Peter Gratton
The title of Arendt’s The Human Condition is as bold as many of its insights. Originally titled “Amor mundi” (love of the world), it is no doubt her central political work, setting out to do no less than to offer “a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears.”1 The book is not some scholarly commentary in the history of philosophy or an analysis of some micro-problem in one of its areas (epistemology, ethics, etc.), as was the fashion during her time and since. Rather, it is an ontology of what the human has been and what she may be. Both parts of her title need to be taken into consideration: unlike those after her in philosophy who would dismiss the “who” of the “human being” to the dustbin of humanistic thought, Arendt attempts to think about the specificity of human actions—leaving aside our ability to think, mostly, for her later Life of the Mind—without adhering to the view that human beings have a shared essence or nature: “Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior,” she avers, “if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing.”2 For this reason, she argues, defining the human condition “is not the same” as defining “human nature.”3 But human beings, while having no pre-given nature or essence, are nevertheless conditioned, facing the inexorable facts of their existence without which they would cease to be human: “life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, and the earth.”4 We will see how each of these fits within the three modes of action identified in The Human Condition, with life, natality, and mortality being the province of labor; wordliness being provided by the work of homo faber (man the maker) and the place within which action takes place; and the earth being the condition of possibility for all three modes of human activity in the broadest sense. While these conditions determine us, they do not reduce us to being the mere cogs of history or wholly determined in the manner often found in the physical or social sciences. Arendt’s worry, spelled out in her prologue and the book’s closing pages, is that the key to modernity is a secularized wish to have the human transcend all of its conditions: speech, which Aristotle said makes us human, is to be replaced by scientific modes of cognition that cannot be communicated orally (e.g., pop books on quantum mechanics offer but vague analogies for what is buried in mathematics); thinking is to be replaced by artificial machines; natality is to be reduced to what can be created in test tubes; mortality is to be stripped away in a quest to expand human life-spans to lengths last found in Greek myths and the legends of the Talmud; household devices are to provide an escape from the toils of labor; and the incipient space age is to be aimed at giving each human the chance for her final journey beyond our earthly condition. Just as her earlier The Origins of Totalitarianism aimed at identifying what was unprecedented in the event of totalitarianism, The Human Condition, looking at “our newest experiences” (especially in terms of scientific and technological advances) and “our most recent fears” (the Shoah, the threat of nuclear conflagration, and so forth), works to identify the unprecedented, related, and modern events of “world” and “earth” alienation.
Arendt’s major thesis is that in modernity, the human being has been reduced to being but a laboring animal. Politics becomes, then, about security and the safety of bare life, which no previous culture in the West saw as its raison d’être. For Arendt, the Greeks held that politics was not about simple living (denoted for her by the Greek term zōē) but about escaping that life into an agonistic relation among equals where life was for something more (the euzēn or living well of civic life, bios). While later Christianity undoubtedly put politics in the service of the church, it nevertheless did not reduce the human to a being merely seeking out its continuance—and nothing more. For Arendt, tragic for the fate of the political was the early modern shift in Hobbes, Spinoza, and others that conceived of politics as providing for individual needs once based in the household, that is, politics no longer provides a space where one acted in concert but merely works to secure one’s life.5 Fear, not courage, it seems, is the quintessential modern political sentiment.
