Günther Anders

For the cinematographer of the same name, see Günther Anders (cinematographer).

Günther Anders
Anders in 1929
Born	Günther Siegmund Stern (1902-07-12)12 July 1902 Breslau, German Empire
Died	17 December 1992(1992-12-17) (aged 90) Vienna, Austria
Alma mater	University of Freiburg
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy, phenomenology

Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern, 12 July 1902 – 17 December 1992) was a German-Austrian philosopher, journalist, essayist and poet.

Trained in the phenomenological tradition, he developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, focusing on such themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, the nuclear threat, the Shoah, and the question of being a philosopher.

In 1992, shortly before his death, Günther Anders was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize.

Biography

Günther Anders' grave in Vienna

Günther Anders (then Stern) was born on 12 July 1902, in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), the son of founders of child developmental psychology Clara and William Stern and cousin to philosopher Walter Benjamin.

In 1923, Anders obtained a PhD in philosophy; Edmund Husserl was his dissertation advisor. Anders' sister Hilde Stern was at one time married to the German philosopher Rudolf Schottlaender, who was also a student of Husserl, however Anders' own father was arguably the most significant intellectual influence in his life.

While Anders was working as a journalist in Berlin (Berliner Börsen-Courier), an editor did not want so many Jewish-sounding bylines in his paper, so Stern chose the name "Anders" (meaning other or different). He used that nom-de-plume for the rest of his life.

Anders was an atheist, and a member of the Frankfurt School, from which emerged a current of thought, often considered as founding or paradigmatic of social philosophy or critical theory. In the late 1920s Anders studied with the philosopher Martin Heidegger in Freiburg.

He married, in 1929, fellow Heidegger student Hannah Arendt, who had engaged in an affair with their common mentor.

In 1930-31 he unsuccessfully attempted a habilitation under Paul Tillich in sociomusicology, and was advised by Max Wertheimer and Karl Mannheim to be patient.

In 1933, Anders fled Nazi Germany, first to France (where he and Arendt divorced amicably in 1937), and in 1936 to the United States.

Here he spent his time in a multitude of activities, hired in the United States Office of War Information, as a writer for Aufbau (journal), as a reviewer for a philosophical journal, as a tutor in the house of a famous composer and songwriter, as a worker in a factory, as a costume and theatrical property boy in Hollywood, as a failed scriptwriter, among others. He was a lecturer in The New School for Social Research.

Anders married a second time, to the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich in 1945.

Anders returned to Europe in 1950 with his second wife, Elisabeth, whom he had met in New York, to live in her native Vienna. While Germany had been the first choice, the political situation was not appropriate and an academic post in Halle no longer a choice.

There Anders wrote his main philosophical work, whose title translates as The Obsolescence of Humankind (1956), became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement, and published numerous essays and expanded versions of his diaries, including one of a trip to Breslau and Auschwitz with his wife. Anders' papers are held by the University of Vienna, and his literary executor is former FORVM editor Gerhard Oberschlick. He and his second wife divorced in 1955.

In 1957, Anders married a third time, to American pianist Charlotte Lois Zelka. Gunther knew how to play the piano and violin. Andres is known for his relationships.

Philosophy

Günther Anders has called his philosophy as "occasional philosophy" (Gelegenheitsphilosoph); and "impressionistic philosophy". Gunther never held an academic rank in Europe. A lack of one influenced his work causing it to deviate from the usual academic style.

Günther Anders was an early critic of the role of technology in modern life and in this context was a trenchant critic of the role of television. His essay "The Phantom World of TV," written in the late 1950s, was published in an edition of Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's influential anthology Mass Culture. In it he details how the televisual experience substitutes images for experience, leading people to eschew first-hand experiences in the world and instead become "voyeurs," His dominant metaphor in this essay centers on how television interposes itself between family members "at the dinner table."

The Obsolescence of Humankind

Main article: The Outdatedness of Human Beings

His major work, of which only a few essays have been translated into English, is acknowledged to be Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (literally "The Antiquated Human Species," 1956; vol. 2 1980). While obsolescence was a typical translation early on, antiquatedness (Antiquatedness of Humanity) is considered as a more suitable translation. By the end of the 20th century, both volumes had sold about 140,000 copies. This wide readership dwarfed scholarly interactions.

It argues that a gap has developed between humanity's technologically enhanced capacity to create and destroy, and our ability to imagine that destruction. Anders devoted a great deal of attention to the nuclear threat, making him an early critic of this technology as well.

