Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology

Babette Babich


Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ “Humanism”

As Heidegger’s student, Anders allied himself early with those who criticized Heidegger on a number of matters, most particularly, as Adorno would echo this, Heideggerian “authenticity” [Eigentlichkeit].1 Most well-known is Anders’ indictment of Heidegger’s “Pseudo-Concreteness.”2 But, like the then-omnipresent terminology of “situation,” as Anders also used this language, the “concrete” is complicated.

Here it can be helpful to recall Adorno’s reference to Anders’ essay—note, too, the spectral allusion—in a footnote to his Negative Dialectics:

The word “concretion,” most affectively occupied in German philosophy between the two World Wars, was drenched with the spirit of the times. Its magic used the feature of Homer’s nekyia, when Ulysses feeds blood to the shadows to make them speak.3

Where both Heidegger and Husserl had sought to avoid the charge of “anthropologism,” a criticism then and now indebted to a Kantian distinction, Anders, a student of the social (human) sciences, embraced “philosophical anthropology,”4 and in this sense one may read the first volume of Anders’ The Antiquatedness of Humanity as an explicit (if negative) “philosophical anthropology.”

Adorno, as Anders’ more acerbic, Frankfurt School colleague, reflects on the philosophical “situation” of our times when it comes to the social scientific discipline of anthropology, writing:

We cannot say what the human is. Humanity today is a function, unfree, regressing behind whatever is ascribed to him as invariant—except perhaps for the defencelessness and neediness in which some anthropologies wallow. He drags along with him as his social heritage the mutilations inflicted upon him over thousands of years.5

We are by now in the philosophical domain well beyond the hype of the ‘singularity’ but still absorbed by the humanist allure of the posthuman, the transhuman,6 typically without having first inquired into, as Adorno here asks almost as Heidegger or as Scheler might have done, “what the human is?” For however modified, trans- or post, the human goes without saying even when undefined or indeterminate or “overcome.”

The language of “overcoming” is Nietzschean enough, and yet what Nietzsche meant when he called for such an overcoming does not mean what some theorists of contemporary post-truth and transhumanism suppose it to mean. To this extent, as Anders would have recognized, it is no easier to read Nietzsche in the service of transhumanism than it is to read him in the service of theism. This does not mean that such readings cannot be or have not been offered.7 Thus Nietzsche’s parodic (an emphasis typically unnoticed) Zarathustra first proclaims his “teaching” of the “Overhuman”—“Ich lehre Euch den Übermenschen”8—with the declaration that the “human is something that shall be overcome” [Der Mensch ist etwas das überwunden werden soll],” a claim repeated, mantra-like, throughout Zarathustra’s “Prelude” [Vorrede]. For Nietzsche, the great thing about the human being “is that he is a bridge and not an aim . . . a going over [Übergang] and a going under [Untergang].”9 At the same time, a detail that causes confusion among scholars (both Nietzscheans and those who write on his work without being familiar with it)10 this dramatic impetus—there is a tightrope dancer in the background as Zarathustra speaks, literally going over and literally going under—is not what we tend to mean when we speak of transhumanism for the religiously founded reason that the idea of transhumanism is itself a millenarian notion.

In the consumer culture that is late capitalism, product updates urge consumers to buy the latest thing, the newest “gadget” as Anders already wrote on this transhuman product-inspired ideal. For his part, Heidegger, who argued the untenability of “merely instrumental, merely anthropological definitions of technology” (QCT 23), included “the man at the switchboard, the engineer in the drafting room” (29), within what he named the technological constellation, that is the set-up, or Ge-Stell.

Triumphalist humanism is long-standing in the Western tradition which typically not only sets the human as deiform—imago dei—but which also drives the notion that the human can be improved upon, a point Descartes repeats among his arguments for the existence of God (once again: had he, Descartes, created himself, he, Descartes, would have done a better job).11 In just this way, today’s transhumanist ideal tends to translate to “long live the human” or in Descartes’ formula: “and thus I should myself be God.”12

To just this extent, transhumanism is a humanism.

Still, we have the problem of definition: What is human? The question, to go back to Heidegger, as Anders reminds us, is a “what”-question13 opposed for Heidegger to the that-question and, indeed, to the who-question (SZ 45). Orienting the question of Being in Being and Time, Heidegger offers a traditional definition:

Das Dasein, i.e., the Being of humanity is in common as in philosophical “definition” comprehended as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, the living being whose being is essentially determined by the capacity for speech.14

Here, Heidegger refers to Plato and to Aristotle on language, along with Rousseau and so on, but he also, as Anders emphasizes, refers to Kant’s What is Enlightenment? For his own part, Anders (himself a son of a famous psychologist father, “the” William Stern) emphasizes the challenge of emancipating oneself from one’s minority status contra the father, in accord with Kant’s language of Mündigkeit.15

To the extent that Heidegger’s definition repeats an Aristotelian-cum-Platonic commonplace, one can specify ἄνθρωπον in place of ζῷον. Here, we recall that Aristotle underlines the hierarchical schematism of plant nutrition and growth, animal perception, sentient awareness, or consciousness, and human contemplation: thinking thinking and it is with the last that Heidegger remains.


Jemeinigkeit: On Becoming a Question to Oneself

Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology includes a famous turn to what he calls “mineness” speaking of Dasein, articulating the force of his title Being and Time: “Das ‘Wesen’ dieses Seienden liegt in seinem Zu-sein.” The “essence” of this entity, this Dasein, lies in its to-be. Dasein is at issue, in its being, for itself, distinctive in its mineness: “ist je meines,” specifically “mine to be in one way or another [meines wiederum je in dieser oder jener Weise zu sein]” (SZ, 42). Here what Heidegger says is basic enough, even self-evident, drawing upon a tissue of conventional references. Yet, despite the immediacy of the being that is to be investigated (nota bene: for the sake of the Seinsfrage), the “me” in each case turns out not to be authentically mine but always already characteristically and almost incorrigibly “unowned.” As Anders observes: “even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity.”16

Although scholars continue to bristle at the conceptual dissonance involved when Heidegger informs his readers that the inauthenticity of which he speaks does not correspond to a “lower” degree of Being [“»niedrigeren« Seinsgrad”], Heidegger intensifies the point, as he very habitually does,17 by explaining, note that Anders echoes him here, that it is “inauthenticity” that determines Dasein in its “fullest concretion.”18 Indeed, and contra Anders’ assertion of Heidegger’s merely “pseudo-concreteness,” the “concretion” in question encompasses ways of being human on a day-to-day basis: “when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment” (SZ, 43).

To this same extent, invoking intentional exemplification, Heidegger is able to remind us of a perplexing reflex towards the conclusion of Augustine’s Confessions, where the saint asks what, after all, could be closer to me than myself to myself: “Quid autem propinquius meipso mihi?” (X, 16). If Augustine’s phrase is well known, it also tends to be underread, which is hardly to say that it is not discussed. To this extent, inattention remains even as the phrase is a commonplace, even as we may note the beauty of the formula Augustine finds confounding, just where the entire text is submitted before God from the outset—the entire text can read like a prayer for today’s secular eyes, and still we can read the beauty and reflexive precision, a question I have become for myself: “mihi quaestio factus sum” (X, 33). Augustine’s successive reflection concerning time and his understanding of it, which also includes a variation on this questioning after himself, echoing his own proximity to himself, compounds the problem.19 The logical proximity of mineness, immediacy—concreteness being part of this—is key. This Heidegger seeks to unpack.20

Once again, somewhat contra Anders’ hyperbolic rebuke of Heidegger’s pseudoconcreteness, it is also patent that what becomes existentialism in France likewise attests to a certain concreteness (this is why Adorno finds it necessary to attack French existentialism and its “humanism”),21 and other readers of Heidegger, like Husserl, fault him precisely for his “anthropologism.” The same “mineness” that invites Heidegger’s reader to read along with him means that we are “free” to fault Heidegger’s observations (as Anders does, as many do), because we, of course and collectively, know better. Similarly, Augustine’s writerly style invites the reader to follow his confessional modality which can result in a-historic solecism, at least in Augustine’s case.22 If Nietzsche’s style exemplifies the same invitation, it also intriguingly, as David Allison shows,23 sidesteps some of the same risks, although style, as such, has never managed to prevent misreadings.

