The Obsolescence of Man, Volume II: On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution – Günther Anders It is not enough to change the world. That is all we have ever done. That happens even without us. We also have to interpret this change. And precisely in order to change it. So that the world will not go on changing without us. And so that it is not changed in the end into a world without us.
Preface This second volume of The Obsolescence of Man is, like the first volume, a philosophy of technology. More precisely: a philosophical anthropology in the epoch of technocracy. By “technocracy” I am not referring to the supremacy of the technocrats (as if they were a group of specialists who dominate contemporary politics), but to the fact that the world in which we live and which surrounds us is a technological world, to such an extent that we are no longer permitted to say that, in our historical situation, technology is just one thing that exists among us like other things, but that instead we must say that now, history unfolds in the situation of the world known as the world of “technology” and therefore technology has actually become the subject of history, alongside of which we are merely “co-historical”.1 This book therefore addresses the transformations that men as individuals, as well as humanity as a whole, have undergone and continue to undergo due to this factum. These transformations affect our entire life in both its active and passive moments; they affect our free time as well as our working time, our inter-subjective relations and even our (allegedly a priori) categories. Today, anyone who still proclaims the “transformability of man” (as Brecht did) is a figure from the past, since we are transformed. And this transformation of man is so fundamental that anyone who still speaks today of his “essence” (as Scheler still did) is a figure from the distant past. If I nonetheless claim that the picture I present of modern man represents not only the man of today, but also the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and therefore it is in a certain sense a definitive picture, I do not do so as a result of arrogance—quite the contrary: I am fully aware of the fragmentary character of my work—but only because the stage that I describe, precisely that of technocracy, is definitive and irrevocable; because this stage, insofar as (there are many things that speak in favor of this possibility) it does not lead one of 1
I formulated this “Copernican revolution”, which has not been understood by any politicians up to this date, in my most specific thesis that it is false to claim that the atomic bomb exists in the framework of our political situation; to the contrary, it is clear that politics takes place in the framework of the atomic reality. See the author’s Endzeit und Zeitenende, pp. 204 et seq.