The two volume work is made up of a string of philosophical essays that start with an observation often found in Anders' diary entries dating back to his exile in the U.S. in the 1940s.

To provide an example from the first chapter of volume one: "First Encounter with Promethean Shame – Today's Prometheus asks: 'Who am I anyway?'"; "Shame about the 'embarrassingly' high quality of manufactured goods." What are we embarrassed about? Anders' answer to this question is simply "that we were born and not manufactured."

Don Ihde suppressed an English translation of the two volumes.

Prometheanism

In 1942, Andres wrote of having found signs of a new form of shame which he provisionally called Promethean shame, that is "the shame when confronted by the humiliatingly high quality of fabricated things. He would later go on to express doubts about the existence of this kind of shame. Another iteration of the shame was "the incapacity of our imagination to grasp the enormity of what we can produce and set in motion". Promethean shame can be seen in posthumanism, in the comparisons we make with our creations. Andres utilizes the story of Prometheus and draws parallels to modern technology. For him, Prometheus means "he who thinks ahead".

The variations of the Promethean disjunction Andres referred to included a disjunction between the maximum that we can produce, and the maximum that we can imagine, use and need, which are in comparison shamefully small to what we can produce. It is a disproportion between the capacities for destruction and construction where "we can construct much more than we are capable of destroying; that it is easy to build but very difficult to destroy". The Promethean gap refers to the incapacity to imagine the consequences of our creations.

Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann

Just as Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem elucidated the Banality of Evil by pointing that most heinous crimes can be committed by quite ordinary people, Anders explores the moral and ethical ramifications of the facts brought to light in the 1960–61 trial of Adolf Eichmann in We Sons of Eichmann: Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann (the son of the noted Nazi bureaucrat and genocidaire). He suggests that the appellation "Eichmann" properly designates any person who actively participated in, ignored or failed to learn about, or even knew about but took no action against the Nazis' mass murder campaigns against Jews and others. He explained to his audience in Austria and Germany, among them young writers searching for ways to empathize with their parents' generation, that "there was but one viable alternative not only for Eichmann's son Klaus but all 'Eichmann sons,' namely to repudiate their fathers since mourning them was not an option."

Mensch ohne Welt

In Mensch ohne Welt, Anders engages in a critique of the contemporary western commodity-society which he deems a society unfit for human beings. He views this perspective as negative-ontological. This world is a world for capital, not human beings, especially not for those who don't have the "great honor" to participate in labour. One is deemed adequate when one sells labour, the human being very far from being viewed as an end in herself. Due to a kind of "non laboro ergo non sum" type of logic.

Quotes by and about Anders

Foreword. "Outdatedness of Human Beings 1", 5th edition
"The three main theses: that we are no match for the perfection of our products; that we produce more than we can visualize and take responsibility for; and that we believe, that, what we can do, are allowed to do, no: should do, no: must do – these three basic theses, in light of the environmental threats emerging over the last quarter century, have become more prevailing and urgent than they were then."

Changing the world
"It does not suffice to change the world. We do that anyway. And to a large extent that happens even without our involvement. In addition we have to interpret this change. Precisely in order to change it. So that the world does not change without us. And ultimately into a world without us."

Introduction. "Outdatedness of Human Beings 2"
This volume is "...a philosophical anthropology in the age of technocracy". With "technocracy" I do not mean the rule of technocrats (as if they were a group of specialists, who dominate today's politics), but the fact, that the world, in which we live and which determines us, is a technological one – which extends so far, that we are not allowed to say, that in our historical situation there is among other things technology, rather do we have to say: within the world's status called "technology" history happens, in other words technology has become the subject of history, in which we are only "co-historical".

Dedication. "Outdatedness of Human Beings 1", 5th edition

Exactly half a century ago, in nineteen hundred and six, my father William Stern published, then twenty years younger and generations more confident than his son today, the first volume of his work "Person and Thing." His hope, to rehabilitate the "Person" through his struggle against an impersonal Psychology, he only unwillingly would have seen dashed. His very own kindness and the optimism of the times, to which he belonged, prevented him for many years, to understand that what makes a "Person" a "Thing", is not its scientific treatment; but the actual treatment of one human being by another. When overnight he was dishonored and chased away by the spurners of humanity, he was not spared the grief that comes from a better understanding into a world worse off.

