Political thought has always investigated the implications of technology, as instrumental dimension of production, of construction, with respect to the deliberative sphere of political acting. This concerns reflections, which in the different declinations assumed in modern thinking, have tried to hold the instrumental-procedural dimension together with the finalistic-projective one, there where the capacity of rational politics based on the subject seemed to be able to go beyond technology, functionally ordering and subordinating it¹. The accelerations that technological progress and industrialisation, on a large scale, have imprinted onto the social fabric, at the beginning of the 20^th century, upset the relationship between technology and politics, opening to an autonomizing of one with respect to the other, which then sets off a crumbling of the prognostic aptitude of political acting. The contraction of the orientating and ordering capacity of politics when facing the imposition of impersonally technical logic, not only marks a withdrawal of the former or an overturning in hierarchies, but interrogates man in his relationship with the world. In the contemporary age, the question of technology moreover is grafted onto the drifting of modern reason, even re-designing the profile of human anthropology in a pessimistic sense. The unfolding of its developments at the beginning of the last century, from the war context to the socio-economic one, affects philosophical thought about the risks involved in such a push with reference to the planet, the heavy essence of the human species and its own survival.

This awareness emerges in the analyses of a series of thinkers who, putting the theme of technology on the agenda, contributed to make it the interpretative category of an age². In the light of the technology-violence marriage shown in the two World Wars, in the killing fields, in the atomic threat, we will try to analyse that gap between man and world which half-opens when the capacity of noticing, of feeling the consequences of that which can, instead, be produced disappears. Placing oneself in this gap that is produced among the overflowing – and exponentially growable – possibilities offered the human being by technology and the difficulties or impossibilities of his imagination capacity to take charge of what is realised, means reactivating a moral task. Such a process of a-synchronization between man and his produce, which signals the incapacity to perceive the consequences of his own doing and to assume responsibility, represents, even though re-formulated in various ways, the vector around which the thinking of Günther Anders takes shape. The intention of this brief essay is that of going over the central conceptual points which may be traced back to the production of Anders, from the philosophy of the discrepancy to the moral issues, not forgetting that the solidity of empiricism remains the matter of a-systematic theoretical weaving throughout all its existence³.

Chance and exaggeration: philosophy of technology

The question from which the thought of Anders originates has to do with a capital urgency, more than with political theories and systems, or better, with the what technology has done, does and will do with us, even before we can do something with it⁴. Technology, more than a means or a tool, is a destiny, a fate that man is not able to lead, but which nevertheless he must not renounce being able to check. It is a vision which in the intentions, attempts to place itself at a critical distance from Heidegger, but which in the end totally derives from its categorical horizon, especially for that which concerns the relationship between production and representation⁵.

Before considering the curvature, in the apocalyptical sense that the writings of Anders imprinted onto the direction of technology, it may be useful to linger on the methodological modality with which this author intended to represent his writings and on the way with which we intend to re-read it here. Anders, in certain brief observations on the method with which the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen was premised, refers to his own essays as a «chance philosophy», or rather, as a philosophising which is tied to today, which makes opaque open gashes on contemporary world that which moves his analyses⁶. Current phenomena and philosophical investigations are interpolated in an unceasing transformation of perspective which seems to take on the character of digression. Nevertheless immovable is, in occasionalism, the warning so that the philosopher meets «something specific» to thoroughly investigate head-on⁷. The worry of Anders does not pertain to the belonging or competences, so that a reflection enters quite rightly into the territory of philosophy, but that which matters is only that which is brought home from the excursus, from the excursion⁸. From here the risk, taken on fully aware, of exercising an excessive tension upon the link between general concepts and contingent phenomena, such as to exhibit the comings and goings between philosophy and current affairs in a sussultatory manner.

