Abstract

According to the author Claessens' sociological anthropology combines a critically revised philosophical anthropology with unorthodox evolution theories, thereby breaking ideological fronts and throwing a bridge between cultural and natural sciences. In contrast to cultural critique, antidarwinian categorizations and Gehlen's pessimism, Claessens grasped world-openness as dependence of all human beings from the exchange with the environment, he stressed the continuity between natural and human history and he appreciated human culture development first of all as opportunity. At the same time Claessens respectively connoted variation mechanism as technization (according to Alsberg's principle of body-liberation), selection mechanism as internal and external concurrence (following Miller's theory of insulation) and cultural evolution mechanism as intergenerational transmission (powering Portmann's neoteny). As a result he understood human being as a hybrid organically equipped for both supporting accelerated cultural evolution and reacting against the excesses of cultural evolution itself.