Political Philosophy of Science:
Eve Seguin
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In loving memory of Professor André Corten, who initiated me to the thought of Hannah Arendt and to so much more.
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Discussions of science and technology are found in a range of Arendt’s writings, including unpublished and uncollected materials, as well as in her correspondence with various interlocutors, most notably Karl Jaspers.1 That said, the bulk of her reflections on science are found in three key texts:2 her 1963 article “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” her 1961 article “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” and mostly her 1958 book The Human Condition, which qualifies, even more than The Origins of Totalitarianism, as her magnum opus. Had Arendt’s interest in science been expressed in more or less confidential writings, commentators’ widespread ignorance of it might be forgivable. But since it lies at the forefront of The Human Condition, such neglect is truly incomprehensible. To begin with, the 1998 edition contains an outstanding introduction by British political theorist Margaret Canovan, which gives Arendt’s analysis of science its fair share. What is more, the architecture of the book is patterned according to the role and impact of science in modernity. As Coeckelbergh points out, the book opens with a Prologue devoted not to some conventional political deed but to a technoscientific one: the 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union, an event Arendt immediately connects to another feat, the splitting of the atom.3 Finally, the book closes with a chapter devoted to her diagnosis of the profound transformation the vita activa went through in the modern age. Her analysis of science is mostly spelled out in this final chapter. For her, the scientific revolution symbolized by Galileo’s telescope has opened up a new historical era.4 It was pivotal in the formation of the modern age, and more significant than the two other events that gave birth to it, namely, the discovery of America and the Reformation. From its inception, modern science was driven by a quest to escape the Earth and our earthly condition. The launch of Sputnik and the conquest of space are the ultimate embodiment of this pursuit.
Cosmos
To encapsulate the spirit of modern science, Arendt uses an encompassing category, the Archimedean point. Greek mathematician and astronomer Archimedes is famous for saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.”5 According to Arendt, modern science draws its unique character from the discovery of the Archimedean point, materialized in three major evolutions: the heliocentric view of our planetary system, the mathematization of physics, and the telescopic observation of the sky.
The first evolution, Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system, shattered the age-old differentiation between the Earth and the sky. In the Ptolemaic geocentric system dominant since ancient times, the planets and the Sun circled the Earth. Arendt contends that the quest for simplicity and beauty led Copernicus to use the Sun rather than the Earth as the standpoint to conceive of the planets’ orbits. In the heliocentric view of the planetary system, all planets, including the Earth, circle the Sun, a fixed star, and the apparent movement of the Sun is due to the Earth’s rotation around its axis. Arendt praises “the great boldness of Copernicus’ imagination, which lifted him from the earth and enabled him to look down upon her as though he actually were an inhabitant of the sun.”6 Thus, Copernicus literally displaced the center of our experience from the Earth to the Sun.7
Arendt argues that the Archimedean point also materialized in the mathematization of physics, that is, the replacement of geometry by algebra. This is the second evolution that gave modern science its distinctive style. Whereas geometry was a spatial language dealing with terrestrial movements and forms, Descartes’s analytical geometry, which combined geometry with algebra, converted a curve into an equation, and an equation back into a curve. This had two major implications. First, the validity of this new method was secured by this back and forth movement, and scientists could thus dispense with any other approach. Second, since terrestrial sense data and movements were reduced to mathematical symbols, scientific reasoning no longer started with empirical observation of nature but became an abstract process. Hence the new mathematics provided a universal vantage point disconnected from phenomena. Arendt argues that “with the rise of modernity, mathematics does not simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at all.”8 She contends that the “new mathematics” allowed Newton to fuse astronomy and physics. When he devised a single equation that explains the motion of objects on the Earth and the movement of celestial bodies, the law of gravitation gave its full power to heliocenterism. The universe was born.
