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Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern, 12 July 1902 – 17 December 1992) was a German-Austrian Jewish[lower-alpha 1] émigré, philosopher, essayist and journalist.

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 (now Wrocław, Poland)
Died17 December 1992(1992-12-17) (aged 90)
Vienna, Austria
Alma materUniversity of Freiburg
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolContinental philosophy, phenomenology
Influences

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 Holocaust, and the question of being a philosopher. Gunther Andres has called himself a critical theorist of technology and his philosophy as occasional philosophy, impressionistic philosophy and a philosophy of discrepancy.

In 1992, shortly before his death, Günther Anders was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize.[6]


Biography


Günther Anders' grave in Vienna
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.[7] His parents kept a diary of Gunther and his two sisters Hilde [de] and Eva [de] from April 1900, the birth of their first child Hilde, until August 1912.[8] This record-keeping would span a combined 18 years in total.[9] The diaries were mainly an academic exercise in developmental child psychology however they were also a larger glimpse into the lives of the children growing up.[9] The diaries were published in 1914.[9] Anders' sister Hilde was at one time married to the German philosopher Rudolf Schottlaender, who was also a student of Edmund Husserl, and later Hans Marchwitza,[10] his other sister Eva would go on to be a part of Youth Aliyah and later worked for people with mental disabilities.[11] However Anders' own parents, arguably his father, was the most significant intellectual influence in his life.[12]

Anders was an atheist,[13][14] 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 at the University of Freiburg. In 1923, Anders obtained a PhD in philosophy; Edmund Husserl was his dissertation advisor.[15] While Anders was working as a journalist in Berlin (Berliner Börsen-Courier[16]) he changed his nom-de-plume to "Anders" (meaning other or different) which would go on to become his official name.[17][18] There is more than one reason given in literature as to why he changed his name- one reason is that an editor did not want so many Jewish-sounding bylines in his paper,[17][19] another reason for changing his surname was that his name would connect him to his popular parents.[18]

He married, in 1929, fellow Heidegger student Hannah Arendt, who had engaged in an affair with their common mentor.[20] They married in Nowawes and at the time lived on Babelsberg's Merkurstraße 3 in Potsdam.[21]

In 1930-31 he unsuccessfully attempted a habilitation under Paul Tillich in sociomusicology,[22] and was advised by Max Wertheimer and Karl Mannheim to be patient.[16] In 1931 he started writing Die Molussische Katakombe ('The Molussian Catacomb').[23] 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 time in New York and California.[24] In 1934 he gave a lecture on Kafka in Paris at the Institute d'Etudes Germaniques; he would go on to engage with Kafka in the coming years.[25][26]

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 tour guide at Metropolitan Museum of Art,[18] as a failed scriptwriter, among others.[16][17] He was a lecturer in The New School for Social Research.[17][27]

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.[28] While Germany had been the first choice, the political situation was not appropriate and an academic post in Halle no longer a choice.[16] He often wrote for Merkur.[29]

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.[30][28] Gunther knew how to play the piano and violin.[31] Anders is known for his relationships.[32]


Philosophy


Günther Anders has called his philosophy "occasional philosophy"[33][1] (Gelegenheitsphilosoph);[34] and "impressionistic philosophy".[35] He never held an academic rank in Europe.[36][17] A professorship from Free University of Berlin was declined.[37] A lack of academic rank influenced his work, causing it to deviate from the usual academic style.[36] Anders has also called himself a "critical theorist of technology".[1] He also used Diskrepanzphilosophie (philosophy of discrepancy) in an attempt to classify himself.[38][28][39] Andres is well known in Europe and has been published and researched to a considerable extent in the German language. Some of his work has been translated into other languages such as French and Spanish.[7] As compared to his presence in Europe, his presence in the English language has been minimal.[7] Gunther wrote mostly in German.[7]

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.[40] 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".[41]


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,[42][43] is acknowledged to be[lower-alpha 2] Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (literally "The Antiquatedness of the Human Being"; while "obsolescence" was a typical translation early on, "antiquatedness" is considered more suitable[31][45]). By the end of the 20th century, both volumes had sold about 140,000 copies.[46] This wide readership dwarfed scholarly interactions.[46] The essay 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 US 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."[42] Don Ihde suppressed an English translation of the two volumes.[47][48]


