CHAPTER 6 The Critique of Modernity
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.
—Heidegger, “The Age of the World-Picture”
World alienation, and not self-alienation as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age.
—Arendt, The Human Condition1
Nothing in our time, it seems to me, is more dubious than our attitude towards the world.
—Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”
I. INTRODUCTION: ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER AS CRITICS OF MODERNITY
The Human Condition presents Arendt’s phenomenology of human activity. This analysis, however, is interwoven with a narrative about the decline of action and the public realm throughout the modern age. “The purpose of the historical analysis,” she tells us, “… is to trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self.”2 The story she unfolds is not an optimistic one. The modern “rise of the social” promotes the absorption of the public realm by household concerns, while homo faber’s consistent utilitarianism results in the “limitless instrumentalization of everything that exists.”3 Add to these developments the tendency, born of modern science, to view the earth (which Arendt calls “the very quintessence of the human condition”) as merely one more object, and the transformation of work into a form of labor via technological automatism, and the result is a pervasive and radical worldlessness. Politically, worldlessness manifests itself in the “atrophy” of the space of appearances and the “withering” of common sense, a loss of feeling for the world.4 Existentially, worldlessness is experienced as a kind of homelessness, a lack of place that results from the modern destruction of the durability of the “human artifice.”
Insofar as worldlessness—“always a form of barbarism”—is homelessness, Arendt agrees with Heidegger’s sentiment in the “Letter on Humanism”: homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the age.5 The forces unleashed by modernity—the forces of capitalist expropriation and accumulation of wealth, of modern science (with its presupposition of an “Archimedean point”), and of technology—are, according to Arendt, directly responsible for this state of affairs. Each has contributed mightily to the undermining of the “human artifice,” to the transformation of relatively stable structures into fluid processes. The result is an alienation from the world even more extreme than that of the early Christians. Like them, we have no faith in, or feeling for, the durability of our world; unlike them, we have no bond strong enough to replace the world.6
For Arendt, the modern project of technological mastery has an essentially ironic outcome. Freedom is not enhanced by the extension of control and the overcoming of necessity; rather, it is gradually eliminated as it loses its place in the world. In taking this stance, Arendt seems very much on the terrain of the Frankfurt School. Her critical thrust, however, is decidedly different from that of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Where they emphasize the domination of nature and the ways it inevitably boomerangs on a subject who is also nature, Arendt stresses the extent to which technology assimilates human existence to the “natural.”7 The problem is not, or not merely, the modern will to expunge otherness and subjugate nature (a project that leads to increased domination). What is at stake for Arendt is not the natural basis of the self but the integrity and durability of the world that stands between humanity and nature.
This crucial difference is linked to another. From Arendt’s perspective, it is not fear of otherness that underlies the project of technological mastery; rather, she believes this peculiarly modern project is driven by a deeply rooted existential resentment, a resentment of finitude and limitation as such.8 Modernity rebels “against human existence as it has been given”; it is driven by the desire to exchange the givenness of the human condition for “something he [man] has made himself.”9 From the perspective of late modernity, the world appears to be a prison. Technology presents itself as the means by which the boundaries of this prison may be removed. Yet technology reveals itself to be something much more than a means: it is a specifically world-destroying power, one that renders the very category of means and ends irrelevant through its focus on process. In the “pseudo-world” of technology, even the “equipmental totality” is “dimmed down.”