However, the Archimedean point would not have been reached without a third evolution: Galileo’s use of the telescope for astronomical observation. Of the three facets of modern science, this is the most important one in Arendt’s view, and we will see why. Arendt reminds us that Copernicus was not the first astronomer who believed the Earth was circling the Sun. Such a hypothesis was put forward as early as the third century bce by Aristarchus of Samos. As long as it remained a hypothesis, the cultural impact of the heliocentric view was limited, as shown by the Catholic Church agreeing for it to be taught. Unlike Galileo, Copernicus was not tried by the Inquisition. This is because, as Arendt puts it, ideas are not events. The speculations and calculations of Copernicus and Kepler could not have achieved the unification of the universe on their own. In contrast, the telescopic observation of the sky was an event in the true sense of the word. Galileo introduced a radical shift in the social order, since his telescope provided empirical proof that the heliocentric view was correct. The telescope brought to light phenomena that contradicted the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of nature. Whereas celestial bodies were held to be perfectly smooth spheres, the telescope pointed to the mountains of the Moon. It also revealed the phases of Venus, which could be explained only if the planet circled the Sun rather than the Earth. Arendt states, “What Galileo did and what nobody had done before was to use the telescope in such a way that the secrets of the universe were delivered to human cognition ‘with the certainty of sense-perception.’”9
Arendt contends that the universalization of science initiated by Copernicus was brought to completion at the beginning of the twentieth century with Einstein’s theory of relativity. She argues that the Archimedean point was then pushed farther since this theory no longer uses the Sun as its point of reference. Reality can be contemplated from any point so that we may hold indistinguishably that the Earth revolves around the Sun or that the Sun revolves around the Earth:
Only we, and we only for hardly more than a few decades, have come to live in a world thoroughly determined by a science and a technology whose objective truth and practical know-how are derived from cosmic and universal, as distinguished from terrestrial and “natural,” laws.10
Humans have thus become truly universal beings, completely detached from a specific location in the cosmos, “moving freely in the universe,” as she puts it.
On the surface, Arendt’s interpretation of the discovery of the Archimedean point looks gloomy. It indicates that modern science is alienated from the Earth: “Earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science.”11 Scientists no longer think and work with the Earth as their reference point. Rather, they look at things from a universal standpoint and aim at uncovering the laws of the universe. To give a measure of this attitude, Arendt emphasizes that these laws were valid before the appearance of the human species and even before the formation of the Earth. Against this backdrop, earthly nature is a mere instance of something much bigger, something actually infinite. Humans themselves are just one case of organic life.
This points to another dimension of earth alienation, which Arendt develops mostly in “The Conquest of Space.” Not only has science ceased to be geocentric, it is no longer anthropocentric. It is characterized by a refusal of human’ finitude and biological condition. The two aspects go hand in hand since humans are Earth-bound creatures. As Berkowitz nicely argues, for Arendt, earthly nature and human finitude are inextricably connected, to the extent that the two notions are almost synonyms.12
The demise of anthropocentrism in science is first noticeable through the relinquishment of human perception. Science endeavors to unveil a reality that is not perceptible by the human senses and even contradicts their testimony. The rising and setting of the Sun is the textbook example. Arendt stresses, “The data with which modern physical research is concerned . . . are not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments.”13 The abandonment of sensory perception has led to the relinquishing of the common sense shared by all, which she defines as the awareness of reality obtained through the coordination of information provided by the five senses. This, in turn, is accompanied by the uselessness of everyday language to communicate reality. Expressed in mathematical language, the universe is “unthinkable,” says Arendt. We are thus facing a highly pa radoxical situation: “Man can do, and successfully do, what he cannot comprehend and cannot express in everyday human language.”14 The overall consequence is that lay people are “out of touch with reality.” According to commentators, Arendt’s depiction of earth alienation has far-reaching implications for our public life. Rita Koganzon stresses that science and politics no longer speak the same language.15 Patrick Deneen argues that science is a threat to human dignity and to democracy, which is being overthrown by technocracy.16
Since modern science has been stripped of all geocentric and anthropocentric contents, Arendt even contemplates, in a manner reminiscent of Hans Jonas, the possibility that scientific practice may result in the destruction of the Earth and humans:
The simple fact that physicists split the atom without any hesitations the very moment they knew how to do it, although they realized full well the enormous destructive potentialities of their operation, demonstrates that the scientist qua scientist does not even care about the survival of the human race on earth or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself.17
Nevertheless, catastrophism, defined as the philosophical strand developed by authors such as Hans Jonas18 and Jean-Pierre Dupuy,19 is not the ground she chooses to occupy. Much more significant to her is science’s routine attempt to escape earthly nature and the limitations of human life:
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.20
One could argue that for her, modern science is estranged from anything located at the human scale, which leads Berkowitz to speak of the “inhumanity of science.”21