For his part, Heidegger proceeds a bit as Anders does, in the mode of Husserlian phenomenology, challenging his own teacher as he challenges Husserl’s project, to argue as Heidegger does that the Being question and thereby the existential analytic of Dasein, here understood in a rigorously Kantian sense as a science, that is as “a priori basis” has to “come before any psychology or anthropology, and certainly in advance of any biology” (SZ, 45). The emphasis contra Husserl is repeated as title for the following section: How the Analytic of Dasein is to be Distinguished from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology (SZ, 45).


Anthropologism and Psychologism

Like its cognate, “psychologism,”24 anthropologism as rebuke follows from Gottlob Frege’s admonition “to sharply separate the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective.”25 What is sought is the (“objective”) truth, not (human) psychology, not (humanistic) anthropology/ethnography.26 In addition to Husserl (after Frege), Heidegger repeats Kant’s own distinction, precluding empirical recourse to what human beings (in fact) practice. In this way, Kant distinguishes his inquiry into practical reason from “anthropology.” Here we should recall that Kant emphasizes that what belongs to a science—properly said as he underlines this—requires what neither anthropology nor psychology (nor indeed chemistry, which is a topic of some contestation in philosophy of science) admit, namely mathematics, as Kant writes in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science: “a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics.”27 The point of underlining that chemistry is not a science, leading the editors of a volume on the philosophy of chemistry to begin their reflections by asking a prototypically hermeneutico-phenomenological (and thus none-too-analytic) question, “But what are all those chemists doing?”28 is quite that this issue can be extended to the range of other, non-physics sciences, including, as Rom Harré did not fail to note, sciences like geology. From this perspective, like chemistry, sociology and ethnography/ anthropology cannot but remain “improper” sciences, as, from a Kantian point of view, the theoretically unguarded quality of the social sciences permits a fair amount of free play in its definition by its professional practitioners throughout the last century, such that, as quoted from Adorno at the outset, its topic or subject matter, humanity, turns out to be “a function, unfree, regressing behind whatever is ascribed to him as invariant.”29 The upshot “vetoes any anthropology.”30 This veto is in line with Frege.

For his own part, Heidegger emphasizes that

in the existential analytic of Dasein we also make headway with a task which is hardly less pressing than that of the Being question itself as—the task of laying bare that a priori basis which must be visible before the question of “what man is” can be discussed philosophically. (SZ, 45)

For Heidegger, as already noted above, the analytic of Dasein precedes anthropological questions, not to mention questions of the proper/improper, for good Kantian reasons as the analysis is not to be limited to the human being per se (quite whereby Kant takes his own prescriptions to apply to extraterrestrials, explicitly so, and, supernaturally, a bit more elliptically, to the “holy one of the gospels”31). Today, concerned as we are with AI, we would seem to have made little progress when it comes to animal- and plant- and even rock intelligence (as Thales is attributed to have ascribed this last to the lodestone), that is, non-human intelligence, not to mention questions of value and dignity. As Adorno observes, as Adorno was more a friend to animals than Anders (or most philosophers to this day):

In the experience of nature, dignity reveals itself as subjective usurpation that degrades what is not subordinate to the subject—the qualities—to mere material and expulses it from art as a totally indeterminate potential, even though art requires it according to its own concept. Human beings are not equipped positively with dignity; rather, dignity would be exclusively what they have yet to achieve.32

Adorno takes his own reflection in the direction of art and the aesthetic constitution of the human being after Schiller’s ideal of aesthetic “education” or formation, a programmatic constitution that, as Anders could not but phenomenologically, hermeneutically observe to have fallen off, irremediably. For Adorno, unquestioning conviction had a distinct benefit, one enhanced to no small degree by failing to question:

Under the sign of the dignity that was tacked on to human beings as they are—a dignity that was rapidly transformed into that official dignity that Schiller nevertheless mistrusted in the spirit of the eighteenth century—art became the tumbling mat of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which in aesthetic reflection forced valuable art out of the way of what the broad, polluted mainstream of spirit drew in its current.33

Anders has his own reflection on human dignity, and this, he argues, is abrogated by the total mobilization of humanity for the purposes of the current post-war, post-atomic, and now we can underscore as transition: today’s transhuman, in an age of Lockdown, ongoing or relaxed, masked and socially distanced life. As Anders reflects, we have the ability to repress the events of the past, foregrounding one of the most conspicuous of these events and one that continues to be repressed to this day, “the events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.”34 But the repression or forgetting is less Anders’ concern, as he writes, than the fact that the repeatability of these events cannot be similarly excluded from our awareness, oblique or dark as this is. In an alarming way, so Anders argues, we have consummated what Ivan Illich regarded as the expropriation of death,35 rending the human being as exactly outdated as Anders argues here, using not the term “Antiquierten,” antiquated, but “obsoleten,” an obsolete option qua “natural death.”36

I have argued that the efforts of the theorists of transhumanism are ways of celebrating humanism by other means, sponsored by corporate interests to be sure. Thus, robot rights, AI values, and cyborg and transhuman configurations turn out to be human, all too human,37 made by ourselves and fashioned in our own image as opposed to what is genuinely other than ourselves and other than what we have made, whether it be plant or animal or other “life.”38

The agenda is clearly that of the original Frankfurt School. Adorno points out the ideological dangers already inherent in categorizing nothing more neutral, seemingly, than art movements via “isms” and suchlike,39 and yet, and by general contrast, the term “anthropologism” (and “psychologism”) foregrounds, as any “ism” can do, a deficiency or lack.

To this extent, it is useful to recall as Martin Kusch reflects that:

[a]ccording to Wundt, Husserl had exchanged psychologism for logicism. Wundt defined the two positions as mirror images of one another such that things would not seem to have progressed much since 1884: “Psychologism wants to turn logic into psychology; logicism wants to turn psychology into logic.”40

Heidegger on Dasein and the Seinsfrage

It is crucial to note the risks of equivocation. This is especially true in the face of Adorno’s reading of both Anders and Heidegger, characterizing the persistence of the so-called “the existentialist misunderstanding of Being and Time,” as Reiner Schürmann (referring to neither Adorno nor Anders who happened for his part to have been influential in the French reception of Heidegger) explains that Sartre selected “some themes from Being and Time—being-towards-death, dread, etc.—developing them into a so-called ‘ontology of human existence.’”41

For Schürmann, by contrast with the French existentialist tradition,

in Being and Time, Heidegger is preoccupied with the question of Being as such—whatever that will turn out to mean—and only therefore with the question of Dasein.42

Françoise Dastur exploring “The Critique of Anthropologism in Heidegger’s Thought” by reading Husserl and Sartre together with the German “romantic” tradition, including Schelling and foregrounding Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, goes beyond Schürmann’s emphasis.43 From a different angle, Dan Dahlstrom reminds us that “the suggestion that his thinking is alien to humanism seems prima facie wrongheaded and Heidegger says as much.”44

