Until the recent and first full translation of Günther Anders’s main work, the original German title Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen has been translated in at least two different ways: The Antiquatedness of the Human or the The Obsolescence of the Human. While the translation to “antiquatedness” is more literal, it sounds quite unidiomatic in English. “Antiquiertheit” is likewise quite an old-fashioned expression in German, rarely used in everyday speech and probably never by millennials or Gen Z.
The term “obsolescence” is a preferred term in today’s language. The all-encompassing fear during Anders’s time was that humans were increasingly becoming appendages to machines. While his contemporaries in the 1950s were humbled by the rapid development of human engineering and cybernetic knowledge, it has been the growing capacities of AI that have been taking a grip on our lives in the last decade. An entire discourse today revolves around human beings and their professional skills becoming obsolete or degraded and how present-day societies are politically unable or unwilling to control what they have invented.
The decision to translate “Antiquiertheit” as “Obsolescence” in the book’s title is a fitting choice to higlight Günther Anders’s timeliness and to introduce his “anthropology of the technocratic age” to our present day. I would like to turn my attention to a thematic undercurrent of Anders’s book which is expressed in the original German title: the aspect of temporality and asynchrony. Anders himself used the term “historically supraliminal” (225) to describe this new human condition.
Anders’s book Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution was first released in 1956 by the German publisher C. H. Beck. Anders wrote in a letter to a friend, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, that the book was “cobbled together.” And indeed, the volume consists of several disparate chapters written or begun during his exile in the United States (1936–50) or referring to observations he made during his odd jobs on the West Coast. Die Antiquiertheit was not conceived as a single, cohesive work. Anders apparently viewed the volume as the culmination and turning point of his creative output. Not only did he revisit previously explored themes such as philosophical anthropology under new historical circumstances, but he also characterized everything written thereafter as “paraphrases of the main work.”
The profound significance Anders attributed to this book stemmed primarily from the fact that he was one of the first to present a detailed philosophical examination of the atomic bomb. The book’s iconic title did not immediately foreshadow the ontological rupture caused by the first deployment of the atomic bomb. The subtitle, however, struck a tone critical and diagnostic of the time and the culture, placing the volume within an entire canon of pessimistic analyses of the technological age that appeared in the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany after World War II.
At first glance, the book seems disparate and lacking a clear structure. Yet the method outlined in Anders’s introduction—taking the “opaque and unsettling nature of things” (13) of his day as the starting point for philosophical inquiry—reveals the book’s underlying coherence. This is grounded not only in the question of technology but also “gives rise to this mode of philosophy” (13). In three chapters, Anders depicts the implications of human beings lagging behind technology for imagination, feeling, and responsibility, which he calls variations on the “fundamental theme of discrepancy” and “the Promethean discrepancy.”
Amid these casual philosophical reflections on the “opaque” material world of late capitalism stands a fourth chapter whose subject matter initially seems to fall outside the scope of the book: Anders’s interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. In explicit contrast to existentialist or metaphysical interpretations, he saw it as a fable about the ahistorical human being, thereby bringing to the fore a thematic strand of the book that is also present, albeit subtly, in all the other chapters.
Anders no longer took human beings as acting or knowing subjects as the starting point for his description of technologized modernity. He pushed the shifting boundaries between humans and objects—or technology—to their absolute limits; he demonstrated the Marxist concepts of reification and alienation in their literal sense. Anders described his aim as a “critique of the limits of all human faculties” (21). He sought to achieve this in Antiquiertheit des Menschen by expanding the boundaries of philosophy. Anders’s turn toward singular phenomena also entailed a disrespectful attitude toward philosophical tradition because he barely acknowledged it at all and merely hinted at philosophical concepts and precursors.
The book begins with a 1942 diary entry from Anders’s exile in California. He had observed how at the Museum of Technology his companion reacted to one of the exhibits: “As soon as one of the highly complicated pieces started to work, he lowered his eyes and fell silent.— Even more strikingly, he concealed his hands behind his back, as if he were ashamed to have brought these heavy, graceless, and obsolete instruments into the company of machines working with such accuracy and refinement” (26). Building on this scene, Anders developed the theme of “Promethean shame” through which he extends the anthropological phenomenon of failed self-identification from the interpersonal sphere to the relationship between humans and things.
Drawing on Fordist assembly-line production, Anders was able to describe the shame stemming from his own work experience in exile. In the act of failing before the machine, the worker was thrown back to an “old residue of self [that] now suddenly stands there without a world—inept, ‘rejected and disproven’ [verworfen]—no longer knowing what to do with itself” (86). Anders observed this tension in a wide variety of cultural and social phenomena of his time. To explain how human boundaries were expanded by force, Anders gave examples stemming not only from industrial production, but also from the operation of the Nazi camps.