Earth alienation is undoubtedly the main aspect of Arendt’s writings on science that has drawn the attention of commentators. It has given rise to various interpretations. For instance, Melis Bas argues that it is reminiscent of Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of modern technology, which is to treat nature as a standing reserve.22 In a very different fashion, Pieter Tijmes claims that she wrongly ascribes to modern science an anthropological feature, that is, humans’ ability to step outside and consider themselves.23 This small body of literature creates the impression that nothing more is to be found in her work with respect to science. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Power
Earth alienation by no means encompasses the whole of her reflections on science and technology. In fact, her analysis is far more complex and her positioning toward science turns out to be deeply ambivalent. As Yaqoob rightly notes, “She portrayed contemporary physics in an almost positive light.”24 The reason why she supplements her gloomy depiction of science with a more positive, even admirative, gaze is the performative view of science she holds, which undeniably anticipates the contemporary notion of technoscience. Yaqoob argues that her philosophy of science is characterized by a typical German focus on technē. A more idiosyncratic interpretation can be drawn from Patchen Markell’s claim that “work,” not “action,” is the central category of the typology of human activities she sketches in The Human Condition.25 Rejecting the rationalist view underlying most twentieth-century philosophy of science, whose main concern is science’s formulation of theories and laws, her analysis anticipates contemporary philosophers of science such as Gérard Fourez, Ian Hacking, and Gilbert Hottois, who focus on the pivotal role of instrumentation and experimentation in modern science. Arendt understood decades before them that modern science was radically different from the previous pursuit of knowledge because it turned knowing into making: “It was not . . . contemplation, observation, and speculation which led to the new knowledge, but the active stepping in of homo faber, of making and fabricating.”26
Indeed, she boldly stresses that reason alone could not have revolutionized the worldview prevailing before the modern age: “It had been an instrument and therefore man in so far as he is a toolmaker . . . led to the modern revolution.”27 Her performative view of science explains why she gives prominence to the telescope over the two other sites where the Archimedean point was discovered and enacted. The significance she ascribes to instruments even leads her to label algebra a “mental instrument.” She openly states that science is made with the hands, a statement that encompasses not only the fabrication of scientific instruments but also the setting up of experiments: “Even more decisive was the element of making and fabricating present in the experiment itself, which produces its own phenomena of observation and therefore depends from the very outset upon man’s productive capacities.”28
Experimentation is to her an original and unprecedented way to approach reality because it dispenses with the constraints of earthly nature. In other words, it enacts the Archimedean point by creating phenomena from the cosmic angle imagined by the human mind. To emphasize the potency of such a method, Arendt reminds us of Kant’s phrase that the human mind “prescribes its laws to nature.” Modern science does not seek to understand the “what” and the “why” but merely the “how” and is extremely powerful at that. Because of this “how” concern, the objects of scientific enquiry are no longer things or motions but rather processes. This testifies to the influence Whitehead’s claim that nature is a process had on her. In the same vein, she remarks that “development” has become the main concept in every scientific discipline. She is adamant that success, the imperative that the handling of the experimental object should “work,” is the prevailing criterion of basic science and quite independent from any search for technological application. Truth is no longer equivalent to theory but to the practical success of a hypothesis whereby nature is put under conditions devised by the human mind and materialized in the experimental setting.
Arendt contends that the experimental attitude toward nature eventually resulted in scientists’ ever-increasing ability to “unchain elemental processes.”29 When exactly this happened is open to discussion, first because she fails to expand on decisive aspects of her argument, and second, due to apparent discrepancies between different texts. In what follows, we draw upon Bronislaw Szerszynski,30 who argues this ability has evolved in two stages, each symbolized by a milestone technology. The first stage is the “electric age,” which she contrasts to the first industrial revolution. Despite the many changes it brought in nineteenth-century way of living, the steam engine was nothing new as a technology. It did not break with the labor carried out by animal laborans, that is, it produced the same type of energy as the human body and, later, water and windmills: it performed mechanical work. Things changed with the experimentations that gave rise to the mastery of electricity. Arendt claims the electric age was entirely different from the earlier period of the steam engine because natural processes were then “unchained” by us. What she presumably means is although it naturally occurs on the Earth, most obviously during lightning, electricity is a rare and fickle phenomenon. Hence our ability to initiate an electron flux at will departs from the traditional production of energy and blurs the boundary between nature and the human world. It “consists of channelling natural forces into the world of the human artifice.”31
The second and most decisive stage in scientists’ ability to unchain elemental processes is the “nuclear age.” Arendt remarks that although nuclear technology has not yet replaced electricity in the automation process, it has brought about a qualitative shift in science. Whereas experimentation had turned knowing into making since the seventeenth century, nuclear fission and fusion have turned knowing into acting. Thus, Arendt writes:
The very fact that natural sciences have become exclusively sciences of process and, in their last stage, sciences of potentially irreversible, irremediable “processes of no return” is a clear indication that . . . the actual underlying human capacity which alone could bring about this development is no “theoretical” capacity, neither contemplation nor reason, but the human ability to act.
