Joint Lecture

Martina Heßler

Flawed Humans, or What Makes Technology Better than Humans:

Historical Considerations on Humans as ‘Faulty Constructions’

25 November 2022

(0:40 h)

Joint Lecture

Martina Heßler

Flawed Humans, or What Makes Technology Better than Humans:
Historical Considerations on Humans as ‘Faulty Constructions’

GHIL Joint Lecture, in co-operation with the Modern German History Seminar, IHR, given 16 March 2022

It is said that to be human is to be flawed, limited, and finite; however, the meaning of ‘flawed’ has changed over time. The lecture argues that in the nineteenth century a new conceptual framework for human deficiency emerged that compares humans with technology. This concept became ubiquitous in the twentieth century and still determines discourses on technology today. Unlike philosophical and anthropological theories of man as a deficient creature (Herder, Gehlen), I do not assume that human beings are biologically deficient by ‘nature’; instead, I examine the cultural construction of faultiness in different contexts such as work, mobility, love, and decision-making. Or, to echo Günther Anders, I ask how humans have become a ‘faulty construction’ in a technological world.

Martina Heßler is Professor of the History of Technology at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Her research interests centre on the man–machine relationship in the twentieth century and on the history of emotions. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of ‘flawed humans’.