Arendt’s focus on existential resentment (the very opposite of all “thankfulness for Being”) refers us directly to Heidegger’s critique of the modern “will to will,” just as her description of the process whereby the instrumentalism of homo faber gives way to the worldlessness of the animal laborans evokes his critique of technology. Like Arendt, Heidegger understands the modern age as one of “insurrection” against what is (in Arendt’s phrase) a “free gift from nowhere.”10 The “will to will” is a will to overcome finitude and contingency, to remake the world and establish man in the position of “lord and master.” Such a project, however, requires a radically transformed understanding of the real, an ontology in which man, qua subject, becomes “the relational center of that which is as such.”11 Heidegger’s writings—from Nietzsche (1936–40) and “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) to “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954)—trace the modern subjectification of the real, the process through which the real is reduced to dimensions set out by a representing, willing subject. For Heidegger, this process coincides with what An Introduction to Metaphysics calls the “darkening of the world.” It culminates in the “ordering revealing” of technological “enframing” (Gestell), a mode of presencing that brings humanity to “the very brink of a precipitous fall.”12
Heidegger’s concern, shared by Arendt, is that man, in making himself “lord of the earth,” destroys the very conditions necessary for the exercise of his disclosive capacity. Thus, what Heidegger fears from technology as a “mode of revealing” is the way it “drives out every other possibility of revealing”; that is, its peculiarly closed or leveling character.13 Arendt’s The Human Condition provides a less abstract account of the modern subjectification of the real, one that focuses upon the “destruction of the common world” promoted by the Faustian energies of modernity.14 The animating worry, nevertheless, is parallel to Heidegger’s: we seem to be creating a “world” in which there is no viable stage for action, and in which “normalized” behavior subsumes disclosive spontaneity. The decline of a genuinely public reality in the modern age raises the possibility that the “survival of the species mankind” will be secured at the cost of extinguishing the disclosive capacity—the capacity for action—that makes us human.15 The paradoxical logic of modern existential resentment is that an age that “began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity” may in fact end “in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”16
This chapter examines the antimodernism of Arendt and Heidegger in light of this fear. At the most general level, I want to show how Arendt’s concern for the world and action leads her to appropriate leading themes from Heidegger’s critique of modernity, including the subjectification of the real, the “de-worldling of the world,” and the technological dis-essencing of our disclosive capacity. As in Chapters 4 and 5, my desire is not to place Arendt in Heidegger’s shadow; rather, it is to reveal the way she extracts novel and unexpected political implications from a critique mired in cultural conservatism. This is not to say that Arendt’s antimodernism is entirely free of such conservatism; however, it is to draw attention to the “sea-change” these themes undergo as they migrate from Heidegger to Arendt. As always with Arendt, what is taken up is transformed, often to the point where it is no longer recognizable. This is especially true in the case of modernity and its pathologies. As a result, Arendt’s understanding of politics, her democratically motivated “care for the world,” places Heidegger’s ontological concerns in a context he would not have recognized.
This is an important point, one frequently overlooked by those who would dismiss the Arendtian critique of modernity as “rejectionist” or “totalizing.” It is true that Arendt fails to play the game of immanent critique: her purpose is not to sing to liberal bourgeois society its own tune. In this respect, she barely qualifies as even a “reluctant” modernist.17 Closer to the mark, I think, is George Kateb’s characterization of her as a “great antimodernist.”18 Yet even this description is offered with polemical intent. Kateb would have us view Arendt as the kind of cultural critic who wishes to see modernity undone. This way of framing the issue strikes me as a liberal version of what Foucault calls “the blackmail of Enlightenment”—the insistence that one take a stand “for” or “against” bourgeois democracy, enlightenment rationality, and so forth, before delivering the specifics of one’s critique. While Arendt is unquestionably antimodern in a broad sense, she hardly shares the cultural conservative’s wish to return to the premodern. Arendt refuses to deal in this type of nostalgia, a fact evident throughout her theoretical work. If nothing else, this work is a prolonged and multifaceted account of why the structures of meaning, morality, and politics defining the premodern world are no longer possible.