Science as “action into nature” is so significant for Arendt that she does not address it in the final chapter of The Human Condition, where much of her discussion of science is located. Rather, she tackles it in the chapter devoted to action, especially in section 32, “The Process Character of Action,” where she seemingly treats nuclear science as the epitome of action. This certainly pleads for broadening Arendtian studies and for acknowledging the politicity of science in mainstream political theory.32
Nuclear physicists “act into nature” because they initiate on the Earth novel processes that would never occur on their own, either because nature is incapable to produce them or because they occur only in the universe, for instance in the Sun. For Arendt, in the nuclear age science no longer masters nature, it makes it: “We know today that . . . we are quite capable of starting new natural processes, and that in a sense therefore we ‘make nature.’”33 Science initiates artificial processes such as the chain reaction, nuclear fusion, and new chemical reactions, and, as she writes, is even attempting to create life in a test tube, a feat Craig Venter now claims to have accomplished with Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. Just as she is a forerunner of analyses of “technoscience,” Arendt also anticipates the contemporary notion of “technonature.” In the nuclear age, the frontier between nature and the human world is not only blurred, it disappears altogether: “the capacity for action . . . has become the exclusive prerogative of the scientists, who have enlarged the realm of human affairs to the point of extinguishing the time-honoured protective dividing line between nature and the human world.”34 Nature is no longer a stable and separate setting for human work and action, and the best proof of it is scientists’ capacity to destroy the Earth. However, we will see in a moment that this extraordinary capacity should not be read as a sign of sovereignty.
Action into nature is akin to action traditionally performed in the web of human relations in two different ways. First and foremost, contemporary scientists set in motion processes that constitute radical new beginnings. The reaction spurred among witnesses of the Trinity test carried out a few weeks before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki testifies to this radical novelty. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific father of the bomb, was flabbergasted by his own creature, as shown by the following Hindu verse that came to his mind: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one.”35 Second, as is well known, Arendt breaks with the brand of modern political philosophy initiated by Bodin and Hobbes. She is adamant that freedom, the enabling capacity for action, should not be equated with sovereignty. Actors do not control the outcome of their actions. Just as with the deeds performed by Homeric heroes, the cosmic processes initiated on the Earth by scientists are irreversible and unpredictable. The most salient manifestation of irreversibility is without a doubt the extremely long half-life of some radioactive isotopes, 703 million years in the case of uranium-235. As to the unpredictability, one can cite doubts aired by many stakeholders about nuclear waste in deep geological repositories. The many unintended consequences of technoscientific endeavors such as the environmental crisis, world population explosion, chronic diseases, biodiversity loss, and so on, all demonstrate that scientists set off processes but do not rule them.
Action is widely regarded as the core element of politics in the Arendtian framework.36 In view of the earlier discussion on scientists’ action, the following question becomes mandatory: Is science the new form that politics has been taking since the beginning of the twentieth century? The only scholar we know of who has addressed this question head on is Beltrán Undurraga in his 2016 doctoral thesis.37 In order to provide an answer, his first move is to perform a contextual lexicometric analysis of what Arendt explicitly calls “political” in The Human Condition. His study reveals that over fifty nouns are qualified with the adjective “political,” but that science and technology are not part of them. From these data, Undurraga infers that, for Arendt, science certainly has political implications but is not a political phenomenon, an alleged conclusion he enthusiastically endorses: “the agency of technoscience is politically significant, and not necessarily political in and of itself, because it is a form of action that does not need a public space of appearance in order to do the things it does.”38 This claim relies on the distinction he makes between two aspects of action, which do not necessarily go hand in hand. The “processual” aspect obviously designates “the process character of action,” the fact that the deeds of actors are suffered by other actors who, in turn, perform new, unpredictable, deeds. Every act starts a narrative sequence made up of boundless and unintended consequences. For its part, the “existential” aspect points to the revelatory capacity of action, the fact that actors reveal who they are through their acting and speaking in a public space of appearance. It is this component of action that produces stories and creates meaning in the realm of human affairs, which ends up as history recorded in artifacts and historiography. For him, “when we turn our attention to technoscience, the difference between these two dimensions of action becomes pronounced because the deeds of technoscientists partake of the processual side of action, but lack its existential aspect.”39 This assertion is entirely in keeping with Arendt’s claim that “the action of the scientists, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical.”40
Unfortunately, Undurraga’s conclusion that science is not political in itself rests on two problematic factors. First, Arendt’s claim that science is an impoverished form of action is unconvincing, and even looks self-contradictory in the light of other vital observations she makes. Equally unpersuasive is the related claim that scientific action is performed outside of human relations. Second, whether she genuinely believes that science is not in itself political appears rather dubious if we leave aside the existential aspect and turn to other notions, such as acting in concert and power, that belong to the conceptual cluster of action, but are surprisingly overlooked by Undurraga. In what follows, we will tackle these two sets of problems in turn.
