Günther Anders

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For the cameraman and cinematographer of the same name, see Günther Anders (cameraman).

Günther Anders (born Günther Stern) (Breslau, July 12, 1902 - Vienna, December 17, 1992) was a German philosopher. He was the first husband of Hannah Arendt.

According to Harold Marcuse, Anders (Stern) studied, along with Marcuse's famous father Herbert, with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. As Jews, however, these men, and Anders's wife Hannah Arendt, along with many others, were forced to flee Germany for their lives, settling in the United States.^[1]

Günther Anders was an early critic of the role of technology in modern life and in this context was a trenchant critic of the role of television. HIs essay "The Phantom World of TV," written in the late 1950s, was published in an edition of Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's influential anthology Mass Culture as "The Phantom World of Television." In it he details how the televisual experience substitutes images for experience, leading people to eschew first-hand experiences in the world and instead become "voyeurs," His dominant metaphor in this essay centers on how television interposes itself between family members "at the dinner table." See "Die Welt als Phantom und Matrize. Philosophische Betrachtungen über Rundfunk und Fernsehen (The World as Phantom and Matrix. Philosophical Observations on Radio and Television) (1956)."

His major work, never translated into English is acknowledged to be Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen'' ("The Outdatedness of Humankind"), which devotes a great deal of attention to the nuclear threat, making him an early critic of this element of human technology as well.