When an epoch builds its most advanced machine, it builds at the same time its next image of the world. The clock in the seventeenth century, the steam engine in the nineteenth, the computer in the twenty-first: each of these artefacts has not remained a mere tool but has become an explanatory formula for the living. That the step from comparison to ontology goes almost unnoticed is the actual point of the machine metaphor. It is not one model among others, but the unconsidered pre-decision to explain the living through the dead.
#The Move from Image to Claim
A metaphor is, at first, harmless. It says: X is like Y. It picks up a likeness and uses it to make something unfamiliar intelligible through something familiar. Every act of cognition begins this way; Hans Vaihinger showed in his Philosophy of As If (1911) how indispensable the as-if is to every science. The problem only begins where the metaphor sheds its conditional mood. The brain works like a computer turns into the brain is a computer. A comparison turns into an ontology.
Jochen Kirchhoff has named this move precisely: This reductionist-mechanical framework thinks the natural order, from the outset, always as a machine — and as the most highly developed machine of the day. First clockwork, then the steam engine, and now the computer. This analogy is forever being projected onto life (cf. Kirchhoff, Wissenschaft auf dem Prüfstand, 20:39). What is historically variable, namely the most complex technology of any given epoch, is set up as ahistorically absolute. The inference is not scientific but metaphorical, and it works only as long as its metaphorical character remains invisible.
Nietzsche and Goethe were the first in the nineteenth century to see this process clearly, and Vaihinger described it systematically. Mathematised fictions function, machines can be built — but they explain nothing about the inner essence of nature (cf. Kirchhoff, Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker, 82:35). Functioning models are not the same as true models. A bridge holds even when the theory used to calculate it fails to grasp the essence of weight.
#Descartes, La Mettrie and the Historical Thread
The philosophical career of the machine metaphor does not begin with industrialisation but with the geometrisation of the world. In the Discours de la méthode (1637), Descartes introduces the concept of the bête-machine: the animal is nothing but a highly complex automaton, comparable to the mechanical figures in royal gardens, only incomparably more artful. The human being is exempted because he can think; the res cogitans stands outside the mechanism. One hundred and ten years later, Julien Offray de La Mettrie drew the consequence of this exception. In L’Homme machine (1747) he erased the Cartesian special status and declared the human being entirely a machine. With that, the step Descartes had refused to take was completed: the machine metaphor became universal.
What had begun as the application domain of early-modern mechanics was renewed in the nineteenth century by thermodynamics and in the twentieth by information theory. Each renewal extended the reach of the metaphor without altering its underlying operation. The materialist naturalism that today functions as the self-evident background assumption of the sciences is the congealed form of this three-hundred-year process. It does not present itself as a philosophical position but as what remains when philosophy is taken away — and precisely this camouflage is the work of the metaphor itself.
#Mumford and the Myth of the Machine
Lewis Mumford, in his two-volume late work — The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development (1967) and Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power (1970) — sounded the depth of this process. His central argument is that the machine did not first enter the world with industrial mechanics but already existed in early high cultures as a social form: the megamachine, an invisible structure made of living but stable human parts, each assigned to a specific function (cf. Mumford, 1967). Pyramid-building, irrigation systems, the military phalanx — all of these are early machines made of human beings.
What holds this megamachine together across millennia is a myth, not its efficiency. Mumford puts it sharply: The one lasting contribution of the megamachine was the myth of the machine: the belief that this machine was, by its very nature, irresistible — and yet, provided one did not oppose it, ultimately beneficent. This magic spell still holds the masters of the megamachine and the mass of their victims captive today (Mumford, 1967, Vol. 1). The myth is the load-bearing principle of a form of life, not folkloric ornament. So long as it works, the machine structure appears without alternative.
What Mumford diagnoses in the modern variant is the dogged disregard for organic limits and human capacities (Mumford, 1967). The myth works by making the living appear inadequate, in need of correction, optimisable. Wherever organic limits become visible — mortality, lack, unavailability — the machine is invoked not as one tool among others but as the true bearer of what is to come.
#What the Metaphor Conceals
The machine metaphor is not dangerous because machines are bad. It is dangerous because it imputes properties the living does not have, and conversely explains away properties of the living that machines lack. The fundamental difference is structural, not gradual. The mechanical is steered from the outside in, towards the purposes of human understanding. The organic organises itself, from the inside out. A machine can build, but it cannot beget. That is something entirely different (Kirchhoff, Interview, 2026-02-24). To understand a machine is to have built it; to understand an organism is to have failed to bring it forth.
