Günther Anders

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

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.

Biography

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. His parents kept a diary of Gunther and his two sisters and from April 1900, the birth of their first child Hilde, until August 1912. This record-keeping would span a combined 18 years in total. 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. The diaries were published in 1914. 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, his other sister Eva would go on to be a part of Youth Aliyah and later worked for people with mental disabilities. However Anders' own parents, arguably his father, was the most significant intellectual influence in 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 at the University of Freiburg. In 1923, Anders obtained a PhD in philosophy; Edmund Husserl was his dissertation advisor. While Anders was working as a journalist in Berlin (''Berliner Börsen-Courier'') he changed his nom-de-plume to "Anders" (meaning other or different) which would go on to become his official name. 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, another reason for changing his surname was that his name would connect him to his popular parents.

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

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 1931 he started writing ''Die Molussische Katakombe'' ('The Molussian Catacomb'). In 1933, Anders fled Nazi Germany, first to France (where he and Arendt divorced amicably in 1937), and in 1936 to the United States. In 1934 he gave a lecture on Kafka in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Germaniques; he would go on to engage with Kafka in the coming years.

In the United States, he spent time in New York and California. 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, as a failed scriptwriter, among others. He was a lecturer in The New School for Social Research.

Anders married a second time, in 1945, to the Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich, whom he had met in New York. Anders returned to Europe in 1950 with his wife 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. He often wrote for ''Merkur''.

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. Anders is known for his relationships.

Philosophy

Günther Anders has called his philosophy "occasional philosophy"
Previously published in (''Gelegenheitsphilosoph''); and "impressionistic philosophy". He never held an academic rank in Europe. A professorship from Free University of Berlin was declined. A lack of academic rank influenced his work, causing it to deviate from the usual academic style. Anders has also called himself a "critical theorist of technology". He also used ''Diskrepanzphilosophie'' (philosophy of discrepancy) in an attempt to classify himself. 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. As compared to his presence in Europe, his presence in the English language has been minimal. Gunther wrote mostly in German.

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''

His major work, of which only a few essays have been translated into English, is acknowledged to be ''Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen'' (literally "The Antiquatedness of the Human Being"; while "obsolescence" was a typical translation early on, "antiquatedness" is considered more suitable'). By the end of the 20th century, both volumes had sold about 140,000 copies. This wide readership dwarfed scholarly interactions. 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." Don Ihde suppressed an English translation of the two volumes.

Prometheanism

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". 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. Anders 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 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". 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 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