[D66] Günther Anders: A Philosopher for the Modern Age

[A.OUT]

https://rhystranter.com/2016/10/26/christopher-john-muller-gunther-anders-prometheanism/

Günther Anders: A Philosopher for the Modern Age
By
Rhys Tranter
rhystranter.com
14 min
View Original
Christopher John Müller on his new book and his English translation of 
Günther Anders, a contemporary of Adorno, Benjamin, and Arendt


How did you come to discover the work of Günther Anders?

I was alerted to a translated essay from the 1930s called the ‘Pathology 
of Freedom’, whilst writing my PhD thesis in 2012. I had never heard of 
its author, Günther Stern, and was captivated by the work, a brilliant 
existential analysis of the experience of freedom.

When looking up the author, I was surprised to learn that he was 
connected to canonical authors and thinkers I liked to study – Stern 
(who assumed the pseudonym Anders) was the first husband of Hannah 
Arendt, a cousin of Walter Benjamin, a student of Husserl and Heidegger, 
friends with Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, and connected to Berthold 
Brecht, Georg Lukács, Literary Modernists, the Frankfurt School thinkers 
– the list goes on and on and on.

What I discovered was a compelling and highly diverse body of work 
spanning 70 years of writing shaped by an extraordinary life marked by 
anti-Semitism, forced exile, emigration and activism. I also realised 
that Anders was scarcely known or mentioned in Anglophone scholarship – 
and that almost none of his work had been translated, despite a vast 
body of secondary literature in French and German (over 50 books to 
date, and counting).

Anders opens his pioneering book on Kafka with the words ‘To take an 
author seriously means to not just talk about him. A significant author 
is someone who represents things differently and whose work has 
consequences for other things’. I think these lines apply to Anders 
himself. They also explain the format of my book. I didn’t want to write 
‘about’ Anders. Rather, I try to present the profound consequences his 
work has, not just for academic research, but also for our lives today. 
I hope that others will share my sense of discovery and surprise when 
encountering his thought-provoking and highly accessible work.

The essay you translated for your book belongs to a longer work called 
The Obsolescence of Human Beings Vol. 1, first published in 1956. What a 
title! Do you think this work fits with broader discussions about human 
identity and culture in the aftermath of the Second World War?

Yes, absolutely. The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1, is marked by two 
seemingly contradictory tendencies that the horror of the Second World 
War exposed. The absolute devaluation of the human – the Holocaust and 
the void at the core of humanism it revealed – and the elevation of the 
human into a seemingly divine realm that happened in parallel through 
the mastery of the atom. Anders suggests that the atom bomb turned us 
into a ‘new species’ although we are ‘anatomically unchanged’. To quote 
him, ‘We are Titans, no longer what until today humans have called “human”’.

Anders evokes this Titanic posthumanity to show that it entails an act 
of devaluation: ‘Because we are the first Titans, we are also the first 
dwarfs, or whatever we may call beings such as ourselves who are mortal 
not only as individuals, but also as a group.’ ‘Obsolescence’, as I read 
Anders’s term, seeks to capture these two conflicting, simultaneously 
operative tendencies of hubris and debasement, which were consolidated 
amidst the rapid rise of a world of consumer culture out of the WW2 
ruins and Western humanist ideals.

     “The atom bomb is thus the ultimate emblem of an unearthly, 
unsettling and haunting force channelled by complex technological 
objects: It illuminates that the more “our” technological power grows, 
the smaller we become”

The atom bomb is thus the ultimate emblem of an unearthly, unsettling 
and haunting force channelled by complex technological objects: It 
illuminates that the more “our” technological power grows, the smaller 
we become; the more unconditional and unlimited the capability of 
machines, the more conditional our existence; the more machines connect 
us by virtue of their very existence, the more we are also singled out 
as being expendable and inadequate.

So yes, the book reflects the (unresolved) crisis in human identity that 
was the aftermath of WW2, unresolved, because we are still very much 
part of this moment.

Do you think Anders’s ideas about technology can be applied to 21st 
century inventions and innovations? For example, what do you think 
Anders would make of smartphones or tablets?

