Apokalypse-Blindheit Reread: Toward an Acceleration that Has Earned its Name

Günther Anders's 1956 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (vol. 1) is read almost everywhere as a closing diagnosis: human beings can make more than they can imagine and imagine more than they can feel, and that asymmetry, the Stufenbau, is structural and unbridgeable. I argue that the 1956 text carries two strata its reception has not reconciled. Alongside the structural Stufenbau there is a bridging stratum, present in Anders's chapter on the plasticity of feeling and the cultivation of moral imagination, and stated plainly in his 1959 instruction to the Hiroshima pilot Claude Eatherly that "your task consists in bridging the gap." This second stratum has been eclipsed by the shadow of the first. I lift it into view and formalize it as a dynamic-gap ethics. Every particular acceleration widens the gap, and it generates a proportionate, locally indexed obligation to close it. The only legitimate way to escape that obligation is not to accelerate; to accelerate while refusing it is the live performance of Apokalypse-Blindheit. From this ethics I derive a triad, we accelerate as mortals, for mortals, with the weight of mortals, and apply it to two 2024–2026 cases, the Stargate compute-energy commitment and Dario Amodei's closed-session admission at DealBook. I locate the position as a sister branch of Hans Jonas's Das Prinzip Verantwortung and distinguish it from Thaler, Issembert, Babich, Müller, and Schwarz.