Every epoch has its diseases. The question is whether it recognises them. When a civilisation mistakes its own pathology for health, when it celebrates symptoms as achievements and books destruction as development, what is needed is a gaze that sees through the confusion. That is precisely what the line of thinking described by pathogenesis-not-progress accomplishes: a philosophical diagnostics that reads, in what passes for progress, the structure of a disease taking shape.
The Diagnostic Turn
Critiquing progress is an old business. But what it usually produces is cultural pessimism: the diffuse feeling that things were better before, paired with the inability to say precisely what was lost and why. The pathogenesis gaze works differently. It does not ask whether things were better in the past. It asks what, in the very structure of progress itself, generates the disease. The difference is methodological, not sentimental: to speak of pathogenesis is not to claim that the past was healthier. It is to claim that the present produces symptoms it mistakes for health.
Schelling articulated his scepticism toward the idea of progress as early as 1842: the principle of the constant advancement of humankind cannot be upheld without clarifying what this advancement moves from and toward (Philosophy of Mythology). Progress without a determination of direction is not progress but mere motion. Modernity has systematically abolished the question of direction. Therein lies the pathogenesis.
Nietzsche, Spengler, Mumford: Three Stages of Symptomatology
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 — 1900) invented the language of philosophical cultural diagnosis. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he described how Socratic culture must collapse under its own optimistic delusion: optimism that believes itself unlimited contains the seed of its own destruction. While the majority lives in the certainty of progress, the philosopher reads in the phenomena of his time the symptoms of an uprootedness that takes itself for flourishing. Nietzsche named the method; the reach of his cosmos remained limited.
Oswald Spengler (1880 — 1936) extended the diagnosis to the morphology of entire cultures. An irreligious age, an age of purely extensive activity that excludes high artistic and metaphysical production, is an age of decline — even if its inhabitants do not feel it that way (The Decline of the West, 1918). Spengler saw in the fading of creative power not an individual but a structural phenomenon: the late phase of an organic process that eludes the grasp of the will.
Lewis Mumford (1895 — 1990) gave the diagnosis concrete form in the domain of technological civilisation. His concept of the megamachine describes not a particular apparatus but a structure: the autonomisation of the mechanical principle, in which only the machine still embodies order and rationality, and the liberation of human beings no longer yields any gain in alternatives (The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 1, 1967). The megamachine produces freedom that is none. Precisely therein lies its pathogenetic structure.
The Materialist Core
Mumford’s diagnosis stopped at technology. Yet the megamachine rests on a foundation it did not itself create: a metaphysics that conceives of the cosmos as a dead mechanism. Jochen Kirchhoff (1944 — 2025) radicalised this line of thought by analysing materialism not as a superseded preliminary stage of knowledge but as bad metaphysics: an unconscious article of faith that takes itself for knowledge of the world. Materialism presupposes that the cosmos is a dead mechanism and treats everything living as a special case of the dead. The misdevelopment that Kirchhoff described in The Anti-History of Physics (1980) concerns not this or that technology but the fundamental trait of Western rationality: its most celebrated triumphs have turned into fiasco on virtually every front.
What makes transhumanism particularly legible from this perspective is its gnostic undercurrent: the notion that human beings must free themselves from dark, deficient matter and rise above their biological limitations through technology. Kirchhoff showed that this notion simultaneously castrates and diminishes the human being. It treats being human as a defect to be repaired. Artificial intelligence, insofar as it is understood as an enhancement or continuation of human thought, repeats the same structure: one aspect of being human — abstract rationality — is isolated, absolutised, and declared the measure of the whole. What is lost in the process is the embodied nature of thinking, the depth of feeling, the relationship with living nature.
Diagnosis, Not Polemic
The pathogenesis gaze is not a ban on technology. It is directed not against innovation as such but against the automatic equation of technological escalation and human maturation. Those who constantly work on themselves to become more efficient and productive are, as a rule, acting not from free decision but from an internalised performance imperative that optimisation culture disguises as self-determination. The diagnosis makes the confusion visible.
The same holds for dealing with digital availability. The question is not whether someone uses a smartphone but whether permanent reachability, the fragmentation of attention, and the habituation to instant availability count as gains in freedom when they actually narrow the inner space. When you next notice that you miss the quiet without being able to say when you lost it, there is no nostalgia behind that observation. It is a diagnostic datum: something booked as a gain has closed off a space that used to be open. The diagnosis makes perceptible the loss hidden within the gain.
What remains decisive is differentiation. Not every critique of technology is a pathogenesis diagnosis, and not every instance of progress is a symptom. This line of thinking requires the ability to read phenomena in their context rather than evaluating them in isolation. Without this judgement — the capacity to read the particular case in the light of the whole — the diagnosis remains either blanket rejection or blind affirmation.
Why the Diagnosis Needs a Counter-Image
Without a living counter-image, critique of progress remains mere pessimism, because it lacks a unit of measurement. That the mechanistic worldview is an impoverishment can only be claimed if a different access to reality is conceivable. Natural philosophy formulates this access: an understanding of the cosmos as living and ensouled that makes the materialist reduction recognisable as a narrowing. Only from this counter-image does the pathogenetic character of progress become visible — not as opinion but as a grounded diagnosis. Pathogenesis-not-progress thus names not merely a problem but points to the precondition of its solution: a thinking that takes the cosmos as a whole back into view. When you find yourself asking why the world, despite all its acceleration, is not growing brighter, the diagnosis has already begun its work.