Apocalypse-Blindness and Insight: Günther Anders at the End of History

Philosophers concerned with extinction, existential risk, and climate change are currently rediscovering the work of Günther Anders, who developed in the 1950s and 60s an understanding of the atomic age as the ‘end of history’. According to Anders, the historical novelty of nuclear weapons marks the end of historical novelty as such; the effects of the invention of the atomic bomb, in other words, are more than merely empirical, reshaping the relationships among human life, history, and time in unforeseen ways. In this article, I first reconstruct Anders's argument that the atomic age constitutes the end of history before noting that it contains a fundamental contradiction. Anders, I argue, both discovers and disavows the power of empirical or ontic events to transform transcendental or ontological conditions, and this disavowal marks the limitation of both his ontological insight and the political project.