Schelling had already named this priority of the living over the dead in 1800 in his System of Transcendental Idealism: the mechanical purposiveness of nature is only the derived form of appearance of an original identity whose ground lies in consciousness itself. The same activity which in free action is productive with consciousness is, in the production of the world, productive without consciousness (Schelling, 1800). The mechanical is not what is first, but what remains when the living is pushed back. There is nothing absolutely dead — everything is primal seed or nothing, Schelling formulates elsewhere (cf. Schelling, Erster Entwurf, 1799). To begin with the dead is to begin with an abstraction and to take it for the beginning.
#Goethe’s Faust and the Artefact That Does Not Become
Goethe gave a single image to the attempt to manufacture the living out of the mechanical, and that image gathers the whole difficulty into one frame. In the second part of Faust (1832), Wagner produces the Homunculus in his laboratory — an artificial being who remains in his vial because he is not a being. The Homunculus can think, speak, long, but he cannot truly become without surrendering himself to the actual becoming of creation. The vial in which he came into existence must shatter for him to enter the living, and his fate is decided not in the laboratory but in the encounter with the elemental beings on the Aegean Sea.
Goethe’s image is no polemic against science. It is a diagnosis of its limit. What is producible by mechanical procedure remains artefact-like as long as it remains within the procedure. Aliveness is not a property added to a finished mechanism but a structural quality that constitutes the whole or does not arise at all. The machine metaphor operates here through an exchange that goes unremarked: it takes the wholeness of the living and replaces it with a sum of its measurable parts, then acts as if nothing had been lost.
#The Ethical Consequence
A metaphor is never merely a description. It opens a horizon of action, and in doing so it is always also an ethical pre-decision. This becomes especially clear in an example Gwendolin Kirchhoff likes to cite: If you cut open a dog while it is alive and it makes noises, then it squeals like a machine. It does not suffer, if we have defined it as a machine. In that moment we justify destructive interventions, loss of empathy, and the arbitrary use of whatever we have so defined (Kirchhoff, Interview, 2026-02-24). What began with Descartes as an argument against animal suffering — the dog squeals because its mechanism is disturbed, not because it suffers — has, three centuries later, become the silent precondition of an animal-experimentation practice whose standards are nourished by precisely this metaphor.
The same operation appears wherever the living is redefined in order to make it technically available. The human body as data carrier, consciousness as information processing, relationship as algorithm, growth as an optimisation problem. Each of these transfers is a metaphor that has lost its metaphoric character. What withdraws, what cannot be machined — the previously dismissed, ungovernable surplus that always travelled along — becomes visible, in the very act of reduction, as the genuinely valuable in the human being. The machine metaphor is thus not only an epistemic problem but the interface at which an image of the human being is fabricated across generations without ever being recognisable as an image.
#A Different Source of Analogy
The way out of the machine metaphor lies not in banning models but in choosing the source of analogy. If every attempt at cognition relies on analogies, the question becomes from where the analogy is drawn. Novalis formulated the answer early: Man is a source of analogy for the universe (Novalis, Allgemeines Brouillon, 1798/99). Instead of explaining the living through the de-vivified artefact, cognition is oriented in reverse on the body itself, on the inside-outside being human. The machine is an artefact, it is de-vivified. It is good and meaningful, when thinking about the living, to take the human being as starting point (cf. Kirchhoff, Symposium: Wie erkennen wir die Welt?, 43:30).
This choice is a philosophical decision with consequences, not a sentimental gesture. Whoever takes the human being as a source of analogy arrives at an organicism that conceives the cosmos itself as living, and thereby at a natural philosophy that exposes reductionism and materialism for what they are: not results of research, but pre-decisions about what may count as research at all. In its current form the machine metaphor lives on as computationalism; in its cultural effect it leads to that diagnostic finding which Jochen Kirchhoff has called pathogenesis-not-progress. What could remain a useful tool as a model becomes, as ontology, the disease of those who settle into it.
#Sources
- Descartes, R. (1637). Discours de la méthode. Leyden: Jan Maire.
- La Mettrie, J. O. (1747). L’Homme machine. Leyden: Elie Luzac fils.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1799). Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie. Jena/Leipzig: Gabler.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System des transzendentalen Idealismus. Tübingen: Cotta.
- Goethe, J. W. (1832). Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil. Stuttgart/Tübingen: Cotta.
- Mumford, L. (1967). The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
- Mumford, L. (1970). The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2019). Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie [Video, msqlr1nZLuA].
- Kirchhoff, J. (2019). Wissenschaft auf dem Prüfstand [Video].
- Kirchhoff, J. (2021). Goethe als Philosoph [Video].