Arnold Gehlen: Moral und Hypermoral, Gebunden

Klappentext

This volume collects Gehlen's contributions to pluralistic ethics, written between 1952 and 1975, showing Gehlen as a conservative and independent philosopher and intellectual who defies conventional political classifications. At the centre of this volume is the essay Morality and Hypermorality, in which Gehlen, as an anthropological sociologist, scientifically and historically substantiates his theory of ethical pluralism. Due to the instability and plasticity of human instinctual structures, ethics tend to become absolute in phases of social upheaval and become immoderate as 'pure morality'. In Western industrialised societies, Gehlen diagnoses a 'moral hypertrophy' in which mass eudaimonism (ethics of prosperity) and humanitarianism (duty of universal philanthropy) undermine institutions as the supporting structures of culture. The contemporary and moral-critical analyses closely linked to his ethics are directed above all against the American-European way of life and the claim to power of a universalist morality, but also against late capitalism and the existentially threatening exploitation of nature. Another important topic is religion: based on the philosophy of religion of German idealism (Kant, Fichte, Hegel), Gehlen, who did not consider himself religious, attempts to determine the nature of man and his position in the world.