Yes, I believe that Anders’s thought is more relevant than ever. In 
fact, in my book I suggest that the tensions Anders identified are being 
amplified amidst the increasingly autonomous, “smart” machines that 
populate our lives. A missing phone signal, slow internet connection or 
low battery can make us feel lost and disoriented, even give us the 
impression of having lost a hand or being naked. Such feelings highlight 
the extent to which machines have become part of our self-image. They 
also reveal how easily we mistake the agency technological objects lend 
us for our own, and how many decisions we silently cede to things, 
because these offer us solutions and seem to make life easier.

     “A missing phone signal, slow internet connection or low battery 
can make us feel lost and disoriented, even give us the impression of 
having lost a hand or being naked. Such feelings highlight the extent to 
which machines have become part of our self-image”

For Anders these feelings of loss, limitation and curtailment serve to 
highlight that complex technological objects aren’t ‘phenomena’ in the 
traditional sense of the word, for they ‘do not show themselves’: ‘They 
shelter behind an appearance that has nothing to do with their nature, 
they appear to be less than they are.’ That is to say, we might be able 
to look at our smartphones, but we cannot positively see how these 
devices shape all aspects of our lives and our perception, how they feed 
us with a curated world and how the data and meta-data we generate 
whilst interacting with them expose us to corporate interests, state 
power, automated bots, quantification, persuasive suggestions and a 
personalised world.

Andres’s perspective highlights that the smoother a process becomes the 
more natural and ordinary it seems. It is this lack of friction that 
protects the technological object from scrutiny, and by doing so keeps 
us tacitly complicit with the ‘supra-liminal’ processes and realities 
our objects tie us to, realities that we are all involved in actively 
producing. In the face of this, I do indeed believe that Anders turn to 
exaggeration reveals something that is otherwise hard to see.

Modern technology has led to an almost utopian level of connection and 
transparency. We are able to share ideas and information faster and more 
widely than ever before. But Anders suggests that things are not quite 
as they might appear. Could you say a little more about that?

Sorry, I am afraid that what I am about to say will be rather 
apocalyptic. Anders’s work suggests that the democratic ideal that 
technological progress could bring humanity closer together was 
perfectly realised with the acquisition and accumulation of nuclear 
weapons. This created the first absolutely democratic, unconditional and 
non-exclusive “we”. Everyone is equally affected by nuclear weapons, as 
life on earth is granted only until someone with the power decides 
otherwise. So on the one side nuclear weapons are the ultimate 
“levellers” of humankind, but on the other they give single authorities 
an unprecedented amount of power.

Anders does not regard an H Bomb as exceptional in this respect, but 
presents it as the exemplary technological object, that show us the soul 
of all others. Every complex machine connects us by merely existing, and 
is democratising in this sense, but the object, say the smartphone, 
ultimately remains in the control of those who created it or the 
‘services’ it can provide. Such democracy is engineered, forced onto the 
world in the form of an object, which itself comes into the world 
undemocratically and is jealously guarded.

So the closer we seem to come together by using, say, social media 
platforms, the more information passes through our networked objects, 
the more power automatically falls to the ultimate owners of our 
devices, that is, the service providers, manufacturers, etc. Further, 
the data we generate can be used to automate complex cognitive 
abilities, create speaking machines – which are all marvellous, but are 
inevitably also leading to radical reconfigurations of our way of life, 
job prospects, and a new form of nakedness toward corporate and state 
power. But, as I discuss in my book, all of this is just being done, 
there was never a referendum on artificial intelligence, and neither 
will there be one, because we don’t seem to see any problem, we merely 
“see” ordinary gadgets.

All this means, that we are living in what Anders calls an ‘inverted 
utopia’: our problem is not that we can’t make the better world we can 
imagine, but that we can no longer imagine the world we have made. For 
as the atom-bomb reveals: each powerful machine harbours a world it can 
actualise, a world we cannot know until it is here – but not every such 
world can be a human world.

