Günther Anders was born Günther Siegmund Stern in Breslau (then Germany, now Wrocław, Poland) on 12 July 1902, the son of the psychologists William Stern and Clara Stern, pioneers of developmental psychology, and a cousin of the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. He received his doctorate in philosophy under the supervision of Edmund Husserl at Freiburg in 1923, having also studied with Heidegger — of whom, decades later, he became a trenchant critic, publishing in 1948 the essay “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), in which he accused the existential analytic of Being and Time of ignoring the concrete materiality of human needs — toothache, hunger, sexual desire. Working as a journalist for the Berliner Börsen-Courier, he adopted the pen name “Anders” (“different” or “otherwise,” in German), which became his permanent name. In 1929 he married Hannah Arendt, whom he had met in Heidegger’s seminar; the marriage ended in an amicable divorce in 1937. With the rise of Nazism he fled Germany in 1933, passing through Paris and, from 1936, the United States, where he lived until 1950, when he returned to Europe and settled in Vienna, the city where he would live until his death on 17 December 1992.
Anders’s most important work is Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Man), published in two volumes: the first, in 1956, subtitled Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution), and the second, in 1980, subtitled Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (On the Destruction of Life in the Age of the Third Industrial Revolution). In it, Anders develops the concept of Promethean shame (prometheische Scham): the unease experienced by modern human beings before the technical perfection of the objects they themselves manufacture — machines more efficient, precise, and durable than the human body, producing a kind of existential humiliation before one’s own creation. Correlative to this concept is the Promethean gap (prometheisches Gefälle): the widening chasm between the human capacity to produce and destroy — especially after the atomic bomb — and the much more limited human capacity to imagine and emotionally grasp the consequences of that productive and destructive capacity. Anders visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1958, an experience recorded in Der Mann auf der Brücke (1959), and between 1959 and 1961 corresponded with Claude Eatherly, the American pilot who had flown the weather-reconnaissance mission ahead of the Hiroshima bombing and who, tormented by guilt, was committed to psychiatric care; the letters were published as Burning Conscience (1961), with a preface by Bertrand Russell. From then on Anders became one of the most active voices of the postwar European anti-nuclear movement, receiving, shortly before his death, the Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose (1992).
Key Concepts
- Promethean shame (prometheische Scham) — the existential unease of human beings before the technical superiority of the objects they manufacture, which leads them to feel inferior, outdated, before their own creation.
- Promethean gap (prometheisches Gefälle) — the widening gap between the human capacity to produce and destroy (especially with nuclear weapons) and the far smaller human capacity to feel and imagine the moral consequences of that production.
- The obsolescence of man — the central thesis of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956/1980): the technical age has rendered human beings themselves, in their biological and emotional constitution, “outdated” relative to the products of their own technical capacity.
- Critique of Heidegger’s “pseudo-concreteness” — in his 1948 essay, Anders accuses the analytic of Dasein of abstracting away the concrete bodily and material needs of human existence.
- Anti-nuclear activism and the correspondence with Claude Eatherly — in Burning Conscience (1961), Anders philosophically articulates guilt and moral responsibility in the face of mass-destruction technology.
Influenced by
- Edmund Husserl — doctoral supervisor (1923); the phenomenological method as a starting point, later reworked toward a materialist philosophical anthropology
- Heidegger — teacher and, later, the target of his most trenchant critique of the “pseudo-concreteness” of existential analytic
- Karl Marx — attention to the concrete material conditions of human existence, against philosophical abstraction
- William Stern and Clara Stern — his parents, pioneers of developmental psychology, whose attention to the concrete formation of human subjectivity echoes in his philosophical anthropology
Influenced
- Bertrand Russell — direct collaboration in prefacing Burning Conscience (1961) and convergence in anti-nuclear activism
- Hannah Arendt — a lasting intellectual dialogue despite the divorce
- Contemporary philosophy of technology and debates on the ethics of nuclear weapons and automation
- The posthumous reception of his concepts of Promethean shame and the Promethean gap in discussions of artificial intelligence and biotechnology
Works
Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Bd. I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (The Obsolescence of Man, Vol. I, 1956); Der Mann auf der Brücke (1959); Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot, Claude Eatherly (1961); Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Bd. II: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (The Obsolescence of Man, Vol. II, 1980).
See also
Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Philosophy of Technology