In memory of him, who indelibly implanted the idea of human dignity in his son, these mournful pages on the devastation of human beings were written.

Love Yesterday. Notes on the History of Feelings. 1986.
Without knights no chivalry, without court no courtliness, without salon no charm, without material support no deference will last indefinitely, not even as make-believe. In the same manner what shrinks in a world that cheats us out of leisure and other preconditions of our privacy, are the subtleties of our emotional private lives.

Jewish Origins. In: Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology.
"His Jewish self-consciousness reveals itself in the acknowledgment that he is never more ashamed than when meeting a Jew who is ashamed to be a Jew. The Judaism that Anders represents with the fierceness and decisiveness that is so characteristic of him is, however, a modern, secular, and humanistic Judaism."

Honors

• 1962: Premio Omegna der Resistenza Italiana (Omegna Award of the Italian Resistance)
• 1967: Deutscher Kritikerpreis (German critics prize)
• 1978: Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste (Grand Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts)
• 1983: Theodor W. Adorno Award
• 1979: Staatspreis für Kulturpublizistik (Austrian State Prize for Cultural Journalism)
• 1985: Andreas Gryphius Prize (rejected)
• 1992: Honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna (rejected)
• 1992: Sigmund Freud Prize

Günther Anders Prize for critical thinking

Günther Anders Prize for critical thinking (Preis für kritisches denken) is a biannual award given by the International Günther Anders Society and sponsored by Verlag C. H. Beck. Constituted in 2018, winners include Joseph Vogl, Corine Pelluchon and Dietmar Dath.

Works

Bibliographies

• Scheffelmeier, Von Heinz (January 1995). "Bibliographie Günther Anders (Stern) Primär-, Sekundär- und Tertiärquellen. 1924-1994". FORVM. Berlin. Archived from the original on 12 February 2006.
  • Scheffelmeier, Heinz (January 1995). "Bibliographie Günther Anders (Stern)". Reorganized and archived by Harold Marcuse. Berlin.

List of selected works

• Der Hungermarsch (The Hunger March) 1935
• Kafka Pro und Contra: Die Prozessunterlagen (Kafka, pro and contra. The Trial Records) 1951, 1985
• Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Outdatedness of Human Beings)
  • vol I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (On the Soul in the Era of the Second Industrial Revolution) 1956
  • vol. II: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution. (On the Destruction of Life in the Era of the Third Industrial Revolution) 1980
• Der Mann auf der Brücke: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (The Man on the Bridge: Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki) 1959
  • Hiroshima ist Überall (Hiroshima is Everywhere)
• The View from the Tower. Tales. 1932
• On Heidegger.
• Homeless Sculpture, On Rodin.
• Visit to Hades. Auschwitz and Breslau 1966.
• Visit Beautiful Vietnam: ABC of Today's Aggression.
• Thesis on the Legitimacy of Violence as a Form of Self-Defense Against the Nuclear Threat to Humanity.
• My Jewishness. 1978
• Heresies. 1996
• Philosophical Notes in Shorthand. 2002
• Daily Notes: Records 1941–1992. 2006
• The Writing on the Wall. 1967
• Narratives. Gay Philosophy. 1983
• Man Without World.
• Hunger March.
• The Atomic Threat. Radical Considerations.
• Exaggerations Towards Truth. Thoughts and Aphorisms. Somewhat reminiscent of Karl Kraus
• Love Yesterday. Notes on the History of Feelings. 1986.
• View from the Moon. Reflections on Space Flights. 1994
• Nuernberg and Vietnam. Synoptical Mosaic.1968
• George Grosz. 1961
• The Dead. Speech on three world wars. 1966
• On Philosophical Diction and the Problem of Popularization. 1992
• The World as Phantom and Matrix. 1990
• The Final Hours and the End of All Time. Thoughts on the Nuclear Situation. 1972 ["Endzeit und Zeitenende"]

Correspondence and conversations

• Anders, Günther (2002). Wir Eichmannsöhne: offener Brief an Klaus Eichmann [We Sons of Eichmann. Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann.] (in German). C.H.Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-47548-1.
• ————; Eatherly, Claude (1961). Off limits für das Gewissen: der Briefwechsel zwischen dem Hiroshima-Piloten Claude Eatherly und Günther Anders [Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot Claude Eatherly, told in his Letters to Günther Anders] (in German). Rowohlt.
• ————; Schubert, Elke (1987). Günther Anders antwortet: Interviews & Erklärungen [Günther Anders answers. Interviews and Explanations] (in German). Klaus Bittermann. ISBN 978-3-923118-11-3.