The Anders essay you translate in your new book is called ‘On Promethean 
Shame’. What drew your attention to this essay in particular?

The essay struck me as being particularly relevant today, and it is a 
great example of Anders’s style of thinking. ‘On Promethean Shame’ 
introduces us to what Anders calls ‘the humiliatingly high quality of 
manmade objects’. It uses observations of everyday life to present our 
growing reliance on machines as a sign that we see ourselves as 
embarrassingly flawed, clumsy and limited. The phenomena and feelings 
the essay discusses include: self-quantification and enhancement, our 
tendency to cover for the inadequacies of machines and make them look 
more capable than they are; Iconomania: our addiction to images of 
ourselves, feelings of alienation, obsolescence and solitude that we 
scarcely acknowledge or even actively conceal, but also, feelings of 
immersion, empowerment and blissful union.

Anders liked to justify what he called the ‘philosophically exaggerated’ 
images his writings develop by an analogy to microscopy. In his words, 
‘If one were to amplify viruses a million times and screen their 
devastating workings, would this amplification of the format also 
co-exaggerate the danger? Or would the danger here rather become visible 
for the first time.’

     “[…] machines embody our hope to escape the lottery of birth, our 
bodily reality and processes that we can’t directly influence, and the 
effort we need to invest to be who we are.”

In the light of this explanation, I now dare to introduce the essay’s 
overarching thesis: It suggests that we fetishize our gadgets because 
they allow us to see ourselves as machines that can be improved, 
altered, repaired and made to function with a designated purpose. As 
such, machines embody our hope to escape the lottery of birth, our 
bodily reality and processes that we can’t directly influence, and the 
effort we need to invest to be who we are. Ultimately, Promethean shame 
is seen as an expression of embarrassment about having been born rather 
than having been made.

The essay names our active – but painfully unfulfillable – desire to be 
a thing, a desire that can only arise if things are on some level 
already acknowledged and experienced as being ‘better’ than us, humans. 
This constellation of ideas is mobilised in my book to think about 
digital and bio-technologies and the human self-image amidst ever 
“smarter” machines.

In addition to being a philosopher, critical theorist and cultural 
commentator, Anders was also a literary critic, wasn’t he? He wrote 
thought-provoking pieces on writers like Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka.

Well in fact, Anders was also a literary author. He published hundreds 
of poems, several novellas and fables and wrote the substantial 
anti-fascist novel die molussische Katakombe (The Catacombs of Molussia) 
in 1932, published posthumously. His book on Franz Kafka was translated 
into English in 1960. It originated from a 1934 lecture that was written 
long before Kafka was well known. Anders also wrote on Rilke together 
with Hannah Arendt, on Brecht and Döblin, as well as on artists such as 
Georg Grosz and Heartfield, but also on Romanticism and Ruins. His piece 
on Beckett’s En attendant Godot, ‘Being without Time’, is part of The 
Obsolescence of Human Beings 1. It doubles as a rebuttal of Heidegger.

‘Homeless Sculpture’, one of my favourite essays on literature and art, 
was written in English. It is a speech for an exhibition of Rodin’s work 
in California, but deals broadly with ideas of alienation and the 
commodification of objects. It is freely accessible online, via the 
homepage of the International Günther Anders Society. I think ‘Homeless 
Sculpture’ gives a good impression of Anders’s originality as a literary 
scholar and the beauty of his prose, even though it is written in his 
Germanic English.

Literature, art and especially music seem to have been Anders’s 
principal passions, but his work frequently discusses how he felt a 
moral obligation to concentrate his efforts on confronting nuclear 
weapons, ecological destruction and the effects of consumerist culture. 
Luckily, more and more of his work on literature, art and music is being 
published posthumously. I am especially looking forward to his highly 
esteemed early phenomenology of music and listening.

Could you say a little bit about the Anders’s life and the wider 
intellectual community he belonged to? He was friends and colleagues 
with a number of notable critical theorists and philosophers, wasn’t he?

