In the atomic age, the traditional political distinction between “friends” and “enemies” utterly failed, not because we all became “friends” but because the very notion of “enemy” is now meaningless. The only real enemy threatening us is atomic annihilation; the only real totalitarianism is the atomic condition, which transforms the whole planet into a borderless concentration camp... Anders’s negative ethics rises from the scandal of our not being scandalized by the scandal, from our blindness before the imminent apocalypse
From Chapter 3 of Simona Forti’s book: Totalitarianism: A Borderline Idea in Political Philosophy; 2024
One author, more than any other, bridges the philosophical reflections on totalitarianism of the late twentieth century with those from the first two decades of the twenty-first: Günther Anders (1902-1992, was married to Hannah Arendt from 1929-1937). Still grounded in the living memory of the totalitarian regimes of the 1900s, Anders is well aware that in the present and future, the risks of total domination will come in different guises. In a sense, those regimes should be “obsolete, now.” In them, the will-to-nothingness was only partially expressed. Our hyper-technological societies, in his view, are instead enacting the “nihilistic promises” of the 1930s and 1940s. Only with the integral interweaving of advanced technologies, control, and destruction can totalitarianism be fully realized together with nihilism, its twin. It is our “atomic condition,” which transforms the whole planet into a borderless concentration camp, that is the true totalitarianism. Torn between a Heideggerian-style apocalyptic rhetoric and a lucid confrontation with the specific objects of technological innovation, Anders seems to anticipate by decades the considerations I will discuss in the next chapter, on the hypercontrolled society.
Audrey Burowski – Gunther Anders: Philosopher of the apocalypse
In the coincidence of apparatus and world, the totalitarian aspiration of technology is realized to extinguish and absorb into itself every “outside,” to “incorporate everything” and “unite in itself all thinkable functions, to assign to all existing things their own function, to integrate into itself, as its
own functionaries, all men born within its sphere” (Anders 1980, 111). “Soft” totalitarianism no longer needs, like that of the mid-twentiethcentury, the systematic and brutal use of violence, since it obtains automatic and unconditional obedience by virtue of the effectiveness and efficiency of its imperceptible – and therefore more insidious – homologation device. The predatory voraciousness of technology and its need to expandendangers the very survival of the species and the entire living being. If, in fact, homo faber, understood in the traditional sense, had limited himself to employing portions of the world to create his own, then technique, in the age of its triumph, makes the world in its totality the instrument of its unrestrained growth. It obeys the imperative command to do everything that can be done and to complete every intended use of the product. It matters little if it involves tools, such as the atomic bomb, capable of annihilating humankind. Thus, technology is indifferent not only to the final destination of its products but also to their moral value. That is why it does not hesitate to unleash, without any scruples, its destructive potential.
It is indeed bizarre that a thinker like Anders, so attuned to the most burning problems of our present, has received so little attention in the Anglo-Saxon world. Let us therefore proceed to present, albeit too briefly,
some features of his thought that are decisive for our discourse and for whatis happening around us.
There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as if he is about to distance himself from something that he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open, and his wings are outstretched. His face is turned toward the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress is this storm (Benjamin 2005). This is the well-known ninth thesis of On the Concept of History, the last book Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, a few months before committing suicide.
Perhaps no philosophy complies with Klee’s painting as much as Günther Siegmund Stern’s, a.k.a. Günther Anders. Anders was born in Breslau (Poland) on July 12, 1902. Because of his Jewish origins, in 1933, he fled into exile in Paris with his wife, Hannah Arendt, whom he would divorce in 1937. With the worsening of antisemitic persecution in German-occupied Europe, in 1936, he eventually fled to the United States, first to New York and then to Los Angeles. The Frankfurt School considers him an
outsider, “excessively Heideggerian,” and Heidegger’s disciples, with whom he studied, will always accuse him of being excessively focused on current events. In 1950, Anders left the United States but did not return to Germany, the land that rejected him and forced him into exile to escape certain death. He eventually settled down in Vienna (Austria), where he died in 1992.
