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 finds itself added on to it: superfluous, obsolete, excluded.
Günther Anders argues that where St. Ignatius of Loyola, the wounded ex-soldier who founded the Jesuits, thought it necessary to devise what he called “spiritual exercises” for his times, we need new spiritual exercises to train our souls to begin to comprehend what we now can do.