In this direction there are the clarifications with which the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen is premised, where he cautions that the philosophy of technology does not want to be a «system», or rather a frame within which, at a later date, those empirical facts that have slipped into it more or less with ease are placed⁹. The impressionistic character of his research, a real theorising «en plein air» free of constructivist intents, is balanced with its anchoring to «precise experiences» as well as to empirical facts concretely experienced or happened¹⁰. Also a framework of the writings that is surely not very organic contributes to this asystematicity, where essays, witness accounts, articles covering numerous «interrupted pathways»¹¹ alternate. The contingency of its philosophizing, provoked by worrisome facts like the assembly line, television, atomic bomb, is all defence against the general and metaphysical speculations around «everything» as well as on the «foundations», setting off an upending of perspective where the same facticity leads to the heart of things¹². To the initial methodological indication follows a second one which concerns the over-the-top modality of exposing such particular facts. Borrowing the attempt to reach the truth enlarging the image from science, from microscopy and from telescopy, Anders specifies that phenomena which cannot be treated without accentuating or enlarging them do exist; and this because, without such a deformation, they could neither be identified nor perceived and, given that they avoid identification by human naked eye, they place us before the alternative “exaggerate them or else renounce knowing them”¹³. The essence of technical products does not reveal itself to the naked eye of an observer who often stops at their neutral appearance, as occurs for nuclear plants or for the containers of Zyklon B¹⁴. We cannot understand the aim for which any product, or nearly any product, exists: not just, therefore, do they hide their origins, but also their function, this statement originates from the circumstance that technology has become so refined that sensitivity is not able to match it and to adequate itself¹⁵. The world of the products hides its essence, that is its dangerousness to our eyes, showing itself as either insignificant or inconspicuous. The possibility of understanding the aim of an object, can pass under the radar of looking and may be seen only by the “imagination”, that is, by way of a “deforming exaggeration” which induces transcending oneself. Above and beyond possibilist breach that the imagination opens, there rains the ascertainment that the objects besides not revealing anything about who has made them, likewise do they reveal little about what […] they do to us. Since there is no device which, it does not matter if we are its servants or its users, does not change us completely¹⁶. In the deformation, we recognise the intention to de-idealize, to have the truth emerge under a disguised appearance, nearly so much so that the alarm bells and the provocation were able to unravel the real danger of products¹⁷.

Such reflections lead us to the core of Anders’ thoughts regarding the technology and its implications for man. Starting from a time-chart of Anders’ writings, however connected to his biography stages, we can point out how his first essays are characterized by a negative anthropology in which the contingency of man leads to a freedom as extraneousness¹⁸. This anthropology of estrangement makes itself explicit in the impossibility for man to identify with himself as well as with the surrounding world, in a non specificity which forbids him to recognise himself on his own horizon, in a sort of «ontological statelessness»¹⁹. As regards the ascertainment of an extraneousness of man in relation to the world, highlighted in the initial writings, whose tones make us think of the paternity of Heidegger and which anticipate certain existentialist positions, we need to record a change of perspective in the later writings, such that they signal a radical inversion in the man-world relationship. The assumption of an extraneousness of man in relation to the world of the first Anders, which we may sum up into the formula of man without world, is overturned in the later reflections in the cautioning of a possible world without man. This radicalization, in the apocalyptic sense, is provoked, as Heidegger would say, by historical events which mark the course of the 20^th century, in a tragic sense: from the extermination camps to making dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki right up until the war in Vietnam, these are facts that stretch negative anthropology till a negative eschatology, as horizon of the no-more where man sees himself as being expropriated of his future²⁰. The hermeneutic figure of this perspective clouding, which risks appearing as a caesura, moulds itself around a radical reading of technology and its effects. The programmatic intention stated by Anders in the opening pages of the first and second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, respectively dated 1956 and 1980, concerns a critique of technology in its technocratic drift²¹. At the centre of the controversy engaged by the author, there is no attempt to sabotage progress, rather there is the recognition that today, technology is not a way to shape reality, but it is the condition where history unfolds²². Technology is a subject of the world. The means, understood as being devices, are not something secondary that follow a free decision concerning the goals to achieve, they do not mediate in view of an aim, but they represent a preliminary decision²³. Criticising technology means to call the same manufactured product into doubt, both in the case of an object like the atomic bomb, and in the case of man, consumer of images manufactured on a large scale. Philosophy has the task of dealing with the possible elimination of man by way of his products.

