World Alienation and the Search for Home in Arendt’s Philosophy
David Macauley
Introduction
With original, wide-ranging, and unconventional thinkers, it is often possible to find striking diagnoses of and useful philosophical tools for grasping complex social problems and political questions. Their work appears at times to embrace a kind of theoretical midwifery, facilitating and bearing new ideas, novel concepts, and unique perspectives into public discourse and intellectual dialogue. Such is the case with Hannah Arendt. Among many valuable insights, she provides a thoughtful framework for engaging the related phenomena that she identifies as world alienation and earth alienation, including our attempts to transcend or escape our given home and the human condition, a notion that she develops and defends and which stands in contrast to a more traditional and essentialist conception of human nature.
In articulating these ideas, Arendt builds upon a distinction between earth and world, and directs our attention to the estrangement that she claims individuals in modern society encounter in or from both realms. In the process, she reveals a broad and robust concern with human dwelling—both on the Earth and in the world—an activity she characterizes as well in terms of the emergence of homelessness and rootlessness. Arendt thereby seeks to “trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the Earth into the universe and from the world into the self, to its origins.”1 The resulting discussion is one that helps to inform her understanding of the public sphere, modernity, and the political community.
World Alienation and Earth Alienation
For Arendt, world alienation implies a loss of shared experiences, intersubjective reality, and commonality. This alienation involves a “distance which man puts between himself and the world,” threatening the very integrity of the political sphere.2 The “world” consists of human artifacts and objects, but it is much more than that because it is also potentially a durable sphere and a symbolic space of shared action and plurality. By extension, “worldliness” is essential for the well-being of the human condition since it furnishes a space between people and provides for the possibility of a viable public realm (a deeper and more defined dimension of the world), where we can gather, disclose ourselves, and act in concert. By contrast, “worldlessness” entails instability, abolishes human identity, and contributes to consumerism, the transformation of work into labor, and the rise of humans as animal laborans.
Arendt employs the term “alienation” in a decidedly distinct manner. She does not use the concept in a Hegelian sense (false consciousness), an explicitly Marxian way (alienated labor; economic factors), or in a strictly existentialist manner (inauthenticity and uncanniness), though there are some occasional similarities in its invocation.3 In The Origins of Totalitarianism—where themes of rootlessness and homelessness occur in the analysis of imperialism and totalitarianism—she observes that the “alien” is “a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy.”4 For Arendt, alienation is not simply a feeling, a matter of the conscious or unconscious mind, or merely an aspect of the self or physical body. Rather, it is more generally a modern condition grounded phenomenologically in historical events and circumstances. Furthermore, her conception of alienation seems to entail the presumption of being at home in the world and on the Earth, a deep and basic human need that arguably even becomes a kind of quasi “religious commitment” for her.5 Alienation thus implies the loss of a common sense of place and belonging or the absence of a sphere where meaningful activity can be pursued together with others and secured by the bonds of tradition, language, or culture.
Arendt maintains that while world alienation has determined the very course of development for modern society, it is actually of relatively “minor significance” compared with earth alienation, which is the distinguishing feature of modern science. Nevertheless, it turns out that the sources of earth and world alienation are closely connected to each other.
Earth alienation is the phenomenon and process whereby the taking-hold, conquest, and transformation of Earth through modern geographic explorations, political expropriations, and technological inventions—and then later the flight from Earth into space—have resulted in a collapse of spatial distances, a shrinkage and alteration of public places, and an estrangement from the planet. Earth alienation is symbolized by the launching in 1957 of a satellite into outer space and stands in relation, though not complete opposition, to world alienation, which involves the ongoing loss of a secure home in the world for many groups of people, as well as the increasing abolition of otherness. Such alienation begins historically with events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including, first, the discovery of America and the mapping and charting of the Earth; second, the Reformation, which expropriated land and uprooted millions of homes; third, the invention of the telescope, which encouraged a departure into space and a new universal relation to the cosmos; and finally, the triumph of Cartesian doubt and geometry, which freed humans from geocentric notions of space.6 In The Human Condition and other writings Arendt examines these events and themes connected with them in an attempt to understand our heightening estrangement from Earth and the dangerous tendency to escape earth-bound inhabitancy and to carry the unpredictability and irreversibility of human actions into the natural world.
