„Tendenz auf mehr Leben“. Arnold Gehlen als Philosoph

Abstract

“Tendency towards more life.” Arnold Gehlen as a Philosopher - According to Arnold Gehlen, man is defined by a unique biological helplessness and can thus be considered as a perilous being with a “constitutive chance to fail.” Through the latter, the human being is forced to assume a relation to itself; however, not on the basis of a stable naturality, but as the open nature as such. Within the nonfixed and hence unlikely biology of man, reaching as far as the vegetative itself, lies a specific dignity—from it, the question arises how such a monstruous, formless, and fragile being is capable of survival. Gehlen’s philosophy is distinguished by the circumstance that it incorporates the physical conditionality of man and thus demonstrates the necessity for biology to emerge from a sort of positive negativity. Yet, the focus of the present contribution is not primarily the hierarchy of accomplishments, with which man seeks to turn deficiency into the positivity of a quasi-animalistic certitude, but Gehlen’s philosophical insight into the self-surpassing, the surplus of life that has, in nature, developed an extensive formal richness and that has, in man, begun to relate to itself. Such insights place Gehlen into the tradition of Plato’s and, above all, Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology.

Keywords

• arnold gehlen
• philosophical anthropology
• surplus
• self-relation
• friedrich nietzsche