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Brief Lives

Günther Anders (1902-1992)

Clive Webb on how Anders warned humanity about the moral costs of technological progress.

Günther Anders was a German Jewish philosopher who spent much of his life in exile. He devoted his work to understanding the moral consequences of modern technology. Born at the start of the twentieth century and shaped by fascism, world war, and the atomic age, he became one of the earliest and most uncompromising critics of the assumption that technological advance automatically amounts to an improvement. Anders argued that, on the contrary, humanity has entered an era in which its moral and imaginative capacities can no longer keep pace with the technological progress it’s bringing into being. Long before artificial intelligence, automation, or planetary ecological crisis became part of everyday discussion, he warned that modern societies were acquiring powers they were no longer able fully to understand, let alone control. Anders saw a widening mismatch between what human beings are capable of and what we can meaningfully imagine the consequences of.

A Life in Exile

Günther Anders was born Günther Stern on 12 July 1902 in Breslau, then part of Germany. His parents, Clara and William Stern, were leading psychologists who kept detailed developmental records of him and his sisters. Growing up as the subject of constant observation, Anders later suggested, gave him an early awareness of what it meant to be treated as an object rather than a person, a theme that would recur in his critique of modern technological societies.

During the First World War he was sent to a labour detachment in France and encountered wounded and traumatised soldiers. After the war, Anders studied philosophy in Hamburg and Freiburg. He completed his doctorate under Edmund Husserl, and later studied with Martin Heidegger. During this time, he met Hannah Arendt, whom he married in 1929. Academic success, however, eluded him. Unable to secure a university post, Anders moved to Berlin, working as a journalist and cultural critic. Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the political atmosphere rapidly darkened. He adopted the name ‘Anders’ – German for ‘different’ – partly because a less recognisably Jewish name made it easier to work in an increasingly hostile cultural climate.

When Anders later learned that his name appeared in a diary confiscated by the Gestapo from his friend the playwright Bertolt Brecht, he understood that time had run out. He fled Berlin on a night train, escaping first to Paris, and, after his divorce from Arendt in 1937, eventually moved to the United States.

Exile did not bring security. Anders worked briefly for the Office of War Information, but resigned after refusing to translate propaganda that racially stereotyped the Japanese. “I had not run away from the fascists to America in order to produce fascist American pamphlets,” he later remarked. He tried, and failed, to establish himself as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and for a time made ends meet working for a costume and theatrical property company. In 1950 he returned to Europe, settling in Vienna, where he lived for the rest of his life, which included two further marriages.

The Atomic Age

The event that most decisively shaped Anders’ philosophy came in August 1945. A radio report about the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima left him speechless. The bomb revealed what Anders would come to regard as the central fact of modernity: humanity has acquired the technical capacity to annihilate itself, yet lacks the imaginative resources to grasp what it’s done. So for Anders, the atomic bomb was not simply a weapon but a transformation in the human condition: it revealed a chasm between the power of what could be produced and the capacity to comprehend its consequences. In his words, “We are smaller than ourselves.”

Anders thought about Hiroshima obsessively, later publishing Burning Conscience (1961), a book based on his correspondence with Claude Eatherly, one of the airmen involved in the mission. He believed that Eatherly’s post war breakdown exposed a moral truth that society preferred to ignore.

From this point onwards, Anders became an uncompromising critic of nuclear weapons. With the onset of the Cold War, he argued that the ideological opposition between East and West was far less dangerous than the arsenals both sides were busily constructing. Philosophy, he concluded, could no longer afford the luxury of political neutrality.

That refusal of neutrality became concrete in the 1960s, when Anders was a member of the International War Crimes Tribunal led by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, which investigated military atrocities in Vietnam. The tribunal had no legal authority, and its findings were dismissed by many at the time, yet for Anders its significance lay elsewhere: it was an attempt to bring acts of violence back within the compass of human judgement, and to insist that the vastness of modern violence does not absolve those who carry it out.

