Günther Anders’s ‘Promethean Disconnect’

Günther Anders’s The Obsolescence of the Human, appeared in English translation, ah, finally! this past January, 2026, seventy years after its first publication in German in 1956.

Anders begins by thematizing technology. I read Anders in my 2022 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology not only as I emphasize Martin Heidegger on technology but owing to a certain prohibition: the premiere American philosopher of technology (Don Ihde [1934-2024] would surely have described himself as ‘premiere’), blocked translations of Anders’s work. Ihde favored new names, a preference shared by many scholars today.

And a new translation, The Obsolescence of the Human, makes Anders new again — rightly so as Anders is worth reading.

A phenomenologist trained by Edmund Husserl (who directed his dissertation) and Martin Heidegger (who found him insufficiently differentiated from himself), The Antiquatedness of the Human, as the title might also be translated, begins by describing a new phenomenon, introspective, regarding the self as other: ‘Promethean shame’ is the ‘shame’ humans feel when comparing themselves with modern technology.

Promethean shame differs from other kinds of shame as all shame is self-referred yet Promethean shame refers to the self alone: no need to be seen by another person (or by deity). Self-absorbed, Promethean shame betrays a desire to be as or to be like the machine — more than a desire for today’s transhumanist immortality, in addition to ‘not-dying,’ this is a desire not-to-have-been-born, at least not in the old-fashioned way, i.e., not to be unique, not to be irreplaceable as a human, or individual, but ultimately replaceable, repairable, or as we say: upgradable.

What Anders describes as ‘Promethean shame’ pales before the ‘Promethean gap’ — gradient or disconnect — [Prometheische Gefälle]. (Alexandre Gilbert asked about just this, importantly, in our dialogue, see here.)

In The Antiquatedness of Humanity, that is, again, the Obsolescence of the Human, Anders focuses on the soul, specifically on the conceptual ‘disconnect’ between what mechanized, standardized, automated, electronic, digital, technologies can do or effect and what we imagine. Faced with AI, ChatGPT/Claude, even spell check will do for this example: we blank, semi-automatically deferring in favor of what we take to be more accurate, faster, better, certainly easier.

Anders’s concerns exceed the automated deception endemic in the current day, in journalism, in science, in academia overall — so much plagiarism on steroids: dicing/slicing the digitized universe of published/unpublished work, but life, that is again: the facticity, the thrownness of having been born along with mortality, I have already mentioned Heidegger, vulnerability, Anders mentions bodily pain and longing, and the importance of dying one’s own death. This automation reaches a limit in military (and pharmaceutical and industrial) applications: dealing death to others, heedlessly. We do not and cannot, dissociated as we are, so Anders argues, grasp the stakes.

Speaking of the Promethean, Anders invokes ancient Greek mythology, as Goethe and Shelley also repeat Hesiod’s Theogony. This is Prometheus, the Titan, according to Aeschylus, son of Themis, father of Aidos [shame], the Prometheus who fashions humanity from clay and proceeds to steal Olympian fire as ontic endowment for us, as ‘creatures of Prometheus.’

I include illustrations of Prometheus and technology (especially Figs. 1, 3-4, 6, 10) by the American artist, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) not because Kent was influenced by Anders but because he shared Anders’s focus on specifically titanic technology. Kent’s Promethean imagery illustrating a paid 1946 newspaper advertisement, commissioned for the coal industry (Fig. 4), could not be more American transcendentalist, more ‘new Jerusalem.’ (Note 1) The ecstatic vision is still part of the American fantasy ideal of corporate benevolence and capitalist potential (but see Fig. 5 below, for a younger, more idealistic Kent, circa 1927).

