Annual Theme 2025/26: Farewell to Artificiality

This text was first published as an editorial in the brochure to the ZfL ANNUAL THEME 2025/26: FAREWELL TO ARTIFICIALITY.

Will AI surpass human intelligence? Can nature still be saved? At first glance, these questions seem more pressing than a conceivable disappearance of artificiality. However, leaving humans and nature aside and focusing instead on artificiality offers not only an appealing reversal of perspective, there are also objective reasons to do so. After all, our contemporary present is saturated with artificiality to the point that it no longer appears as such—also and especially so when we want to expose a deepfake for what it truly is! In our everyday lives, however, we no longer care whether we speak or text or our devices are doing it for us. The disappearance of artificiality is a function of its omnipresence; what has disappeared are counterconcepts to the artificial. This observation constitutes the starting point for the ZfL’s investigations of the fate of artificiality today. The contributions by Claude Haas, Aurore Peyroles, and Georg Toepfer engage with it in different ways.

Of course, the three of them know very well that artificiality cannot be defined only by its opposites. After all, humans are not only part of nature, but also craftspeople and artists. Helmuth Plessner’s “law of natural artificiality” attests to the fact that our individual and collective survival depends on what homo faber produces, from clothing and tools to elaborate institutions. Karl Marx also defined humans as the only creatures that must produce the means of their subsistence through labor. Using a metaphor, he translated this artificiality into the idea of labor as the “metabolism of man with nature”—a maneuver that has caught on. To this day, people tend to avoid calling artificiality by its name: Meat produced in a laboratory is now called in-vitro meat; and nobody talks about test-tube babies any more.

This preference for “nature-identical” terminology suggests a superiority of the natural, which only emerged alongside bourgeois moral concepts in the 18th century. Georg Toepfer’s sketch of the history of the concept confirms that in the 17th century artificiality was in fact the exclusive medium for obtaining knowledge about nature. In a poem from that time, Barthold Heinrich Brockes writes of a little fly:

How very artificial! it occurred to me
Must the small parts here
Be interlocked with each other,
Linked by each other,
Marvellously connected!

‘Marvellous’ is both the arrangement itself and its recognisability to the human mind. Their convergence leads back to the divine creator and artifex,

Who preserves the world,
As created,
And prepares it so magnificently.

This easy transition from artificiality to nature and back did not disappear entirely later on. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget assumed that an animistic phase, in which the child perceives everything in the world as alive, is followed by a phase of “artificialism,” in which the child believes that everything, even nature, was “made.”

In Aurore Peyrole’s description of the art installation Artificialis, Piaget’s separate phases seem to have been fused into an adventurous hybrid world. However, while the distinction between artificiality and nature recedes into the background, an internal difference emerges within the artificial: The artificiality of the artwork is said to be different from the new artificiality of the AI-generated portrait. The former is result of the author’s sovereign authorship and his decision over which artificial means he chooses. This faith in an ascertainable distinction between mere fakes and true art resonates in Georg Toepfer’s claim that humans, as the only beings capable of taking responsibility for others, retain their special status even in times of a possible end of artificiality.

Claude Haas, who explores the relationship between art and artificiality in contemporary literature, sees artificiality triumphing over art—but only in literature. In the bestseller The Anomaly, the fictive writer comes to the rescue of literature as an artificiality sui generis in a world in which artificiality also renders questionable the very idea of art. Perhaps today, the long-standing business of critique—to prove that what appears to be a natural phenomenon is actually artificial (H. Blumenberg) may have reached its limits. Instead of asking “is this or that artificial or natural (or human)?,” perhaps we ought to rephrase the question and ask “How does this or that show itself? Does it make itself known or does it conceal itself?” Such a question would also move into the view the entire field of dissimulatio, the artificial pretense that was only inciminated as artificial and relegated to a courtly world deemed questionable by the rising bourgeoisie in the 18th century. Perhaps premodern theories of prudence are not the only source that might be helpful in an age in which the idea of artificiality is waning because it saturates our world. In the upcoming three semesters, we will investigate the archives in search of other materials and theories.

Eva Geulen

Fig. above: © D.M. Nagu, from the series “And the Livin Ain’t Easy,” 2022