and especially
Max Scheler
Max Ferdinand Scheler (; 22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers,Davis, Zachar ...
.
Furthermore, he was heavily influenced by
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
,
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer ( , ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the prod ...
and US-American
pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...
:
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".
Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...
,
William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...
and especially
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, Sociology, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatism, pragmati ...
.
In 1933 Gehlen signed the ''
''. Although he joined the
Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
in 1933 and made a career as a member of the '
Leipzig School' under
Hans Freyer
Hans Freyer (31 July 1887 – 18 January 1969) was a German conservative revolutionary sociologist and philosopher.
Life
Freyer began studying theology, national economics, history and philosophy at the University of Greifswald in 1907, with the ...
, he was not a Nazi, but rather a political opportunist: his main work ''Der Mensch'' appeared in 1940 and was published in English translation in 1987 as ''Man. His Nature and Place in the World''. In contrast to philosophers such as
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
, it contains not a single passage which can be classified as Nazi ideology. Unlike Heidegger, who was a convinced anti-democrat until his death in 1976, Gehlen, although clearly a conservative thinker, never published any anti-democratic writings. He was a modernist conservative who accepted the cultural changes brought about by the industrial revolution and by mass society (see his ''Man in the age of technology'', Chapter V).
Gehlen succeeded
Paul Tillich
Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran Protestant theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologi ...
, who emigrated to the U.S., at the
University of Frankfurt. In 1938 he accepted a teaching position at the
University of Königsberg
The University of Königsberg (german: Albertus-Universität Königsberg) was the university of Königsberg in East Prussia. It was founded in 1544 as the world's second Protestant academy (after the University of Marburg) by Duke Albert of Prussi ...
(today's
Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad ( ; rus, Калининград, p=kəlʲɪnʲɪnˈɡrat, links=y), until 1946 known as Königsberg (; rus, Кёнигсберг, Kyonigsberg, ˈkʲɵnʲɪɡzbɛrk; rus, Короле́вец, Korolevets), is the largest city and ...
) and then taught at the
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...
in 1940 until he was drafted into the ''
Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previous ...
'' in 1943. After undergoing
denazification
Denazification (german: link=yes, Entnazifizierung) was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by remov ...
he taught at the administrative college in
Speyer
Speyer (, older spelling ''Speier'', French: ''Spire,'' historical English: ''Spires''; pfl, Schbaija) is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany with approximately 50,000 inhabitants. Located on the left bank of the river Rhine, Speyer li ...
. He went on to teach at the
Aachen University of Technology between 1962 and 1969. Gehlen became a sharp critic of the
protest
A protest (also called a demonstration, remonstration or remonstrance) is a public expression of objection, disapproval or dissent towards an idea or action, typically a political one.
Protests can be thought of as acts of coopera ...
movements that developed in the late 1960s.
Main ideas
Gehlen's core idea in ''Der Mensch'' is that humans have unique properties which distinguish them from all other species: world-openness (
:de:Weltoffenheit), a concept originally coined by
Max Scheler
Max Ferdinand Scheler (; 22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers,Davis, Zachar ...
, which describes the ability of humans to adapt to various environments as contrasted with animals, which can only survive in environments which match their evolutionary specialisation. This world-openness gives us the ability to shape our environment according to our intentions, and it comprises a view of language as a way of acting (Gehlen was one of the first proponents of speech act theory), an excess of impulses and the ability of self-control. These properties allow us—in contrast to all other animals—to create our own (for example cultural) environments, though this is also at the risk of a certain self-destabilisation.
Gehlen's philosophy has influenced many contemporary German thinkers in a range of disciplines, including
Peter L. Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger (17 March 1929 – 27 June 2017) was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theor ...
,
Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann (; October 14, 1927 – May 10, 2016) was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany. Born in Jesenice, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Luckmann studied philosophy and linguistics at the Uni ...
and
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann (; ; December 8, 1927 – November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory.
Biography
Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Free State of Prussia, where his father's fa ...
in sociology, and
Hans Blumenberg Hans Blumenberg (born 13 July 1920, Lübeck – 28 March 1996, Altenberge) was a German philosopher and intellectual historian.
He studied philosophy, German studies and the classics (1939–47, interrupted by World War II) and is considered to be ...
in philosophy. Since the mid-2010s, there has occurred a Gehlen revival based in part on the predictions in his book ''Moral und Hypermoral'' as concerns the development of German (and Western) politics from 1969. Two examples of his work - "On culture, nature and naturalness" and "Man and Institutions" - are included in the anthology of conservative social and political thought published by Jerry Z. Muller in 1997.
''Post-histoire''
As early as 1952 Gehlen adopted the expression ''post-histoire'' from the writings of
Paul de Man's uncle, Hendrik de Man, a Belgian socialist thinker who later became a Nazi collaborator. He first used the term to designate an epoch characterized by a state of stability and rigidity, devoid of utopian ideas, change, or development. In 1961, in an article appropriately entitled ''Über kulturelle Kristallisation'' ( "On Cultural Crystallization"), Gehlen wrote: "I am predicting that the history of ideas has come to an end and that we have arrived at the epoch of ''post-histoire'', so that now the advice
Gottfried Benn
Gottfried Benn (2 May 1886 – 7 July 1956) was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951.
Biography and work
Family and beginnings
Go ...
gave the individual, 'Make do with what you have,' is valid for humanity as a whole".
Selected writings
* ''Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt.'' (1940) (Translated as ''Man. His Nature and Place in the World'', Columbia University Press, 1987)
* ''Urmensch und Spätkultur. Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen.'' (1956)
* ''Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter.'' (1957) (Translated as "Man in the age of technology")
* ''Moral und Hypermoral. Eine pluralistische Ethik.'' (1969)
* ''Zeit-Bilder. Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei.'' (1960)
See also
*
Philosophical anthropology
Philosophical anthropology, sometimes called anthropological philosophy, is a discipline dealing with questions of metaphysics and phenomenology of the human person.
History
Ancient Christian writers: Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo wa ...
*
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
References
Further reading
* Berger, Peter L., and Hansfried Kellner. "Arnold Gehlen and the theory of institutions." ''Social Research'' (1965): 110–115
in JSTOR* Weiß, Johannes: ''Weltverlust und Subjektivität. Zur Kritik der Institutionenlehre Arnold Gehlens'', Freiburg im Breisgau, 1973
* Greiffenhagen, Martin. "The Dilemma of Conservatism in Germany." ''Journal of Contemporary History'' (1979): 611–625
in JSTOR* Magerski, Christine. "Arnold Gehlen: Modern art as symbol of modern society." ´´Thesis Eleven. Critical Theory and Historical Sociology´´ (8/2012): 81–96.
* Magerski, Christine,
Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976)" ´´The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology´´, Ed. George Ritzer.
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Gehlen, Arnold
1904 births
1976 deaths
Writers from Leipzig
People from the Kingdom of Saxony
Nazi Party members
German anthropologists
German sociologists
German male writers
German Army personnel of World War II
Leipzig University alumni
Goethe University Frankfurt faculty
University of Königsberg faculty
Academics of the University of Vienna
RWTH Aachen University faculty
20th-century anthropologists
20th-century German philosophers