On the obsolescence of human beings in sustainable development

ABSTRACT

In 1956, the Jewish-German philosopher Günther Anders developed a philosophical anthropology on the technological and moral challenges of his time. Anders suggested the societal changes that arose with the industrial age opened a gap between the capability of individuals to produce machines and their ability to imagine and deal with the consequences caused by this capability. He argues that a ‘Promethean gap’ manifests in academic and scientific thinking and leads to an extensive trivialization of societal issues. In the face of climate change, Anders’ philosophical anthropology contributes substantially to our attempts to fight climate change with innovation. Anders' description of ‘apocalyptic blindness’ helps us to explain why we cannot help pairing our belief in historical progress and growth with our ideas on social and environmental justice. With that said, this paper contributes to the debate on humanity ‘after sustainability’ by calling to mind Anders’ historical theory on the outdatedness of humankind and his thoughts on our lack of imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• development
• ethical consumption
• technology
• promethean shame
• apocalyptic blindness

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank both reviewers Nina Isabella Moeller and John Martin Pedersen for their positive and enriching comments on the paper. Their helpful remarks led to a great improvement of the work, in particular in terms of language and clarity. Thanks also to Joachim Gruber, Abdulla Adel and Chloe Jeffries for their constructive comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All quotations of Anders’ German contributions used in this paper (Anders 1961, 1964, 1981, 2002) have been translated by the author.

2. See, for example, Dawsey (2012, 2013); Babich (2012, 2013a, 2013b); Müller (2015) as well as the recent translation of Anders’ essay on ‘The world as phantom and as matrix: Philosophical considerations on radio and television’, as well as a complete translation of ‘The Outdatedness of Human Beings 2’ available online (Libcom.org 2014, 2015).

3. This is particularly evident for his analysis of the human being. Reading about the ‘metamorphosis’ in the industrial age (Anders 1961, 15–16), for example, inevitably provokes associations with Lewis Mumford’s ‘transformation’ (Mumford 1957).

4. In German orig: ‘Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen’ (Liessmann 2002, 30–52). This speech is not available in German original. However, a French essay version based on this speech was published 6 years later, of which there is an English translation available (‘The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification’, 2009).

5. ‘For Anders, such attempts to separate and single out the human being from the aggregate of beings, and therefore all forms of anthropocentrism, are typical of the metaphysics of the Western world. Such an elevated position of the human being leads to degradation of all other beings to mere means and must ultimately lead to exploitation and destruction of nature’ (Van Dijk 2000, 102).

6. Having been a student of Heidegger in his earlier life, he later on claimed that he had been fallen under his ‘demonic spell’ (Dries 2014). On Anders’ standpoint to the question ‘what is man’ and his critique of Heidegger in that context see also Anders (2002, 128–130).

7. Further to this anthropologist tradition, Anders could be denominated as Gehlens’ antipode in the context of the twentieth century. Despite the similarities in both their analyses, Anders substantially distanced himself from the conservative anthropologist Gehlen, referring to his words as ‘darkest provincialism’ (Greffrath 1989, 48–50). On Gehlen and his explanations of the human as a deficient being (Mängelwesen), see Gehlen (1940).

8. Anders’ philosophical anthropology explains how humans are set to not look towards a certain end: If human history is made for experimenting and designing, there is no end of it to be seen (Anders 1961). The notion of humans being sacrificed to the demands of the machinic world, however, was current at the time. See Charlie Chaplin’s‚ ‘Modern Times’, in which he becomes quite literally a cog in the machine. See also Fritz Lang’s dystopic‚ ‘Metropolis’ for a similar account. Earlier, the English novelist E.M Forster wrote a short story, ‘The Machine Stops’ about humans who had become dependent upon machines for every aspect of their lives.

9. Note that, even though it was Sartre, who adopted fundamental thoughts of this piece and made the quote of the man condemned to be free famous, it was Anders’ who stated this claim about the human existence in his ‘Pathology of Freedom’ already ‘a few years before Sartre’, as emphasized by Anders (Anders 2002, 130).

10. The first volume of Anders’ major work was originally published in Germany in 1956, given the title: ‘Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. [The Outdatedness of Human Beings 1. On the Soul in the Era of the Second Industrial Revolution]’. This was followed by a second volume in 1980, titled ‘Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution. [The Outdatedness of Human Beings 2. On the Destruction of Life in the Era of the Third Industrial Revolution]’. In the second volume, Anders explains that epochs no longer change after 1945, as with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima notions of a continuation of history and a succession of other epochs became invalid. The current epoch, in any event, is the last one. The third revolution is, therefore, the last age of humanity (Anders 2002, 15–33).

11. The faith in progress and the trust in new technological solutions to recurring issues define the thinking in the twentieth century, when nobody would think, as Heidegger (1976) had put it, that ‘only a god can save us’.

12. Though of course, social and financial benefits can accrue to those who are able not to see, a point made forcefully in pre-bomb literature such as Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and Henrik Ibsen’s ‘An Enemy of the People’. For a more recent, and scholarly exposition of this, see Stanley Cohen’s ‘States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering’ (Cohen 2001).

13. See in that context the existentialist thought on the self-deceiving attitude of humans and that ‘(b)ad faith … is a social disease rather than an individual failing, in Sartre’s view, and is an ongoing condition rather than a sporadic activity’ (Webber 2010, 188). Also note the more recent literature on ‘willful blindness’ in the context of short term economic interest (Heffernan 2011).

14. For discussion see Howe (2014)

15. Anders argues that anxiety got converted into a commodity. These days, he says, everybody speaks about anxiety, but just a few speak out of anxiety (Anders 1961, 264).

16. Perhaps Anders would see this continuation of ‘universal mechanization’ as an unavoidable tendency from the division of labour and specialization in the late eighteenth century. This would be quite a deterministic interpretation of Anders’ thoughts though, and while he was highly influenced by Marx’s analysis of dialectical materialism, he also provides the space for the reclamation of the human ‘soul’ from the processes of modernization and an eventual apocalypse.

17. The similarity to Arendt’s famous observation about the banality of evil is unmistakable (Arendt 1963).

18. ‘Alternative’, ‘ethical’, ‘critical’, ‘radical’ or ‘political’ consumption typically implies a notion that critically questions the contemporary consumption patterns such as in particular over-consumption, less in a sense of a renunciation of consumption, but more as active political participation through the marketplace (Sassatelli 2007, 186–188).

19. Anders explains that the identity crisis of the human being is strongly related to shame. In the given situation, humans are forced to identify themselves with something that is part of them, even though they cannot identify themselves with it. Thus, humans are not ashamed even though it is not their fault, but because it is not their fault. They cannot deal with the contradiction, and they can also not deal with their shame (Anders 1961, 69).

20. ‘Every epoch gets the prophets it deserves’ (Anders 1964).

21. In that effect, Anders explains how for NS war criminals their actions were morally right. Back then, it was morally legitimate to take part in the operations of a death camp. The circumstances changed and moral legitimation shifted after the war, but back then, they did not act very different to what they were committed to by work organization (Anders 1961, 287–288). ‘As long as we do not face the fact and do not realize that contemporary enterprises are the forge, the modus operandi and the prototype of gleichschaltung, we will remain incapable to understand the figure of the conformist. We will remain incapable to understand what it is all about the obdurate men who refused to regret or take the responsibility for co-conducting in atrocities’. The atrocities were not ‘erratic incidences’ of history that only happened once will ever happen again (Anders 1961, 290).