Prometheanism & Human Obsolescence

Jason Dawsey

“We can make hydrogen bombs but are insuffi-ciently able to imagine the consequences of what we produce. Our capacity to feel, likewise, limps behind our deed: We can bomb hundreds of thousands into the ground but cannot sufficiently mourn them or feel remorse.” —Günther Anders (1956)

LONG NEGLECTED IN the Anglophone world, the ideas of the German-Jewish technology critic and anti-nuclear militant Günther Anders (1902-1992) have become, over the last decade, an increasingly ubiquitous presence in a transatlantic public sphere.

Understandable trepidation about “existential threats” to humanity like the climate crisis, the subsumption of much of everyday life by mass media, the resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism, the ceaseless expansion of the means of high-tech warfare, and the impact of forms of runaway technology (e.g. artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation) on workers has driven much of the attention to his life and writings.(1)

Anders is a theorist who speaks directly to these concerns with his radical, complex, and pessimistic critique of modern technology. With the recent appearance of Christopher John Müller’s superb translation of the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956), the philosophical thought of Anders can now reach a much wider audience.(2)

Rendered by Müller into English as The Obsolescence of the Human: On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution (hereafter OH), the book’s release caps a growing and impressive series of translations of his writings.

The time when Anders was a largely unknown thinker or known mainly for his connections to other intellectuals (his professor, Martin Heidegger, his marriage to Hannah Arendt, ties to Bertolt Brecht or the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) has largely passed.

Judged more on his own contributions as a theorist, he is now not only frequently invoked but deemed a fundamental thinker for the present, an indispensable oppositional voice in the Anthropocene.

The University of Minnesota Press echoes such discussions by characterizing him, on the book’s back cover, as “eerily predictive of current debates.” Müller himself says of Anders that his “voice speaks with an immediacy that requires no supplementary commentary.”(OH, vii)

Yet it seems apt to emphasize how Anders’ life and thought are simultaneously familiar, yet distant to us. This article is an attempt to sort through some of the central arguments of The Obsolescence of the Human, without pulling in untranslated material, and to identify what is of importance for the audience of Against the Current.

Anders’ Journey

Born Günther Stern in Germany just after the turn of the 20th century (he began to use the pseudonym Günther Anders around 1930 and fully adopted it in the 1950s), Anders studied with some of the leading philosophers of the time, including Edmund Husserl, Heidegger, and Max Scheler.

After the February 1933 Reichstag Fire he fled to Paris. and three years later to the United States. For the remainder of his long life, he would tout his antifascism and commemorate those, like himself, uprooted by classical fascism.

Settling in Vienna, Austria in 1950, after 14 years of exile in the United States, Anders achieved renown as a critic of mechanization, a fierce advocate of Holocaust remembrance, and a staunch opponent of nuclear weapons.

The thematics of OH largely ordered Anders’s philosophical-political activities for the remainder of his life. A quick look at its contents presents readers with four seemingly unrelated essays: one on what he called “Promethean shame,” a piece on radio and television, an excursus on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and a lengthy philosophical analysis of “blindness” to the threat of global nuclear annihilation.

There are also two dense appendices, “On the Plasticity of Feelings” and “Portrait of the Nihilist.” On closer inspection, a bewildering array of largely unfamiliar categories such as “industrial Platonism,” “human engineering,” the “mass hermit,” “mediality,” “annihilism” and “blindness to apocalypse” suffuses the book’s arguments.

These categories will perplex and provoke readers. Virtually every few pages comes a new concept requiring careful attention.

Anders dedicated OH to his late father, William Stern (1871-1938), still best known for his work on the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Despite how the IQ is now remembered, for Anders, his father’s larger body of research embodied critical, humanistic elements. Stern had “planted the notion of human dignity firmly and irremovably in his son.”

William Stern had struggled, five decades before, to salvage a conception of personhood from the influence of a psychology dismissive of the idea. Anders intended his “sad pages about the devastation of the human” to honor the memory of his father’s efforts.

Even in such a touching tribute, Anders distinguished his time from the more optimistic, pre-1914 era in which his father worked out his ideas of “person and thing” (a reference to Stern’s 1906 work Person and Thing).

Reducing people to things did not result, as Stern believed, from a flawed scientific perspective, but rather from the “way humans actually treat humans” — a terrible insight that his father learned only after being driven out of Germany by the Nazis. (All quotations in this and three preceding paragraphs are from OH, 3)

Almost 20 years after his father’s sudden death in exile in North Carolina and over a decade after the defeat of National Socialism, Anders feared that the situation for the person had actually only worsened. He styled his own book as a defense of the dignity of the human being against forms of dehumanization that were neither experienced nor anticipated by his father’s generation.