Anders was the son of eminent child psychologists Clara and William 
Stern who coined the notion of an Intelligence Quotient, i.e., an IQ. He 
was born in 1902 and grew up in Breslau, now the Polish city Wroclaw. In 
the early 1920’s, he belonged to the famous group of students of Husserl 
and Heidegger in Freiburg. These included Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, to 
whom Anders was married from 1929-1937. Anders went on to work as an 
assistant of Max Scheler. So already as a student, he was very much part 
of a now famous German academic scene.

Hitler’s rise to power changed everything. At the time Anders was living 
in Berlin (Brecht had helped him find work at a newspaper). Early in 
1933, after the arson attack on the Reichstag, when Brecht’s address 
book was confiscated by the Gestapo, Anders fled into exile in Paris. 
There he developed his philosophical writings further. ‘The Pathology of 
Freedom’ stems from this time. It was translated into French in the mid 
1930’s by Emanuel Levinas, and Sartre and Deleuze cite it as a 
significant influence.

In 1936 Anders moved on to California, where he found himself together 
with Adorno, Horkheimer, the Marcuses, and much of the German cultural 
elite. He also briefly taught at the New School in New York. He returned 
to Europe in 1949 and settled in Vienna, having vowed to never live in 
Germany again.

Although connected to the pre- and post-war ‘intellectual elite’, it is 
important to note that Anders also resolutely stood apart from it. As a 
public intellectual and uncompromising political activist, he did not 
hesitate to voice his dissatisfaction with both the academic institution 
and jargon and the political engagement of his contemporaries, or rather 
the perceived lack of it. For instance, he publicly criticised Adorno’s 
reluctance to be part of anti-nuclear demonstrations. Following a rift 
in the late 20’s, Heidegger was his lifelong target, and Anders was 
utterly unforgiving of his former teacher’s involvement in Nazism.

The extensive correspondence by letter Anders entertained throughout his 
life with his contemporaries contributes to an incredibly rich archive, 
housed in The Literary Archives of the Austrian National Library in 
Vienna. The correspondence with Hannah Arendt has just been published.

When we read the work of certain European critical theorists, let’s say 
Theodor W. Adorno, we can often see a fascination with American consumer 
culture. Is this fascination something Anders shared?

It is safe to say that this fascination often amounted to an allergic 
reaction – especially to wartime California, and the household 
appliances, the cars, popular culture – particularly the reality TV 
shows and pop-music – that he associated to America. During the war, 
Anders actively participated at seminars convened by Adorno and 
Horkheimer, and some of his key ideas were developed in this context. 
Anders supported himself with a number of ‘odd-jobs’ in factories and 
movie repositories. These experiences shaped his writing and way of 
thinking.

His work reflects on the attitudes of his co-workers, the extreme 
division of labour, and the chains of abstraction that shape globalised 
consumerist culture and separate the worker form the end product, the 
consumer from the producer (‘the first’ from ‘the third’ world). His 
book Visit Beautiful Vietnam, on the Vietnam war is very powerful indeed.

His assessment was not all negative, though. His fascination with space 
flight is evident in The View from the Moon: Philosophical Reflections 
on Space Travel. In this book, Anders imagines looking back at the earth 
from the moon and hopes that this will make us realise the shared fate 
of humanity and the fragility of the planet. The famous ‘Earthrise’ 
picture that was taken in 1968 did indeed go on to have this effect.

What’s next for you?

I will continue to translate Anders work. A long essay ‘The Obsolescence 
of Privacy’ will appear early in 2017 in the journal CounterText, but 
book length work is also on the horizon. I have a number of writing 
projects close to completion in the broad area of critical and literary 
theory and American literature. These are not directly connected to 
Anders, although there is thematic overlap. My most pressing project is 
the completion of a monograph on the perceived immediacy of feeling, and 
how this is shaped by literary imagination and artificial structures. 
Some general info is available online.

Prometheanism is available from Rowman & Littlefield.

About the Author

Christopher John Müller is an Honorary Research Associate of the School 
of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University. He is also 
an Associate Teacher at the Department of English, University of 
Bristol, where he teaches American Literature and Literary Theory.