Note again that for Heidegger, what is at stake concerns ontological, even scientific, as Heidegger always remains a Kantian, rigour. How can one raise the question of being as a science? How can one ask about it, methodologically speaking? Heidegger’s first reflections begin here but it is always worth recalling Nietzsche’s claim to have been the first “to raise the question of science as a question.”45 Nietzsche makes this claim in his (likewise Kantian) “Attempt at a Self-Critique,” appended to his first book on tragedy concerning what Nietzsche named “aesthetic science” [ästhetische Wissenschaft]. In addition to his distinctive focus on questioning, Heidegger raises, as Husserl also does, the question of the human sciences,46 noting that these depend for their data, that is, their least interpreted “facts,” upon a prior or pregiven “foundational” conception of that same science itself. It is at that foundation level that Heidegger reflects

heretofore our information about primitives has been provided by ethnology. And ethnology operates with definite preliminary conceptions and interpretations of human Dasein in general, even in first “receiving” its material, and in sifting it and working it up. Whether the everyday psychology or even the scientific psychology and sociology which the ethnologist brings with him can provide any scientific assurance that we can have proper access to the phenomena we are studying, and can interpret them and transmit them in the right way, has not yet been established. (SZ, 51)

“Anthropology” thus presupposes a defining orientation such that that anthropology stands in need of hermeneutic phenomenology properly conceived: “Ethnology itself already presupposes as its clue an inadequate analytic of Dasein” (SZ, 51). Thus, Heidegger emphasizes that “neither” the human sciences nor the so-called “positive sciences” can

or should wait for the ontological labours of philosophy to be done, the further course of research will not take the form of an “advance” but will be accomplished by recapitulating what has already been ontically discovered, and by purifying it in a way which is ontologically more transparent. (SZ, 51)

Referring to human beings in the context of the humane sciences—Geisteswissenschaften—Heidegger invokes the social world by speaking of das Man as of a Menschending, a “human thing.”


“Who,” Then, is Dasein?

It was earlier useful to underline Anders’ (fairly Schelerian) reference to the traditional distinction between What- and Who-questions. Emphasizing that Dasein is “that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue” (SZ, 42), at issue ultimately is the insufficiently pressed question concerning whether Dasein is to be limited to the human as such. For Schürmann, as noted earlier, the human is the “subject.” This subjective dimension informs metaphysics, ideology, and religious sensibility. Thus, many scholars suggest that only human beings are “able” to be Dasein, by which is often meant, and some say as much, the literal there, the Da of Being.47 But Heidegger himself is a little different, as he opens the question of the I that he foregrounds in his famous book, as the I-connect, the I-myself self of Dasein, the subject of his interrogation of the same preoccupation of Dasein with the issue of its own being, quite as this may turn out, in the conceit of the questions Heidegger didactically proposes to ask, to be other-than supposed or assumed.48 Theology with all its advantages and all its aporia follows hard on the heels of this train of inquiry.49

On Schürmann’s account, there is an additional reading that looks to a different conception of the subject, if all such readings “locate Being and Time within the tradition of the philosophy of subjectivity.”50 Thus, the great bulk of Being and Time seems to be “about” Dasein. As Schürmann counts for the reader: “of the 83 sections of Being and Time, 75 deal with an analysis of what Heidegger calls Dasein, for which there seems to be no English equivalent.”51 Indeed: once we undertake to read those seventy-five sections, our chances of recalling Heidegger’s point of departure in his first eight sections “are often more or less forgotten.”52

Rigorously, for his part, note, once again Schürmann’s point that Heidegger

is preoccupied with the question of Being as such—whatever that will turn out to mean—and only therefore with the question of Dasein.53

The “therefore” is scholastically key. By taking Heidegger at his word, contra William Richardson’s convention of Heidegger I and II, to the extent that Heidegger himself begins by denying that “there is a break in his thought” or that he abandons “the intention of Being and Time,” Schürmann is able to sidestep the division of Heidegger into a I and a II, arguing as the Black Notebooks would only seem to confirm in retrospect, that we will need to take the later writings into account in reading Being and Time.

At issue then is the question less of existentialism (and humanism) than anthropology, quite as Husserl seems to object. Accordingly, Heidegger’s Being and Time elaborates a hermeneutics of phenomenology. For all the emphasis on Aristotle and given his own research on scholastic or school logicians, for all the references that we would/should be following with respect to Descartes and Kant, and hence and therefore to Husserl, Heidegger’s project follows a dialectical schema, in terms of this same preliminary exposition. But just this leaves him vulnerable to Anders’ critique.


On Animal Dasein: Anders and “Other” Others

Throughout his provocative and fairly unreceived career, Anders urged a differently minded move, not unlike Adorno’s when it comes to what Adorno named a life “wrongly lived.”54 To Heidegger’s hermeneutic approach to phenomenology, Anders adds an engagement with spirit, not as a reference to Hegel but rather to the religious, to deity, including a reference to Augustine and the biblical tradition along with angels, dark and light. In this angelic spirit, when Heidegger emphasizes that he means to attribute no kind of demonry to the essence of technology,55 Anders, does not flinch at the notion of the demonic, specifically the idea of the devil, affirming the religious dimension silenced as to deity in the factic wake of history, in its complexity and essential to any philosophy meaning to consider both the dominion of the world and the damage wrought by beings such as ourselves, inasmuch as humanity, as Anders understands the human condition, has far less to do with “being” as such than with “having” which Anders takes to include reflection on what has been done:

With these formulas—which also define our status religioso—a fracture in our existence (and for the first time, our current existence) has been described, a disjunction, which surpasses in importance or, more precisely, makes the fracture that once existed between flesh and spirit, or between duty and inclination, or however such differences that were once considered to be so decisive might be denominated, not appear to be so serious. What is our “capacity” for robbery or adultery, or blasphemy or murder compared with our “capacity” to commit genocide or, even worse (I must introduce this term), globicide? (AM II, 410)

We will need the greater part of the chapters to follow to begin to be able to consider this claim as set at the end of Anders’ second volume on the outdated human.

For the moment, we note that it is our religious legacy that affords humanistic licence for global destruction; thus, Anders describes our “Promethean” “capacity”— the language is calculatedly Kantian—as fait accompli. To this day, we regard climate change, in the age of the Anthropocene, as having the character of revelation, a circumstance in which we somehow find ourselves and about which something might be done and today’s health pandemic as it is named as such (following certain mathematical models, which means that it is more a matter of projection or anticipation such that every measure undertaken is done preventively, or, as Fuller/Lipinsky would say, in a “proactionary” mode). This is a “soft” or social media war (of all the small people against all the small people). Thus, in his introduction to his “three industrial revolutions,” in a note to a section tellingly titled “Post-civilizational Cannibalism,” Anders writes:

This terrible general-license, which renders nothing taboo apart from the human and which assumes that everything has been created for the human, that is, that everything is at his disposal, has never existed apart from the monotheistic domain of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Genesis 1, 26-28): neither in the systems of the magi nor in the multifarious systems of polytheism. This is the defect of our “Western” ethic. Only in the framework of the anthropocentric tradition in which the world was regarded as “subordinated” to the human being, as servant, object, and means of survival; and in which the human, although still creatura, was not regarded as part of nature but as unlimited lord of all creation; solely within this frame could natural science arise and with it technology and with it, finally, industrialism. That the human being should be the goal and the world a means, such anthropocentrism was the common denominator (rarely interrupted by pantheistic intermezzos) of the European philosophies and vulgar worldviews, whose innumerable differences are hardly significant by comparison with their commonalities. (AM II, 433)

If Anders emphasizes animals in a passage from the Kirschenschlacht,56 the animal is not his concern. Rather his argument there, articulated in tribute to and in memory of Hannah Arendt, is that we have not progressed beyond the post-Renaissance heirs of Copernicus precisely in terms of biology, qua students of post-Darwinian evolution. We human beings are those (unfinished) “animals” who do not hold themselves to be “animals,” supposing as we do that the universe itself, the globe was either specifically designed for us or else that it is effectively “ours” by violent default: acquisition.

