GEHLEN AND THE MACHINE

Another installment of my far from regular series of philosophers and their discussion of technology. You can see previous installments here.

This time: Arnold Gehlen, from Man in the Age of Technology (1957). The following is from the first chapter of this book, entitled “Man and Technique”. Gehlen uses the German term ‘Tecknik’ (translated as ‘technique’) in much the same way Heidegger uses the term ‘technology’, to include both our tools and machines, and our various scienfitic and engineering methods and procedures that help us organize and structure our environment.

If by technique we understand the capacities and means whereby man puts nature into his own service, by identifying nature’s properties and laws in order to exploit them and to control their interaction, clearly technique, in this highly general sense, is part and parcel of man’s very essence. It truely mirrors man– like man himself it is clever, it represents something intrinsically improbable, it bears a complex and twisted relationship to nature.

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Like man, [technique] is inventive, resourceful, life-fostering and at the same time life-destroying, involved with primeval nature in a complex relationship. Technique constitutes, as does man himself, nature artificelle.

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Scientific research employs ever-new technical devices; nature is forced open through technique. The scientist much reach an understanding with the technician, for each problem is defined by the not-yet-available equipment required to solve it. Advances in theoretical physics, for instance, depend no less upon electronic computers than upon the brains of physicists.

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The fascination with automatisms is a prerational, transpractical impulse, which previously, for millennia, found expression in magic– the technique of things and processes beyond our senses– and has more recently found its full realization in clocks, engines, and all manner of rotating mechanisms. Whoever considers from a psychological viewpoint the magic which cars exercise upon today’s young, cannot doubt that the interests appealed to lie deeper than those of a rational and practical nature. If this seems improbable, one should consider the fact that a machine’s automatism exercises a fascination entirely independent of its practical uses, a fascination that might well be best embodied in a perpetual motion machine whose only goal and activity would consist in forever reproducing the same circular motion. None of the innumerable individuals who over the centuries have grappled with the insoluble problem of perpetual motion, did so in view of any practical effect. Instead, they were all fascinated by the singular appeal of a machine that runs itself, a clock that winds itself. Such an appeal is not merely intellectual in nature, but has deeper sources.