In so doing, Arendt locates an intimate and important link between the concepts of nature and history, especially for the ancient Greeks. At the beginning of Western history, a distinction was made between the mortality of humans and the immortality of nature, and this difference was the basic assumption of historiography. The chore of history, as she puts it, was “to save human deeds from the futility that comes from oblivion.”7 Through history, humans can attempt to achieve greatness and immortality and to transcend our own earthly mortality. We can “almost” become equals with nature through great deeds, words, or events. Nature achieves such immortality without effort, she asserts, while humans must strive consciously for it. According to Arendt’s account, it was in late antiquity when history was re-integrated into nature and viewed in the same terms as biological life (as having circular movement) that the possibility of greatness for humans was lost. With this occurrence, “immortality has fled the world,” and such a condition is tantamount for Arendt to a kind of homelessness.8 Immortal things “have lost their home in the world; since the world, since nature is perishable” and these objects and events, too, start to perish as soon as they come into being.9
In this regard, Arendt introduces a strong distinction between culture (or history) and nature. As in The Human Condition, she upholds the former realm of the artificially permanent (culture, history, and world) over the latter realm of the naturally changing and fleeting (nature, biology, and the Earth), drawing a sharp contrast between them that cannot always be adequately supported. This desire for immortality and the lamentation at its loss can be seen not only as an attempt to secure a more or less stable place in the world but also as a desire to escape nature and to avoid the very natural phenomenon of death. It too is a rebellion against the human condition, no less than the desire to literally flee the Earth’s atmosphere that Arendt finds as an unfortunate hallmark of the modern age. It leads Arendt in turn to locate in art, as opposed to nature, one of the few realms of permanence, objectivity, stability, and value because art offers redemptive power potentially for society.
Arendt’s Influences
There are several influences upon Arendt’s thinking about earth and world alienation. First, Arendt holds with confidence that the Greeks “dreaded” the devaluation of the world and nature with its “inherent anthropocentrism” and so she looks toward the ancients for recovering, or at least rethinking, a conception of politics and the natural world that preserves their original meaning and that fosters a sense of greatness and immortality.10 Second, in her discussions of world and earth alienation, Arendt adverts frequently to the philosophical positions of Alfred North Whitehead and Alexandre Koyré. With Whitehead, she critiques the foundations of modern science, borrows his views on the telescope and Cartesian thought, and discovers with him that the “complexity of nature is inexhaustible.”11 She also draws upon Koyré’s milestone work, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, which explores the process through which humans have lost their place in the world as we have transitioned from a finite, closed, value-laden, and hierarchical conception of the world to one marked by indefiniteness, infinity, value-free aspects, and ontological parity.