Prometheanism


Main article: Promethean gap

In 1942, Anders 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".[49] He would later go on to express doubts about the existence of this kind of shame.[50] Another iteration of the shame was "the incapacity of our imagination to grasp the enormity of what we can produce and set in motion".[51] Promethean shame can be seen in posthumanism,[1] in the comparisons we make with our creations.[52] Anders utilizes the story of Prometheus and draws parallels to modern technology.[1] For him, Prometheus means "he who thinks ahead".[53]

The variations of the Promethean disjunction Anders referred to included the gap between the maximum that we can produce and imagine as compared to the maximum we use and need, which are in comparison "shamefully small".[54] 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".[55] The Promethean gap refers to the incapacity to imagine the consequences of our creations.[1][56][57]


Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann


Just as Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem elucidated the Banality of Evil by pointing out 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."[58]


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.


Honors



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.[62] Constituted in 2018, winners include Joseph Vogl, Corine Pelluchon [de] and Dietmar Dath.[62]


Works



Bibliographies



List of selected works



Correspondence and conversations


Prose


Anthologies


Notes


  1. Different sources use different versions - "Austrian philosopher",[1] "German Jewish philosopher",[2] "20th-century German Jewish philosopher Günther Anders",[3] "a German philosopher and essayist of Jewish descent",[4] "Le penseur allemand Günther Anders".[5]
  2. Christopher John Müller writes "Anders' philosophical anthropology of the technological world, which he developed mainly in The Obsolescence of Human Beings Vol. 1 (1956) and Vol. 2 (1980)".[44] Christian Fuchs writes that Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen is "principal work".[1]