Despite Anders’ foregrounding of our thorough anthropocentrism, together with our fantasy of what we should, by rights be, and hence our “shame” at having been born, in our “natum esse” (AM I, 24), Anders himself is a humanist. To this extent, Anders remains closer to Heidegger (and Arendt, although he for his part focuses on “fathering”) than he is to Adorno. Thus “incarnationist,” Anders critiques Heidegger’s “concreteness” as a seeming or pseudo-concreteness. For Anders, “nature” is ontologically ordered to Dasein for Heidegger, emphasizing further on the level of embodiment that Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time despite its explicit focus on being in the world, leaves out (this is not a matter of “bracketing”) questions of hunger and sex.57

To be sure, this too we will need to unpack, but earlier I noted that what is at issue when it comes to animals is not the liberal notion of intelligence (nearly always disappointingly defined) or “moral-political agency” (a stipulated term defined in such a way that even human beings can be excluded, such that the whole point seems to be about privilege); the closest philosophical convention for this concern is Kantian, a bloodless and theoretical respect for the dignity of animals an sich, and as “other” beings.58

Elsewhere I draw attention to the importance of Heidegger’s discussion of mechanized or industrialized agriculture given its all-too-literal force: agribusiness, the meat industry as such, is in fact, as Heidegger writes in Das Ge-Stell, “the manufacture of corpses.”59 Note too that is useful to follow Adorno’s observation when he notes the logic of our inattention, what we manage not to notice whenever we dismiss what is done to animals by saying (by simply thinking) that, and after all, they’re “just animals.”

The locus here is Adorno’s Minima Moralia in the title of an aphorism encapsulating Levinas’ reflections on the look, the regard, the gaze. “People are looking at you.” Derrida to be sure takes this from Adorno.60 The context, as this is Adorno we are reading and his style escapes most readings, is elliptical or difficult to the extent that Adorno emphasizes “scotosis,” blindness, as key to anti-Semitism, qua constitutive failure to see “Jews as human beings.”61

The ceaselessly recurrent expression that savages, blacks, Japanese resemble animals, or something like apes, already contains the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—“after all, it’s only an animal”—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is “only an animal,” because they could never fully believe this even of animals.62

Anders offers a dialogical reflection on “phantasmatic” realism, as what is via imagination and concomitant inattention given to be seen which is by the same token unseen, inconspicuous. The language ranges between Adorno and the same Levinas who, to be sure, translated Anders into French63:

Your face. Or mine. In mine you know me. In yours I see you. With all things, more or less, as all of them have a face. Animals too. Machines too. Also a house. Even a summer’s day. (AM II, 322)64

Unlike Heidegger who focuses on the human in order, from the positionality of the most proximate, to pose the question of Augustinian immediacy concerning the who that I am myself, for the sake of raising the question of being qua being, Anders is focused on the human qua human but without the usual concessions human beings tend to grant themselves: an enduring state of exception.

Anders glosses, and this is just in passing and does not quite count as a focal concern as it does for Adorno, Kant’s contention in his Lectures on Anthropology, that with respect to “[irrational animals] one may deal and dispose at one’s Discretion” (AM II, 433), pointing out in passing that today’s whalers as indeed recreation or trophy hunters, including “collection” in the name of science, be it for university labs or for museums, quite as much as for the fishing industry, could invoke the same claim to justify their dealings. Thus, we saw that Anders emphasizes the crucial importance of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as assuming that “everything is created for the human being” (AM II, 433).

Nietzsche foregrounds a similarly key consonance between Western thinking in religious and moral values and Western science. Anders, as noted earlier, takes this in the same critical direction, if not towards, a “genealogy” of morals but as indicative of deficient or “negative ethics.”

This Judaeo-Christian tradition of anthropocentrism Anders connects, as Nietzsche does, with Western science and technology, but Anders goes further than Nietzsche because the connection with the Western tradition turns out to be, as we well know, compatible with both theism and atheism:

Today, of course, the natural sciences and technology, which would never have come into existence lacking theological anthropocentrism, have also found ground among those peoples, such as the Japanese, for example, that did not originally possess the requisite theological presuppositions for them. However, these presuppositions have also long been forgotten in Judeo-Christian cultural circles. Moreover, the technocratic countries are no longer united by a single faith; to the contrary, what unites them is (rarely as articulated but exercised) atheism that (despite the occasional proclamations of faith on the part of physicists) is the basis of the natural sciences. (AM II, 433, emphasis added)65

Sein and Dasein without God

Anders faults Heidegger for excluding elements of hunger and sex, excluding the incarnate body with all its needs from his thematization of that Dasein for whom its being is at issue. Anders also shows that those human cares can tend to be concerns that are not at issue for Heidegger. If Heidegger’s focus on the tragic question of humanity in his Introduction to Metaphysics foregrounds the uncanny, this is because his question is as as Schürmann says the “being question,” hence neither the existentialist question of the human nor, indeed, as some theologians claim, “meaning.”

What excites our interest in reading Heidegger goes beyond the where, the here, and the there of our being on this earth to touch the gods in flight. It is where Heidegger reads Nietzsche on the unfinished animal and it is where Heidegger reads Hölderlin, as he speaks of divinities in their passage, calling to them, where are you? wo bist du? To inspire readers in this fashion is no small achievement. We find it hard as Nietzsche says to see beyond our own shadow, and Heidegger seems, for some readers, to bring us a little into a certain light with his focus on the transcendental schlechthin. Thus, in Being and Time, as Dan Dahlstrom points out:

the transcendence that makes up the very being of being-here encompasses a relation to oneself as well as a correlative relatedness to the world at large. Heidegger attempts to capture this distinctive transcendence with the metonym, “being-in-the-world.”66

Still and at the same time, we remain lost. If the thinkers of existentialism sought in Sartre’s voice at least to claim their movement as a “humanism,” and if the human face became the cause of a philosophical generation, we are now in the age of Anthropocene, which is more than even Anders had imagined it, the Anthropo-obscene confronted with a different, another, and more invidious way to read the reflection Heidegger borrows from his friend, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, to make his own, to close his Question Concerning Technology, one of the key places he speaks decisively of the human, beginning his essay with a chained reference, unmarked, to Rousseau as also to, on the side of the promise of cultural redemption, Schiller. Few of Heidegger’s readers have come to terms with Heidegger on technology but foremost among those who have, and both take a Marxist point of view, are Kostas Axelos67 and Dominique Janicaud in his Powers of Rationality.68 Perhaps this is a fault of translation or of philosophical fashions but what is at stake concerns the history of reception, meaning, once again the lack of interlocutors. Thus, if Janicaud invokes Illich, he still seeks as his title suggests a different envisioning of the future, de-technized, and his imagined interlocutors are analytic or mainstream, regrettable as mainstream scholars do not engage his work, and Janicaud was simply absorbed and co-opted into what he condemned as the “theological” turn.