Hard Questions

The questions for anyone moving through the book are direct ones. What kind of critique of modern technology at the heart of Obsolescence are we dealing with here and does it truly speak to our time?

Are we not several decades from the advent of technologies that so concerned Anders: television in its infancy; the first computers; early automation of the labor process; the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi genocide; and, most crucially, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons?

Later, it is true, he would integrate early biotechnology, surveillance devices, and space flight into his analysis. Notwithstanding its long-term openness to new technological developments, is there really anything new to consider in a book apparently far apart from our age of climate change, the internet, screen-to-screen existence, smart phones and bar codes, ChatGPT and GPS, identity theft, species regenesis, drone warfare, and social media?

Is there not something hopelessly archaic about a critic like Anders haunted by both the reduction of our world through the spread of television to a “phantom-world” (OH, 114-133) and the specter of worldwide nuclear overkill, where “humanity can be killed as a whole”? (OH, 208-209)

“Technocratic Totalitarianism”

For those of us who have been researching and writing about Anders, the answer to such blunt queries is a resolute NO.

The availability of part of his magnum opus work in English (a second volume did not come out until 1980 and a planned third volume was never published) does not mean that we should devote less time to introducing his ideas and making the case for their significance.

Anders’ relevance cannot simply be taken for granted, certainly not by socialists first encountering his philosophy. Indeed, socialists grounded in Marxism must not only engage with but challenge his ideas when he sounds most similar to current catastrophism — that “technology has become our fate today” (OH, 12, emphasis in the original) or that a “technocratic totalitarianism” engulfs our lives. (OH, 76)

Such readiness to challenge is even more needed when Anders tends to divide technological innovation from the capitalist mode of production, a claim not exactly peripheral to his critique of technology (Marx, who “declared the economy our fate,” comes across as a figure, if a powerful and prescient theorist, of a bygone age — OH, 12).

The willingness for socialists to think and question boldly is essential for perspectives like that defended by Anders.

Müller’s excellent translation and editing, the latter undertaken collaboratively with fellow Anders scholar Christian Dries, push us to confront what is perhaps the greatest resource yielded by Obsolescence, the astonishingly fertile analysis of the “human” found there.

In this text, the “human” touches on faculties, potentialities, actions and externalizations of human beings as totally transformed by technological revolution.

The humankind depicted in the book has already conquered distance through transportation technology as well as radio and television. It has split the atom, laid eyes on the microscopic, and is poised to penetrate extraterrestrial space. This same world has also witnessed a continent-wide genocide perpetrated by the Nazi dictatorship with industrial means, and the prospect of human extinction in the obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

With an eye to this history, revealed to the world only a decade before, have humans engineered their own demise or at their very least unwittingly ceded control to an “autonomous technology,” to borrow Langdon Winner’s words?(3)

“Today, as human production seems to have exploded all limits, and as this particular explosion has made the unchanged boundaries of all our other faculties even more visible, a critique of the limits of the human seems to have become the desideratum of philosophy. And not just a critique of the limits of reason, but of the limits of all human faculties: of the capacity to imagine, feel, bear responsibility, and so forth.” (OH, 21, emphasis in the original)

In other words, the “human” at the level of our thinking, our emotions, and our sense of responsibility has remained static — while a system of factories, power plants, airports, arsenals, laboratories, machines, devices and their networks. all creations of human beings, raced ahead of our comprehension.

No wonder then that Anders foregrounded the “shattered human” and “destruction of the human” in Obsolescence. (OH, 125) Philosophical thought had to catch up rapidly and to close what Anders termed, unforgettably, the “Promethean gradient” or the “Promethean gap.” (OH, 19)

“The First Titans”

The enormous powers of mass production and mass destruction, of life and death, acquired by Homo sapiens demanded a new philosophical classification. How could the truth contained in the maxim “the human being is bigger and smaller than itself,” a phrase Anders had long brandished and modified, be adequately captured? (OH, 228)

Vividly, he chose to characterize human­kind after 1945 — and this date was absolutely crucial — as “the first Titans.” (OH, 208) As we have just seen, one Titan in particular, Prometheus, appealed to him. Perhaps second only to the category of “technology” itself in its repetition in Anders’ texts, the idea of the “Promethean gap” formed the cornerstone of his later philosophical anthropology.

In the best tradition of German Philhellinism, Anders mined Greek mythology for the most appropriate metaphor for his new theory. Fittingly, he selected Prometheus, the Titan who defied the Olympian gods, gave the gift of fire to the human race he fathered, and was horribly punished by Zeus for his act, to be the archetype for the post-1945 human being.

