ABSTRACT
Günther Anders’s political philosophy expresses a hermeneutico-phenomenological critical theory. Advocate of a negative philosophical anthropology, Anders articulates a political phenomenology in terms not of what we ‘are’ but what we ‘have’ and ‘have done’ as protentional imperatives. By emphasizing that “technological inventions are never just technological inventions,” Anders does not merely refer to tools/instruments as ready-to-hand ‘gadgets’ [Geräte], even qua Promethean transhumanism, but media, including the image or acoustic signal, as culture and surveillance, as the dedicated production of/consumption of ‘phantoms,’ an early term Anders used to characterize the artificialization of political life. A hermeneutic phenomenologist of the lived body in its concrete and politico-social circumstance or ‘situation,’ Anders criticized the political and socio-anthropological dimensionality of human life as his philosophy of technology required two negative moments of reflection, conditioning life in the post-industrial age while simultaneously withdrawing from attention and thereby precluding critique.
