<Nature Artificielle>
Series on Arnold Gehlen
To start my first series of a philosopher of technology, I choose Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) who still has interesting takes on this matter. Being one of the founding fathers of Western philosophical anthropology, he wrote a lot of essays on socio-psychological issues that stem from our industrialised society.
His dominant theme that seems to underpin his body of works is the human as a deficient being. The whole human culture is just a product of deficient characteristics of the human body that forced us to adapt by acting in accordance with intellect. Consequently, the whole of technology becomes a necessity for the human race to compensate for organic deficiencies.
Being active becomes an existential necessity and techniques evolved to help us act upon nature in order to survive. Gehlen describes three categories for such techniques:
- Supplementation: techniques that are not possible due to our organic deficiency, for example, making fire.
- Potentiation: augmenting an existing skill with a tool, for example, hitting something with a stone is more efficient than with the bare hand.
- Relief: making existing organic characteristics unnecessary, for example, a cart that allows us to not haul anything anymore.
The resulting world of technology is then for Gehlen the “big human” as a mere copy of humans becoming the nature artificielle.
After describing this, Gehlen continues with predicting trends that evolve from this substitution of the organic. On one hand, synthetic ones increasingly replaced organically grown material, for example, evolving from wood to metal. For good reason, we started describing technological periods of the past as Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc. All these marked technological bumps.
On the other hand, there is a trend from organic forces to synthetic ones. Switching first to coal and oil, which are still at least remains of organic life but continuing by producing electricity with hydropower and nuclear energy completely replacing the organic materials. From these two, Gehlen concludes the clear trend of replacing the organic itself.
Since it’s been some years since he wrote about this, I’m wondering if this trend still exists. The newest tool that replaces more and more even our cognitive skills is, of course, the computer. The dream of artificial intelligence that should be able to perform any human task without us fuels us. Even though the two described trends are still visible, one could ask if digitalisation is now the third trend. Everything, even our consciousness itself, reduced to a physical process, is part of the higher arching goal. However, transferring our mind into a machine somehow is again a synthesization process of the “natural”. What do you think?