A much-cherished figure in the 19th and 20th century European literary milieu, Prometheus had an especially distinguished resumé in German intellectual history.

The stature of this myth stretched back, Anders acknowledged, some 175 years and he counted (with the rather glaring omission of Marx and the Young Hegelians) Goethe, Shelley, Ibsen and Sartre (from The Flies) among its admirers. (OH, 47-48)

Noticeably, several of these admirers lived and wrote during the period of early industrialization. Unlike their appropriations of the legend, Anders’ Prometheus was a purely tragic figure, not a heroic one.

For allegorical purposes, Prometheus’s combination of human and divine appealed to Anders. If the ancient Greek recounting of Prometheus foregrounded his love for humankind and willingness to risk the gods’ wrath, Anders interpreted him as perfectly conveying the “collectively pathological condition” humanity had entered in the technological age. (OH, 20)

Neither fully human nor deity, the Titan, in his rendering, was marred by a gulf, a staggering discrepancy, between his divinity and his humanity.

This remarkable exposition of “Prometheanism” by Anders leads back to the specifically human, all-too-human.(4) In Obsolescence, Anders identified several different “faculties” (more on them below) that distinguished the human being from other creatures.

“Each faculty,” he contended, “has its own relationship to size and scale. Their ‘internal volumes,’ their ‘holding capacities,’ their ‘performance parameters,’ and the ‘effective ranges’ vary.” (OH, 229) The same principle held for their “elasticity,” the “level of their rigidity” and how “expandable” they were. (OH, 231)

“Promethean Gap”

Now we come to the crux of Anders’ argu­ment in Obsolescence, and what socialists should take or not from it.

The “Promethean gap” or “Promethean gradient” Anders compared to Marx’s famous base-superstructure model of social life, where culture and reflective thought (the superstructure) often lagged behind changes in the economic foundation (the base).

A caveat accompanied the acknowledgment of similarities. Pointing to what he saw as another limitation of Marxism, he said, “The gradient Marxism was concerned with was just one example among many, an example extracted from a much wider complex in which highly diverse gradient-phenomena can be differentiated.” (OH, 19-20)

“The Promethean gap” was for Anders a more radical, fundamental category that went to the root of the problem. Under this category he laid out the faculties noted above, and addressed several distressing phenomena, the gaps: 1) between “making and imagining”; 2) between “doing and feeling”; 3) between “knowledge and conscience”; and 4) “finally and above all, that between the manufactured device and the human body (a body ill-fitted to the ‘body’ [Leib] of the machine).” (OH, 20, emphasis in the original)

The gap’s “structure is always the same” repeated in each variation, where one capacity leaped ahead of the others. “Nobody is immune,” Anders concluded, from the “gradient,” “irrespective of personal status and differences in rank.” (OH, 231)

Making the design and testing of the hydrogen bomb the linchpin of his argument, Anders showed his readers what was the endpoint of this demanding philosophical framework:

“We can make hydrogen bombs but are insufficiently able to imagine the consequences of what we produce. Our capacity to feel, likewise, limps behind our deed: We can bomb hundreds of thousands into the ground but cannot sufficiently mourn them or feel remorse.” (OH, 20)

Challenges for Our Time

As much a commentary then on how the “human” has assumed alienated, destructive and terrifying forms in the 20th century, Anders’ masterwork unceasingly poses this question to us 70 years after its initial publication: How much space and time do we still have to think and act transformationally?

What role has technology played in the spread of an undercurrent of extreme pessimism about the prospects not only for socialism but even for the continuity of civilization?

“Both in the East and the West,” he wrote of his world, rent by the Cold War, “the transformation and liquidation of the human by its own products is a burningly pressing question, regardless of whether the flames are seen, regardless of whether they are discussed — let alone extinguished.”(OH, 12)

In fact, his thinking would move almost inexorably towards a “product critique,” an ethics of industrial production, of whether to say yes or no to a whole range of products.

Anders asserted, “At issue today are the actual products being produced: the bomb, for instance, or the human of today, who is just as much a product — as humans now owe their characteristics, or at least their totally altered character, to television and the consumption of industrially produced world-and opinion-pictures.” (OH, 11, emphasis in the original)

These were bold claims in 1956 and challenged the traditional focus of Marxism on bourgeois property relations, i.e. who owned and controlled the means of production.

He doubted the efficacy of class analysis for discerning the repercussions of television. “It would be outright absurd to try and distinguish a middle-class atom bomb problem from a proletarian one,” he said bluntly. (OH, 12)

These same contentions were indicative, too, of a much larger and urgently pressed contention that a fundamental, systemic critique of technology was not only vital to the prospects of an international Left with which Anders identified, but also necessary for the survival of humankind.