Several factors cast doubt on the idea that science has retained only the processual aspect of action. The first one is the status of the scientific community. Arendt claims it has been performing in “the unseen quiet of the laboratories” for centuries. However, by drawing a parallel with her analysis of monastic orders, could we not hypothesize that it is a space of appearance? For Arendt the historic achievement of Christianity was to make people live in a wordless condition. The world and the public realm were replaced by the principle of charity as the only bond between people, turning the Christian community into a family, arguably the ant ithesis of the public. And yet, she points out that because monks’ activities were carried out in the presence of others, monastic orders carried the potential for the emergence of a public space in the midst of Christianity:
We know from the history and the rules of the monastic orders . . . the danger that the activities undertaken under “the necessity of present life” . . . would lead by themselves, because they were performed in the presence of others, to the establishment of a kind of counterworld, a public realm within the orders themselves, was great enough to require additional rules and regulations, the most relevant one in our context being the prohibition of excellence.41
Peer-reviewed scientific journals, the practice of citation, and regular meetings of scientific societies all show that science necessitates and is performed in the presence of others. The pursuit of excellence and the desire to surpass colleagues and distinguish themselves definitely fuel researchers. Indeed, their main reward is not something tangible such as money but scientific prizes and accolades. Following Latour,42 it can be argued that the experiments carried out at the Royal Society were so disturbing to Hobbes precisely because he perceived in this community of natural philosophers a public space dangerously lying outside of, and parallel to, the Leviathan.43
Beyond the space of appearance within the scientific community, many aspects of the integration of science in the wider society indicate that it is not, or no longer, performed in a space hidden from view. This was already noticeable in Arendt’s lifetime, and is even more striking today. What makes these factors significant is they are all connected to the main elements of the existential side of action: speech, meaning, and history. First, since the eighteenth century, and even more so in the wake of the 1960s and the 1970s protest movements, public scientific controversies regularly disrupt the smooth progression of science, hit the press, and dictate the political agenda.44 Such controversies involve several social groups who question, challenge, or oppose current technoscientific advances. On the scientific level, they are fuelled by existing disputes between experts.45 On the political level, they are ignited by the many political, cultural, and economic implications of science that, as a rule, are ignored or even intentionally concealed by official experts’ scientific framings. The genetically modified-organism controversy that stirred up the European Union in the 1990s and the 2000s is a textbook case. We know that Arendt took part in debates about the risk of nuclear war and the cultural meaning of atomic weapons, and she most probably witnessed a number of public controversies brought about by various aspects of nuclear physics, for instance the Cayuga Lake controversy.46
Second, if scientific language has been traditionally considered far too technical to be understood by people outside communities of peers, recent research, notably on public scientific controversies, has shown that lay people can develop high levels of proficiency in various scientific disciplines and specialties. This ability has been theorized by means of different concepts. The two most prominent are probably Collins and Evans’ “interactional expertise,” which designates non-experts’ capacity to interact with experts, and Callon’s “hybrid forums,” which refers to groupings of scientists and lay people discussing and orienting together the research needed to solve the latter’s problems.47
Third, science communication has undergone profound changes in the past decades. Whereas it was traditionally targeted primarily at peers, nowadays, the general public has become its main receiver. This is shown by several developments such as the hiring of science journalists in generalist medias, the inclusion of science and technology pages and columns in daily newspapers, and press conferences regularly organized by laboratories to announce research results and discoveries, even prior to publication in peer-reviewed journals. This evolution has been encapsulated in the notion of “mediatization of scientific communication,”48 and this was well underway in Arendt’s lifetime. As a matter of fact, she collected press cuttings on technoscientific achievements, now gathered in a file of “The Hannah Arendt Papers” collection at the Library of Congress.49 Besides, she was clearly aware of the increased public presence and meaningfulness of science when she wrote, “It seems only proper that their [scientists’] deeds should eventually have turned out to have greater news value . . . than the administrative and diplomatic doings of most so-called statesmen.”50
Finally, Arendt’s contention that science lacks the ability to become historical is truly incomprehensible in the light of her analysis of the “new science” as one of the three events that gave rise to the modern age. Science has led to a novel historical epoch and is, for that matter, one that stands apart from all previous eras. Hence, it is no surprise that Western culture casts protagonists of the scientific revolution as heroes, with their experiments and discoveries recorded in paintings, sculptures, and a plethora of history books and theses. Every museum hangs portraits of kings and queens alongs ide those of natural philosophers. Among them, Galileo stands apart. His use of the telescope has indeed changed the course of Western history, and this explains why he has achieved the status of a superstar whose story is recounted in numerous biographies, movies, and even a theater play by Bertolt Brecht. Recall that for Arendt, “the theatre is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art.”51 The cultural treatment of scientists as historical figures who perform heroic deeds that change the body politic is by no means restricted to the seventeenth century. The best proof of it is no doubt Louis Pasteur, nineteenth-century leader of the war on microbes. The celebration of his glory clearly parallels that of Charles de Gaulle, leader of the resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. Such a similarity is particularly significant from an Arendtian perspective for “the resistance experience was arguably the model of modern politics for Arendt.”52 If historiography and works of art are two means to reify action, toponymy is a third means of remembrance, as physical spaces are given the names of people who have performed great deeds. Pasteur is a case in point. It can jokingly be said that half the streets of French cities are called “rue Pasteur,” whereas the other half are called, of course, “rue du Général de Gaulle.”