In German, anders means “otherwise,” “differently”: Günther Stern wanted to be “different,” to “think otherwise.” Different from whom and what? First, from a certain professionalism that affects academic
philosophy. As a disciple of Husserl and Heidegger during his studies in Freiburg, Anders contests the “esoteric” character of a philosophy accessible only for a few chosen ones. Against such an “initiated” academic philosophy, Anders will always present himself as an “occasional philosopher” who practices philosophy by combining metaphysics and journalism. He even refused a university chair in Germany, preferring instead to be a militant intellectual whose activity lies on the edge between theory and praxis.
In 1958, Anders went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to take part in the fourth international congress against bombs A and H. This is the period where he writes The Man on the Bridge: Diary from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (1959), and began a correspondence with Claude Eatherly, the pilot who authorized, at President Truman’s orders, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Later, Anders would support the opposition to the Vietnam War, take part as jury member in the Russell Tribunal, join the first big ecologist conferences, and commit to many other political initiatives.
Anders never wrote a fully fledged treatise; he did, however, author many essays, various thoughts, aphorisms, diaries, short stories, and letters. His main work, the two volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The obsolescence of man] (1961 and 1980, respectively), is indeed a collection of occasional essays (covering a forty-year period) that together attempt to define “philosophical anthropology in the epoch of technocracy” (Anders1980, 9).6 Inaugurated in 1929 by Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Nonidentification (Anders 2009), Anders’s negative philosophical anthropology lies in the wake of that German anthropological philosophy (read Gehlen and Plessner) according to which “the proper” of human beings consists of lacking a constitutive proper that can be defined once and for all. In other words, as Anders writes, “the fact of not being fixed on any a priori material world, of not being settled on any world, of not having any foreseen determination, thus of being indeterminate, defines man essentially (Anders 2009, 286).
The human condition is affected by uprooting and contingency; by the “shame of the origin” (Anders 2009, 288). Because a human being’s position in the world is qualified by a defect, a human being does not belong to any predetermined world. Unlike nonhuman animals, whose instincts provide them with a certain stability, human beings are unstable and lack a specific behavior. Obviously, behind Anders’s negative anthropology, there stands a Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world as human beings’ nonidentification with their very self. This is why Anders understands human freedom as a pathology: since the proper of human nature is the lack of a nature, human beings are led to turn to artificiality to
bridge the poverty of their biology.
In their search for freedom as indetermination, human beings are always found to be unfree, constantly exposed to what Anders names the “shock of the contingent.” Human beings discover their structural uprooting, their ontological difference in relation to the world, or even their awareness of constituting an excess. According to Anders, such an anthropological condition is exemplified by writers such as Rilke, Doeblin, and, especially, Kafka, who masterfully depicted the condition of being a pariah, the impossibility of feeling at home in the world. Surely, Anders’s Jewish origins amply influenced the anthropology of the nonbelonging – in summary, a philosophical anthropology for human beings lacking a world.
Like Hannah Arendt, for Anders the figure of the Jew represents the diasporic condition of humankind, whose insurmountable feeling of nonbelonging is accompanied by messianism – in Derrida’s world, a
messianism without the Messiah (Derrida 1994, 74). As Anders writes in his 1978 essay “Mein Judentum” (My Jewishness):
For many years, I have lived in the wait of the “not-yet” for the messianic to be established. However, on August 6th 1945, the shocking day of Hiroshima, I realized that, perhaps, not to say probably, we were all heading toward a “no-longer.” This was the end of messianism. I have always tried to make Ernst Bloch “comprehend” Hiroshima, but he always refused to know. For he clearly lacks either the flexibility or the strength to carry out with me such a “Copernican revolution” from the “not-yet” to the “no-longer.” We were not on the same page as he was incapable of accepting what is our current condition: to live hopelessly. (Anders 1984)
For Anders, 1945 marks a point of no return, as well as a turning point for his reflection and writing. His philosophical anthropology radicalizes further, becoming the abyssal thought of a “world without human beings.” To put it differently, Anders abandons what Ernst Bloch would call “the principle of hope” to embrace “the principle of despair” that afflicts the frightened sight of Klee’s angel of history (Portinaro 2003).
