Some words, Günther Anders proposes, must be understood as Zaubervokabel: “magical words” that, as it were, cast a spell on thought, exert a peculiar fascination, demand to be interpreted, defined, determined. Such words do not serve as the carrier of an already given conceptual meaning, but rather pull thought into their circle, compelling the generation of ever-new concepts. The philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, from whose work Anders may have adopted the term, argued that entire epochs may find themselves in the thrall of such magical words: appearing suddenly, at particular historical junctures, they promise to unlock an insight into a predicament that has, until now, withdrawn from our grasp.
“Obsolescence” (Antiquiertheit) takes on the status of such a Zaubervokabel in Anders’ later work, written in the decades after Hiroshima. Over the course of the multiple volumes of his magnum opus, Anders returns time and again to this word, which attaches itself to ever more artefacts of the human world. The second volume presents an apparently inexhaustible inventory of such artefacts, addressing, among others, the obsolescence of freedom and death, of history and progress, of labour and usage, of reality and fantasy, and of space and time. Above all, and most jarringly, obsolescence appears as the epithet of the figure that takes itself to stand at the centre of the world it had created: the human being.
The formula “obsolescence of the human” harbours a tension. What is called “obsolete” is something that has lost its purpose, that no longer has a place in the world. The obsolete stands out from what Anders calls the “cosmos of means” in that it is no longer justified by an end it is directed toward. The measure of this obsolescence is the human being: the obsolete is, implicitly or explicitly, what has ceased to serve human ends, what has lost its purpose in a world with the human being at its centre. The phrase Antiquiertheit des Menschen, the title under which Anders undertook the majority of his later philosophical work, thus marks both an extreme and a reversal: it evokes a world in which the human being ceases to have a place – a world that no longer has a use for the being that created it.
After Hiroshima, Anders increasingly understands this world through a philosophy of history. The historical forces that render the human being obsolete – or, perhaps more accurately, reveal an already latent obsolescence – are viewed from the vantage point of an extreme: from a present understood as an end. The history that comes to an end is, for Anders, the history of the Promethean human being: a being destined to ceaseless make and remake its world and itself. The history of the Promethean enterprise is, for Anders, a history of Technik, technology; it is the history of the “cosmos of means” – a term coined in the important chapter on the atomic bomb in the first volume of Obsolescence of the Human – and the forces whereby these turn against the human being. At the apparent peak of its powers, at the point where it rules even over the atom, the human being, in Anders’ account, shrivels, finds itself thrown back into an archaic powerlessness, subject to the forces of a world that overwhelm its capacities. At the end of its history, he writes, the human being reveals itself as both titan and dwarf.
In his early work, Anders began to analyse the Promethean human being from the standpoint of another extreme of the historical process: its origin. The apocalyptic perspective that dominates the writings after Hiroshima is prepared in the remarkable philosophical anthropology that Anders developed in the previous decades, reconstructing the origin of the human in strictly negative terms. From the 1920s onwards, Anders began to experimentally develop a still little examined theory of the human as a “lesser” animal – a creature defined not by positive capacities but rather by an originary “lack.”
Anders’ negative anthropology is organised around a motif derived from the myth of Prometheus, an origin story that provides the backdrop of the titan’s gift of fire, stolen from the gods, to the humans. Older accounts of Prometheus creating the human being out of clay and fire, as they are found in Hesiod, are of lesser interest to the young Anders, who is drawn above all to the origin story that appears in later versions of the myth, particularly in Aeschylus. According to this origin story, the human being is a failed, unfinished creature, left incomplete by the older gods. While Zeus, who inherited this creature from older gods, intended to annihilate this creature, it was Prometheus who saw its incompleteness as a potential for improvement and decided to save this wretched being. The possibility of annihilation marks not only at the end but also the beginning of human history.
The Promethean human being is, in this origin story, defined by the relation to its own obsolescence. Human history, according to this account, begins from the encounter with a world that could have done without it. Anders emphasised this aspect in his own composition of new versions of the Promethean origin myth – a practice that anticipates his later rewriting of the story of Noah, failing to reach the ears of a crowd to which he announces the coming flood. In Anders’ version of the myth, which appears in early drafts of his novel The Molussian Catacomb, the human being is created by the Molussian gods (“world bakers”) only after they had completed the whole of creation. Quickly bored by a creaturely life where every being follows its purpose, the gods, at the occasion of their completed work, decide to add one more being, kneaded but not baked: an unfinished creature, with no positive definition or purpose, added onto an otherwise finished world. In the beginning, this origin myth proposes, the human being is “superfluous in the world” (Überflüssig in der Welt).
Anders captures his philosophical interpretation of the Promethean origin story in a formula that, as the “magical word” at the centre of his early anthropological speculations, mirrors the title of his major late work: Unfertigkeit des Menschen, “unfinishedness of the human.” The concept through which Anders ends up defining this “unfinishedness” – or what he describes with reference to the Promethean myth as a state of “not being created until the end” – is Unbestimmtheit, “indeterminacy.” This concept would have taken on central importance in a text dedicated to the “unfinishedness of the human” that Anders planned to write in the early 1940s but never completed, although the concept surfaces yet again in the Obsolescence. Like all key concepts in Anders’ work, Unbestimmtheit is marked by ambiguity: it may be taken to refer both to a lack of determination, the negative state of a being and world that can never be determined definitively, but also the lack of a Bestimmung in the sense of a destination, an end or purpose that would direct such determinations.
Anders’ negative anthropology thus presents a striking response to the problem that Max Scheler had described as the “place of the human being in the cosmos.” The human being, Günther Anders proposes, is a creature distinguished by its lack of a fixed place or definite purpose in the order of creation. Before being “in the world,” the human is “added on” to it: superfluous, obsolete, excluded. It is by dint of this originary exclusion, which it will soon abandon by “intervening” in the natural world, that the human being becomes capable of relating to the world as something that does not exist for it. The obsolete being carries a potential to take up relations to the world that are not reducible to what Anders calls, in a later reflection on the obsolescence of the homo faber, the “natural concept of the world” (natürlichen Weltbegriff). While this natural world is defined by its existence “for” a living being, the obsolete creature would have a potential, however remote, to consider the world “as such,” not dependent on the human.
Anders’ early rewriting of the Promethean myth includes a scene in which the first human beings face a world where all things take their own course, where each creature follows a given purpose – except the human being itself. This human exclusion from the world, however, also harbours the possibility of resentment. The as yet obsolete being, denied the world that all other living beings received a priori, experiences a cosmic injury of sorts.
Some of the passages in Anders’ early work that resonate most strongly in the present refer to this resentment toward the natural world as a distinctive mark of the Promethean human being. The history of the unfinished creature, compelled to define its own world and itself, could be comprehended only with reference to an impulse that springs from this resentment: the creature’s desire to make an indifferent, complete world dependent on itself, to transform this world into a “cosmos of means” that depend on the human being for its purpose and fulfilment. The young Anders describes this impulse, latent in a human being faced with its own obsolescence, as the desire to “take revenge on the world.”
