Book reviews

Thesis Eleven
2019, Vol. 153(1) 141–153
World-Estrangement ª The Author(s) 2019
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Günther Anders’s
Early Essays

Günther Anders
Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen: Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie, edited by C. Dries in
collaboration with H. Gätjens
(C.H. Beck, 2018)

Reviewed by: Hannes Bajohr, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, Germany
DOI: 10.1177/0725513619863865

In a footnote to his Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze at one point draws attention to ‘a very
interesting article’ by a certain Gunther Stein. Deleuze praises Stein for explicating the
relationship of self-exteriority that is expressed in a subject’s referring to itself in the future
perfect: ‘The extended future, like the past perfect, ceases to belong to man’ (Deleuze,
1990: 349). That Gunther Stein was in fact Günther Stern, who is best known today by his
pen name Günther Anders, suggests something of the misreadings and passings-over the
philosopher suffered during his career. This is not to say that Anders evaded recognition
altogether, but it came late and rests primarily on one book: The Obsolescence of the
Human (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen) (1956; now Anders, 1987, 1992), a collection
of essays on, among many other things, the human-technology relationship, media, and the
nuclear threat. Yet its first and most influential volume was published 27 years after
Anders had presented the talk Deleuze praises, after years of exile during the Nazi years in
France and the US, where the lack of publishing opportunities practically stilled his output.
Today, Anders’s work of the interwar period has been all but forgotten. Fortunately, this is
beginning to change, and the recently published volume Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen:
Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie, edited (together with Henrike Gätjens) by
Christian Dries, who also wrote the highly informative afterword, offers a glimpse into
some of Anders’s central texts of this time (Anders, 2018; Dries 2018).
The early Anders deserves better than a wayward footnote as he takes up a productively
lateral position in the history of 20th-century German philosophy. With 19th-century
positivism, neo-Kantianism, and Bergsonian vitalism having lost their lustre, the 1920s
were a cauldron of emerging paradigms that only later and in hindsight became neatly
separated into distinct philosophical currents. Anders’s work of the 1920s and 1930s
showcases the fact that what appears to have clear edges today was a jumble of overlapping
142 Thesis Eleven 153(1)

positions at the time. For Anders, this jumble was made up of phenomenology, fundamental
ontology, and philosophical anthropology, and he aspired to offer a kind of synthesis.
Having studied philosophy and art history, Anders wrote his dissertation under Husserl in
1924, and was drawn into the sphere of Martin Heidegger in Marburg. However, he soon
combined his phenomenological training with an interest in the new current of ‘philoso-
phical anthropology’. Associated with the names Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner,
philosophical anthropology sought to investigate the nature and world-relation not of
abstract consciousness as such, but of the concrete human being in its psycho-physical unity
(for a useful introduction see Fischer, 2009a). It claimed for itself the status of a prima
philosophia, much as Heidegger did with his fundamental ontology. What is often forgotten
today – as ‘Davos’ is retroactively forged into the decisive moment of modern philosophy –
is that philosophical anthropology, for a brief moment in the late 1920s, held an almost
hegemonic sway over German philosophy. Even Heidegger’s Being and Time – published in
the same year as Scheler’s The Human Place in the Cosmos (Scheler, 2009 [1927]), and a
year before Plessner’s The Levels of the Organic and the Human (Plessner, 2019 [1928]) –
was at first understood to be a work of philosophical anthropology (see Fischer, 2009b: 94–
133). Indeed, Heidegger at one point offers the surprising assertion that the book’s purpose is
‘to make such an anthropology possible, or to lay its ontological foundations’ (Heidegger,
1962: 38 [17]). Only with Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics did he draw a clear line
between himself and the philosophical anthropologists (Heidegger, 1997). And yet, the hope
of a dialog remained powerful for many.
Within this constellation of fundamental ontology versus philosophical anthropology,
Anders began his first major academic project. Its method was to bring one to bear on the
other, and it can be broken down into two phases: A reformulation of a Heideggerian
thought in the terms of philosophical anthropology; and a reversal toward Anders’s most
original contribution, a negative anthropology.
In the first phase, Anders attempts to give Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in’ an anthro-
pological foundation. Against the traditional subject-object division as the model for human
world-relation, to which even Husserlian intentionality still adheres, Anders seeks to pit
‘instinct’. It constitutes what he calls a ‘material apriori’, as he argues in a text with that name
from around 1927. He defines ‘material apriori’ as ‘forms of knowledge insofar as they
anticipate materials, i.e. certain contents, prior to any experience’ (Anders, 2018: 93, here and
henceforth my translation). The material apriori thus denotes the predetermination of the types
of perceptual data that an organism can perceive. This has consequences for the ‘ontology of
cognition’ (p. 109): It now encompasses more than the ‘knowledge of states of affairs’
characteristic of the theoretical attitude (p. 104), and includes knowledge in which object and
subject are co-constitutive. Taking the example of the infant’s sucking reflex, he writes:

