The Institution of Life in Gehlen and Merleau-Ponty: Searching for the Common Ground for the Anthropological Difference

Jan Halák,Jiří Klouda

doi:10.1007/s10746-018-9469-5

Abstract

The goal of our article is to review the widespread anthropological figure, according to which we can achieve a better understanding of humans by contrasting them with animals. This originally Herderian approach was elaborated by Arnold Gehlen, who characterized humans as “deficient beings” who become complete through culture. According to Gehlen, humans, who are insufficiently equipped by instincts, indirectly stabilize their existence by creating institutions, i.e., complexes of habitual actions. On the other hand, Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows that corporeal relationship to the world is already indirect because it is based on preestablished and readjusted “standards” or “norms” of interaction with the environment. Merleau-Ponty then calls these norms “institutions” and views culture as readjustment of institutions which operate already on the level of corporeal existence. The anthropological figure of confronting humans and animals thus cannot produce, as in Gehlen, a contrast between an allegedly “direct” relationship to the world in animals and a supposedly “indirect” relationship to the world in humans. The Herderian approach can be meaningfully retained only if interpreted as an invitation to confront the norms of indirect interaction with the world in animals and in people, that is, if viewed as a comparison of their respective institutions.

Highlights

The Herderian Schema as the Cornerstone of Cultural AnthropologyOne of the most significant sources from which Modern secularized humanity draws knowledge about itself is a comparison between humans and animals
We show that Gehlen does not take a full advantage of the far-reaching philosophical implications of his theory of institutions because he interprets institutions too narrowly, primarily as a restrictive mechanism
Our goal is to demonstrate some important implications of the Herderian figure for our understanding of the anthropological difference and culture

Summary

Introduction

One of the most significant sources from which Modern secularized humanity draws knowledge about itself is a comparison between humans and animals. He believed that an exchange of individual subjective opinions cannot invest human behavior with stable supra-personal forms and can only result in self-destructing chaos Due to this conservative accent of his cultural anthropology, Gehlen’s outline of a generalized theory of experience based on institutions cannot take advantage of the full positive potential of the anthropological framework he proposed. The other important positive aspect of the “relief,” namely the creative process of the “increase in motives,” is interpreted by Gehlen rather unconvincingly as a process through which subjectivity is consumed or alienated from itself This aspect of Gehlen’s account of institutions is, clearly incompatible with the other essential trait which he describes, namely the fact that human behavior, inasmuch as it is mediated by institutions and founded on them, becomes polyvalent and can no longer be understood as an unequivocal, one-dimensional given. In the following parts of our paper, we will try to show that this understanding of institutions is fatally one-sided, and one ought to be able to find a way of retaining the positive and productive aspect of institutions

11 See Gehlen 1964

Conclusion