Four breaking historical events make Anders move from a negative philosophical anthropology to a thought of “the catastrophe without redemption,” of “apocalypse without Reign”: the First World War and its horrors; Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War; the discovery of Nazi extermination camps; and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The latter definitely persuaded him that a new age had begun. According to Anders, neither philosophical anthropology, even when negative, nor the “philosophies of technology” that characterized the first half of the twentieth century are sufficient to comprehend such a new age. Anders’s view was undoubtedly influenced by the “philosophies of technology” of authors such as Splenger, Benjamin, Adorno, Jünger, Jonas, and Heidegger, to list the best-known. In such authors, the philosophical reflection on technology becomes a fully fledged metaphysical question.
As Heidegger claims, to think of technology is not something technical. Surely, for Anders, Heidegger was the most influential figure. Consider the 1953 conference The Question Concerning Technology, where Heidegger proposed that Western metaphysics is responsible for technology, as it has always identified being with the totality of beings (Heidegger 1977). For Heidegger – and Anders adheres to such conviction – technology transforms a living and vital whole in a rigid and deathly organization technology violently devastates everything that falls under its grip.
Nevertheless, Anders becomes more radical than Heidegger, and this is why, for him, the philosophies of technology became useless. The products of technological progress not only alienate human beings from their world, from their existence, but they also open up the unprecedented possibility of
the complete destruction of the world and humankind.
According to Anders, the inadequacy, not to mention the “obsolescence” (Anders 1980, 128–30), of philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of technology is due to their stubborn and anachronistic anthropocentrism. They still bestow a central position in the world on human beings. As Anders claims in the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen:
Heidegger, the last person who asked about the meaning of man, was still an heir of Old Testament
anthropomorphism, for he had judged the romantically arrogant role from the ontological point of view of the shepherd of Being. His thesis, a century after the appearance of The Origin of Species, represents the epitome of anti-naturalism in modern-day nonreligious philosophy. Evidently, man, if he is an ontological shepherd, does not belong to the flock of beings; that is, he does not belong to nature. Of course, this is just inoffensive and metaphysically comical. What is dangerous and fearsome, however, is the metaphysics of industrialism, which likewise is based on Genesis, which conferred upon man the “meaning” of being the exploiter of existence and sees the meaning of existence in being raw material for man. (2:461n20)
Thus, it seems that philosophical anthropology stubbornly prefers Creationism to Darwinism. Heidegger’s metaphysic of technology is an outdated Creationism, a form of anthropocentrism that has not yet realized that “no God can save us.” For Anders, however, we cannot but accept Darwin, and we can no longer consider the human being as the “shepherd of Being.”
Such a “thought of catastrophe,” which contemplates the complete destruction, rather than the mere oblivion, of being, discloses a radical ontological scenario on which Anders focuses in the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. According to Anders, there is an enormous gap between human beings’ biopsychological equipment as rational animals and the artificial world they bring into the real world. This is what Anders names the “promethean gap” (prometheische Gefälle), that is, the dyscrasia between human productivity and humans’ ability to foresee the effect of such productivity (Anders 1961, 267–71).
Human beings are obsolete because they are not aware of what they produce, because between the ends
they set and the means they employ to achieve them, there stands an immense hiatus. For this reason, human beings have become “smaller” than themselves—that is, incapable of being responsible for what they produce. Unlike Heidegger, Anders does not invoke humans’ thinking, as human beings are utterly unaware of their tragic condition. As Anders claims in his preface to the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, “Today, anyone who still proclaims the ‘transformability of man’ (as Brecht did) is a figure from the past, since we are transformed. In addition, this transformation of man is so fundamental that anyone who still speaks today of his ‘essence’ (as Scheler still did) is a figure from the distant past” (Anders 1980, 24–25).
The triumphs of technology and, thus, the outcomes of technological progress have made human beings obsolete. In Anders’s eyes, the technical possibility of the utter destruction of humankind does not represent an extreme abuse of a technical potentiality= that is otherwise positive. Like Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, technology naturally tends to replace human beings (Anders 1980, 396–410). Before being destroyed and uninhabited, the “world without human beings” will be a place where humankind is not an end in itself but rather a means of feeding the industrial process. It is worth repeating, however, that this is not the dystopic drift of a betrayed utopia. This is the inescapable destiny of technological progress. As Anders reconstructs in the introduction to the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (15–33): initially, with the introduction of mechanization, the first industrial revolution caused the obsolescence of human beings; then, the second industrial revolution carried out the shift from the production of goods to the production of needs; finally, with the third industrial revolution, such transition from obsolescence to subjugation results in destruction.