Heidegger introduces his reflection with a reference to Nietzsche who names humanity a “skin disease of the earth,” emphasizing the hopping and the blinking tendencies of that same terrestrial “inflammation.” This is arrogance, like the tiny flying creature Nietzsche invokes at the beginning of his essay on truth and lying, arguing from a rather different point of view than does Wittgenstein when he speaks of the lion, that like ourselves, as Nietzsche writes:

If we could but communicate with the Mosquito [Mücke], we would learn that it too swims through the air with this same pathos and feels within itself the flying centre of this world. (Über Wahrheit und Lüge)

Heidegger, speaking of what he names the “danger,” “not just any danger but danger as such,” explains that the human is “endangered from out of destining” (QCT, 26). Here the “fall” that threatens is a human inversion, as the human “precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth” (QCT, 27). It is no accident that Heidegger cites Heisenberg’s “Das Naturbild,” the same Heisenberg who articulates the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics as the Uncertainty Principle,69 whereby

the real must present itself to contemporary humanity in this way. In truth, however, precisely nowhere does the human today encounter himself, i.e., his essence. (QCT, 27)

The structure that thus unfolds, the “Ge-Stell,” is occluded for the human, preoccupied as the human being is with himself in every case,

he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself. (QCT, 27)

Heidegger challenges human exceptionalism, “For there is no such thing as a human who, solely of himself, is only human” (QCT, 31). By contrast, Heidegger thinks Hölderlin’s reflexive word, Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch. The “questioning that is the piety of thought” (QCT, 35) is to be thought in “the presence of the gods, bringing the dialogue of divine and human destinings, to radiance” (34). In this spirit, there is no way to read the final line of Heidegger’s “The Turning” other than as a kind of archaic, gnomic prayer:

May world in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the truth of being near to the essence of the human, and so gives the human to belong to the disclosing bringing to pass that is a bringing into its own. (35)

One can pray as Heidegger seems to do, to whatever divinity or else, absent piety, one can reflect on enlightenment without enlightenment, as Anders did in 1936, in the ambit of Heidegger’s lecture On the Origin of the Work of Art, as of the proletariat, as Anders writes, without proletarian consciousness, the work without a worker, which is also to say, “The self-made man as mystic.”70

If Heidegger kept as clear of critical theory’s disenchanted enlightenment as of the real implications of political rhetoric, Anders took a lifetime to engage the horrors of war and not less the real danger that is academic blindness to the same real, all-too-real horrors, foregrounded in Anders’ 1985 reflections not so much via Heidegger but on the blindness, be it incidental or deliberate, that also characterized Max Scheler and Georg Simmel—both of whom advocated on behalf of war—cheering not only its outset but throughout (KS 54). “And that they were sufficiently clever enough to have found the means,” Anders writes, “to have remained so very naïve? In order to allow themselves to be abused as bona fide free whores?” (AM II, 407).

The force of this language can surprise us—it is written late in life, hyperbolically, provocatively, more so perhaps than even Marcuse or Adorno, as Anders kept well to the side of all academic spheres, as it can seem (not having an appointment has this as consequence). Nevertheless, calling thinkers like Scheler and Simmel “whores” seems excessive (and complicated enough that we will return to it). But the language is deliberate. Thus, the reference to calculated advantage cuts to the quick of the problem, as Max Weber already underlines this in his Wissenschaft als Beruf/Science as Vocation, and as Lucian had already written in the second century AD in his Philosophies for Sale, which will always be about the practice of philosophy as profession: a paid job rather than a vocation one follows, paid or not, for the love of it, as Anders did. To the same extent, the great majority, that would be nearly all philosophers in Germany during the war, as everywhere else before and after the war, tended to take the side of what the great naïve of the 1960s and 1970s of the last century called “the establishment.”

For Anders, “Scheler’s dictum” was crystallized in the contrast between his own disposition to “believe” as he did “in the devil (in contrast to the theologians of his own generation who believed in the existence of god but not the devil)” (AM I, 407). Dependent on Scheler and Heidegger, as his teachers, Anders also invokes some of the most influential voices of his generation (his invocation would irritate Hannah Arendt on the same topic), citing Denis de Rougement on the idea of the devil in America society:

The Devil’s first trick, remarks André Gide, is to make us believe that he does not exist. This trick has never better succeeded than in the modern epoch. All America has fallen into the snare.71

Once upon a time, not only with Arendt but also with Maritain, and centuries of Augustinians and Thomists, not to mention the refinements of the Dominicans,72 the question of evil was significant. More recently, tracking the analytic history of philosophy, the question returns with Susan Neiman, upending the sense of Nietzsche’s conception of evil, along with the sometimes as harmless but always by no means incidentally Hegelian question of ugliness.73 Thus, the question of evil had been a theme historically and after Arendt, for the Holocaust, but otherwise, in an age of nonbelievers, it became an “outmoded” question that fit into notions of Gnosticism and magically anticipatory catastrophism—as if activism against the bomb post-Hiroshima was somehow an overstatement. Recently, Covid-19 shut down the Vatican itself, conspicuously enough for those interested in theological punctuations, on Easter Sunday 2020, and all other churches (synagogues, temples, mosques) along with it. Thus Anders’ formula concerning the devil’s new apartment or address has to be read in an era that takes zombie pandemics in stride, virtually speaking with, The Walking Dead, along with a literal televised version of the apocalypse for prime time, with the 2019 BBC series Good Omens, and the deaths of collective folk deities with the still-running 2017 cable television series American Gods and HBO’s little-noted 2003 and 2005 Carnivàle, along with Twilight and True Blood and the magical realm of Hogwarts, all spells and wand-waving included. And why ever not? We have had orcs and half-orcs for years. What was once fiction for readers of Tolkien, amused provocation for C.S. Lewis with his version of Wormwood, very different from Alan Rickman’s invocation, is more harmlessly, as we suppose, lodged in our collective unconscious gaming fantasies. I will return to this at the end, as it concerns what Wolfgang Palaver, citing Pierre Dupuy’s “enlightened catastrophism,” characterizes as a “prophylactic apocalypse.”74 We can read as we do about disaster capitalism as about surveillance capitalism because catastrophe capitalism, pharmaceutical and quasimilitarized enforced home-confinement, is (or can easily again be) the order of the day.

To cite Baudelaire (the source, pace Arendt,75 for de Rougemont’s repurposing of Gide):

My dear brothers, never forget, as you undertake to vaunt enlightenment progress, that the most beautiful of the Devil’s tricks is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.76

Speaking of the devil, we have the same saying in English, is a German commonplace, if it also has, post Luther, a vulgar dimensionality to it. Anders takes this over as well from Goethe, who writes his Mephisto with a touch of urbanity and bumbling pathos, prerequisite for sympathy well beyond Milton’s tragic Satan in Paradise Lost. If Anders also draws on Scheler to invoke the devil, the formula may be found in Kafka and in Buber’s 1953 expression of the age of God’s eclipse77 along with Sartre’s more existentialist writerly vision of nihilism, which is Hell itself (and the durably wretched claim that other people suffice for this) or the classic contrast between Le Diable et le bon Dieu. This is Anders’ reference to the devil’s “new address” (AM II, 410). For Anders: we disattend to the category of evil quite where we think we have nailed it down with Eichmann or indeed and after the Black Notebooks, with Heidegger. The point here, as both Bloch78 and Anders remind us, is that by assigning the lion’s share of evil to Hitler/Heidegger, one may be seduced into the confident illusion, we have this in the meme of the moment—hunting Nazis, punching Nazis—that one had thereby permanently categorized and enclosed it.

If everything that is to be done is in a sense, to repeat Adorno’s expression as so many emphasize this, undertaken in order to ensure that “it” never happens again, one has created a pseudo primal scene: one that can be neatly cordoned off, identified, as if on an old map of ocean monsters: there is where evil lurks, but here is where we find ourselves. Do we talk about Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Fukushima? Do we talk about ‘climate change’ or do we mention, as few do apart to be sure from Peter Sloterdijk, the ongoing and accelerating circumstance of both weather control and weather multipliers effected by spraying accelerants on trees for years and years in the fire disasters, in California, in Greece, in Australia?

