Arnold Gehlen – The Role of the Standard of Living in Today's Society” (1952)

...The standard of living here becomes as though the smoke of a sort of abstract search. One gets used
to ever increasing quantities and finally feels no satisfaction arise from consumption and, generally
speaking, no longer feels any psychological effect. Only the renunciation of this strange quest counts as
unreasonable.

These last facts now suddenly raise the problem to a World-Political level of meaning, because all
governments find themselves today in a dilemma: between strengthening their military and defensive
capacities and lowering the standard of living. It seems hard to be, and in addition few regimes appear
to be able to expect the latter of the people in a drastic manner. And this for two reasons. The majority
of governments have come to be in a state of expectation; they would do anything within the realm of
possibility to directly elevate living standards. But the decisive reason perhaps does not lie here, but is
rather deeper: it probably lies in the fact that people in general no longer see a connection between their
obligations, on the one hand, and their claims upon life on the other. Conversely: the good life has thus
become something like a kind of legal claim. The deep obliging sound that the words once had:“In the
sweat of your face you shall eat your bread,” has been created from the world through inventive
progress.

Hendrik de Man has recently expressed the interesting thought that we have entered into an epoch that
no longer belongs to History, an age of “post-histoire”* as Cournot called it. If this should be the case,
naturally one can say nothing more about the future. Is it not the case then that one can still always find
in the past keys to the future and must then already derive the reaction of humanity to these increases in
consumption, expect the impoverishment of existence and loss of personality, from these ever more
flagrant difficulties and the demands of our actual lifestyles. Then perhaps we can once again see
ascetic elites that exclude themselves from the general race toward “a good life,” and would in doing so
deny that they are still subject to the same common conditions over which all present social and
political contradictions so noisily fight however.1

*Hendrik de Man – (Vermassung und Kulturverfall (München: Lehnen, 1951), p. 135 f., see also n. 22
to p. 410): Dizzied by an awareness of this position, sensitive contemporaries interpret it in many ways
such that it is as if we have entered into an epoch that no longer belongs to history. As far as I am
aware, Françoise Bertrand de Jouvenel was the first to express this thought. He probably did not mean
entirely the same as what another Frenchman, the mathematician A. A. Cournot had envisioned, as it
was about a century before the phrase post-histoire was coined; then, Cournot wanted to designate the
position that emerges when any human invention or innovation has been so perfected that every further
morphological change appears closed off. Since then, only the very perceptive and too few others can
follow Cournots theory (on the concept of morphological stabilization and archetype creation) when
one applies it to today's situation, support the conclusion that our culture has filled its “archetypal”
sense and is thus has entered a phase of meaninglessness; the alternative was then, viewed biologically,
death or mutation. What Spengler understood as ahistorical existence is essentially distinct from what
Jouvenel or Cournot had in mind. Post-histoire is not concerned with the lethargy of a culture in which
its vital powers have been extinguished, rather with the entry to a phase of world-events occurring
overall outside of the framework of History because they lack any noticeable historical connection
between causes and effects.2
1 Arnold Gehlen, from “Das Rolle des Lebenstandards in der Heutige Gesellschaft,”Gesamtausgabe Bd. 7: Einblicke, 18-
19.
2 Hendrick de Man, Vermassung und Kulturverfall (München: Lehnen, 1951), quoted in Arnold Gehlen, Gesamtausgabe
Bd. 7: Einblicke, “Anmerkung des Herausgebers,” 468-9.