References



Citations


  1. Fuchs, Christian (2021). "Chapter 7. Günther Anders' critical theory of technology". Marxist Humanism and Communication Theory. Media, Communication and Society. Vol. 1. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-34553-7.
    Previously published in Fuchs, Christian (2017). "Günther Anders' Undiscovered Critical Theory of Technology in the Age of Big Data Capitalism". tripleC. 15 (2): 582–611. doi:10.31269/triplec.v15i2.898.
  2. Harrington, Anne I. (6 August 2020). "The Hiroshima Pilot Who Became a Symbol of Antinuclear Protest". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 24 June 2022. is what Günther Anders, the postwar German-Jewish philosopher and antinuclear activist
  3. Cummins, Eleanor (26 April 2022). "With the Clock Running Out, Humans Need to Rethink Time Itself". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 24 June 2022.
  4. Borowski, Audrey (17 May 2022). Haselby, Sam (ed.). "Günther Anders, a forgotten prophet for the 21st century?". Aeon. Retrieved 24 June 2022.
  5. Weill, Par Nicolas (25 December 2021). "« La Catacombe de Molussie », de Günther Anders : le projet d'une vie". Le Monde.fr (in French). Retrieved 24 June 2022.
  6. "Sigmund-Freud-Preis". Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. Retrieved 9 January 2013.
  7. Armon, Adi (12 January 2017). "The Parochialism of Intellectual History: The Case of Günther Anders". The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. 62: ybw022. doi:10.1093/leobaeck/ybw022. ISSN 0075-8744.
  8. Levelt, Willem J. M. (2011). "The Stern Diaries" (PDF). Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguists. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  9. Wobick-Segev, Sarah (2014). ""The Religion We Plant in Their Hearts": A Critical Exploration of the Religiosity of a German Jewish Family at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century". Jewish History. 28 (2): 159–185. doi:10.1007/s10835-014-9214-1. ISSN 0334-701X. JSTOR 24709716. S2CID 145765941 – via JSTOR.
  10. "Marchwitza, Hans". Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung (in German). Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship. Retrieved 7 August 2022.
  11. Dawsey, Jason (25 June 2019). "The Life of a Rescuer: Eva Michaelis-Stern in Dark Times". The National WWII Museum, New Orleans. Retrieved 7 August 2022.
  12. Dijk 2000, p. 5.
  13. Dijk 2000, p. 25.
  14. Bauman, Zygmunt; Obirek, Stanislaw (21 July 2015). Of God and Man. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-7456-9570-9 – via Google Books.
  15. Dijk 2000, p. 6.
  16. Greffrath, Mathias (4 July 2002). "Lob der Sturheit. Eine Erinnerung an Günther Anders - den Philosophen und Pamphletisten, den Analytiker und Kämpfer, der am 12. Juli 100 Jahre geworden wäre" [Praise of Stubbornness. A memory of Günther Anders - the philosopher and pamphleteer, the analyst and fighter, who would have been 100 on July 12th]. Zeit Online (in German). Die Zeit. Retrieved 3 June 2022.
  17. "The Life of Günther Anders (1902-1992)". Günther Anders Gesellschaft. Retrieved 29 May 2022.
  18. Jonas, Hans; Fox, Brian; Wolin, Richard (2006). "Hannah Arendt: An Intimate Portrait". New England Review (1990-). 27 (2): 133–142. ISSN 1053-1297. JSTOR 40244828.
  19. Babich 2021, p. Introduction. Nomen est omen: "Other" Reflections.
  20. Ettinger, Elżbieta (1995). Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger. Yale University Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-300-07254-9.
  21. Grunenberg, Antonia (17 July 2017). Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love. Translated by Birmingham, Peg; Lebedeva, Kristina; Birmingham, Elizabeth von Witzke. Indiana University Press. p. 84. ISBN 978-0-253-02718-4.
  22. Ellensohn, Reinhard (February 2014). "Günther Anders' Musikphilosophie" (PDF) (in German). Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
  23. Wolfe, Katharine (2009). "Introduction to Günther Anders' 'The Pathology of Freedom'". Deleuze Studies. 3 (2): 274–277. doi:10.3366/E1750224109000646. ISSN 1750-2241. JSTOR 45331702 – via JSTOR.
  24. "Exiled in Hollywood: A Coordinate System for the Anders Experience". Goethe-Institut. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  25. Gellen, Kata (2016). "Kafka, Pro and Contra". In Cools, Arthur; Liska, Vivian (eds.). Kafka, Pro and Contra: Günther Anders's Holocaust Book. Kafka and the Universal (1 ed.). De Gruyter. pp. 283–306. JSTOR j.ctvbkjt9v.18. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  26. Anders, Günther; Steer, A.; Thorlby, A. K. (1970). "Reflections on My Book Kafka—Pro und Contra". Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 3 (4): 59–72. ISSN 0027-1276. JSTOR 24776232.
  27. "Volume 8: The Life and Work of Günther Anders". Center Austria. The University of New Orleans. Retrieved 3 June 2022.
  28. "Günther Anders: biography, texts and links, by Harold Marcuse". UC Santa Barbara. Retrieved 13 May 2022.
  29. Dawsey, Jason (2012). "Where Hitler's Name is Never Spoken". In Bischof, Günter; Plasser, Fritz; Maltschnig, Eva (eds.). Where Hitler's Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna. Austrian Lives. Vol. 21. University of New Orleans Press. pp. 212–239. ISBN 978-1-60801-092-9. JSTOR j.ctt1n2txnx.13. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  30. "Charlotte Zelka (1930 – Oct. 6, 2001)".