Who today, which academic, which philosopher, here and now, that is since March of 2020—and again apart from a sole exception, in this case: Giorgio Agamben79— raises the question of what we have done and are doing to the old and the sick, in an era of social media programmed and thus organized hysteria, pro mandatory masks, pro mandatory testing, pro mandatory, that means forced, vaccinations, all in response to a single pathogen somehow supposed singularly responsible for all death as such (this is a stunning complicity in statistics) and for overwhelming medical facilities in potential, unless all manner of fascist measures be taken on a global scale—including individual self-incarceration, lockdown and quarantine, the prohibition of movement and social interaction of the most everyday kind, in addition to the pursuit of one’s livelihood, including art and theatre and face-to-face teaching.80

“Human,” as we are, are we, as we prefer to see ourselves, allied with the divine? Image and likeness? As Nietzsche mused in recollecting his youthful theodistical variations on good and evil, as Anders contemplated the fact not merely of Auschwitz but also of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ongoing instantiation of nuclear violence via nuclear reactors in the then case of Chernobyl (which is still with us and today we also have Fukushima, but the point is not to talk about it, as he maintained in his Gewalt, Ja oder Nein?81), is there evil within us? The tradition that sets the devil as the “prince of the world”—this is not by accident the title of Jacob Taubes’ edited collection on Carl Schmitt82—seems frighteningly fitting, again consider only the burning of Australia with wildfires abetted by months and years of chemtrail accelerants in the trees followed by the wholesale persecution of its wildlife, nothing seems to hinder our willingness, as Anders argues, to do the devil’s work for him.




1 Anders, “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit nämlich bei Heidegger (1936).” In Über Heidegger (Munich: Beck, 2001).

2 Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8, no. 3 (March, 1948): 337–71. I discuss this striking image as it also haunts Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture on Homer in Basel, which I read in connection with Hans Ruin’s 2019 study of physical anthropology, articulated in dialogue with Michel de Certeau (on Michelet and history): Hans Ruin, Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019) in: Babich, “Blood for the Ghosts: Reading Ruin’s Being With The Dead With Nietzsche.” History and Theory, 59, no. 2 (June 2020): 255–69.

3 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973 [1966]), 75.

4 To wit, Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen. Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie.

5 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 124. Others in addition to Adorno and Anders shared this view; see Gail Soffer, “Heidegger, Humanism, and the Destruction of History” as well as, and beyond the scope of the present chapter, a range of discussions of Heidegger and ecology and ecofeminism, and so on.

6 Some readers can take this ambiguity to write Anders in the posthuman tradition, beyond the “anthropocene.” See Christopher John Müller, “Desert Ethics: Technology and the Question of Evil in Günther Anders and Jacques Derrida.” Parallax, 21, no. 1 (2015): 87–102 and Andreas Beinsteiner, “Cyborg Agency: The Technological Self-Production of the (Post-) Human and the Anti-Hermeneutic Trajectory,” Thesis Eleven, 153, no. 1 (2019): 113–33 as well as for a statement of the optimistic sentiment of humanist transhumanism: Mark O’Connell’s 2018 “hackeristically” styled manifesto: O’Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (London: Granta, 2018). Cf. further, note 10.

7 See here the contributions to Enders’ and Zaborowski’s curated issue of the 2014 Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie, Vol. 13 (Freiburg: Alber, 2014), on Nietzsche, along with Eugen Biser, Nietzsche—Zerstörer oder Erneuerer des Christentums? (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002); it is worth reviewing Ernest Fortin’s writings on Nietzsche, and, for a focus on recent conventional authors, see Hans Ruin, “Saying Amen to the Light of Dawn: Nietzsche on Praise, Prayer, and Affirmation.” Nietzsche-Studien, 48 (2019): 99–116.

8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Chemnitz: Verlag von Ernst Schmeitzner, 1883). Online. http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Nietzsche,+Friedrich/Also+sprach+Zarathustra/Zarathustras+Vorrede, “Vorrede,” 3.

9 Ibid., 4.

10 See for example, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “From Nietzsche’s Overhuman to the Posthuman of Transhumanism,” English Language and Literature, 62, no. 2 (2016): 163–76, in addition to Tuncel (ed.), Nietzsche and Transhumanism as well as Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values.” Journal of Philosophical Research, 30 (2005): 3–14, along with Steve Fuller, Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era (Basel: Schwabe, 2019) and Jeffrey Bishop, “Nietzsche’s Power Ontology and Transhumanism: Or Why Christians Cannot Be Transhumanists.” In Steve Donaldson and Ron Cole-Turner (eds.), Christian Perspectives on Transhumanism and the Church: Chips in the Brain, Immortality, and the World of Tomorrow (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2018), 117–35.

11 “Yet if I derived my existence from myself, then I would neither doubt nor want, nor lack anything at all; for I should have given myself all perfections of which I have any idea.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33.

12 Ibid.

13 “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit nämlich bei Heidegger (1936).” In Über Heidegger (Munich: Beck, 2001), 33.

14 “d. h. das Sein des Menschen ist in der vulgären ebenso wie in der philosophischen ‘Definition’ umgrenzt als ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, das Lebende, dessen Sein wesenhaft durch das Redenkönnen bestimmt ist.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984), 48. Hereafter: SZ.

15 Anders, “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit,” 37.

16 Ibid.

17 I foreground this stylistic tactic in Babich, “A Musical Retrieve of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, and Playing Brass.” Man and World, 26 (1993): 239–60.

18 “Die Uneigentlichkeit kann vielmehr das Dasein nach seiner vollsten Konkretion bestimmen in seiner Geschaftigkeit, Angeregtheit, Interessiertheit, Genußfähigkeit” (SZ, 43).

19Ego certe, domine, laboro hic et laboro in me ipso: factus sum mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii.” Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), X, 25, 193.

20 This has been done, to be sure, especially with reference to time. See, for a start, Jean Grondin, “Heidegger und Augustine.” In: Ewald Richter, ed., Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 161–73 in addition to the late Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, “Die ‘Confessiones’ des Heiligen Augustinus im Denken Heideggers,” Questio, 1 (2001): 113–46.

21 See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927-1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

22 This is the point of departure for Pierre Hadot as he reflects on the path of historical philology, citing Pierre Courcelle’s conventional-literary as opposed to biographical account, scandalous then, as Hadot emphasized that the scandal would endure. To quote Hadot, “Alerted by his profound knowledge of Augustine’s literary procedures and the traditions of Christian allegory, Courcelle dared to write that the fig tree could well have a purely symbolic value, representing the ‘mortal shadow of sin,’ and that the child’s voice could also have been introduced in a purely literary way indicate allegorically the divine response to Augustine’s questioning.” Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

23 See the first chapter of David Blair Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

24 See Matthias Rath, Der Psychologismusstreit in der deutschen Philosophie (Freiburg i. Briesgau: Karl Alber Verlag, 1994).

25 Gottlob Frege, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl (Breslau: Wilhelm Koebner, 1884), x.

26 See Jean-Claude Monod, “‘L’interdit anthropologique’ chez Husserl et Heidegger et sa transgression par Blumenberg.” Revue germanique internationale, 10 (2009): 221–36, as well as Françoise Dastur, “La critique heideggérienne de l’anthropologisme,” In: Heidegger et la pensée à venir (Paris: Vrin, 2011). And see more broadly, Kai Haucke, “Anthropologie bei Heidegger. Über das Verhältnis seines Denkenszur philosophischen Tradition,” Phil. Jahrbuch, 105. Jahrgang / Π (1998): 321–45. For a discussion (in two parts) of Heidegger and (Bourdieu’s) anthropology, see James F. Weiner, “Anthropology contra Heidegger Part I: Anthropology’s Nihilism.” Critique of Anthropology, 12, no. 1 (1992): 75–90 and “Anthropology contra Heidegger Part II: The Limit of Relationship.” Critique of Anthropology, 13, no. 3 (1993): 285–301.