The Human Condition operates across three temporal registers: first, it offers the long historical arch, following figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger from the rise of philosophy in ancient Greece to the dénouement of metaphysics with the death of God and all absolutes in modernity. For Arendt, as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, philosophy covered over insights that the Greeks had in the pre-Socratic period. Where for Nietzsche this meant a denial of the will to power in terms of a will to truth and where for Heidegger this meant a forgetting of the question of the meaning of being, Arendt’s view is that our loss was political—and no less meaningful for all that. We will see this particularly in her thinking of action, since philosophy and theory always privileged the life of thought, the vita contempliva, over the life of action, the vita activa, a privileging that has only recently begun to be undone—though to the detriment of both, since thinking is not on the model of dialogical contemplation and action is leveled down to the human capacity for labor. Second, there is her description of the several-hundred-year rise of the social in modernity, which culminates in politics treating life itself as the highest good. Third, Arendt speaks to her own milieu in the post–Second World War period: the triumph of the techno-sciences—the book opens wi th a description of the meaning of Sputnik—not just continues the world alienation of modernity, that is, a loss of politics on her account, but also provides for an “earth alienation” where “transcendence” is found not in acting in concert with others but by moving beyond the human condition altogether.6 As we’ll see, the roots of this victory arrive with the advent of the natural sciences. The task in this chapter is to take each of these claims in turn.
The West’s Privileging of Theory over Action
The Human Condition is centered around defining labor, work, and action, which form the title of its three middle chapters and are the three modes of activity that philosophers since Plato have been found to be diminished forms of being in the world. Arendt argues that the philosophical tradition has always privileged the bios theōrētikos (the life of theorizing) over the vita activa, especially the life of action or praxis in politics, and the latter was always to follow the ideal forms found in the former. This is clear from Plato’s Republic, but this Platonism, she argues, survives wherever politics is to be the manufacturing in the world of a “political” space in the name of some idea or ideology in order to avoid giving politics over to differences of opinion and a plurality of voices. The theorist, from Plato to Marx and beyond, is to tell us what is to be done and politics does not have any dignity on its own, since it is but a means for bringing what is found in theory into the world. While this model borrows, Arendt argues, from the Greek thinking of poiēsis or making, wherein the artisan has the shape or form in the soul of what he or she is to create, post-Socratic thinking nevertheless diminishes the forms of the vita activa in the name of the contemplative life. The vita activa, for Arendt is threefold:
1. Labor, that is, the life of animal laborans (the human as laboring animal), answers to our necessities: food, defecation, cleaning, and the like, whose proper place is the private sphere of the home. “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body,” she writes, “whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor.”7 This is life “itself,” or rather, a bare life that responds only to its minimal “animal” condition.
2. Work is the activity of homo faber and produces the artificial world in which we roam. This artificiality is the “unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever recurring life cycle,” as in labor.8 This “artificial” world is “distinctly different from all natural surroundings,”9 and only homo faber’s products give the world any sense of permanence. Given that action is the creation of the world, we will need to see just what is meant by work’s “worldliness”; for Arendt, the stakes of getting this right are crucial.
3. Action is what occurs within that manufactured world, and is nothing less than the words and deeds (neither one without the other) performed in concert with others: “action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without intermediary of thing or matter [as labor and work do], corresponds to the human condition of plurality, the fact that that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world.”10 For Arendt, action is inherently creative, and it is premised on the fact that we are born into this world and we can bring something new into the political; this is what she calls “natality.” In action, we are thrown into a web of relations with others who are never the same and whose existence means we can be assured neither that our aims will be carried out nor about the limits between what we have done and what has been accomplished by others. “Plurality,” she writes, “is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”11 It is the fact of this plurality at which totalitarianism aims, and The Human Condition can be rightly read as a positive account of the political lost under the deadly Stalinist and Nazi regimes covered in Origins of Totalitarianism.
Though none of these modes could exist without the other—one must have tended to the necessities of life and have built an artificial world in order to take part in action’s web of relations—readers have been right to see her privileging, within the vita activa, one form of living, the life of bios and not zōē, over the others. In fact, her language is downright religious: action provides for the dignity of the human and allows us our only chance at an “earthly immortality” or “transcendence”12 over the privative and repetitive life of labor, where one is but “a specimen of the animal species man-kind.”13 Action, then, can be “the miracle that saves the world,” and when we enter the public realm it is, “as it were, a second birth”14 that “redeems” and “saves” human beings, in a manner that is “like the revelation of divinity,” from the valuelessness of life as laboring animal or as a maker of things.15 After the death of God and all absolutes, it is action, narrated by ourselves and others and written down in the work of scribes, that offers our only chance at a this-worldly immortality.
