Günther Anders, the Philosopher at the End of the World

When Army Air Forces officer Claude Eatherly piloted the plane Straight Flush in support of Enola Gay’s mission to obliterate the city of Hiroshima, his tasks were little different from those of past flights. It was just another flight requiring the twenty-six-year-old’s technical acumen, but it also involved wiping 70,000 people off the face of the earth. Eatherly would later feel anguish over his role: He repeatedly attempted suicide and was eventually institutionalized. At the time, though, he saw it as just another job.How had this convergence of routine activity and unprecedented catastrophe become possible, and what did it mean? For the philosopher Günther Anders, this was the defining question of the twentieth century, and of the final epoch of man that he saw unfolding around him. Only by answering it—by bringing our self-knowledge up to the level of our monstrous new technological powers—would humanity be able to forestall its self-destruction. “Anders’s question resonates anew today.”Anders’s question resonates anew today, as the employees of frontier labs tell us that the machines they are building pose an existential threat to humanity. AI’s increasingly remarkable technical feats are accompanied by ever louder warnings of impending doom from within the industry. For most observers, the contrast is jarring to the point of absurdity; but for Anders, it would have come as no surprise.In the crowded field of German, and especially German Jewish, thinkers who probed the catastrophes of the twentieth century—Walter Benjamin was Anders’s cousin, and Hannah Arendt his first wife—Anders therefore deserves better than his obscurity in the English-speaking world. Amid mounting prophecies of self-induced Armageddon, and the tech industry’s escalating talk of the end-times, it isn’t too late to learn from the man known as the Atomphilosoph. Anders grew up in the heady climate of early-twentieth-century German thought, absorbing the phenomenological methods of Husserl and Heidegger, befriending Bertolt Brecht, and marrying Arendt, whom he had met in Heidegger’s seminar. Over a decade before the atom bomb, Anders experienced the end of his own world with Hitler’s rise to power, which forced him to flee Germany for Paris, where he attended Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel and the end of history. He later moved to the United States, where he divorced Arendt, lived for a time with Herbert Marcuse, tutored Irving Berlin, failed in an attempt at scriptwriting for Charlie Chaplin, and attended seminars with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. After World War II, he returned to Europe and settled for good in Vienna, where he died in 1992 at the age of ninety. In his long life, one event stood as the Archimedean point for Anders and, he believed, for all of humanity. On August 6, 1945, the “day zero” that the bomb fell on Hiroshima, “a New Age began”: the age in which it is in our power to destroy the entire world. The New Age of the bomb was also the “Last Age,” in which the bomb would hang over the earth like a cosmic sword of Damocles, always threatening a shift from “the time of the end” to a final “end of time.” For Anders, the existence of the bomb created a permanent state of emergency in which every moment brings with it the possibility of the final disaster. This bleak vision of a common global eschatological condition, transcending the geopolitical rivalries and mutual threats that concerned other observers of the nuclear age, might be dubbed SAD—self-assured destruction. One of Anders’s most important concepts was the “Promethean gap”: the “growing asynchronicity between the human and the world of their own products.” It is the difference, today widening into a chasm, “between our action and our imagination.” Our technological prowess has grown stupendously, enabling us to incinerate millions in a moment; but our mental and moral capacity to contemplate the significance or meaning of our actions has not grown proportionately. The scope and consequences of our powers over the earth are now simply too great for our petty imaginations. The cause of this gap is not humans’ short-sightedness or moral deformity, but rather the basic and previously unproblematic limits on our capacity to contemplate our actions.The result is an inability to comprehend the evils we can now perform. One might imagine terrible crimes to offer a kind of malevolent sublime before which, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, we gasp in awe. But, Anders argues, our imaginative limits instead prompt us towards the opposite reaction: a retreat to cold calculation, turning mass slaughter into a matter of Strangelovian pseudo-rationality. We understand the immensity of killing a single human in cold blood; but our minds freeze up at the thought of the death of a hundred thousand, such that Eatherly could assist in the dropping of Little Boy with no more perturbation than any other task.Anders