Prose

• Anders, Gunther (1978). Kosmologische Humoreske und andere Erzahlungen [Cosmological humoresque and other narratives] (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ISBN 978-3-518-06932-5. OCLC 4033457.
• —— (1992) [1938]. Die molussische Katakombe: Roman [The Molussian Catacomb] (in German). Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-36473-0.
• —— (1993). Mariechen: eine Gutenachtgeschichte für Liebende, Philosophen und Angehörige anderer Berufsgruppen [Little Mary. Bedtime Stories for lovers, philosophers and members of other professional groups] (in German). C.H.Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-37403-6.

Anthologies

• Anders, Günther (2006). Tagesnotizen : Aufzeichnungen 1941-1979 (1. Aufl. ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ISBN 978-3-518-22405-2.

References

Works cited

• Dijk, Paul van (2000). Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contributions of Günther Anders. Rodopi. Brill Publishers. ISBN 978-90-420-1402-2 – via Google Books.
• Müller, Christopher John (2016). Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 29–95. ISBN 978-1-78348-240-5.
• Babich, Babette (2021). Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-350-22860-3.
• Anders, Günther (2014) [1980]. The Obsolescence of Man. Vol. 2. Translated by Pérez, Josep Monter – via libcom.org. Translated in June-December 2014 from the Spanish translation: Günther Anders, La Obsolescencia del Hombre (Vol. II) Sobre la destrucción de la vida en la época de la tercera revolución industrial, tr. Josep Monter Pérez, Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2011. Originally published under the title: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen II

Secondary literature

Biography

• Bahr, Raimund (2010). Gunther Anders Leben und Denken im Wort (in German). ISBN 978-3-902157-71-3. OCLC 754200959.

In English

• Schraube, Ernst (2005), "Anders, Günther. In (Ed.), (pp. 67-68). Farmington Hills: Macmillan.", in Mitcham, Carl (ed.), Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills: Macmillan, pp. 67–68
  • ———— (2005). "'Torturing things until they confess': Günther Anders' critique of technology". Science as Culture. 14 (1): 77–85. doi:10.1080/09505430500041983. ISSN 0950-5431. S2CID 73638346.
  • ———— (2012). "Das Ich und der Andere in der psychologischen Technikforschung". Journal für Psychologie. 20 (1).
• Nosthoff, Anna-Verena; Maschewski, Felix (2019). "The obsolescence of politics: Rereading Günther Anders's critique of cybernetic governance and integral power in the digital age". Thesis Eleven. 153 (1): 75–93. doi:10.1177/0725513619863853. ISSN 0725-5136. S2CID 203054020.
• Babich, Babette (2018). "On Günther Anders, political media theory, and nuclear violence". Philosophy & Social Criticism. 44 (10): 1110–1126. doi:10.1177/0191453718794741. ISSN 0191-4537. S2CID 150120200. [1]
  • ———— (July 2012). "Geworfenheit und prometheische Scham im Zeitalter der transhumanen Kybernetik Technik und Machenschaft bei Martin Heidegger, Fritz Lang und Günther Anders". Die Neugier des Glücklichen (in German). Weimar: Bauhaus Universitätsverlag: 7–35.
  • ———— (2012–2013). "O, Superman! or Being Towards Transhumanism: Martin Heidegger, Günther Anders, and Media Aesthetics". Divinatio. 36: 83–99.

• Latini, Micaela (Fall 2015). Farinotti, Luisella; Grespi, Barbara; Maitre, Barbara Le (eds.). "The Vision of the End. Anders on the TV Series Holocaust". Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal. Vol. XV, no. 25 (Overlapping Images. Between Cinema and Photography ed.). Mimesis International. pp. 115–124.
• Müller, Christopher John (2021). "Hollywood, Exile, and New Types of Pictures: Günther Anders's 1941 California Diary "Washing the Corpses of History"". Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. 5 (4). doi:10.26597/mod.0185. S2CID 234021085.
• —————; Mellor, David (2019). "Utopia inverted: Günther Anders, technology and the social". Thesis Eleven. 153 (1): 3–8. doi:10.1177/0725513619865638. ISSN 0725-5136. S2CID 203107887.

