Technology through Objectification

Series on Arnold Gehlen

Created by the author in NightCafeStudio

In the last report, I sketched Gehlen’s thoughts on the human attraction towards automatism in nature and how we have a need for environmental stability that goes with it. He described all this as a resonance phenomenon of humans understanding themselves better through the externalisation of their own automatic way of being.

This time, I’d like to go deeper into this process of externalisation as a form of objectification for our environment. Gehlen calls it a “deeper bond” towards rhythmic, periodic, and self-sufficient external processes. He uses this bond to explain our natural drive component.

Objectification of Labour

We already discussed how technology throughout history was not only used to potentiate our actions but finally also relieve us completely from the burden of the task at hand. The example mentioned there was the invention of the cart that relieved us from carrying weight ourselves.

Here, however, we go further into the description of what this is all about. Gehlen even argues that this objectification of labour stems actually from a very sensual part of our nature.

To recall: humans are dependent on action due to them being deficient. We have no specialised organic advantage, so we must act upon nature to survive. But that is exactly the origin of our habitual behaviour. The habit of successful actions is the result of trying something and adapting the behaviour accordingly. This means adapting it according to the success or failure of the attempted goal to achieve. More so, this habit over time already results in repeated movements resembling automatism.

This circular motion of action is, according to Gehlen, then the “universal form” of sensual human expression. Maybe that clarifies what sensual means in this context: gathering and evaluating information through our senses. Adapting our behaviour then to the result of an action is the very essence of patterns we evolve in our everyday lives.

The Need to connect with Nature

The above-mentioned resonance phenomenon describes our need to resonate with our surroundings to understand ourselves better. It is a need to project ourselves onto nature while also using nature itself to come back to our processes. That entails then also our natural need to stabilise the environment as much as we try to stabilise our own processes. This results in the need for a disruption-free course of the world: our world in nature.

To summarise and conclude, as action beings being thrown into existence, we evolve the following three processes:

1. We start objectifying our labour to recognise our own internal automatisms.
2. We act along with our tendencies to relieve ourselves to go against helplessness.
3. We create habits by adapting to successes and failures and this, in turn, gives our consciousness the freedom to focus on new things.

Resulting Technology

These human characteristics of the action and our relieving tendencies become then the necessary condition for technological evolution. When tracing this back historically, we get the following three steps:

1. Tools are created as simple aids while we still must perform and evaluate the tasks at hand.
2. Then machines are built to relieve us from physical labour, but the evaluation of tasks is still done by us.
3. To even relieve us from mental labour, we start creating automata.

All this technological evolution becomes in this light a mere technological objectivation of ourselves.

What’s interesting is that we can see here how timely Gehlen’s essays still are. Even though his book mentioned in the sources is already more than 60 years old, a lot of these trends can still be observed. The third step is still the case nowadays. But one could ask, of course, what a fourth step would be or if that would even make sense in this scheme.

When we look at current evolvments it’s remarkable that objectification is just getting more and more complex. With current developments in cognitive sciences and neurology, artificial intelligence simply become automata that should copy every growing part of our mental processes.

In the sense of understanding ourselves better, time will show what the fourth step of this technological evolution will be. Maybe one could argue that replacing the action itself becomes more obvious as soon as AI becomes self-sufficient? It will relieve us from action to find the best way to do something and just find it out on its own. Maybe the fourth step will be the complete immersion of humanity inside technology? I guess that is the whole point of trans-humanism after all. Removing any biological and organic barrier to not be merely such helpless beings thrown into existence. But wouldn’t that remove the basic need for objectification if we become one with the object itself again? Or will a new process start that needs a new scheme of categorising human behaviour?

Source: Man in the Age of Technology I.4, Gehlen