To instinct, organ, act, and thing are completely unseparated; the difference between the
lips, the mastered act of sucking, and the known ‘object’ of the mother’s breast is, for
instinct, not simply yet to be accomplished, but outright nonsensical: The mouth is the sip,
the sip is the milk. (2018: 113)

Anders calls this a ‘datival’ world-relation, while the distanced model of theory is
‘accusatival’ (pp. 105–8).
Book reviews 143

Already in this reformulation of Heidegger’s being-in through the notion of the

material apriori, Anders deploys the principal distinction of philosophical anthropology:
that between humans and animals. Even though Anders uses the infant as an example for
the material apriori, he acknowledges that humans overwhelmingly lack the pre-
organized experience found in animals. Two years later, this becomes the main point in
the essay ‘The Human’s World-Estrangement’ (Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen),
which reverses his earlier position, and inaugurates the second phase of Anders’s phi-
losophical anthropology, which asks: How it is possible for humans, lacking instinct, to
have experiences at all? Anders now sees the material apriori wholly on the side of
animals, while humans have no predetermined structures of perception; their world-
relation is indeed a posteriori. The a posteriori structure of human experience is,
unlike in the earlier text, precisely not that of being-in. That does not mean that Anders
argues for a return to a distanced object-subject division; humans are still part of the
world, but this participation is the product of retroactive familiarization – world-
estrangement is met with world-building. Anders thus suggest a specifically human
being-in, a ‘being-in at a distance’ (p. 16). Finally, the human’s a posteriori relation to
the world constitutes for Anders an ontological ground for freedom, which is not
understood as ethical autonomy but the reverse of the animal’s embeddedness in the
world: humans are free since they are, by their very ontological structure, separate from
and stand in distance to the world.
In 1929, Anders presented this text as a talk at the prestigious Kantgesellschaft
before an illustrious audience that included Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno,
Karl Mannheim, Paul Tillich, and Hannah Arendt, Anders’s first wife; ‘The Pathology
of Freedom’ (Die Pathologie der Freiheit), to which Deleuze would later refer, is
directly built on that talk. Here, it becomes clear that Anders has not yet bid farewell to
Heidegger completely, as he draws out the existentialist conclusions of his anthro-
pology. In their radical freedom, humans experience their own contingency, and this
‘shock of contingency’ (p. 49) marks the titular pathology of freedom. What follows
anticipates a lot of key concepts that are familiar from the Heidegger-inspired French
existentialism, particularly of the Sartrean variety: When humans experience them-
selves to be free, they paradoxically feel their unfreedom. The human being is not self-
created but ‘condemned to himself’ (p. 49) – condemned, in other words, to be free. In
a typology of reactions to this experience, Anders first describes the nihilist, a figure
that comes close to Antoine Roquentin from Sartre’s Nausea, and, secondly, the his-
torical individual, which is able to overcome the feeling of contingency by creating a
link to his own past through memory. Yet even that, in the end, seems futile. Only by
means of action, by facing aposteriority through world-building is there a way out of
the constitutive nihilism of the human being; Anders’s anthropology increasingly
allows glimpses towards a Marxist solution.
Anders was still working on these texts when he was forced to flee to Paris in 1933
because of his Jewish heritage. He published them as a two-part essay in Alexandré
Koyré’s journal Recherches Philosophiques in 1935 and 1937 (Anders, 1934/35, 1936/
37) and Deleuze quotes from these French translations, of which ‘The Human’s World-
Estrangement’ was rendered into French by a young Emmanuel Lévinas. (The German
version of ‘The Pathology of Freedom’ is lost and was retranslated for this volume with
144 Thesis Eleven 153(1)