Anders’s reference to the Titan, Prometheus (see for a Roman depiction: Fig 5), followed Goethe, as Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus was influenced by the same Hesiod. (Note 2)

Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (I argue the importance of Beethoven and Schiller as opposed to Wagner in The Hallelujah Effect [Note 3]) cites the conclusion of Goethe’s 1774 poem, Prometheus, defying the Olympian Zeus:

Here I sit, forming man [Menschen]
In my own image,
A race to be like me,
To suffer, to weep,
To delight and rejoice,
As I do. (Note 4)

Cascading intervals of separation, what Anders names the ‘Promethean gap’ anticipates today’s dissociated blindness, aware/unaware, noting, with the coldness of zombies, the destruction of Gaza — Palestine — bombed to rubble and dust, children shot deliberately, entire communities liquidated, decimated, now capped by an automatic death penalty as if, seemingly, to include those Palestinians already captive as prisoners, to which we may add, on the same Promethean dissociative gradient, now turned against Lebanon, including the ancient city of Tyre, the US/Israel bombing of Tehran, and so on and on.

Such things articulating Anders’s Promethean gap seem to elude symbolic or imaginary representation, what Jacques Lacan called the ‘Real,’ that would be, and what matters is that it is unimaginable: the “impossible.” (Note 5) Anders writes of blindness by number. The human capacity for conceptualization, the imagination, is not a counting machine — Ihde would also speak of this but more flatly: one cannot, he liked to quip, denumerate the bricks in an imagined brick wall: count them off and keep them in focus, all the way up and all the way down. Anders emphasizes this in his introduction and again at the end of his book he recalls this emphasis in ‘On the Roots of Our Apocalypse Blindness’ in a section subtitled The human being is greater and smaller than himself: “We can murder thousands; perhaps we can imagine ten dead persons; yet at most we can cry for or have regrets for one.” (AM, 267, 17) A quote attributed to Stalin, circa 1947, in TheWashington Post has Stalin replying to reports of starvation, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” (Note 6)

The quote, which has various attributions, belongs in the ‘ben trovato’ array of quips heard from Tracy B. Strong (1943-2022), once Kissinger’s assistant at Harvard. There are more complex versions, one after the ‘great war’ (said to be, wasn’t), the war to end all wars, attributed to Kurt Tucholsky: “‘the death of one man: this is a catastrophe, a hundred thousand dead, a statistic’ — this, my dear child, is French, the language of the diplomat: a man who knows a woman’s birthday but has forgotten her age.” (Note 7)

The Promethean disconnect is a conceptual deficiency and this corresponds to the impossibility, so Anders clarifies (writing in English in the original), of “being up to date,” keeping up not with the ‘Joneses’ but our gadgets [Geräte] as they out-whiz us. Attuned to our things, the attunement is ‘human engineering,’ Anders argued, already employed in military and other ‘training.’ The same programming is currently effected wholesale by social media, which we avidly consume — Anders called us ‘eaters,’ inclined, like force-fed geese (his metaphor), to swallow everything. For Anders, a conceptual slippage divides what we do (better: what industry does on our behalf which we then ‘consume’) and what we comprehend of modern technology, especially large scale — think geo-engineering — or else and perhaps especially: the very small —nanotechnologies we cannot imagine which are (already) part of our bodies thanks to mRNA, and inhaled/ingested pollutants, already deployed, like the bombs many times more destructive than Hiroshima. And Anders observes that ‘testing bombs,’ allowed by atomic treaties, presupposes the detonation of bombs (See for discussion and references my essay, “Günther Anders’s Epitaph for Aikichi Kuboyama.”)

To introduce his concept of ‘Promethean dissociation,’ Anders began with the feeling of ‘Promethean shame,’ a stock example for which would be the factory worker keeping pace with the speed of the assembly line in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Inevitably failing to keep pace, Chaplin’s assembly line worker falls into the machine (Fig. 7). Years before Chaplin, there was the Moloch machine of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, and earlier, more literally, Upton Sinclair’s meat processing worker in his 1906 novel, The Jungle, has a fatal encounter, falling into the machinery and vats of slaughter, risks that continue to this day, uncannily akin to Heidegger’s  description of industrial agriculture as the ‘manufacture of corpses.’

