Gehlen, Nietzsche, and the Project of a Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

Arnold Gehlen stands in the first rank of those to whom we are indebted for the emergence and development of ‘philosophical anthropology’ in European philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century as an explicit and self-conscious philosophical project, in competition with Existenzphilosophie (the philosophy of human Existenz) and other tendencies in the contest of philosophical approaches to the interpretation of human reality. In this respect Gehlen is commonly linked with Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, who were already active in this respect in the late 1920s, a dozen years before the publication in 1940 of his first and most notable book-length contribution to this enterprise, Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Man: His Nature and Place in the World; henceforth ‘Man’).