The production of his own destruction is gone over again looking at the succession of the three industrial revolutions. If the first one placed the machine principle into play, where man remains as eventual inventor and consumer of a process, the second has to do with the possibility of producing the same needs²⁴. It is a matter of a phase in which we note the need to satisfy not only the consumption of the products, but also of the same production technology, like saying that all which may be realized must be translated into reality. The third revolution concerns the possibility for a product to cause the extinction of the very same human kind. The final phase seems to be that in which technology reveals a metaphysical perspective, to the degree that it leads to a being-still-just to which another age will not be able to follow²⁵. In brief, the progressive colonization which technology operates on mankind leads to the obsolescence of man and to his substitution²⁶.

We, nevertheless, need to pause on that which Anders identifies as the essence of technology, which he makes those annihilating consequences follow which characterize the third industrial revolution, or rather on the remark that we cannot but produce that which we are able to and, especially, we cannot but use it²⁷. The fixed idea of the third industrial revolution consists in considering everything, in this sense also man, as being completely utilizable, without limits being able to be placed to eventual effects. Considered scandalous is not exploiting a potential raw material, as is the non recognizing the raw material in something existing²⁸. It is a duty to discover the exploitability which is immanent in things, because their secret utilizability represents the law and the essence thereof. In this sense, the world is not something in itself, but it is a raw material, affirmation which preludes the metaphysics of industrialism which wants being to coincide with being raw material²⁹. After the meeting with atomic bomb, Anders, in the diary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gives a yet more realistic interpretation of these themes observing that the fact of not producing more reactors, nuclear arms or other means of mass destruction does not imply suppression of the capacity to produce them. The technical situation where man finds himself is defined not only by that which he dominates, but also by that which he is incapable of not dominating; however, an apocalyptic situation marked by the possibility for mankind to self-destruct stands out³⁰.

Anders investigates the frustration of man in relation to manufactured products, highlighting how, since the very beginning, such a sense of inadequacy takes on the contours of shame, that is of a disdain towards the self in that we feel necessarily inferior in comparison to machines. This feeling, called the «Promethean shame», describes the unease of man in relation to the height and perfection of manufactured products, attesting to their ontological superiority³¹. From here is the attempt by man to overcome the sense of inadequacy in relation to things, trying to adapt to them, to make himself conform to machines. This foolish ambition shall not but be forever disappointed, since the raw material of which man is made is perishable, ephemeral with respect to that of products which may, anyway, be replaced and mass produced. The mimetic temptation may transform the shame into a sort of idolatrous devotion towards objects that seem to be equally potentially seductive³². Summing up, humanity risks appearing to be pre-historic in comparison to a reality performed by the technical subject and being attracted by its magnetic field to adapt to its logic.

In more philosophical terms, the shame represents failure of identification with oneself as well, to the degree that one cannot obviate the fact of being anchored to an origin, to a body which is not placed by oneself, but which is received as equipment³³. This natural equipment which oppresses the self is placed side by side of another equipment, a technical one in this case, that attests to the participation of man to the machine and its automatisms. In the effort to adapt itself to the rhythms of the machine, especially as regards those mechanisms of work, like those beaten by the assembly line, an identification between the self and the machine at least until the converted worker functions as a cog can be found. If, nevertheless, this job should grind to a halt, the self would come off like a strength contrary to the machine and would be chased again into the shame of its backwardness, discovering not being but an imperfect way of being machine³⁴. Ontological superiority of machines opens up a scenario in which man is dethroned and technology places itself as subject of history. Humanity tries to go after the levels reached by technology placing himself underneath its imperatives, such as the consumption and continual turnover of products. It is a matter of an imperative which fully unfolds the essence of technology understood in terms of total utilizability, moreover, meeting an efficacious realization in the war industry³⁵. The circumstance that technology imposes upon as the historical subject involves an incapacity of man to turn as much backwards as forwards, in the sense that history changes itself in an uninterrupted cancellation of current instants, a sort of unobserved succession, which never comes to an awareness of itself. Humanity devoid of the past and future finds itself, moreover, devoid also of the sense of its own work, to the degree that the artificially created world is nothing but a universe of means³⁶.