To explain why scientific action allegedly lacks the revelatory dimension, Arendt puts forward that it is not performed “into the web of human relationships.” This claim too is questionable, and seemingly contradicts a crucial conclusion of her analysis, namely, that science has abolished the protective divide between nature and the human world. If science has introduced human unpredictability in the natural domain, should we not conclude that nature has entered the web of human relations? Indeed, Arendt acknowledges the serious implications scientific action has for human affairs. In the first section of “The Concept of History,” largely devoted to a discussion of the natural sciences, she points out in relation to acting into nature: “It is beyond doubt that the capacity to act is the most dangerous of all human abilities and possibilities, and it is also beyond doubt that the self-created risks mankind faces today have never been faced before.”53 However, she fails to take this observation to the logical conclusion that acting into nature amounts to acting in the web of human relations. Still, with this implicit conclusion, Arendt proves once more the visionary character of her analysis. She clearly anticipates developments that were to happen years later, such as the emergence of the environmental movement, the theory of risk society and its claim that science plays a pivotal role in the ecological crisis, and green political theory.
The earlier discussion casts serious doubt on the idea that science only has political implications. A complementary way to ascertain whether it is a political endeavor “in and of itself” is to stop concentrating on the public space and self-revelation. Such an exclusive focus has negative consequences. Chief among them is the charge that Arendt wrongly depicts politics as a theatrical performance. For our purpose though, the main shortcoming of this revelatory approach is its individualistic overtone. True, Arendt pays a great deal of attention to the individual root of action through her analysis of natality. Yet even though she does not deny that individuals can act alone,54 for her, nowhere is action more glorious than when performed in a cooperative fashion by several people together, what she calls “acting in concert.” Herein lays the reason why she so admires the Greek polis and sees in it the archetype of the body politic. It provides an enduring space for acting in concert and, accordingly, the status of citizen allows individuals to partake in politics, to act in concert with others. Action is the most futile activity of mankind, and the polis was the Greek solution for ensuring its regular occurrence: “The wall of the polis and the boundaries of the law were drawn around an already existing public space which, however, without such stabilizing protection could not endure, could not survive the moment of action and speech itself.”55
The emphasis Arendt places on acting in concert is in large part due to its being the source of power: “Power springs up between men when they act together.”56 Power is a notion sometimes overlooked by commentators who tend to view her conception of politics as essentially theatrical. Actually, power is of the utmost importance for her because it is the only way for the artificial world to be maintained.57 In more practical terms, power designates the capacity to innovate,58 that is, the possibility of setting original ends and of pursuing them.59 This linkage of action and end-setting is noteworthy for it dispels the mistaken interpretation of “end” as a category that strictly belongs to homo faber and to work, and allegedly stands opposite to action. As Leslie Paul Thiele reminds us, “Arendt did not believe that political actors were all whimsy and spontaneity or that instrumental effort was foreign to their nature. Actors without purposes do not exist: intentionality is intrinsic to action.”60 This is crucial for properly addressing the politics/science interface. But before turning to science, a final observation must be made.