Other languages

German

• Dries, Christian (2012). Die Welt als Vernichtungslager: Eine kritische Theorie der Moderne im Anschluss an Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt und Hans Jonas (in German). Bielefeld: Verlag.
• ———— (2009). Günther Anders. UTB Profile (in French and German). Stuttgart. ISBN 9783825232573. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Konrad Paul Liessmann, Günther Anders. Philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen Revolutionen. Munich, 2002.
• Margret Lohman, Philosophieren in der Endzeit. Zur Gegenwartsanalyse von Günther Anders. München, 1999.
• Bernd Neumann, "Noch Einmal: Hannah Arendt, Günther Stern/Anders mit bezug auf den jüngst komplettierten Briefwechsel zwischen Arendt und Stern und unter Rekurs auf Hannah Arendts unveröffentlichte Fabelerzählung Die weisen Tiere", in: Bernd Neumann, Helgard Mahrdt, and Martin Frank, eds., "The angel of history is looking back": Hannah Arendts Werk. Würzbach, 2001. pp. 107–126.
• Dirk Röpcke and Raimund Bahr, eds., Geheimagent der Masseneremiten – Günther Anders Wien, 2002.

Italian

• Franco Lolli, Günther Anders. Napoli-Salerno: Orthotes Editrice, 2014
• Micaela Latini, Aldo Meccariello, L'uomo e la (sua) fine. Studi su Günther Anders, eds., Asterios, Trieste 2014.
• Alessio Cernicchiaro, Günther Anders. La Cassandra della filosofia. Dall'uomo senza mondo al mondo senza uomo, Petite Plaisance, Pistoia 2014.
• Rosanna Gangemi, "Sovversioni del fotomontaggio politico: l'immagine agitata di John Heartfield", in Elephant&Castle. Laboratorio dell’immaginario, n. 26, dicembre 2021, https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/web/saggi/sovversioni-del-fotomontaggio-politico-l-immagine-agitata-di-john-heartfield/403.
• Rosanna Gangemi, "L’arte è una disciplina da combattimento: George Grosz e Günther Anders", in Itinera 21/2021, Università degli Studi di Milano, https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/itinera/issue/view/1705.
• Rosanna Gangemi, "Senza riparo in moto perpetuo. Günther Anders su Rodin", in La scrittura dell’esilio oltreoceano. Diaspora culturale italo-tedesca nell’Europa totalitaria del Nazifascismo. Riflessioni interdisciplinari, in E. Saletta (dir.), Roma, Aracne, 2020.

French

• David, Christophe (2007). "Nous formons une équipe triste: Notes sur Günther Anders et Theodor W. Adorno". Tumultes. Günther Anders: Agir pour repousser la fin du monde (in French) (28/29): 169–183. doi:10.3917/tumu.28.0169. ISSN 1243-549X. JSTOR 24598663.
• Rosanna Gangemi, "Le choc esthétique comme jugement moral et lutte politique : John Heartfield d’après Günther Anders", in C. Foucher Zarmanian, M. Nachtergael (dir.), Le phototexte engagé. Une culture visuelle du militantisme au XXe siècle, les presses du réél, Dijon, 2021.
• Rosanna Gangemi, "Günther Anders et Nicolas Rey – Le conte philosophique comme réactivation écranique de fragments sans lecteurs", in P. Clermont, D. Henky (dir.), Transmédialités du conte, Peter Lang, 2019.
• Rosanna Gangemi, Conférence Sculpture sans abri – L’inéluctabilité de l’air (Günther Anders 1902–1992), Musée Rodin, Paris, 9–10 novembre 2017. Podcast : http://www.musee-rodin.fr/fr/agenda/activite/rodin-londe-de-choc-ii.
• Edouard Jolly, Nihilisme et technique. Etude sur Günther Anders, EuroPhilosophie Editions, coll. "Bibliothèque de philosophie. sociale et politique". Lille, 2010.
• Thierry Simonelli, Günther Anders, De la désuétude de l'homme. Paris: Éditions September, 2004.

Spanish

• Cozzi, Fabio (2011). Günther Anders Dall'uomo senza mondo al mondo senza uomo (Thesis). Pisa University Press.

External links

• Media related to Günther Anders at Wikimedia Commons

• Detailed site on Anders by Harold Marcuse, includes extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works
• The extensive, beautifully illustrated biography of Anders's life on the web site of the International Gunther Anders Society is now also available in English. Source text by Christian Dries, translated by Christopher John Müller
• Günther Anders (1902-1992) Schriftsteller und Philosoph. Austrian National Library