 

Between producing and imagining. The philosophy of the discrepancy

The feeling of shame that men have before their own subordination with respect to the machine highlights a gap between the human bio-psychological equipment and the artificialness of the products, which Anders has explored from a philosophical perspective throughout many of his works³⁷. Taking up the theoretical weave of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen again twenty-five years from the initial volume, it is the same Anders, afterwards, to point out that his writings appear a persistent variation around a set theme, rather, the philosophy of discrepancy as a gap between man and the world of products or, in a broader sense, between doing and imagining³⁸. Ever since the subheading of the first volume of the work regarding obsolescence of man, considerations on the soul during the epoch of the second industrial revolution, the intention is to highlight that the soul does not succeed in keeping up with production. The unlimited Promethean freedom of creating new things induces man to follow those products created from afar, and mostly with the evil conscience of being antiquated. Anders calls the asynchronization, which is everyday increasing between man and a world of products which exercises an ever-growing tyranny, a «Promethean gap»³⁹. Such a distance between man and world is traceable to a gap in human faculties, as if everyone toiled behind every other marching at a differing rhythm. This deficient synchronisation between faculties concerns principally the gap between doing and acting with regards to imagining and feeling. A similar delay, especially in feeling, which may radicalize in detachment or oblivion, is exemplified by the possibility of constructing a weapon of mass destruction without being able to figure out its consequences. And if this implicates extermination, we are not able to mourn the victims beyond a certain number⁴⁰.

Before highlighting in detail the theoretical nucleus weaved around the «Promethean gap», we need to underline that it goes back to the «philosophical programme» announced by Anders in the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: making a critique of the boundaries of man as critic on the fringes of his faculties⁴¹. Besides going over such a critical analysis of the human faculties, in the attempt to clarify to what extent Anders succeeds, or not, in dissecting such heterogeneous faculties, we must remember that precisely the meeting with atomic bomb generated a refining of the gap between man and thing, in a philosophy of discrepancy of capacity between human faculties, a real torment for the author⁴². As has been noticed, this gap, more than stressing a dissimilarity ab origine between human faculties, it points out the leap forward of technological progress in the sense of the automatization of production processes and of the destructive potential of the products, with respect to which an obsolescence of human capacities is recorded⁴³. Moving from the different comprehensive capacity of faculties, such as feeling, doing, imagining, assuming responsibility, Anders highlights a disassociation between a pragmatic capacity, like that of producing, and a representative one, like imagining. Such a gap is exemplified within the possibility of planning the destruction of a city and within the impossibility of figuring out its adequate effects, no matter how you try to grab its effects via the imagination⁴⁴. The preoccupation which stimulates the author seems to be the comprehension of that schism between action and conscience that starts off with indolence to self-destruction or, in other words, to the identification of those conditions of possibility that open to an incapacity to feel that which we do and produce. It is a matter of a central conceptual point which re-echoes, with a different formulation, the warning towards «thinking about what we are doing», with which Arendt undertakes her reflections concerning morals⁴⁵. One cannot, nevertheless, not signal that Anders’ investigation of human faculties shows itself to be lacking from the speculative point of view, in the sense that the hoped-for critique of the capacities seems to stay in the area of the intention, if not completely a priori resolved, almost as if it were a matter of philosophical evidence⁴⁶.