Lang’s Metropolis (which appeared in the same year as Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit) is a subterranean vista of tragedy, Chaplin’s Modern Times adds humor (Lucille Ball parodies the assembly line image for television in I Love Lucy), and Sinclair’s The Jungle (Fig. 8) is still with us in our food.

Responding to the horrors of Sinclair’s book, laws were passed and today the FDA permits a contamination gradient allowing a certain percentage of insect and animal parts, including the human. Anders insisted on everyday technologies in the age of the second industrial revolution we call the digital with specific reference not to the factory but the computer: “surrealism has never been more ‘classically’ realized than in the configuration formed by a human standing in front of a ‘computing machine’.” (Obs., 19)

Reflecting on the ‘could’ that becomes the ‘should,’ looking back on his first book, Anders will emphasize “the production of weapons that make the annihilation of the human [Untergang der Menschheit] possible many times over” (AM II, 17), writing “‘Variations on the ‘Promethean Differential’,” as “one builds computers that in a second can produce not only a 1000 times more data than a 1000 workers in a 1000 hours could generate, but also more than 1000 men could use in a 1000 hours,” (18)) whereby the maximum difference, the metaphor is importantly an economic one, between what can be produced and what can be used is magnified by the difference between the embarrassingly minimal maximum of our current needs and projected future needs. (19)

When it comes to computing and its requisites, think AI and power and water consumption, there is no limit to what Heidegger called ‘standing reserve.’

Fond of fairy tales, Anders instances Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Fig. 9), Goethe’s remix of Lucian. (Note 8) If Anders also knew the American musical cartoon, Fantasia, at stake for Anders is not a mouse in the cartoon garb of a sorcerer but the Faustian challenge of technology, using magical, that is to say technological powers with negative consequences impossible to predict.

At stake in the ‘Promethean gap’ is the dissociative conceptual slippage between the damage we do with the press of button (or as ‘programmed’ with/by an AI prompt) and our comprehension of what is done. Anders recollects that outsourcing war/the decisions of war began back in the 1950s with General Douglas MacArthur, fallen from his role in World War II to executive impotence in Korea, his strategic decisions remanded to an ‘electronic brain,’ intended to calculate all the data — or as Anders emphasized, ‘all’ the data that one could ‘feed’ to a computer — thereby excluding the all-too ontic ‘endowment’ of the world, real people, real things, damage and death quite beyond our capacity to imagine or represent to ourselves.

Anders had argued that if St. Ignatius of Loyola, the ex-soldier who founded the Jesuits, had found it necessary to devise spiritual practices for his times (Note 9), we today would need our own new “spiritual exercises” that we will have to devise for the direction of the imagination, ‘training’ our souls to comprehend what we do, what we can do, and not less what we have already done.

It was just this negative judgment of the present, the future and the past, — this is Anders’s focus on time and it is also his reflection on eschatology (Note 10) — that would inspire Ihde, himself trained in theology, to keep Anders safely excluded from philosophy of technology.

The Promethean gap begins with ourselves in our human, all-too-human mortality. Death-bound, as Heidegger points out in his analysis of human Dasein, we can scarcely imagine our own deaths. Thus we do not think of death as Heidegger reflected on our ‘inauthenticity’ as mortals. The tactic, as Anders recognized, reflecting on having a body, subject to toothaches and a variety of lusts, is deflection, expressly idle as Heidegger also points out, we deflect death simply by saying, language is cheap, everybody dies. ‘Standardized ubiquity,’ in Adorno’s language, blocks comprehension in the age of the second industrial revolution, blocking feeling especially when it comes to a capacity to imagine the death of others.

We do not think of the Palestinian dead any more than we ever thought, so Anders repeated in book after book, of the dead of Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Korea or Vietnam.