Arendt is a thinker of distinctions, and The Human Condition often borrows on the tradition’s binary oppositions—th e human (bios) versus the animal (zōē), the artificial and technical (the world made by homo faber) versus the natural (labor), and so forth—that other Continental thinkers during her lifetime were attempting to upend. That the only “world” under consideration in her work is a human one also belies her attempts to critique the tradition’s anthropocentrism at several points in The Human Condition.16 In any event, against this same tradition, which wished to replace making for action so as to bring to an end its unpredictability and the come-what-may of any future worthy of the name, action, for Arendt, is almost never in fact dissolved. Even in violent, tyrannical regimes, there is a reliance on what she dubs “power,” that is, the acting in concert of those upon whom any politics relies. For Arendt, this is why any claim to sovereignty is “spurious if claimed by an isolated single entity.”17 After all, even the tyrant must rely not just on violence over everyone but also on persuasion over those within the regime—hence there is always room for responsibility, Arendt argues, in even the worst conditions, since one has agency in following the lead of others, even if they are despotic. But philosophy, by conflating making with action, defends violence; after all, if one has contemplated the truth, as the Platonic school wished to do, then one must combat as sophistry any use of persuasion to act politically not in its accord: “Traditionally, therefore, the term vita activa receives its meaning from the vita contempliva,” she writes, where theoretical knowledge of the truth ought to lead action. For Arendt, where there is an adherence to some truth (as opposed to a given set of goals), there is no politics. What Plato and Aristotle wished to rid from the polis was its unreliability, its “uncertainty of outcome,” and the “frailty of human affairs” along with it.18 This is clear in Plato’s political dialogues, in which just rulers have a technē, an expertise, analogous, say, to that of the weaver, as in the Statesman, which the ruler utilizes to find the form or eidos of the just state and then in turn arrange the polis accordingly. And just as there is a violence performed to “matter” by the craftsman, so too, Arendt believes, there is an inherent violence in applying the ruler-ruled model to the political. The means-end character of Plato’s thought is a result of replacing making for acting, of poiēsis for praxis, which in turn leads to a thinking of the political as a form of rule through which the ruler is provided with all the means at his or her disposal to create a particular end. This thinking of the political in terms of means and ends, rulers and ruled, has been implacable in the West. Arendt’s contention is that the “pre-philosophical” experience of politics for the Greeks was quite different:
It was understood as a form of political organization in which citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between ruler and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the forms of government . . . was that the notion of rule (the “archy” from archein in monarchy and oligarchy, or the “cracy” from kratein in democracy) was entirely absent from it.19
For Arendt, it is this other thinking of politics and its promise of the new that has been forgotten by the tradition, and this line of thinking has proved disastrous:
We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that forces one to admit that all means, provided they are efficient, are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an end. . . . As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybody’s using all means to pursue recognized ends.20
We build our castles in the sky, and given this idea’s supposed greatness, all manner of means are admissible for this end. But there is a stronger point to make: rather than seeing persuasion, plurality, and the frailty of action as leaving all manner of “ends” up to those operating within a given public realm, the philosopher always wants to give to the public realm its proper and perfected shape, cutting off the rabble in their discussions and frail actions, which for Arendt is precisely the performance of freedom and equality that provides for the spaces and performances of human dignity. This, as we’ve seen, is denied by a long tradition. She writes:
Nowhere, in other words, neither in labor, subject to the necessity of life, nor in fabrication, dependent upon given material, does man appear to be less free than in those capacities whose very essence is freedom and in that realm which owes its existence to nobody and nothing but man. It is in accordance with the great tradition of Western thought to think along these lines: to accuse freedom of luring man into necessity, to condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who seems to forfeit his freedom the very moment he makes use of it. The only salvation from this kind of freedom seems to lie in non-acting, in abstention from the whole realm of human affairs as the only means to safeguard one’s sovereignty and integrity as a person.21
The reason for this is that in a web of relations, one is set within a chain of events for which one is responsible and is always responding in ways unpredictable, as if one had no control over a given situation. If Arendt is first and foremost a thinker of responsibility, it is because ontologically one is always born in such a way as to be responding to others by taking on deeds that one did not begin and sending them along through more action whose results are unforeseeable and whose consequences are potentially limitless.