Anders’s alienation device should also be viewed in relation to Marx’s work on commodity fetishism. Whereas for Marx, the social relations mediated by abstract labor and exchange were obscured within the commodity, in a literary act of inversion, Anders presented these relations to us as active forces, as Margret Lohmann in her monograph Philosophieren in der Endzeit has argued. Analogous to this inversion, Gabriele Althaus sees in Anders “the blurring of the distinction of labor and action.” With increasing industrialization and technologization, human action had been degraded to mere collaboration or operation of machines.
The concluding chapter, which Anders titled “On the Bomb and the Roots of Our Apocalypse Blindness,” offered a radical thematic focal point for his critique of technology. Yet Anders’s ability to write about the atomic bomb had only developed after some time. In the end, the experience of shock, the fact that his “imagination, thinking,” his “mouth and skin were on strike in light of the enormity of events” became the central theme of his oeuvre. Althaus described this as “the experience of a boundary that was crossed, and the boundaries of possible experience: the experience of ‘nothingness,’” after which philosophical thinking would have to recalibrate. To Anders, the explosion of the bomb had raised important questions relating to ontology, metaphysics, and history, object, and concept, and had no longer posed them as objects of philosophical reflection, but as everyday questions. The bomb overshadowed the societal and political life of every individual from then on, determined by the fluctuations of the Cold War.
It was the deployment of the atomic bomb, the action degraded to the act of pressing a button, that had presaged the possibility of nothingness, of bringing about the end of humankind by killing and contaminating hundreds of thousands of people with radiation. As a result, a chasm appeared between making something happen and imagining it had expanded beyond measure: a man-made “event [that], despite it being empirical, defied imagination” (Althaus). In a sense, he interpreted the bomb as the absolute of the Promethean discrepancy in that the relationship between means and ends was scrambled: “If the bomb were to be used, even its smallest effect would already be greater than any human end, be it political or military, regardless of how great such an end may be” (214).
However, the Promethean discrepancy also provided a framework for bringing together two past events—Auschwitz and Hiroshima—that differed vastly in their circumstances, “Yet anyone who gasps at these crimes as erratic events of our epoch closes themselves off from actually comprehending them. When viewed in isolation, these crimes seem devoid of reality—or at least of a reality that can be understood” (245). It was precisely the fact that two very different mass extermination events had occurred within a short period of time that offered an initial clue toward understanding them. Anders considered that clue to involve technological development and its basis in the division of labor.
According to Anders, Auschwitz and Hiroshima differed in their relationship to the historical world. That the destruction of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 represented an ontological break and his critique of a general “apocalypse blindness” were to become the most prominent themes of his work. In this context, the extermination camps ultimately appeared as a “prehistory” of the annihilation of humanity as a whole: “The machineries of death were operating with such absolute reliability that no uneconomical remnant of life remained. In these camps, the respectable premise ‘All Humans Are Mortal’ lost its meaning once and for all and already became an object of ridicule. […] If there was a change, it was only for the worse, for it is now not just ‘all humans’ but humanity as a whole that can be killed” (209).
The vision of a possible end of humankind affected historical thinking in two ways. First, it precluded the possibility of conceiving of the future as anything other than a negative teleology of destruction. What remained for the present, then, were expressions such as “living in the temporal cell” or a “grace period.” Although this “grace period” was repeatedly extended up to the present day, it nevertheless obstructed an open horizon of historical development.
Even more importantly, the vision of a possible end of humankind violated the understanding and the representation of the past. Anders addressed this problem of the transmission of the past as a “second death.” To whom should memory be entrusted if the fear of death extended to humanity as a whole? “Even for us today, still alive in a world that still exists, the past that ‘was’—the past that is nothing more than, ‘what once had been’—seems dead. […] For if nobody is left to remember anything that was, how would that differ from that which never has been?” (210-211).
The first volume of The Obsolescence of the Human. On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution is complex in terms of its subject matter, its manner of representation, and its concept of history. In it, the figure of Prometheus connects various levels of interpretation, pointing to a philosophical void in order to determine the limits of humankind. The Promethean discrepancy also models a process of gaining insight into history. Yet at the same time, the discrepancy between making something happen and imagining it also made transcending the historical itself comprehensible. Anders’s idea of asynchrony had not only become radicalized in the course of history to become a discrepancy between humans and history, but the book itself had become inscribed with an asynchrony which, in its reception, was oftentimes resolved in favor of an apocalyptic prognosis.
