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Arnold Gehlen (29 January 1904 inLeipzig,German Empire – 30 January 1976 inHamburg,West Germany) was an influentialconservative German philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist.[1]
Gehlen's major influences while studying philosophy wereHans Driesch,Nicolai Hartmann and especiallyMax Scheler.Furthermore, he was heavily influenced byImmanuel Kant,Arthur Schopenhauer and US-Americanpragmatism:Charles Sanders Peirce,William James and especiallyGeorge Herbert Mead.
In 1933 Gehlen signed theVow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. Although he joined theNazi Party in 1933 and made a career as a member of the 'Leipzig School' underHans Freyer, he was a political opportunist: his main workDer Mensch appeared in 1940 and was published in English translation in 1987 asMan. His Nature and Place in the World. Gehlen was a modernist conservative who accepted the cultural changes brought about by the industrial revolution and by mass society (see hisMan in the Age of Technology, Chapter V).
Gehlen succeededPaul Tillich, who emigrated to the U.S., at theUniversity of Frankfurt. In 1938 he accepted a teaching position at theUniversity of Königsberg (today'sKaliningrad) and then taught at theUniversity of Vienna in 1940 until he was drafted into theWehrmacht in 1943. After undergoingdenazification he taught at the administrative college inSpeyer. He went on to teach at the RWTH Aachen University between 1962 and 1969. Gehlen became a sharp critic of theprotest movements that developed in the late 1960s.
He was the cousin ofReinhard Gehlen, the founder and president of the West GermanFederal Intelligence Service.[2]
Gehlen's core idea inDer Mensch is that humans have unique properties which distinguish them from all other species: world-openness (de:Weltoffenheit), a concept originally coined byMax Scheler, 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, includingPeter L. Berger,Thomas Luckmann andNiklas Luhmann in sociology, andHans Blumenberg in philosophy.[3] Since the mid-2010s, there has occurred a Gehlen revival based in part on the predictions in his bookMoral 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.[4]
As early as 1952 Gehlen adopted the expressionpost-histoire[5] from the writings ofPaul 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 entitledÜber kulturelle Kristallisation[6] (lit. "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 ofpost-histoire, so that now the adviceGottfried Benn gave the individual, 'Make do with what you have,' is valid for humanity as a whole".[7][8]
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