The Hemorrhagic Dialectic of Günther Anders: On the Reversed Temporality of Fear
Among the constellation of mid-century thinkers ensnared by the implications of technological totality, the figure of Günther Anders (1902–1992) stands as a shadow behind the stage of more celebrated actors such as Heidegger, Arendt, or Jaspers. Marginalized in Anglo-American philosophical discourse, Anders remains radically sui generis in both intention and tone. Especially in his magnum opus, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Man), he proposes a phenomenology of existential dread not reducible to the schemata of mere existentialism, nor capturable within the conceptual lasso of technophobic lament. It is in this intricate labyrinth that we find a subtle but significant thread: his theory of “promethean shame” unfolds in tandem with a reversal of the temporal structure of fear, herein referred to as the hemorrhagic dialectic.
Promethean shame, as Anders defines it, is the human’s shame before the superiority of their own products — that is, a species-specific alienation in which the human invents that which exceeds them in perfection, resilience, and predictability, and mourns not the creation itself but the interiority thereby rendered insufficient. Yet buried within this lamentation is a strange inversion of temporality — one that, if inadequately excavated, escapes even the diligent reader. It is the peculiar evidential irony that unlike Heidegger’s “being-toward-death,” Anders’ modern human is not so much oriented toward finitude as recoiling from that which had not yet occurred, as if already posthumous to his own future.
I propose that Anders’ conceptual innovation lies precisely in this: that he reconfigures fear not as an anticipative mood arising from the possibility of death, but as a backward-radiating response to already imminent catastrophe. In this model, our dread is not premonitory but hemorrhagic — a leakage from the future into the present. The dialectic hemorrhages; fear spills backwards.
Let us analyze his case study par excellence: the nuclear bomb. Anders was one of the few philosophers to take seriously the existential implications of nuclear capability beyond its historical contingency. For him, Hiroshima was not an event but a threshold — one from which mankind entered an ontologically distinct epoch. The bomb is not a thing but an epochal mode of Being, a torch that burns through time.*1* After Hiroshima, the possibility of total annihilation is no longer a contingent projection but a standing reality that blankets even our most mundane aesthetic experiences.
Thus, fear becomes unmoored. In classical conceptions — from Aristotle to Hobbes — fear is defined as a passion rooted in the anticipation of a future harm. Yet in Anders’ post-atomic topology, fear functions as a retroactive stain; we suffer today the consequences of a future we have already made inevitable. In a letter to Claude Eatherly, the pilot who scouted Hiroshima before the bombing, Anders writes: “The catastrophe has moved from being a possibility to being a duty, for it is now that only in annihilation do our inventions find their full realization.”*2* Here, the future is no longer that which may occur but that which demands retroactive legitimization. It is the very opposite of possibility; it is necessity inverted.
Therein lies the hemorrhagic dialectic. The dialectician, since Hegel, has always presupposed that negation, contradiction, and resolution unfold in a temporal sequence. Anders, however, subtly subverts this: negation precedes the term it negates. The future annihilates the present by making it the vestibule of memorial guilt. We exist as survivors of an apocalypse that has not yet happened. In this ontological condition, fear is not a sensor of threat but a repository of deferred actuality, which leaks backwards into conscience, behavior, and political stasis.
Compare Anders’ temporality with that of Kierkegaard, who saw despair as the sickness unto death rooted in the infinite self’s relation to itself; Anders identifies the sickness unto extinction — a despair not from an insufficient self, but from the over-sufficiency of the collective self’s technological will. This will has outpaced not merely our ethics but our emotions. In his formulation, we are emotionally obsolete — we cannot feel appropriately in response to the scale of our own actions. From this arises a new moral pathology: the incapacity to mourn correctly, not because mourning is inept, but because it is anachronistic. The tears of the ethical subject fall always behind the event, or ahead of it, never synchronously.
This asynchronicity breeds a peculiar mode of conscience: what Anders calls the “as-if” imperative. We must act today as if the future ruins already exist, and yet we lack the phenomenological tools to experience their weight. Unlike Kant’s categorical imperative, which prescribes universality, the “as-if” command slouches under the pressure of irreconcilability: to feel shame for things we have not yet done but are virtually certain to commit. This is ethics as time-travel, unmoored even from Nietzsche’s eternal return, for what returns here is not life but debris.
Here, Anders’ influence by and divergence from his former wife, Hannah Arendt, become illuminating. Whereas Arendt privileged natality — the human capacity for new beginnings — Anders emphasizes terminality, the tendency of technological man toward suicidal collectivity. This disposition reflects not a death-drive in the Freudian sense, but an annihilation-drive of the machinic surplus — where production begets purpose only insofar as it leads to maximal destructiveness. Society’s productivity becomes its teleological cancer.*3*
In closing, one may be tempted to align Anders with the gloom-laden school of apocalyptic philosophers — Cioran, perhaps, or even the later Adorno. Yet this would be a category error. Anders does not merely announce despair; he anatomizes the temporality of despair’s systemic misfire. For him, the great philosophical error of the 20th century was not merely to underestimate the power of technology, but to misinterpret the temporality of moral affect in the age of irreversibility.
A subtle detail, yes, but a seismic one: fear, dislodged from future possibility, becomes the seeping wound of a future already born. We bleed not from events, but from premonitions turned proleptic memories — a grammar of time in which the present is merely the anemia left behind by urgency unacted upon.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
promethean shame, technological phenomenology, ethics of fear, Anders, atomic age metaphysics, temporality, future pasts
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*1 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Vol. I (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1956), especially the chapters “Die Welt als Phantom und Matrize” and “Abschaffen der Scham”.
*2 Günther Anders, Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot, Claude Eatherly, Told in His Letters to Günther Anders (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961).
*3 See Siamis, Vincent. “Technological Eschatology and Radiological Conscience: A Revisionist Reading of Günther Anders,” Journal of Posthuman Ethics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2016): pp. 203–215.