Since the polis provides humans with a stable structure for acting in concert, by definition, it also constitutes an enduring space for breeding power. Arendt is crystal clear about it: “Bodies politic generate power.”61 Power and the body politic shed a different light on action. These notions allow us to break away from the sanitized interpretation that pervades many exegetical works on Arendt’s thought and makes it almost impossible to understand the political nature of scientists’ action. Traditionally, political theory has been indifferent to science.62 Arendt is to be commended for going against the grain and putting science at the core of her political reflections. What is equally remarkable is that the importance she ascribes to science testifies to the coherence of her conceptual framework. In effect, we find in her writings an exact, albeit embryonic, parallel between action officially labeled political and scientists’ action. First and foremost, she fully acknowledges that science is a form of acting in concert: “the scientists found it necessary from the beginning to organize themselves into a society [the Royal Society] . . . to act together and in concert in order to conquer nature.”63 We have seen earlier that end-setting, dubbed “instrumental reason” in the case of science, is not incompatible with action. On the contrary, it is part of it.
Like all actors, scientists pursue a goal, albeit one that is historically unprecedented and thus entirely different from any other: the conquest of nature. Scientists’ acting in concert to conquer nature is no small affair for it has put action center-stage in our era. Arendt argues that acting into nature signals “that for the first time in our history the human capacity for action has begun to dominate all others”64 Contemporary scientists’ enormous capacity for action has even led to yet another reversal in the hierarchy of vita activa:
In the initial stages of the modern age, man was thought of primarily as homo faber, until, in the nineteenth century, man was interpreted as an animal laborans whose metabolism with nature would yield the highest productivity of which human life is capable. Against the background of these schematic definitions, it would be adequate for the world we have come to live in to define man as a being capable of action; for this capacity seems to have become the center of all other human capabilities.65
In this context, it is difficult to see how science could evade being political “in and of itself.” As a matter of fact, and although this may be anathema to positivist ears, for Arendt, scientific action is intrinsically connected to power, like other forms of action. From the early days of the scientific revolution, power was part of scientists’ scheme “where men organize they intend to act and to acquire power.”66 Thus, it was a search for power that prompted the founding of the Royal Society. This search eventually proved to be extraordinarily successful and scientists have outshined politicians and other political actors: “For their early organizations . . . have become one of the most potent power-generating groups in all history.”67
For Arendt, scientific institutions generate power in much the same way as bodies politic do. Can it be inferred that they are political? Certainly and she does not shy away from spelling it out: “An organization, whether of scientists who have abjured politics or of politicians, is always a political institution.”68
Notes
1 Waseem Yaqoob, “The Archimedean Point: Science and Technology in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Journal of European Studies 44, no. 3 (2014): 1–26.
2 I sincerely thank Peter Gratton for the confidence he has placed in me by asking me to contribute a piece on Arendt and science. I extend my thanks to Yasemin Sari for her diligent editorial work and support.
3 Mark Coeckelbergh, “The Public Thing: On the Idea of a Politics of Artefacts,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 13, no. 3 (2009). Available at https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-public-thing-on-the-idea-of-a-politics-of-artefacts (accessed February 24, 2018).
4 The scope and nature of the scientific revolution have been revisited in recent years. See Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); John Tresch, “Cosmologies Materialized: The History of Science and History of Ideas,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. D. McMahon and S. Moyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 153–72.
5 In 1983, Bruno Latour published a paper titled “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Move the Earth,” which offers a genuine political theory of science. The similarities between his work and Arendt’s are numerous. See Eve Seguin, “The Common World of Hannah Arendt and Bruno Latour,” Symposium 22, no. 2 (2018): 1–26.
6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 259.
7 Giordano Bruno went even further in 1584 when he postulated the existence of innumerable suns with planets orbiting them. In this respect, he can be regarded as the forerunner of exoplanetology. See Eve Seguin, “Why Are Exoplanets Political? Pragmatism and the Politicity of Science in the Work of Bruno Latour,” Revue française de science politique 65, no. 2 (2015): 279–302, and Eve Seguin, “What Sense Should We Make of Astronomy’s Sensing Devices?.” Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, Panel 244, Boston, Septemb er 1, 2017.
8 Arendt, Human Condition, 266.
9 Ibid., 259–60.
10 Ibid., 268.
11 Ibid., 264.
12 Roger Berkowitz, “Earth Alienation from Galileo to Google,” Paper delivered at Bard College’s Language and Thinking Rostrum Series, August 2010. Available at https://languageandthinking.bard.edu/2014/06/roger-berkowitz-earth-alienation-from-galileo-to-google/ (accessed February 24, 2019).
13 Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” New Atlantis (Fall 2007): 43–55, 44.
14 Ibid., 46.
15 Rita Koganzon, “Science and Totalitarianism,” New Atlantis (Fall 2007): 60–66.
16 Patrick Deneen, “Nature, Man, and Common Sense,” New Atlantis (Fall 2007): 56–60.
17 Arendt, “The Conquest of Space,” 51.
18 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).
19 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est certain (Paris: Seuil 2004).
