Conference | Paper

Future as lived time: Günther Anders on time, history and historical expectations

Felipe Catalani

Wednesday 6th September 2023

12:00 - 12:30

 

Although Günther Anders was a student of Heidegger and Husserl, who was his doctoral advisor in the early 1920s, and although the phenomenological approach is charateristic not only of his early writings but also of his mature critique of culture, his work is rarely taken into account in the history of phenomenological thought. I would like, in this presentation, to bring Anders' contribution in the context of his reflections on time and history, in particular in his phenomenology of historical expectations and the transformations of the experience of time. They are found above all in the two volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956 and 1980), and Endzeit und Zeitenende (1972). In a first moment, I would like to analyse what Anders understands under the idea of a "spatialisation of time", which appears in his essay "Sein ohne Zeit" (present in the first volume of the Antiquiertheit), which is dedicated to an interpretation of Samuel Beckett's play En attendant Godot. Analogous to the experience of history after 1945, when the notion of the future changes structurally, Anders observes that in the play time becomes "temporally neutral": the notion of advance and change no longer appears as something grounded in time and history, which implies an analysis of temporal affections, namely, of the difference here between warten, erwarten and hoffen. In a second moment, we will seek to analyse this shift in historical experience as Anders interprets it in his essay Die Frist, in which he presents a secularised view of eschatological expectations in the nuclear age (which become equally actual in the epoch of climate collapse). The core of our investigation is therefore the idea of the future as “lived time”, as also Eugène Minkowski elaborates it in his classic Temps vécu (1933).