World Alienation: From the Public and the Private to the Social and the Intimate
Against this background of a general philosophical dismissal of the meaningfulness of the practical and thi s-world actions, Arendt provides an historical account of the rise of the social from approximately the eighteenth century onward. This account is crucial to all of her later work, especially On Revolution, and gives greater depth to her account of the atomization of mass man in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s interest is very much of her time: the early-to-mid-twentieth century was rife with theorists and literary works diagnosing the rise of mass man and the bureaucratic state that was its political by-product. Martin Heidegger’s notion of das Man (the “they”) in Being and Time (1927) gave these discussions ontological heft, though his depiction rightly strikes many as an elitist attempt to render everyday life as merely inauthentic, even as he noted this was the default mode of each of us. Arendt is often seen as giving in to this temptation, which would have the effect of banishing most from having a singular life, with or without action, whatever the problems of mass conformism. In any case, Arendt argues that while the Greeks and Romans neatly defined the public and private realms, where privacy marked a darkness deprived of the light of the transcendence of action she cherished, the social blurred the affairs of the private realm with the public space of appearances. Far from those who cherish as the ultimate political model the Enlightenment-era rise of civil society and its endless discussions, Arendt paints society largely as Heidegger depicted das Man: a space in which idle chatter prevails, where nothing ultimately is at stake, and “one unanimous opinion is tremendously enforced by sheer number.”22 Distinctiveness retreats into a sphere of intimacy and subjectivity, and a retreat into its endless interiority is introduced—and such modern art forms as the novel are born. “Behavior” replaces action “as the foremost mode of human relationship”23 and the social sciences, using the tools of statistics, keep watch over those “considered to be asocial or abnormal.”24 Indeed, Arendt argues, one no longer needs the despotism of a tyrant or ruling class: mass society’s adherence to conformism makes any such tyranny superfluous. Moreover, our making of science as the ultimate arbiter of truth and human meaning has meant that the human sciences (preeminently, for her, economics, sociology, and political science) ape the science’s mathematization of nature by rendering human relations in terms of statistical distributions around a norm, erasing from consideration the contingencies of history and anything that cannot be enumerated. As Arendt argues, “The trouble with modern behaviorism,” the science that would quantify psychological reactions to phenomena, “is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society.”25 No doubt, as iPhone apps and such quantify our intake of calories and graph our outputs in terms of exercise, we don’t need to be told about the goals of this quantification and the efficient, disciplined machines we make of ourselves. “It is quite conceivable,” Arendt continues, “that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”26
What is then lost, for Arendt, is the world itself. If society, specifically with the onset of nationalism, is only possible through conformism and adherence to a given norm or single set of opinions, the public realm provides the only possibility for distinctiveness and even reality itself:
Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object. If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of men, least of all the unnatural conformism of mass society, can prevent the destruction of the common world.27
This loss of a common world and the isolation of subjects that goes with it provides the breeding ground for the ideologies Arendt spent the previous decade exploring: “A noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility,” she writes, are “almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.”28 Nationalisms, for example, are modeled on the private home, and for this reason, governance is described only in terms of managing the national household, while these nationalisms also provide the atomized individuals of modernity a pale form of being-with-others once found in the spaces of action. Lost, too, is the private realm, as all that was once private becomes a public concern (and vice versa), replaced by intimacy, the stuff of novels and idle gossip. Freedom, once an objective fact in the spaces of appearances, is brought within the subject and is all the more