the assistance of earlier German drafts.) According to Anders’s own, notoriously

unreliable, testimony, Sartre confided to him that ‘The Pathology of Freedom’ was ‘not
completely innocent in the development of his existentialism’ (Anders, 1979: 38). It also
appears in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, in which the author refers to ‘a
German philosopher’ describing the frantic need to make up for the feeling of con-
tingency ‘as the pathology of freedom’ (Fanon, 2008: 176). But these scattered mentions
matter little given that Anders’s texts did not find any extended resonance. These were
the last publications by Anders in Europe until the 1950s.
And yet, if the direct influences are sparse, Anders shared in a silent current, one that
can be constructed retroactively. It would have to be called ‘negative anthropology’
(Anders, 2018: 367). For what is striking about Anders’s philosophical anthropology is
that it forgoes a substantive definition of humans for a formal description. Unlike other
anthropologists, such as Arnold Gehlen or Paul Alsberg (Alsberg, 1970; Gehlen, 1988),
Anders does not make biological or evolutionary considerations, be they bipedalism or
neoteny, into the defining markers for humans; and unlike Scheler or his pupil Paul
Ludwig Landsberg (Landsberg, 1960; Scheler, 2009), Anders is wary of determining a
human ‘essence’ or making one trait, like the ability to negate, into the distinctive and
final characteristic of what humans are. Instead, he offers what he calls a ‘positional-
theoretical’ approach (Anders, 2018: 19) that allocates to each being a certain ‘positional
index’ (p. 15), an ‘embeddedness coefficient’ (p. 14), describing how it stands in relation
to the world. If plants are completely embedded, and animals are mobile but remain
bound to the world through the material apriori, humans’ world-estrangement is the form
by which to describe them without positing any ‘essence’. Anders puts his approach to
philosophical anthropology in the paradoxical formula: ‘Aposteriority is an a priori
character of the human, that is, that experience comes specifically after the fact is not
itself a post hoc circumstance’ (p. 18) This structural description of human beings as a
priori a posteriori first of all connects Anders with Plessner, who expressed much the
same in the concept of ‘excentric positionality’ (Plessner, 2019: ch. 7). But it also
clusters Anders together with philosophers like the peripheral Frankfurt School thinker
Ulrich Sonnemann, whose term ‘negative anthropology’ Anders later adopts to describe
the intentions of his early essays (Sonnemann, 2011; Anders, 1992: 129). Hannah Arendt
would have to be counted among this group, too, for whom no human essence but at best
conditions under which humans live can be stated (Arendt, 1998). Negative anthro-
pology, one could say, is the alternative German philosophy offered to posthumanism –
as it was constructed mostly in America with a mostly French canon – before it even
existed. This exceedingly well edited and commented volume, which centres around the
two 1929 essay and collects preparatory as well as later works, finally allows one to
follow Anders’s anthropological path.

References
Alsberg P (1970) In Quest of Man: A Biological Approach to the Problem of Man’s Place in
Nature. Oxford: Pergamon.
Anders G (1979) ‘Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?’ Günther Anders im Gespräch.
In: Greffrath M (ed.) Die Zerstörung einer Zukunft: Gespräche mit emigrierten Sozialwis-
senschaftlern. Reinbek: Rowohlt, pp. 19–57.
Book reviews 145

Anders G (1987) Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten
industriellen Revolution. Munich: Beck.
Anders G (1992) Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter
der dritten industriellen Revolution. Munich: Beck.
Anders G (2018) Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen: Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie,
ed. Dries C and Gätjens H. Munich: Beck.
Anders G (Stern) (1934/35) Une interpretation de l’a posteriori. Recherches Philosophiques 4:
65–80.
Anders G (Stern) (1936/37) Pathologie de la liberté: Essai sur la non-identification. Recherches
Philosophiques 6: 22–54.
Arendt H (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Deleuze G (1990) The Logic of Sense, ed. Boundas CV. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dries C (2018) Von der Weltfremdheit zur Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Güther Anders’ negative
Anthropologie. In: Dries C and Gätjens H (eds.) Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen. Schriften zur
philosophischen Anthropologie. Munich: Beck, pp. 437–535.
Fanon F (2008) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto.
Fischer J (2009a) Exploring the core identity of philosophical anthropology through the works of
Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen. Iris 1(1): 153–170.
Fischer J (2009b) Philosophische Anthropologie: Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts.
Freiburg: Karl Alber.
Gehlen A (1988) Man: His Nature and Place in the World. New York: Columbia University Press.
Heidegger M (1962) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heidegger M (1997) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press.
Landsberg PL (1960) Einführung in die philosophische Anthropologie, 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann.
Plessner H (2019) The Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical
Anthropology. New York: Fordham University Press.
Scheler M (2009) The Human Place in the Cosmos. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Sonnemann U (2011) Negative Anthropologie: Vorstudien zur Sabotage des Schicksals. Springe:
zu Klampen.

Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest

Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought during the Thermonuclear Revolution
(Routledge, 2016)

Reviewed by: Anne I. Harrington, Cardiff University, UK

DOI: 10.1177/0725513619863868

Arguably, the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union was one of the most surprising
events of the 20th century. After 45 years of an intense arms race, geo-political com-
petition, and overt antagonism, the Soviet Union splintered peaceably, ending the Cold
War. Few in the United States saw it coming (Gusterson, 1999). The conventional