Finally and most significantly, Arendt adopts and then creatively adapts Heideggerian notions related to both the Earth and the world. Heidegger’s conceptions of “worldhood” and “being-in-the-world” are, for example, enlarged to include a sense of being-with-others. Heidegger also spoke of the shrinkage or abolition of distances brought about through modern technology, showed a concern with the problem of homelessness, and used the language of “world-withdrawal” and “world-decay.”12 Heidegger, too, underscored the fact that something of vital and animating importance has been lost in the translation of Greek words into Latin and other Roman languages, processes whereby we have severed and alienated ourselves from the original Greek thinking.13 According to him, the “rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation,” a theme which becomes very important to Arendt.14
Significance and Criticisms
Arendt’s ideas on earth and world alienation as well as her related views on technology, nature, and the public realm have become of interest to contemporary environmental thinkers. Her analyses and warnings about the transformation of the planet and human world have been engaged, applied, and critiqued by recent philosophers and political theorists in constructive ways. Kerry Whiteside argues that Arendt’s conceptions of worldliness and culture provide a working ethic for the treatment of nonhuman things.15 Anne Chapman and Paul Ott both explore Arendt’s conceptions of the world and the Earth, with Ott developing a view of environmental ethics vis-à-vis a notion of “world mediation” and Chapman applying interpretations of the world and earth distinction to a controversy regarding wind farms in the UK.16 Finn Bowring in turn uses Arendt’s theory of worldliness to argue for a “conservationist” reading of her work that encourages care for the world in a way that is close to the view of nature held by the Romans and compatible in some respects with Marx.17 Paul Voice looks at the links between the political conditions of freedom and the material or biological conditions of existence in Arendt and the constraints she develops against “consuming” the world.18 And David Macauley examines Arendt’s work on earth and world alienation in terms of an ecological politics of place, focusing on her views of nature, science, and technology along with the practice of agriculture.19
There are, of course, questions that can be raised about Arendt’s accounts, especially the ambiguity or ambivalence they show with respect to the status of the “natural” and “artificial” in relation to the modern world and to each other, the diminished role of inner-worldly alienation (or what Weber termed “inner-worldly asceticism”) in her narrative, and more broadly, her “reluctant” or critical modernism. Despite these and other challenges to or limitations of her thought, Arendt presciently alerts us to the estrangement many experience in the modern world and to our risky attempts to flee, fly from, or free ourselves from the physical earth. In so doing, she offers us a deep and nuanced account of political theory, recovering insights from ancient Greek thought, history, and phenomenology that are relevant to contemporary society, even if her particular positions are at times problematic.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 6.
2 Ibid., 252, fn 2.
3 Marx identified four different kinds of alienation involved in the labor process: (1) alienation from nature and the sensuous external world expressed the relation with the product of one’s labor; (2) estrangement from self and one’s activity; (3) alienation from the human species-being and; (4) estrangement from other humans. Arendt’s thought cuts across some of these distinctions, though she would not likely acknowledge Marx’s third sense because she is critical of essentialist conceptions of human nature.
4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 301.
5 George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 158. Even if Arendt is generally un-theological, a commitment that is religiously held does not necessarily entail reference to the transcendental. It can include issues or articles of faith, passion, and even unidentified assumptions to which one subscribes. The theologian Paul Tillich, for example, identified faith as one’s “ultimate concern,” construed in a broad sense.
6 Arendt challenges modern mathematics and Cartesian geometry in particular because they can reduce all that is not human into numerical formulas and truths. They free us potentially from finitude, terrestrial life and geocentric notions of space. They remove the geo (the Earth) out of geometry, in effect. The transition from natural science to universal science and the creation of a new Archimedean point (a metaphor Descartes uses in his Second Meditation) in the human mind, where it can be moved about, is at the center of her view of earth alienation and a distinguishing characteristic of the modern world.
7 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 41.
8 Ibid: 44.
9 Ibid.
10 Arendt, The Human Condition, 157. Arendt defines anthropocentrism as “the ‘absurd’ opinion that man is the highest being and that everything else is subject to the exigencies of human life” (ibid.).
11 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1969), 126.
12 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 41.
13 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. , 1961), 13. See also Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1984).
14 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 23.
15 K. H. Whiteside, “Worldliness and Respect for Nature: An Ecological Appreciation of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Culture,” Environmental Values 7, no. 1(1998): 25–40 and Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt and Ecological Politics,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (1994): 339–58.
16 Anne Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Environmental Values 16, no. 4 (2007): 433–45. Paul Ott, “World and Earth: Hannah Arendt and the Human Relationship to Nature,” Ethics, Place & Environment 12, no. 1 (2009): 1–16.
17 Finn Bowring, “Arendt after Marx: Rethinking the Dualism of Nature and World,” Rethinking Marxism 26, no. 2 (2014): 278–90.
18 Paul Voice, “Consuming the World: Hannah Arendt on Politics and the Environment,” Journal of International Political Theory 9, no. 2 (2013): 178–93.
19 David Macauley, “Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation to Oikos,” in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology , ed. David Macauley (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).