ineffective for all that: it is a freedom of will, not of action, or a freedom of thought that fails to involve action. This internalization of freedom is also its worldly disappearance. To be free, in fact, is now thought to be free from politics, to have the chance to choose one’s job and consumer goods and other means for the mere sustenance of life. The links Arendt makes among disparate modern phenomena—urbanization, the rise of mass man, the move to capitalism and the mass accumulation of wealth, the advent of nationalism and depictions of the nation as a single family, rampant subjectivism, the invention of the bureaucratic state and the forms of knowledge (statistics and economics) that go with it, and so forth—under the moniker of the rise of social are, are often weak, but there is nevertheless no denying the historical coincidence of these events. And these phenomena all crystalize into a “world alienation” that prevents most from having any place in which one’s words and deeds matter.29
The alienation of modernity, therefore, is not that of human beings from their “species-being” or from the products of their labor, as Marx argued, but from the world as such, the place in which reality is what appears. The accumulation of wealth, the switchover from previous forms of economy to commodity capitalism and its “wealth accumulation,” is not historically prior to this alienation, as Marx would have held, but is in fact only “possible only if the world and the very worldliness of man” have already been “sacrificed. ”30 Arendt marks out three major stages in this “world alienation”: First, there is the loss of the “twofold protection of family and property” in early modernity, wherein the labor “market” was produced on the backs of the mass misery and “material wretchedness.”31 This matches Arendt’s claims in The Origins of Totalitarianism about the rise of “superfluous” men and labor in early capitalism, that is, the first step is the expropriation of a “private share in the world,” the oikos or home in which one took care of life’s necessities. The second phase is when one was to be a member of a “social class.” The rise of the social, as Arendt calls it, “replaced the protection previously offered by membership in a family.”32 Where the family’s well-being was indexed to the spaces of the home, social well-being was indexed to the “territory of the nation-state,” which “offered all classes a substitute for the privately owned home of which the class of the poor had been deprived.”33 This would end in the era of nationalism just prior to “racism”—which had no boundaries, according to Arendt in Origins—and was premised on a thinking of a “homogeneity of the population” and “rootedness in the soil of a given territory,” which was for her one of the historical conditions of possibility of totalitarianism. The third stage of this alienation is when there is the decline of the nation-state system and the transformation of humanity from an abstraction into a “really existing entity whose members at the most distant points of the globe” are joined in a common project that we would today call globalization.
This era is also one of profound loneliness, Arendt claims, where sameness rules, excellence is leveled out, and spaces for being different are rare. But The Human Condition is not meant to leave us without hope since this is not to say that spaces for action have completely disappeared—though scientists often aim to be, as we’ll see, our last actors.34 For Arendt, wherever human beings in the plural exist, there is the possibility of action. In this way, there is only rarely a zero degree of action, of mutual persuasion and the doing of deeds, that is, there is always the “promise of politics,” to use the apt title of one collection of her essays, even if Arendt in On Revolution and Between Past and Future often depicts action as a “lost” and ephemeral treasure dated to specific moments: 1776, 1848, 1917, and so on. But if sovereignty, even the sovereignty of the nation or mass man, is always a myth, and human beings always have the capacity for creating something new in webs of relations with others, this also means that while we are ever fragile, we are also always responsible for how we act when we acquiesce in conformity or give comfort to the strong. Despite the bureaucratized spacing of our geographies, despite all that the tradition has done to shut down the loud and chatty spaces of persuasion, and despite all that violence has wrought in the last century and before, there is action wherever even a few look to persuade others, where deeds are undertaken, and where one in combination with others takes on the responsibility to create the world anew.