It is the same Anders who circumscribes his field of survey to the stretching apart of producing and feeling, remarking on the incapacity for man to adapt his own feelings of anguish in relation to the effects of his own actions or of his own products⁴⁷. The gap between the faculties implies that, as much as the effects of a bomb which can be produced may be known, this competence will never be adequate to effective realization. Feeling, regretting appear rigid, incapable of grasping even just the idea of an Apocalypse. The limited performances of feeling indicate that humanity is not up to the level of the products it can manufacture, of the Prometheus which it holds within. If the volume of doing and thinking is dilatable, it is much less so that of feeling and imagining. In a more radical way, we may sustain that the performances of feeling, like repentance and anguish, appear to decrease with the power of actions⁴⁸.

This relationship between productive unlimitedness and imaginative limits goes back to the transformations that technology impressed upon the world of work, specifically upon those procedural automatisms which, combining the principle of efficiency and moral indifference, take away the ultimate goal of his own activity from man⁴⁹. In the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, the «Promethean gap» has fallen within the productive machine, in the sense that the very same production presents an internal non identification⁵⁰. The worker does not recognise the object or the product as his own, but he finds himself defrauded of the right to realize a recognition, even if only in the form of a trace, with that which he realizes. At the assembly line, but the same is true for bureaucratic work, there can be only fragmented work with which it is not possible to realize an identification but just a repetition. The stages the author carries out moving from the disproportion between productive and imaginative power, then, concern, on the one hand, the incapacity to represent the effects of one’s own actions, and on the other, the change of the action itself which is ever more a collaborating or a mere operating⁵¹. In this perspective, the inadequacy of feeling does not express a weakening of the faculties, rather an increase of one’s tasks in the presence of immeasurable actions, which more and more take on the sense of acts of servile collaboration. There is a fracture between tasks and capacities of men to feel emotions in front of which stumble the feelings of guilt, of horror as well as the assuming of responsibility. The immeasurable produces indifference, a sort of «emotional illiteracy» which removes the comparison with that which appears too great⁵². The author uses the terms of super liminal with the intent of nominating those events that transcend human capacity to understand and remember⁵³.

The reflection that Anders clarifies regarding the metamorphosis of people from agents to collaborators takes the name of «mediality»⁵⁴. It has to do with that conformist corporate collaboration where, lacking a vision of the whole, it is not possible to establish a separation line between reactive and active components of a machine operator. In this dimension, human existence is connoted by taking on an active-passive-neuter style⁵⁵. The «mediality» has been exhibited in a paradigmatical way in the trials for crimes against humanity, there where the accused are not able to feel any sentiments, from acknowledgement to remorse, in relation to that which they committed because, for them, the moral essence coincided with collaboration with a certain management body. Comprehending these crimes needs underlining of the principle which inspires them, even at the cost of diminishing their exceptional weight, or rather that conformist «mediality» which manifests itself in an active-passive-neuter collaboration typical of businesses⁵⁶. «The company is the place wherein the type of medial man without conscience is created, the birthplace of the conformist», since the neuter morality of the product also reflects upon the action. Summing up, one can contribute to the construction of a bomb or a gas, without this throwing any shadow upon the morality of the work as such. Such crimes then, are neither frightening nor erratic since their condition of possibility, rather working style, is survived and has enlarged in procedures which may be given daily. Anders’ basic thesis is that the crimes are connected to that «mediality» of working style which obliterates the conscience in the conscientiousness with which a task is completed⁵⁷.