27 Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedmann (Stanford: Stanford University, 2004), viii. Kant includes chemistry in his roster of non-sciences, and it can seem that this goes too far but philosophy of chemistry has very only recently habilitated itself, and it is indisputable that physics remains the queen of the sciences. See Michael Bennett McNulty, “What is Chemistry, for Kant?” Kant Yearbook, 9 (2017): 85–112, as well as Baird, Scerri, and McIntyre’s introduction to their collection on the topic, “Introduction: The Invisibility of Chemistry.” In Davis Baird, Eric Scerri, and L. McIntyre (eds.), Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 3–18, as well as Jaap Van Brakel. “Kant’s Legacy for the Philosophy of Chemistry.” In Davis Baird, Eric Scerri, and L. McIntyre (eds.), Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 69–91.

28 Baird, Scerri, and McIntyre, “Introduction: The Invisibility of Chemistry,” 3.

29 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 124.

30 Ibid.

31 See Babich, “Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Tension and Hume’s Standard of Taste.” In: Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 236. See on Kant and the extraterrestrials, Peter Szendy, Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), as well as, earlier, David L. Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others.” The New Centennial Review, 1, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 201–89, in addition to Holger Schmid’s afterword to a French translation of Kant’s text: Sur les extraterrestres: Théorie du ciel (Paris: Editions Manucius, 2019). But see too, Tyke Nunez, “Logical Mistakes, Logical Aliens, and the Laws of Kant’s Pure General Logic.” Mind, 128, no. 512 (October 2019): 1149–80.

32 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentnor (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 62.

33 Ibid.

34 Anders, Die atomare Drohung. Radikale Überlegungen zum atomaren Zeitalter (Munich: Beck. 1993) , 57, cf. 106f.

35 See, my retrospective essay, Babette Babich, “Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘Age of the Show’: On the Expropriation of Death,” Nursing Philosophy, 19, no. 1 (2018): 1–13.

36 “The events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima can indeed be repressed in memory (insofar as they ever penetrated into it)—and that is in fact what has happened. But what cannot be repressed by contrast is their repeatability. Since these two events—i.e., now for more than twenty years—so-called ‘natural death’ has become an obsolete special privilege and the possibility of humanity’s violent self-annihilation continuously virulent. And since then we have been continuously defined by this non-stop possibility.” Anders, Die atomare Drohung, 57. Cf. van Munster and Sulvest, “Appetite for Destruction.”

37 See Fuller as cited above in addition to Vincent Blok’s insightful: “Denken als Handlung. Heideggers Besinnung auf das Wesen des Menschen im Zeitalter des human enhancement.” In Holger Zaborowsky and Alfred Denker (eds.), Heidegger Jahrbuch 10 (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2017), 265–79.

38 See for a discussion of the broader European tradition in ethnography, Dennis Johannßen, “Mensch und Dasein in Heideggers’ Sein und Zeit.” In Thomas Ebke and Caterina Zanfi (eds.), Das Leben im Menschen oder der Mensch im Leben? Deutsch-Französische Genealogien zwischen Anthropologie und Anti-Humanismus (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2017), 91–104. For another discussion, more precise, terminologically regarded, see Annette Sell, “Leben führen—Dasein entwurfen: Zur systematischen und gesellschaftspolitischen Bedeutung von Plessners anthropologischem und Heideggers fundamental-ontologischem Konzept des Menschen.” In Kevin Liggieri and Julia Gruevska (eds.), Vom Wissen um den Menschen: Philosophie, Geschichte, Materialität (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2018), 46–61. On anthropology, see Sato, “The Way of the Reduction via Anthropology: Husserl and Lévy-Bruhl, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss.” Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, X, no. 1 (2014): 1–18. See, too, Alfred Schütz, “Phenomenology and the Social Sciences,” In Maurice Natanson (ed.), Collected Papers I. The Problem of Social Reality (Dordrecht: Kluwer (1972)), 118–39. Cf. Philippe Cabestan, “Phénoménologie, anthropologie: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre.” Alter, 23 (2015): 226–42, and, again, as cited earlier, Dastur. Anders had been both Husserl’s and Max Scheler’s student, among others. See Christophe David, “Fidélité de Günther Anders à l’anthropologie philosophique : de l’anthropologie négative de la fin des années 1920 à L’obsolescence de l’homme.” L’Homme et la société. La Question anthropologique, no. 181 (2011/3): 165–80. See too Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Philosophical Anthropology from the End of World War I to the 1940s and in a Current Perspective.” Iris, 1, no. 1 (2009): 131–52.

39 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 24. For Adorno, “The painfulness of experimentation finds response in the animosity toward the so called isms: programmatic, self-conscious, and often collective art movements. This rancor is shared by the likes of Hitler, who loved to rail against ‘these im- and expressionists,’ and by writers who out of a politically avant-garde zealousness are wary of the idea of an aesthetic avant-garde.” Ibid.

40 Martin Kusch, “The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge: A Case Study and a Defense.” In Kusch (ed.), The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (Dordrecht: Springer, 2000), 15–38. Kusch gives the locus here as “1910, p. 516.” See too Kusch’s valuable discussion: Psychologism as well as the sections on Heidegger in Kusch, Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium, 135ff.

41 Reiner Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time (London. Routledge, 2008), 56.

42 Ibid.

43 Françoise Dastur, “The Critique of Anthropologism in Heidegger’s Thought.” In James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), Appropriating Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119–34.

44 Daniel Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

45 I make the connection between Heidegger and Nietzsche on questioning and science in Babich, “On Heidegger on Education and Questioning.” In Michael A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 1641–52, and “The Essence of Questioning after Technology: Techne as Constraint and Saving Power,” British Journal of Phenomenology, 30, no. 1 (January 1999): 106–24.

46 Cf. here Marco Cavallaro, “Der Beitrag der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls zur Debatte über die Fundierung der Geisteswissenschaften.” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2013): 77–93, as well as Dieter Lohmar, “On Some Motives for Husserl’s Genetic Turn in his Research on a Foundation of the Geisteswissenschaften.” Studia Phaenomenologica, 18 (2018): 31–48, and for a different logical take on a theory of everything social, assuming as the author says, that “social theory is not just ‘social philosophy for failed philosophers.’” Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Empathy as the Foundation of the Social Sciences and of Social Life: A Reading of Husserl’s Phenomenology of Transcendental Intersubjectivity.” Sociedade e Estado, Brasília, 17, no. 2 (2002): 563–85.

47 See George A. Schrader Jr., “Heidegger’s Ontology of Human Existence.” The Review of Metaphysics, 10, no. 1 (1956): 35–56. See too and in general the contributions to Zaborowsky and Denker, eds., Heidegger Jahrbuch 10 (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2017), particularly Raimon Paez Blanch, “Dasein und Mensch bei Heidegger. Eine Überlegung anlässlich des ‘Humanismusbriefes.’” In Holger Zaborowsky and Alfred Denker (eds.), Heidegger Jahrbuch 10 (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2017), 165–77, and especially Zaborowski, “Bedingungen und Möglichkeiten des Humanismus – heute. Jaspers, Heidegger und Levinas zur Frage nach dem Menschen.” In Zaborowsky and Denker (eds.), Heidegger Jahrbuch 10, 251–64.