20 Arendt, Human Condition, 262.
21 Berkowitz, “Earth Alienation,” 15.
22 Melis Bas, A Reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt as a Philosopher of Technology. M.A. Thesis, University of Twente (2013). Available at http://essay.utwente.nl/64574/1/Bas%CC%A7%2C%20Melis%20-%20S1232150%20-%20Master%20Thesis.pdf (accessed February 24, 2019).
23 Pieter Tijmes, “The Archimedean Point and Eccentricity: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Science and Technology,” Inquiry 35, nos. 3–4 (1992): 389–406.
24 Yaqoob, “The Archimedean Point,” 17.
25 Patchen Markell, “Arendt’s Work: on the Architecture of the Human Condition,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 15–44.
26 Arendt, Human Condition, 274.
27 Ibid., 295.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 231.
30 Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Technology, Performance and Life Itself: Hannah Arendt and the Fate of Nature,” Sociological Review 51, supp. 2 (2003): 203–18.
31 Ibid., 150.
32 The amazing neologism « politicité » was coined by French political scientist Nicolas Tenzer (La politique [Paris: PUF, 1991], 108). It is modeled on “scientificity” and denotes the intrinsic political character of the phenomenon it is applied to, here science.
33 Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 58.
34 Arendt, Human Condition, 323–24.
35 Available at http://susanskrit.org/qoq-for-oppenheimer.html (accessed June 1, 2019).
36 See Margaret Canovan, “Introduction,” in Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), vii–xx, and Phillip Birger Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Citizenship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
37 Beltrán Undurraga, Amor Mundi: Politics, Democracy, and TechnoScience. Ph.D. Thesis, UCLA. Available at https://escholarship.org/content/qt3rh226m9/qt3rh226m9.pdf (2016) (accessed February 24, 2018).
38 Ibid., 10.
39 Ibid., 38.
40 Arendt, Human Condition, 324.
41 Ibid., 54.
42 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
43 For an analysis of Hobbes’s dissatisfaction with the experiments of the Royal Society and his debate with Robert Boyle, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
44 Dorothy Nelkin, Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979).
45 Allan Mazur, “Disputes between Experts,” Minerva 11, no. 2 (1973): 243–62.
46 Dorothy Nelkin, Nuclear Power and Its Critics: The Cayuga Lake Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).
47 See Michel Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); and Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).
48 Pierre Fayard, La communication scientifique publique. De la vulgarisation à la médiatisation (Lyon: Chronique sociale, 1988).
49 Yaqoob, “The Archimedean Point.”
50 Arendt, Human Condition, 324.
51 Ibid., 188.
52 Jeffrey Isaac, “Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 534–40, 537.
53 Arendt, “Concept of History,” 63.
54 Guido Parietti, “Arendt on Power and Violence,” in The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. P. Baehr and P. Walsh (London: Anthem, 2017), 197–220.
55 Arendt, Human Condition, 198.
56 Ibid., 200.
57 Elizabeth Frazer, “Power and Violence,” in Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. P. Hayden (London: Routledge, 2014), 155–66; Parietti, “Arendt on Power and Violence.”
58 Hauke Brunkhorst, “The Productivity of Power: Hannah Arendt’s Renewal of the Classical Concept of Politics,” Revista de Ciencia Política 26, no. 2 (2006): 125–36.
59 Guido Parietti, “On the Concept of Power,” IPSA Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series 63 (2015): 1–29. Available at https://www.scribd.com/document/282640533/Guido-Parietti-On-the-Concept-of-Power (accessed February 24, 2018).
60 Leslie Paul Thiele, “The Ontology of Action . Arendt and the Role of Narrative,” Theory & Event 12, no. 4 (2009): 1–21, 15.
61 Arendt, Human Condition, 202. This assertion should be read with caution. First, the body politic can be anti-political. This is most obvious with tyranny, which breeds impotence rather than power, as she puts it. Second, political action is not necessarily performed within the polis, as shown by all manners of civil disobedience. Arendt qualifies the French resistance as “a kind of citizenship that was defined against the state” (Isaac, “Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics,” 536).
62 Eve Seguin, “Review of Graham Harman’s Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political,” Political Theory, November 24, 2016: 1–4.
63 Arendt, Human Condition, 271, n. 26.
64 Arendt, “Concept of History,” 62.
65 Ibid., 63.
66 Arendt, Human Condition, 271, n. 26.
67 Ibid., 324. A quarter of a century later, Bruno Latour would make the same observation: “it is in laboratories that most new sources of power are generated” (We Have Never Been Modern, 160).
68 Arendt, Human Condition, 271, n. 26.