Only certain deaths matter.

More than that, the Promethean differential between our ability to comprehend the working of our technologies and our capacity to comprehend what they effect is partially why technologies such as nanoparticles will always elude our grasp: sliding through cell membranes, which same nanoscale is why they function as they do, useful as LNPs in mRNA in medical applications but also as ‘smart dust’ in geoengineering or vaccine deployment. The Promethean failure to conceptualize also means we are inclined to suppose such things, patents and publications make no difference to us, as ‘fictions’ or ‘conspiracy,’ including microplastics as these do not degrade: perpetual motion machines, splintering without disappearing, getting worse as they get smaller, as in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, no kill-switch, ubiquitous air borne, water borne, in our bodies.

Wish fulfillment (also works with denial), our conceptual limitations enable a classically tragic disconnect in our capacity to feel, to conceptualize, that is: to know what we do or to recognize, feel any sense of responsibility for what we have already done including the consequences of the same. Distracted, we focus on one thing, forgetting everything that is still happening.

Given Promethean dissociation, we do not/cannot grasp what is at stake. We cannot, so Anders observes, “live up to the Prometheus in us.” [OH 231]

The Promethean gap entails a failure of empathy, a lack of compassion. Thus if Anders says we are not able to imagine ten deaths (not really), let alone thousands (not at all), not to speak of feeling any regret for these deaths, we also do not speak, as increasingly we do not speak, of Gaza or Lebanon or Iran. And so on.

Nanotech once used, once dispersed, persists in the environment/body; AI requires massive amounts of pure water, and aquifers are not unlimited. And that is not all AI needs to lie to us. (See further.)

Momentary meteors, flashing across screen consciousness.

Nietzsche’s last men blink — ironically today’s LED lights (studies, soon to be unsearchable, currently denied by industry and government) installed everywhere by law, cause macular degeneration — and say, we have invented happiness.

Anders had more to say and after reflecting on Promethean Shame and The World as Phantom and Matrix, Anders goes on to reflect on theology and the end of time in Being Without Time before writing On the Bomb and the Roots of Our Apocalypse-Blindness.

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Note 1. Purdue Galleries featured a special exhibit 7-8 March 2016, ‘Divine Likeness’ and ‘On or About: Rockwell Kent.’

Note 2. Ludwig van Beethoven, Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43, following the libretto of Salvatore Viganò and which premiered in Vienna, 28 March 1801.

Note 3. See Babich, The Hallelujah Effect (London: Routledge, 2016), also for a discussion of digital desire.

Note 4. Walter Kaufmann’s translation, cited in Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Random House, 1967), 69.

Note 5. See Babich, “On the Order of the Real: Nietzsche and Lacan,” in: David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, eds., Disseminating Lacan (Albany. SUNY Press, 1996), 48-63.

Note 6. 1947 January 30, Washington Post, “Loose-Leaf Notebook by Leonard Lyons,” quote p. 9, Washington, D.C.

Note 7. Kurt Tucholsky (Peter Panter): „Französischer Witz,“ Vossische Zeitung, 23. August 1925. in: Tucholsky, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Bänden (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975), Vol. 4, 189-191. Sexist as it is, the joke requires knowing the language of diplomacy and that the French invented statistics and that even American passports feature French.

Note 8. See for a historically philological account, Daniel Ogden, In Search of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The Traditional Tales of Lucian’s Lover of Lies (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007).

Note 9. For a discussion of Loyola in Spain’s Golden Age, see, and note the title of, Antonio T. de Nicolás, Powers of Imagining: Ignatius of Loyola : A Philosophical Hermeneutic of Imagining Through the Collected Works of Ignatius De Loyola With a Translation of These Works (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

Note 10. See for discussion, it is elusive, Babich, “Gnosticism, Critical Theory, and Apocalypse: Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders, Tracy Strong and Carl Schmitt,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 51, Issue 6 (July 2025): 885-926.