Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter

Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter, first published in 1957 in the legendary book series rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie, is the best-selling and probably most widely read of Arnold Gehlen's books, whose effectiveness made him an influential contemporary diagnostician in the young Federal Republic. This concise attempt at interpretation, which at the same time provides a cultural theory of modernity, is made accessible again here in an inexpensive single edition. The starting point is the thesis of two "absolute cultural thresholds", on the one hand the sedentarization of man in the Neolithic period, on the other hand industrialization. For Gehlen, technology is part of the basic anthropological equipment of man, a "deficient being" dependent on artificiality and relief in his coping with life. As cultural characteristics of the modern age he saw a tendency towards "desensualization" and the spread of the ".