Anders did not halt there, however. He went on to contest the argument of many Marxists that the factory was a “school” for the proletariat, that workers found commonality in the workplace, and solidarity with workers elsewhere experiencing similar conditions of exploitation and loss of control over their laboring activity.

For Anders, the opposite was the case. The workplace inculcated obedience and was “the birthplace of the conformist.” (OH, 247) In fact, he used the German word Gleichschaltung, usually translated as “coordination” or “synchronization” and a term utilized by the Nazis to denote the Nazification of German institutions, to encompass what happened to workers under industrial production.

Anders asserted against the old line of Marxist theorizing, ““As long as we refuse to face up to this, refusing to acknowledge that the coordinated human is forged in today’s workplaces — that work is itself the model for this synchronization — we remain incapable of understanding today’s conformist contemporaries.” (OH, 247)

Fascism as lived unfreedom, then, survived in the organization of work. Unsurprisingly, this line of argumentation would eventually lead Anders to join many other Leftist intellectuals in the three decades after World War II who viewed the working class as fully integrated into the industrial order, not as a viable source of resistance to the “technocratic totalitarianism” holding sway.

Even these few quotations from The Obsolescence of the Human can demonstrate why his concerns about the increasing autonomy of technology and elimination of human agency by machines resonated with many in the New Left, the counterculture, and early ecology movement, and has really begun to reverberate among many young activists today concerned that their future may only involve circling the drain for years to come.

Critique of a Critique

What I want to note, in closing, is that those drawn to Anders should not flinch from ruthless criticism of his critique of technology. The stakes could certainly not be higher.

Did Anders’s turn to the “Promethean gap” not align with a major shift away from Marxist class analysis at the very time, in the mid-1950s, when the capitalist world was experiencing such an unexpected, though ultimately transitory, prosperity?

More emphatically stressing the present, what happens to the antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class within a perspective that leans on the premise of a universal, trans-class phenomenon, a general failure of comprehension, responsibility, and action ultimately rooted in the very constitution of being human?

In The Obsolescence of the Human, Anders would even maintain that workers had so adapted to industrialism that they pined to overcome their own physical limitations to meet the demands of production.

These perverse yearnings to be unfree underlay the psychological complex which Anders classified as “Promethean shame,” a shame borne from encounters with machines and machine-produced commodities and the ensuing realization of our bodily limitations.(OH, 25-87)

While Anders justified this as an extension of Georg Lukács’s theory of reification, the socio-political implications are far from unambiguous, since mechanization, not capitalism, is the source of this social pathology for him.

What in fact happened to capital accumulation, to competition, the focus on the production of surplus-value, and the molding of technology according to the imperatives of capital in Anders’s critique of technology? What social force would resist the rule of machines and what would, if it were at all possible, the overcoming of technological domination mean?

These questions, which point to a larger critique of Anders as an example of the fetishism of technology, cannot be answered here.(5) Still, they should contribute to any adequate confrontation by socialists with an incisive body of ideas about technological supremacy and whether the technologies of our time, like AI, so outpace humanity’s moral and imaginative capacities that we become obsolete.

Without such a confrontation, Anders’ heory of Prometheanism and human obsolescence may actually hinder rather than aid the struggle for a liberated society, an aim with which Anders always identified.

Notes

1. While only utilizing a small number of footnotes in this piece, I do want to acknowledge some of the English-language scholarship on Anders. See Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders, trans. Frans Kooymans (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000); Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey, and Bernhard Fetz, eds., The Life and Work of Günther Anders: Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2015); “Utopia Inverted: Günther Anders, Technology and the Social,” a special issue of Thesis Eleven 153, no. 1 (2019), eds. Christopher John Müller and David Mellior; Srecko Horvat, After the Apocalypse (Cambridge: Polity, 2021); Enzo Traverso, “Günther Anders: Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” Historical Materialism 32, no. 2 (2024): 100-123.
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2. Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of the Human: On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution, trans. Christopher John Müller, eds. Christopher John Müller and Christian Dries (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025) (hereafter OH)
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3. I refer here to Langdon Winner’s classic Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).
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4. For a terrific discussion of Anders’s Prometheanism, see Christopher John Müller, Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). This book contains Müller’s first translation of Anders’s “On Promethean Shame” essay from The Obsolescence of the Human, which he adopted, with minor modifications, for the book examined here.
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5. For more on this, see Jason Dawsey, “Marxism and Technocracy: Günther Anders and the Necessity for a Critique of Technology,” Thesis Eleven 153, no. 1 (2019): 39-56.
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September-October 2026, ATC 244