  31. Babich 2021, p. Introduction. A star among other stars.
  32. Babich 2021, p. Chapter 1. Criticizing Technology. Oblivion.
  33. "Günther Anders: Existential "Occasional Philosophy" with a Critical Approach". Goethe-Institut. Retrieved 29 May 2022.
  34. "Günther Anders: "Der Mann auf der Brücke"". Der Spiegel (in German). 17 November 1959. ISSN 2195-1349. Retrieved 1 June 2022.
  35. Dijk 2000, p. 1.
  36. Babich 2021, Introduction. Black Stars.
  37. Schraube 2005a, p. 78.
  38. Muller 2016, p. 12.
  39. Dries, Christian (2012). Die Welt als Vernichtungslager (in German). transcript Verlag. p. 63. ISBN 978-3-8376-1949-2.
  40. Anders, Günther (1957). "The Phantom World of TV". In Rosenberg, Bernard; White, David Manning (eds.). Mass Culture. The Free Press of Gelcoe – via archive.org.
  41. Anders, Günther (2002) [1956]. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution [The World as Phantom and Matrix. Philosophical Observations on Radio and Television] (in German). C.H.Beck. pp. 97–193. ISBN 978-3-406-47644-0. link
  42. Müller 2016, p. 29–95.
  43. Günther Anders, 'The Obsolescence of Privacy', CounterText 3:1
  44. Müller 2016, p. 3.
  45. Babich 2021, p. Chapter 1. Criticizing technology.
  46. Müller, Christopher John; 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.
  47. Babich 2021, p. Introduction. Suppression: Positivity and Neutrality.
  48. Babich 2021, p. Criticizing technology.
  49. Muller 2016, p. 30, In "Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence".
  50. Anders, The Obsolescence of Man 1980, Introduction: The Three Industrial Revolutions (1979) § 7 "But I have never encountered this kind of shame, which would be a kind of "Promethean shame", referred to in the first volume. It is possible that it does not exist, something that would certainly justify a second kind of shame".
  51. Anders, The Obsolescence of Man 1980, Chapter 1. The Obsolescence of Appearance.
  52. Hauskeller, Michael (2014), Hauskeller, Michael (ed.), "Promethean Shame and the Engineering of Love", Sex and the Posthuman Condition, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 41–52, doi:10.1057/9781137393500_4, ISBN 978-1-137-39350-0, retrieved 27 May 2022, Promethean shame is what we feel when we realize that the machines we have created are so powerful and perfect that we humans with our messy and mortal bodies cannot but feel very deficient in comparison. We recognize the superiority of the made over the born, and as a consequence wish to be made ourselves, which allows us more control over what we are
  53. Anders, The Obsolescence of Man 1980, Chapter 24. The Obsolescence of "Meaning" (1972) § 13. "Only now has Prometheus, with whose name I began the first volume (for the name means: he who thinks ahead), become our symbolic moral figure".
  54. Anders, The Obsolescence of Man 1980, Introduction: The Three Industrial Revolutions (1979) § 3. Variations on the "Promethean Disjunction".
  55. Anders, The Obsolescence of Man 1980, Chapter 26. The Obsolescence of Inability (1975).
  56. Pardo, Rafael I. (2021). "On Bankruptcy's Promethean Gap: Building Enslaving Capacity into the Antebellum Administrative State". Fordham Urban Law Journal. 48 (4): 801. The concept, created by German philosopher Günther Anders, focuses on "the discrepancy between the tremendous power of humanity's inventions and the limited ability of any single person to comprehend, let alone control, the moral and practical implications of that power."
  57. Sandvik, Hannah Monsrud (3 March 2018). "Apocalyptic Blindness and the Atomic Bomb". Teknovatøren (in Norwegian Bokmål). Retrieved 27 May 2022. The only solution, according to Anders, is a radical expansion of our imagination – we have to bridge the promethean gap
  58. Dagmar Lorenz. The Established Outsider: Bernhard. in: The Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard. Camden House, 2002. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Matthias Konzett editor.
  59. "Albo d'oro - Premio Letterario "Della Resistenza" - Città di Omegna" [Roll of honor - Omegna "Della Resistenza" Award]. Premio Omegna (in Italian). Retrieved 31 May 2022.
  60. "Die Preisträger 1951–2008. Verband der deutschen Kritiker". Archived from the original on 7 March 2009. Retrieved 31 May 2022.
  61. "Thomas-Mann-Preis der Hansestadt Lübeck und der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste". Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (in German). Retrieved 31 May 2022.
  62. "Der Anders Preis. Günther Anders-Preis für kritisches Denken". Günther Anders Gesellschaft (in German). Retrieved 31 May 2022.

Works cited



Secondary literature



Biography



In English



Other languages


German
Italian
French
Spanish



На других языках

[de] Günther Anders

Günther Anders (bürgerlich Günther Siegmund Stern; geboren am 12. Juli 1902 in Breslau; gestorben am 17. Dezember 1992 in Wien) war ein deutsch-österreichischer Philosoph, Dichter und Schriftsteller.
- [en] Günther Anders

[ru] Андерс, Гюнтер

Гюнтер Андерс (нем. Günther Anders; 12 июля 1902, Бреслау, под именем Гюнтер Штерн (нем. Günther Stern), Германская империя — 17 декабря 1992, Вена, Австрия) — австрийский писатель, философ немецко-еврейского происхождения, активный участник всемирного антиядерного и антивоенного движения.


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