Earth Alienation and the End of the Human Condition
But if we are to do so today, one must work to stave off climate change and what Arendt describes as the relatively new phenomena of the human beings’ acting into nature. “Earth alienation,” as she dubs it, is marked by the technoscientific conquering of the universe and its view that “nature” is something to be made through experimentation, industry, and the work of homo faber.35 World alienation is the political problem par excellence, but through the concept of earth alienation, we can see diagnosed the contemporary ecological problems whereby the earth is not something out of which we appear, but is that which we make appear through our instruments of coordination and intervention (GPS, satellites, latitude and longitude, etc.)—and that which we can very much destroy.36 Earth alienation, then, is the “hallmark of natural science.”37 In fact, she argues that what heralded the modern age was the inception of a new kind of scientific thinking:
What ushered in the modern age was not the age-old desire of astronomers for simplicity, harmony, and beauty . . . [but] the discovery, due to the [telescope], that Copernicus’ image of “the virile man standing in the sun . . . overlooking the planets” was much more than an image or a gesture, was in fact an indication of the astounding human capacity to think in terms of the universe while remaining on the earth, and the perhaps even more astounding human ability to use cosmic laws as guiding principles for terrestrial action. Compared with the earth alienation underlying the whole development of natural science in the modern age, the withdrawal from terrestrial proximity contained in the discovery of the globe as a whole and the world alienation produced in the twofold process of expropriation and wealth accumulation are of minor significance. . . . Under the sign of earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural science, so radically changed its innermost content that one may doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science existed at all.38
This brings us to the mathematization of the universe. Arendt’s claims align well with Martin Heidegger’s discussions in The Question Concerning Technology. There, Heidegger argues that since around the time of Descartes we have seen a technological “enframing” (Gestell) in which all, including human beings, are quantified and are to be made efficient as a resource or standing reserve, which Arendt critiques in terms of the social sciences. Heidegger writes that there is a “challenging [that] gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon order the real as standing reserve.”39 This clearly influences Arendt’s account in The Human Condition. First, earth alienation occurs, Arendt claims, through the replacement of previous forms of thinking with calculative reason or what she calls “reckoning with consequences,” which is at the heart of “utilitarian” approaches to existence critiqued in this book’s last pages: even the gravest issues of human interactions should be reducible to quantifiable formulae.40 For Arendt, mathematics allowed science to “look upon nature from a universal standpoint” and not from within a given place, and in this way the human replaces God as having “mastery over her”41 while having a view from nowhere. Modern science removes any sense of place: based in algebraic symbolization; it doesn’t even relate to space as geometric mathematics previously did. For these reasons, place is removed in the name of abstract space, and no doubt we can also denote the specter of a future time in which human beings are treated as no more than points or numbers on a page—the heart of bureaucratic reasoning, which offers the rule of no one from a view from nowhere. Mathematics, via calculus, gives us a thinking of the infinite, but Arendt details the ways in which we must not lose the importance of “earth-bound experience” and our finite relation to being in the world.42 As Arendt comes to the closing pages of The Human Condition, her claim, often ignored in receptions of the book that focus on the public realm and the import of action, is that “earth alienation” is more devastating than “world alienation,” which is of “minor significance” in comparison. The stakes, for her, are of absolute import:
For whatever we do today in physics whether we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or penetrate with the help of telescopes the cosmic space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature, or attain speeds in atomic accelerators which approach the speed of light, or produce elements not to be found in nature, or disperse radioactive particles, created by us through the use of cosmic radiation, on the earth—we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth. Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand (dos moi pou stô), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point. And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature’s household.43