This analysis on the relationship between work-irresponsibility seems to be upheld by the figure of Eichmann as well as by the very many anonymous people who operate productive-destructive processes. In the correspondence with Eatherly, pilot on Hiroshima, in the open letters to his son by Eichmann, the reflections of Anders on the discrepancy of capacities also involve the moral sphere. When the machine principle of maximum efficiency transfers to the world, we are on the path of a techno-totalitarianism where expansionism as the essence of the machine absorbs everything in its process⁵⁸. The full realization of this chiliast kingdom of technology will make men more or less direct pieces of the machines which may be substituted or eliminated like global waste, as Bauman would have it⁵⁹. Technical-political totalitarianism that caused Auschwitz appears to continue along the road of co-machination where many are used for the co-preparation of arms of various nature with which whole portions of humanity will be eliminated. These individuals represent the sad repeating of the destiny of employees who carry out their own work within the coincidence of being there and function, of specialization and separation from the final effect⁶⁰. The conscientiousness by which the conscience is substituted, then, is equal to a vow of not discerning the result of the activity participated in. The business-like methods with which man is called to fulfil his own tasks extends till killing, to the point that one can end up sustaining that the worker in the extermination camp did not act, he simply worked. And since the aim and effects of the work do not concern the official, his collaborating will appear morally neutral to him⁶¹.

And yet, Anders does not seem to give up at the proof of the discrepancy, nor to the blind unconsciousness of the worker to the procedure he has contributed to break up into pieces, often landing at nihilistic outcomes such as the absurdity of human existence and the end of history. As much as it might seem paradoxical in relation to his theoretical layout interweaved around an intransigent diagnosis of the minor importance of human feeling with respect to technology, the author does not renounce providing indications for new ethics of the technological age. On such a theme, he cautions that if things are thus, if we do not want everything to go to waste, the determining task of today consists in developing moral imagination, that is in the attempt to bridge this gap, to adjust the capacity and elasticity of our imagination and our feeling to the dimensions of our products and to the unpredictable excess of that which we may perpetrate; bringing, to the same level of us producers, our faculties of imagination and feeling⁶². We need to attempt to broaden the performances of feeling, imagination and fantasy, by way of exercises of moral extension which aim at breaking down limits of capacities. The warning is of trying to make up for excess between the fabricated world and the senses, into a sort of self-dilatation that reactivates the capacity of being affected, to perceive the effects of what oneself does. Anders does not say how this opening may come about, but he invites everybody to pause upon the threshold of that action which precedes it in order to attempt to extend those faculties of feeling that normally cannot go beyond disposing⁶³.

Over and beyond a growing of the volume of the soul or the invention of new ways of feeling, he wants, especially, to reactivate a sensation of fear, a vivifying anguish of whoever has the destiny of the world close to their heart⁶⁴. The fear upon which Anders intends to lever, is not that one spread with the intent to fool nor that Hobbesian one which can balance power. When faced with the impossibility that the world can keep itself unharmed following technological manipulations, when faced with a doing that exceeds forecasting tearing itself away from the emotional sphere, a reawakening of fear appears able to reactivate some sort of reaction. The risk that the Promethean almightiness of the homo faber flows into the impotence of the collaborator, of the consumer-spectator who, inertly, assists at the extinction of the species, has to induce to an ethical assumption of awareness. The limited imaginative capacity of men has to at least try to represent the void and react to this sense of losing that which is not given, once and for all enlarging the feeling, reawakening the fear of a lacking. Anders writes that men are Utopians, the other way round, in the sense that they do not know how to imagine that which they have produced whereas the Utopians cannot realize that which they imagine⁶⁵. The anguish, nevertheless, appears unavailable to men anaesthetized and who are immune to risks of that which they produce, who are used to not hold themselves responsible for the effects, almost as if it was an issue reserved for the experts only. In his Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki, Anders remarked how it is a heedlessness to think that technicians or politicians are more competent in deciding about the fate of the world, since nobody has the moral competence over the being and the non-being⁶⁶. The sense of democracy can be recognized precisely in the rights and duty to take part in decisions which concern the res publica in that men and citizens. In this direction goes the formulation of that moral imperative which invites people to only possess those products whose principles may become principles of man. The warning concerns the need to know the hidden impulses of machines which are used to heal the gap between feeling and doing. This fear, like a passion which reacts to the threat of a loss, seems also to take on the contours of civil ethics, there where it is clarified that acting on the moral level implies the capacity to limit that which can be done⁶⁷. Conscience has to be able to take root to the point of inhibiting doing, of using devices, awakening general indignation. We are facing a hypothesis that, no matter how destined it is to fail, we have to try, at least, to imagine.