was so taken by this disturbing puzzle that he began a years-long correspondence with Eatherly, collected in the book Burning Conscience. The Promethean gap, by which man’s technological reach increasingly exceeds his grasp, gives phenomenological depth to the remark attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths are a statistic. As Anders put it in one letter to Eatherly, “How should one repent 200,000?”The resort to analytical detachment rather than stupefied horror was not unique to the bomb. He saw a similar apathy of the imagination in another atrocity that was coming to be widely known at the same time: the Nazi death camps. As Anders insists in his essay “Reflections on the H Bomb,” it was reductive calculation that made such evils possible. “The mass exterminations under Hitler could be carried out,” he says, “because they absolutely transcended the moral imagination of the agents,” thereby making “possible a new, truly infernal innocence.”The possibility of such a reduction does not occur only at the extremes of mass murder. Rather, it lies latent across our modern technical society. Many techno-optimists today will grant that a new technology might seem scary right now, but assure us that eventually everyone will get used to it. For Anders, this possibility was precisely what was so terrifying: that through our nondeliberative submission to the reality of our expanding technological abilities, we would sleepwalk into disaster. Without a concerted effort to confront the awesome powers we have attained, even the atom bomb and Zyklon-B would come to be seen as merely another “normal technology” that we would no more gape at than we do now at the light bulb. Anders’s argument complements his more famous ex-wife’s “banality of evil” thesis, laid out in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. By virtue of what Anders dubbed “mediality,” the interposition of technologies and chains of command between our actions and ourselves has served to break down the distinction between activity and passivity. Severed from direct contact with our own actions, we come to forget our culpability for the deeds that we, and not anyone else, are after all performing. Just as the bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann had managed the simultaneously remarkable and all-too-human feat of not thinking about what he was doing as he orchestrated the Final Solution, so might a pilot lackadaisically deploy the weapon to destroy a city; and so now, as many fear, might an engineer deploy the AI model that turns against its creator. As the title of Anders’s own commentary on Eichmann, We, the Sons of Eichmann, indicates, he feared that all of us were today susceptible to the intermediation, and thus the banalization, of evil.Much of Anders’s writing is an exercise in the very thinking through horror that he himself recognizes is so difficult to perform. On the page, the reader witnesses Anders struggling to make sense of the “historically supraliminal” significance of the bomb and the era it ushered in.“Our failure to think is the natural consequence of the modern worship of progress.”He would have been the first to admit the inadequacy of his own efforts. “Most thought-provoking,” Anders’s teacher Heidegger observed in his book What Is Called Thinking?, “is that we are still not thinking—not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking.” For Anders, this was not accidental: Our failure to think is the natural consequence of the modern worship of progress. Once one adopts the pious faith that the world must continually get better, the end of the world is ruled out as a matter of course. What’s more, when modern man does attempt to contemplate the apocalypse, he simply inverts his progressivism and succumbs to a nihilism that also forecloses the possibility of effective action. As Anders summarizes such thinking, “The bomb is OK because there is no point to us anyway, and because the bomb is here, we are no good for anything anymore anyway.” Disillusionment here becomes the mirror image of optimism; for both, determinism forestalls the recognition of human agency, and therefore the assumption of responsibility.Anders was also a careful observer of how technology can warp us in less obviously insidious ways. The possibility of banal evil for Anders exists not merely at the edge of human conduct, but across our everyday lives, especially in our engagement with new media. Long before Neil Postman and David Foster Wallace, he was dissecting the ways that television in particular could be an agent of social atomization. He feared that our mounting dependence on novel technologies was forming us into a mass of indistinguishable automatons, identical in our consumption, our loneliness, and our parasocial relationships with the products we consume. In the essay “The World as Phantom and Matrix,” Anders detects in our media-addled getting and spending a deep, if unspoken, yearning to resemble our products: pristine and, by virtue of their constant