This Is Not a Test
Benjamin Steege · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020
In response to the devastating human and environmental impact of U.S. nuclear testing in the mid-1950s, the philosopher Günther Anders concluded that it was meaningless in such situations to distinguish between “test” and “reality.” In a surprising twist of thought, the radical putting into question of life, brought about by the global nuclear experiment, led Anders to turn to what initially appears an unrelated interest in the phenomenology of musical hearing. Where the fact of worldhood was being put to the test, he responded with a provocative call to “test” in kind the limits to which one might extend the capacity for imagination through desperate acts of aesthetic listening and sober exercise in “techniques of feeling.” Meanwhile, an opportunity for exploring Anders’s ideas appears in a reworking of one of his thematically germane texts in the context of a 1962 electronic composition by his contemporary Herbert Eimert.