The Obsolescence of the Human

Anders’ most important work, The Obsolescence of the Human, appearing in two volumes (in 1956 and 1980), was an attempt to describe what he saw as the dawn of a new epoch, of a world in which human beings were increasingly overshadowed by the machines they’d made. At the heart of the idea lies Anders’ concept of the ‘Promethean Gap’ – the growing distance between what human beings can produce and what we can morally and imaginatively comprehend. Borrowing from the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity, Anders argued that modern technology had placed in peoples’ hands powers they could not control, since what we could make, we could no longer responsibly imagine. Nowhere were these dynamics more dangerous than in the case of nuclear weapons. Nuclear annihilation exceeds our predictive and emotional capacities. Anders observed that it could be psychologically harder to kill one person than to kill millions, precisely because we can imagine the pain and suffering of an individual, but not the destruction of an entire population. “The apocalyptic danger,” Anders warned, “is all the more menacing because we are unable to picture the immensity of such a catastrophe.” When consequences cannot be imagined, the moral inhibitions that would normally restrain action begin to lose force. Thus the defining ethical question of the atomic age was no longer how humanity should live, but whether it would continue to live at all.

Closely linked to the Promethean Gap idea was what Anders called ‘Promethean Shame’ – a feeling of inferiority that arises when humans compare themselves to the technologies they have created. Surrounded by flawless machines that operate faster, more precisely, or on a far greater scale than human beings ever could, people come to see themselves as defective. For Anders, this shame isn’t a psychological weakness but an understandable response to technological conditions that systematically devalue humanity.

Technology & Responsibility

For Anders, nuclear weapons offered the clearest warning that humanity’s capacity to produce technologies had outrun its ability to responsively comprehend their consequences. With the creation of the bomb, he argued, humanity became simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than ever before. “Because we are the first Titans,” he wrote, “we are also the first dwarfs or pygmies.”

Gunther Anders with Hannah Arendt c. 1929

This failure of imagination was compounded, Anders believed, by the way modern technologies reorganise responsibility. As systems grow more complex, individuals increasingly act as operators following prescribed procedures rather than as agents exercising judgement, and decision making is delegated to machines using models and calculations. In such conditions, responsibility does not so much disappear as dissolve into the system. Moreover, to mistrust the output of the machine comes to feel irrational, even subversive. As Anders put it, to question the conclusions delivered by technical systems is to question “the very principle of our mechanised existence.” This surrender of judgement means that decisions of unimaginable consequences could be carried out as if they require no deliberation at all, because they’re automated.

Anders traced this pattern beyond weapons systems to the wider technological environment, particularly the rise of mass media. In his essay ‘The Phantom World of Television’ (1956), he argued that television does not merely transmit information but fundamentally restructures how human beings relate to reality. The paradox, Anders suggested, is that to encounter the world we now have to retreat indoors. Here, events come to us mediated through images, while the immediate world around us grows strangely unreal. “When that which is remote becomes familiar,” he wrote, “that which is familiar becomes remote. When the phantom becomes real, reality itself becomes a phantom.” In this sense, life is no longer lived, but consumed. Television (and by extension, phone screens) encourages passive spectatorship in place of direct engagement, reorganising perception and thinking around itself rather than around human needs. Once again, technology dictates the terms on which the world is encountered, widening further the Promethean Gap between human capacity and human understanding.

These concerns came vividly into focus with the Moon landing in July 1969. Like some 650 million others, Anders watched Neil Armstrong step onto the lunar surface via a TV screen. What should have been an occasion for existential reflection – a moment to glimpse the Earth from a cosmic perspective and sense its fragility – struck him instead as curiously diminished. The Moon had been domesticated, reduced to a familiar object within the décor of everyday life. Anders captured the moment with characteristic irony, imagining living rooms around the world arranged with “the record collection on the right, the bar on the left, and in between, the universe.”And for all the technological brilliance on display, nothing fundamental had changed in how human beings understood themselves or their responsibilities. Once again, the reach of human power had expanded, while the capacity to reflect meaningfully on its consequences lagged behind.

Why Anders Matters Now

For much of his life, Anders was treated as a marginal figure – too political for academic philosophy, too philosophical for political activism. Yet the problems he identified have only intensified in the years since his death. With several of his major works now appearing in English translation, Anders is finally being recognised as one of the twentieth century’s most prescient thinkers of technology, and his warnings speak directly to the pressures of the present. Although The Obsolescence of the Human became widely read in Europe, much of Anders’s work remained untranslated for decades. Only now is an English language readership catching up with a thinker who refused the comforting illusion that technological development necessarily amounts to moral progress.

Anders believed that responsibility begins with imagination – with the effort to picture realities beyond our immediate experience. Without making that effort, the gap between what we understand and what we can do threatens to become catastrophic. His core question therefore remains urgent: Can we still master the world we’re making, or have we already become obsolete in relation to our own creations?

Clive Webb is Professor of Modern American History at the University of Sussex.