The third industrial revolution is the age that produces the instruments for the destruction of humankind, the instruments of complete apocalypse. The third industrial revolution introduced the atomic bomb into this world and, with it, the concrete possibility of nihilism.
In light of Hiroshima and the possibility of atomic apocalypse, for Anders the complete catastrophe is looming, inevitable. This is an earthly apocalypse, however—a Last Judgment that brings no salvation. Despite his catastrophism, Anders still thinks within an eschatological frame. For he considers the time he lives in as the “end of times” or, better, as the “end time.” But this “thought of the end,” which is often obsessive, diverges from traditional eschatology and apocalypse. The “end time” is the nuclear age: the apocalypse without Reign. Unlike Jacob Taubes, Hans Jonas, Walter Benjamin, and all the other authors who wrote about eschatology, Anders outlines a “negative eschatology,” an “anti-eschatology” that contemplates annihilation. For Anders, the future is already over. Jonas’s call for the “imperative of responsibility,” which still attempts to metaphysically deduce the moral obligation to preserve the
world for future generations, is worthless—as if the notion of life as selfaffirmation of being could still inspire in us the absolute duty to contrast the nonbeing.
Bloch’s principle of hope is even more naive: in Anders’s eyes, at this point, calling for hope is ridiculous. After August 6, 1945, the very categories of “possible” and “free will” became pure abstractions, outmoded metaphysical delusions—in other words, ghosts. If traditional eschatology has always carried out a mystical leap into Gnosticism, in contrast, Anders remains firmly anchored to immanence.
Nevertheless, is Anders’s thought truly hopeless? Does it truly renounce assigning a task, a goal, to such obsolescent humanity? I think that, in Anders, the only and effective chance for hope lies in a negative ethics that “says no” to the existing state of things. For Anders, the destiny of humankind, an escapable destiny, is clearly self-destruction, and, therefore, our task does not consist of changing it but rather of delaying it as much as possible. Humankind’s bitter victory will be nothing but the postponement
of such destruction. Anders’s negative ethics rises from the scandal of our not being scandalized by the scandal, from our blindness before the imminent apocalypse. Anders’s negative ethics condemns a world that has made positive ethics phony and impossible, for it is not a matter of defining what is good and what is evil but of acknowledging that the very normative question of good and evil is obsolete. For Anders, if evil, as a moral notion,= still makes sense today, it does so only in terms of “being blind before evil,” the evil of concrete nihilism.
This finally leads me to elucidate the reasons that motivated me to include Günther Anders in a book on totalitarianism. Recent events have persuaded me, indeed, of the necessity to highlight the topicality of a
reflection on our present age that, in spite of all its limitations, has been excessively neglected, not to say forgotten. We recently started to fear the atomic risk again, as if it were an ended past we thought would have never returned, when it actually was a dormant possibility before which we have been, as Anders claimed more than forty years ago, completely and deliberately blind. After all, the atomic arsenals that today, under serious threats that are not “bluffs,” have returned to scare us contain mostly the same warheads that Anders feared in his time.
Perhaps his catastrophism, surely technophobic and somewhat moralistic (not to say irritatingly prophetic), has been simply debunked by decades of the celebratory rhetoric of atomic deterrence. But Anders himself, in a brief but biting essay in his second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, reminded us how naive, ideological, and especially dangerous the distinction between “right hands” and “wrong hands” is. Atomic bombs are never “in right hands.” They stay there, still, ready to be used: “‘To have’ is already ‘to use.’ … The amorality consists not only of the fact that they were used, but in their possession” (Anders 1980, 334). This is because the atomic bomb that has been used once and, like any “possibility” that becomes real from that moment on, the only impossible thing is its impossibility. The atomic bomb is not a “bluff.”
In February 1959, Günther Anders conducted a seminar entitled The Moral Implications of the Atomic Age at the University of Berlin. At the end, students asked him for a short text that could serve as a basis for further discussion. Anders dictated twenty-three “theses,” later published as Theses for the Atomic Age. I believe that these theses represent a sort of “rulebook” of his negative ethics.