What is it, then, that makes Arendt’s critique of modernity seem like a paradigmatic instance of rejectionist critique? Partly (as Kateb notes) it is her unyielding focus on the downside of modernity: she describes its horrors and pathologies at length, but none of its greatness.19 Another explanation, less obvious but no less important, is that this critique moves on explicitly ontological terrain. Just as her rethinking of action and freedom centered on the mode of being and type of reality implied by an authentically political existence, so her critique of modernity focuses on the destruction of the “space of appearances” and the decline of a genuinely public reality. Hence the distance that separates her critique from one that takes the Weberian concept of rationalization as its central category of analysis.20
The impression that The Human Condition is an exercise in “Hellenic nostalgia” is created when we hypostatize Arendt’s ontological concerns into a static phenomenology of human activity. The old hierarchy of the vita activa then appears as the means to condemn the new—a “stick to beat modernity with.” Yet this phenomenology is not as conceptually static as it first appears, and in fact it relies upon an implicit historical ontology. Unlike many of her critics, Arendt refused to reify the capacities and conditions of human existence into a transhistorical human “nature.”21 As her rejoinder to Eric Voegelin makes clear, she was intensely aware of the internal connection between individual capacities and the conditions necessary for their exercise.22 Thus, she could easily imagine situations in which the effacement of certain conditions necessary for action (e.g., plurality or worldliness) had progressed to the point where this capacity itself began to wither. It is not, in other words, simply a question of the relative status an activity has in the hierarchy of the vita activa; it is also a matter of the peculiar historical reality the activity inhabits. Hence the possibility not only of a change in rank (the “reversal” within the vita activa that helps define the entry into modernity), but of a dis-essencing or transformation of the capacities themselves. It is the resulting inseparability of the ontological and the political that makes Arendt’s critique of modernity at once so powerful and so frustratingly final.
II. HEIDEGGER: THE METAPHYSICS OF THE MODERNS AND THE SUBJECTIFICATION OF THE REAL
Collapse and desolation find their adequate occurrence in the fact that metaphysical man, the animal rationale, gets fixed as the laboring animal.
—Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics”23
Self-Assertion as Self-Grounding: The “Inauthenticity” of Modernity
Heidegger views the modern age as the age of the autonomous subject, of the “will to will” and boundless human self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung). Yet he also sees it as an advanced expression of the inauthenticity that characterizes the tradition of Western metaphysics. The apparent paradox—the idea that self-assertion might somehow be “irresolute”—dissolves when we realize that for Heidegger, the will to will (the will to increased power) is essentially a will to security.24 The dynamism of modernity, its ceaseless application to the project of remaking or (to use Kant’s figure) completing the world, is essentially reactive. It is driven by the characteristically metaphysical desire to grasp and secure Being as a whole, to render Being as something permanently present. Human self-assertion takes the form of a perpetual “making secure,” an ordering of all that is that reaches its culmination in the technological presencing of the real as “standing-reserve” (Bestand).
The modern goal of planetary domination, and the overcoming of finitude this implies, proceeds via a radicalization of the productionist prejudices of the tradition. According to Heidegger, both Greek philosophy and Christianity equated “to be” with “to be produced.” In the modern age, this understanding is given an explicitly anthropocentric twist. “Being” is no longer an attribute dispensed by the Creator God of Christianity; rather, it is identified with the realm of objectivity set out by the active, self-conscious subject. That which is finds its measure and ground in the “planning and calculating” of this subject, who represents and “sets before.”25 The world, in Heidegger’s famous phrase, “becomes picture” as man becomes, at the threshold of modernity, “the primary and only real subiectum.”26
The “dominance of the subject in the modern age” is announced by the work of Descartes, whose work Heidegger singles out as the beginning of modern metaphysics.27 Descartes’s subjective turn (by way of the cogito) illustrates, for Heidegger, the inextricability of self-assertion and the will to security within modernity. On the one hand, the cogito signifies the liberation from a medieval ordo and the traditional concept of truth as revelation. It is a symbol of a newfound autonomy, which Heidegger describes as “the emancipation of man in which he frees himself from obligation to Christian revelational truth and Church doctrine to a legislating for himself that takes its stand upon itself.”28 This autonomy, however, is possible only on the basis of a new ground, a new certainty. The eclipse of the lumen naturale, the suspension of the divinely guaranteed correspondence (adequatio) between “the matter” and truth, precipitated a crisis in ground, which could be resolved only by the substitution of a new ground for the old. Thus, as Heidegger puts it, “liberation from the revelational certainty of salvation had to be intrinsically a freeing to a certainty in which man secures for himself the true as the known of his own knowing.”29 The other side of the liberation preformed by Cartesian doubt is Descartes’s claim to have found the fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritas within man himself.30