At risk, then, is the very loss of the human condition. First, the mathematization of the universe gave us all sorts of natural determinisms, where calculative reasoning had “to leave out the unexpected, the event itself, since it would unreasonable or irrational to expect what is no more than ‘infinite improbability,’” which occurs wherever there is action.44 Nothing is more foreign to Arendt’s philosophy than that one that disallows a thinking of the event and the birth of the new that is the mark of freedom. Second, because science gives us a picture of what is at a distance from any appearance (one can never experience relativity theory), modernity was bound to give us a quasi-Kantian split between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between what appears and nature in itself, and to think that what we share is not a common world, but rather common modes of understanding or cognition that allow us access to nature in terms of mathematics.45 This leads to a philosophical focus on the processes of consciousness away from what appears to a plural “we” in common. Third, Arendt in these pages argues that in the modern age there was a reversal of the vita contempliva and the vita activa. That is, at the beginning of the modern age, homo faber came to the fore and nature was “instrumentalized.”46 In this way, homo faber’s “reckoning” or calculative reason replaced the contemplation of existence—so useless for production—and with it a vital aspect of the human condition. Ultimately, this fabrication, though, was put in the service of life itself and the laboring process: the creative destruction of capitalism means that what is made one day is undone the next, at ever greater speeds. The aim of the natural sciences is not to passively witness nature, but in the end act into it: we see this in dreams that geo-engineering can save us from climate change, which was itself a result of man’s “acting into nature.” Arendt has in mind the atomic bomb and the beginning of ecological catastrophes of the Anthropocene that are the daily background of the modern condition. For this reason, we can see quite literally how we are threatening the destruction of any world in which action takes place through an earth alienation that is another name for its destruction. Kelly Oliver summarizes this nicely:
What Arendt calls earth alienation is caused by the scientific worldview symbolized by Einstein’s “observer who is poised freely in space.”47 The view from the universe gives us the illusion that we are not earthbound creatures but universal citizens who can leave earth. . . . With science, we think that the given world is man-made or can become man-made. We think that we create the earth and its raw materials. . . . In a sense, earth alienation is the result of scientific hubris and the disavowal of the limits of the human condition.48
Here, in another work written not long after The Human Condition, Arendt pulls many of these threads together and summarizes the powerful critique of the entirety of her book:
The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himsel f. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves as either man-made or as potentially man-made. . . . This two-fold loss of the world—the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history—has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.49
The only actors left, Arendt argues in the closing paragraphs of The Human Condition, are scientists, but their action is one that is from the point of view of the universe, not “the web of human relationships,” and as such their activity “lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence.”50 We have gained the whole universe and lost the earth, we have gained insights into the farthest reaches of nature and into its furthest depths and lost any worldly meaning. And we have reduced thinking such that some can dream that we can simply be rid of the vita activa and hence the human condition altogether, downloading our minds onto computers and shipping them off before the coming conflagration. Surely, the language is apocalyptic: we are looking at no less than the end of the earth and any possibility of a world along with it. But such is the human condition that we must face up to what is unprecedented in our day and to think again “our newest experiences and our most recent fears.”
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10.
2 Ibid., 7.
3 Ibid., 10.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 46.
6 Ibid., 268.
7 Ibid., 7.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 8.
12 Ibid., 55.
13 Ibid., 46.
14 Ibid., 246.
15 Ibid., 236.
16 Ibid., 157, 169, 173.
17 Ibid., 245.
18 Ibid., 213.
19 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 30.
20 Arendt, Human Condition, 229.
21 Ibid., 234.
22 Ibid., 40.
23 Ibid., 41.
24 Ibid., 42.
25 Ibid., 322, my emphasis.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid, 58.
28 Ibid., 209.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 256.
31 Ibid., 278.
32 Ibid., 256.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 324.
35 Ibid., 288.
36 Ibid., 172. See also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 298.
37 Arendt, Human Condition, 264.
38 Ibid.
39 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, ed. W. Levitt (New York: Harper Collins), 19.
40 Arendt, Human Condition, 310.
41 Ibid., 268.
42 Ibid., 265.
43 Ibid., 262.
44 Ibid., 300.
45 Ibid., 286.
46 Ibid., 305.
47 She cites ibid., 195, 273.
48 Kelly Oliver, Earth and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 98.
49 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 89–90.
50 Arendt, Human Condition, 324.