Arnold Gehlen 1904 – 1976

Arnold Gehlen was a German philosopher and one of the principal founders, with Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, of modern philosophical anthropology. After teaching at Leipzig and Vienna under the National Socialist regime, a compromise that shadowed his later reputation, he spent his postwar career at the Speyer administrative academy and at Aachen. His Man: His Nature and Place in the World argued that the human being is a biologically deficient being whose institutions, techniques, and habits compensate for that deficiency, while his Moral and Hyper-Morality offered a controversial defense of stable institutions against modern moral over-reach.