The significance of the cogito hardly ends here. The epistemological move, while revolutionary, points to a deeper ontological transformation, one that results from Descartes’s appeal to self-consciousness as the paradigmatic instance of presence.31 By offering the self-consciousness of the subject as his one indubitable point, as that which is “firmly fixed,” Descartes implicitly makes this ground of truth the ground of being. Heidegger points to this in a gloss of the cogito offered in the Nietzsche lectures:
Cogito then does not merely say that I think, nor merely that I am, nor that my existence follows from the fact of my thinking. The principle speaks of a connection between cogito and sum. It says that I am as one representing, but that my representation, as definitive repraesentatio, decides about the being present of everything that is represented; that is to say, about the presence of what is meant in it; that is, about its being as a being. The principle says that representation, which is essentially represented to itself, posits Being as representedness, and truth as certitude. That to which everything is referred back as to the unshakeable ground is the full essence of representation itself.32
The “thing that thinks” finds its clearest and most distinct idea, its most real idea, in consciousness of self. This provides the basis for its drawing an ontological horizon around itself in terms of representation: “The Being of the one who represents and secures himself in representing is the measure of the Being of what is represented as such.”33 The subject’s capacity for foundational (self) representation is that upon which the objectivity of the object can first appear. Thus, the epistemological turn performed by Descartes at the beginning of the modern period serves as a kind of Trojan horse for metaphysics, in that the cogito establishes and secures the truth of Being within the space opened up by representation.34 The cogito is the vehicle through which man implicitly assumes his specifically modern role as “that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of it Being and its truth.”35 It symbolizes the moment in which “man becomes the relational center of that which is as such”; in which ontology becomes anthropology; in which the real is subjectified through the reduction of Being to representation.36
According to Heidegger, it remained for Kant and German Idealism to strip Descartes’s argument of its scholastic anachronisms and tease out its full ontological implications. By focusing upon the a priori contribution of transcendental logic (the categories) and imagination (the schematism of concepts), Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in epistemology explicitly grounded the objectivity of the object in the subjectivity of the subject. The tacit reduction of the real to an objectivity (Gegenstandigkeit) constructed or “posited” (Fichte) by a transcendental subject resolved the old metaphysical question concerning the Being of beings into an anthropological one.37 Radicalizing the basic Cartesian strategy, the first Critique grounds Being (thought metaphysically, as the totality of beings) as that which “stands-against” the subject.38 Thus, Heidegger’s reading reveals transcendental philosophy as indeed the “modern form of ontology.”39 The critique of pure reason presents an anthropocentric narrowing and reification of our ontological horizon, a “demarcation, on the basis of our reason, of the determinations of the Being of beings, of the thingness of things; it means an admeasuring and projecting of those fundamental principles of pure reason on whose basis a thing is determined in its thingness.”40
Heidegger famously sees Nietzsche as the culmination of this modern, anthropocentric and reductionist, ontologizing. He interprets Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power as a metaphysics, in which “that which is in being” is whatever a will driven to increase its own power sets before itself.41 Nietzsche consummates the “modern metaphysics of subjectness” in that he takes the Cartesian demarcation of the real (as that which the ego cogito sets before itself) to its logical extreme. Cartesian certainty assures the self of its fixedness, its availability as ground. Nietzsche “activates” this certainty in the form of a will to power whose securing of itself demands that it surround itself “with an encircling sphere of that which it can reliably grasp at.”42 Such an encircling sphere “bounds off the constant reserve of what presences,” and transforms reality into something “fixedly constant,” something that can be “immediately at the disposal of the will.”43 The “inauthenticity” of the moderns, first expressed in the Cartesian turn to the subject as ground and measure of the real, reaches a new level in Nietzsche’s reduction of Being to that which can be “made secure,” which can provide the raw material necessary for the will to power’s preservation and increase. With Nietzsche, the Cartesian quest for certainty reveals itself to be driven by a deep-seated existential resentment.