48 This fluidity opens a set of possibilities. See my reflections on the question of the human in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, “Heideggers ‘Brief über ‚Humanismus’. Über die Technik, das Bösartige des Grimmes—und das Heilen.” In Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger und der Humanismus. Heidegger-Jahrbuch, Bd. 10 (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2017), 237–50, as well as Matthew Calarco, “‘Another Insistence of Man’: Prolegomena to the Question of the Animal in Derrida’s Reading of Heidegger.” Human Studies, 28, no. 3 (November, 2005): 317–34, and, more conventionally, Simon James, “Phenomenology and the Problem of Animal Minds.” Environmental Values, 18 (2009): 33–49.

49 It is for this reason that Perlman can point to the distinction between speaking of Mensch (Perlman writes “man”) and Dasein between Heidegger and Heschel. See Lawrence Perlman, The Eclipse of Humanity: Heschel’s Critique of Heidegger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), see esp. 29–31.

50 Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time, 57.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 See Babich, “Being on Television: Wisser—Heidegger—Adorno.” In John Rose (ed.), 52nd Annual Heidegger Conference (Baltimore: Goucher College, 2018), 81–95. A sharper version of this was presented in German at a May, 2018 meeting at the Heidegger Archiv in Messkirch, and see too, with reference to geoengineering, “Between Heidegger and Adorno: Airplanes, Radios, and Sloterdijk’s Atmoterrorism.” Kronos Philosophical Journal, VI (2017 [2018]): 133–58.

55 Heidegger, Überlegungen XII-XV, 198.

56 Anders, Die Kirschenschlacht. Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt, ed. Gerhard Oberschlick (Munich: Beck, 2011).

57 Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” 346, note 11.

58 There are fellow travellers, with variously different approaches, such as Calarco, Zoographies or Francione and Charlton, Eat Like You Care or Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis, or indeed, and I tend to note such contributions for personal reasons, as I began as a biologist before turning to philosophy, Marc Bekoff, Wild Justice, as well as, in sociology, Jeffrey Bussolini, who works on important themes of recognition and respect between disciplinary fields and has a critical and valuable reflection, “Felidae and Extinction: ‘Victim’ and ‘Cause’.”

59 Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation fon Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und Aushungern on Landern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben. ” Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, 27. I have been writing about this since my 1992 essay, “Heidegger’s Silence.”

60 Adorno himself takes the title from a popular overview: Paul Eiper’s Tiere siehen dich an (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer / Ernst Vohsen, 1928), and which also becomes a politicized vehicle as a 1944 documentary, a fact after the war to justify a (humanistic) concern/unconcern with animals.

61 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left, 1997 [1974]), §68, 105.

62 Ibid.

63 Anders (Stern) (1934/35) “Une interprétation de l’a posteriori.” Recherches philosophiques, IV (1934–1935): 65–80, and (1936–7) “Pathologie de la liberté. Essai sur la non-identification.” Recherches Philosophiques, VI (1936–1937): 22–54.

64 Hannes Bajohr, in his review of the Anders’ posthumous Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen, reminds us that drafts of what appears in Anders’ Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen had already appeared in French in 1937–8, an esoteric reference made even more salient as the, “Pathologie de la liberté [The Pathology of Freedom],” is missing the German original, such that our only English access to Anders’ text is via the French. Cf. Bajohr, “World-Estrangement as Negative Anthropology: Günther Anders’s Early Essays.” Thesis Eleven, 153 (2019): 141–53.

65 Cf., Babich, “Nietzsche’s Antichrist: The Birth of Modern Science out of the Spirit of Religion.” In Markus Enders and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg i. Briesgau: Alber, 2014), 134–54, together with Babich, “Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals, and Jews,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale, 14, no. 1, (2011): 110–45.

66 Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Transcendentalism.” Research in Phenomenology, 35, no. 1 (2005): 35.

67 See Kostas Axelos, Einführung in ein künftiges Denken. Über Marx und Heidegger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966 [1961]).

68 Dominique Janicaud, Powers of Rationality: Science, Technology, and the Future of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994 [1985]).

69 See for this articulation, Patrick Aidan Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965).

70 Anders, “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit,” 38.

71 Denis de Rougement, “On the Devil and Politics.” Christianity and Crisis, 1 (June 2, 1941): 2, and cf. The Devil’s Share.

72 For a discussion from the point of view of Ignatius of Loyola of some of the good faith complexities of this Dominican sense of evil and of heresy, see Antonio de Nicolas’ importantly historical and geographically contextualized discussion of the Spanish Inquisition in Powers of Imagining: Ignatius de Loyola: A Philosophical Hermeneutic of Imagining through the Collected Works of Ignatius de Loyola (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), beginning with 9–10.

73 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963), Jacques Maritain, Thomas and the Problem of Evil (Milwaukee: University of Marquette Press, 1942), and Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See also, although more elliptically, Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 [1947]), as well as, bringing in Löwith’s Meaning in History, notable in the current context given Löwith’s subtitle, The Theological Implications of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), Willem Styfhals, “Evil in History: Karl Löwith and Jacob Taubes on Modern Eschatology.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 76, no. 2 (April 2015): 191–213, and Marin Terpstra, “The Management of Distinctions: Jacob Taubes on Paul’s Political Theology.” In Gert Jan van der Heiden, George Henry van Kooten, and Antonio Cimino (eds.), Saint Paul and Philosophy (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 251–68. And see, particularly useful in connection with Anders, Manfred Frings, “Max Scheler: A Novel Look at the Origin of Evil.” Philosophy and Theology, 6, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 201–11.

74 Wolfgang Palaver, “The Respite: Günther Anders’ Apocalyptic Vision in Light of the Christian Virtue of Hope.” In Bischof, Dawsey and Fetz (eds.), The Life and Work of Günther Anders, 82. Palaver’s reference, thinned as this is via the language of rational choice, is to Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est certain (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

75 Hannah Arendt, in a tiny solecism, asserts that de Rougement establishes his reading of the devil via G. K. Chesterton rather than Baudelaire. For a political, historical discussion of the furor de Rougement raised in general, see Jeffrey Mehlman, Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944 (Plunkett Lake Press, 2019).

76 For political reasons of exile, one always has to read Anders with (and through) the French, as he himself would have read his Baudelaire and his Gide and his de Rougement: “Mes chers frères, n’oubliez jamais, quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas!” Charles Baudelaire. “Le Joueur Généreux.” Le Figaro: February 7, 1864.

77 Martin Buber, Gottesfinsternis (Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1953).

78 Ernst Bloch, “Die riesige Gebietskategorie des Bösen ist eine der am wenigsten durchdachten, sie kommt fast nur adjektivisch vor und dann matt, so etwa in der Phrase vom blutbesudelten Hitlerregime.” Experimentum Mundi (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 231.

79 See, Giorgio Agamben, Una domanda. April 13, 2020. https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-una-domanda. I discuss this originally in an online lecture on the 20th of May 2020 and now in print in Babich, “Pseudo-Science and ‘Fake’ News: ‘Inventing’ Epidemics and the Police State.” In Irene Strasser (ed.), The Psychology of Global Crises and Crisis Politics - Intervention, Resistance (Singapore: Springer, 2021).

80 See on teaching, especially today in the wake of the zoomification of the university, Babich, “Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Educational Institutions’ with Jaspers & MacIntyre on ‘The Idea of the University’—and Severus Snape.” Existenz, Vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall 2020).

81 Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? Eine notwendige Diskussion (Munich: Knaur, 1987).

82 Jacob Taubes (ed.), Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen (Munich: Fink, 1983).




Babette Babich - Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology. From the book Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology. Original PDF.

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