The fear for the loss of the world and for the extinction of humankind, signals that the discrepancy, for Anders, does not represent an alibi which absolves everybody as victims of the mega-machine. The incapacity to feel does not authorize thinking that the moral defeat of mankind has already been decided: as much as work morals dull the imagination, it is nevertheless possible to dilate the imagination and watch for the dangers lurking within the mechanisms. There is yet a chance to dis-identify oneself with the pure happening, a chance that opens slightly when the mechanism which activates the human mediality jams, thus starting up a moral resistance. Anders writes on this, that whoever really has tried, at least once, to imagine the effects of the action he was planning (or better still: the effects of the project where he, without being aware, was involved […]), and whoever, following the failure of this attempt of imagination, has truly admitted such failure, he due to this is stuck by fear⁶⁸. A vivifying fear in relation to that which is about to be caused might permit a return to the decisions regarding one’s own actions, perhaps fleeing the Eichmann danger zone. In the work Wir Eichmannsöhne, Anders reminds us that for Eichmann, the discrepancy has worked as a principle of irresponsibility and of legitimization of that perfect coincidence between being there and being a function of the extermination apparatus, within which morals never burst onto the scene⁶⁹. An attempt to keep conscience of the apparatus alive, through the taking on of personal moral responsibility for that which he had done was carried out, instead, by Claude Eatherly, one of the pilots who collaborated in the deletion of Hiroshima, the only one, nevertheless, to have a posteriori assumed upon himself the burden of guilt for his military actions. Anders underlines on this point that no, Eatherly is not the twin of Eichmann, but his great and (for us) consoling antithesis. He is not the man who makes the mechanism a pretext and a justification of the lack of conscience, but he is the man who inquires into the mechanism as a fearsome threat of the conscience⁷⁰. Within this universe of sense, the figures of Eichmann and Eatherly, placed at extreme ends to one another, symbolize the two possible outcomes of morals in a world progressively colonized by imperialist principles of employment, consumption and specialization of labour⁷¹.

Not unlike that pointed out for the philosophy of discrepancy, also Anders’ ethical layout leaves its flank open to a theoretical weakness summarily resolved on the plan of evidence. The apocalyptic end of humanity seems an indubitable truth from which he has the moral imperative of the commitment towards the preservation of the world and life tout court derived, considering aspects and values which signify life itself marginal, such as freedom and autonomy. The theoretical perplexity of interpreters facing an intransigent catastrophism and a moral rigorism may, perhaps, be balanced by reference to the context in which the philosophy of Anders matured: that humanity sunk in his own destruction which runs throughout 20^th century thinking and assumes tragic concreteness in Auschwitz and Hiroshima. When facing these events, humanity cannot but be represented as «survivor» in Anders’ philosophy, a bitter consideration which, at the very core, limits itself to generalizing, within a universalistic spirit, the subjective experience of the Jew, Günther Anders⁷².

 

 

This article was traslated into English by Mr. Aaron Mary Greenwood.

How to cite: Natascia Mattucci, The gap between man and world. Thoughts on technique and minority of the human in Günther Anders, in N. Mattucci, C. Santoni, Esclusione, identità e differenza. Riflessioni su diritti e alterità, Bologna, Clueb, 2010, also in Before and Beyond Auschwitz Project - Digital Brochure, 
http://www.odg-isrec.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=164%3Athe-gap-between-man-and-world-thoughts-on-technique-and-minority-of-the-human-in-guenther-anders&catid=21%3Aesclusione-identita-e-differenza-whole-essays&Itemid=43〈=it

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