I will summarize its key points:
Hiroshima as World Condition. Every place is potentially another Hiroshima. From August 6, 1945, we “became, at least modo negativo, omnipotent; but since, on the other hand, we can be wiped out at any given moment, we also became totally impotent” (Anders 1962, 493).
Ethics of Respite. By now, our existence can be only defined in terms of “respite,” as “not yet= being nonexisting.” We “still” exist in light of our imminent “nonexisting.” Hence, the only possible answer to the question “how should we live?” – and here Anders’s ethics betray their negative character to provide us with normative hints – is to never end the time of the time, to keep on postponing the inevitable annihilation. “We must do everything in our power to make The End Time endless” (494).
The Totalitarianism of Atomic Power. In Anders’s eyes, atomic warheads are not mere weapons.
Atomic power is rather a total condition. Yet, unlike Jaspers and Strauss, for Anders, we cannot invoke “deterrence” to defend our free world from the totalitarian threat. In the atomic age, the traditional political distinction between “friends” and “enemies” utterly failed, not because we all became “friends” but because the very notion of “enemy” is now meaningless. The only real enemy threatening us is atomic annihilation; the only real totalitarianism is the atomic condition, which transforms the whole planet into a borderless concentration camp.
The Inconceivability of Nothingness. The human animal is incapable of conceiving nothingness. We can only conceive a determined negation, but for our mind, the catastrophe is inconceivable, and we cannot truly think of the nonbeing. This is a structural limitation that prevents us from imagining and foreseeing something that goes beyond what we perceive. Here, Anders’s negative ethics provides us with another normative hint: to not rely on perception but to practice our imagination. Currently, in the atomic age, we human animals are “inverted utopians” (496). Unlike traditional utopians, who cannot realize what they imagine, we cannot imagine what we have produced.
The Promethean Gap as Moral Condition of Today’s Humanity. Currently, the main dualism affecting the human condition is no longer the spirit-matter distinction but rather the discrepancy between our capacity for technological production and our capacity to imagine the ultimate purpose of such production. This causes what Anders names, in contrast to the psychological notion of subliminal (the stimulus too small to produce any reaction), the “supra-liminal” (497): an unbridgeable distance between the products we created and the inconceivability of what they may cause, something so wide that it provokes no reaction. For Anders, the “supra-liminal” is our inability to perceive any moral responsibility toward the effect of our products as they take place on such a wide scale that they no longer “touch” us. To press a button and incinerate a city is a “job,” a detached “triggering” (500)—as if the atomic age had made even the “banality of evil” outmoded. If anything, the atomic age should be considered the age of the “banality of nihilism.”
Imagination as the Organ of Ethics. Adolf Eichmann is no longer an ethical ideal-type. For Anders, Eichmann has become an all-encompassing anthropological paradigm concerning each of us, none excluded. Eichmann’s self-deception is now humankind’s self-deception. We all live within the Promethean gap. This is why, for Anders, imagination, despite its structural weakness, is the sole faculty with which we are left to connect our moral consciousness to the truth, to reality, to ethics. Surely, in this struggle against the inevitable end, perception is no ally: it is rather “‘false witness,’ in a far more radical sense than Greek philosophy meant when warning against it” (497).
The Courage of Fear. Extending our imagination means acquiring “the courage to be frightened.” As Anders claims: “‘Expand the capacity of your imagination’ means, concretely, to ‘increase your capacity to fear’” (498). Without such fear, the fear before the imaginative representation of nothingness, we will never be able to halt the final catastrophe. This is not a paralyzing fear but a fear as principle of action, as the driving force of ethics.
It is quite surprising that Günther Anders does not constitute a key reference for the current debate on the Anthropocene. Notions such as the “Promethean gap” or “the courage of being frightened” would surely be of help to understand the catastrophic scenario toward which we are relentlessly going…
From Simona Forti’s Totalitarianism: A Borderline Idea in Political Philosophy; 2024; pages 98 to 108
*********************************
A radical act of cinematic restraint: How to understand the ending of ‘A House of Dynamite’
Biblical Archaeology and the Judeo-Christian legends / The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho
The Oceanic Circle: Talk on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 155th birthday
Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Lecture (2015)
Unsolicited thoughts from an elder citizen
Closing the Circle (E-Book)
The further you look, the more you realize you don’t have a clue
After the truth-shower 