Heidegger’s interpretation is quite controversial: he manages to see Nietzsche as animated by the “spirit of revenge.”44 I want to leave this controversy to one side in order to focus on the role Nietzsche plays in Heidegger’s narrative about modernity; for it is with the framing of Nietzsche as Descartes’s heir, as the most extreme expression of modern subjectivism and self-assertion, that the practical implications of Heidegger’s analysis reveal themselves. If (and it is a big “if”) one accepts Heidegger’s contention that “metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed,” then it becomes possible to view the progressive subjectification of the real in modern philosophy as signaling a fundamental alteration in man’s “precomprehension of Being,” and (thus) an equally fundamental change in his modes of comportment toward Being.45 Where “the whole of that which is as such … has been drunk up by man,” where man “rises up into the subjectivity of his essence,” into “the I-ness of the ego cogito,” there
Man enters into insurrection. The world changes into object. In this revolutionary objectifying of all that is, the earth, that which first of all must be put at the disposal of representing and setting forth, moves into the midst of human positing and analyzing. The earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an object that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere … as the object of technology.46
The subjectivism of Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche—their reduction of that which is to representation and will—prefigures the destiny of the modern age. From Heidegger’s perspective, it is the destiny of this age to remake the world, to actualize the productionist ontology of the tradition. For Heidegger, it is a straight line from Plato’s presentation of the fabrication experience as a lasting image of the real (eidos as blueprint) to the subject of modern philosophy who produces by representing and setting before.47 It is a similarly straight line from this “merely” theoretical objectification to the “unconditional objectification” of modern science and technology. The end result is not simply an exchange of grounding images (the world viewed as clock or mechanism rather than text), but rather the creation of an instrumentalized, and utterly anthropocentric, reality, in which that which is appears as raw material.48 As we shall see, for Heidegger the horror of the technological age is that humanity also “comes to presence” as raw material.
The Will to Will and the Conquest of the World as Picture
Heidegger’s 1938 essay “The Age of the World-Picture” (Die Zeit des Weltbildes) approaches the modern subjectification of the real from a different angle. In contrast to the contemporaneous Nietzsche lectures, it does not offer commentary on philosophical texts, but rather a transcendental argument in the broadly Kantian sense. Beginning with phenomena he considers essential to the modern age—science, machine technology, the subjectification of art in aesthetics, the framing of human activity as “culture,” and “the loss of the gods”—Heidegger attempts to uncover the particular historical understanding of what it is that makes them possible.49 By elucidating the “modern interpretations of that which is,” Heidegger believes he can help the “essential character of the modern age” to reveal itself.50
The importance of this essay, for my purposes, is twofold. On the one hand, it provides a more concrete version of the subjectification thesis, one that concentrates on the exemplary character of modern science in a manner which anticipates Arendt’s own analysis in The Human Condition. On the other hand, the essay provides a striking formulation of this subjectification (the “reduction of the world to picture”) that clarifies the link between modern anthropocentrism and productionism.
Heidegger begins his quest for the understanding of what is that underlies the modern age by limiting his investigation to the phenomenon of modern science. By isolating the “essence” of modern science, Heidegger hopes to uncover the metaphysical ground that provides its foundation. And, he thinks, once this is accomplished “the entire essence of the modern age will have to let itself be apprehended from out of that ground.”51
The first in Heidegger’s series of descending questions is, then, “In what does the essence of modern science lie?”52 The answer, in a word, is research.53 In marked contrast to the epistxmx of the Greeks or the doctrina and scientia of the Middle Ages, modern science takes the form of research. As a form of knowing, research is characterized by the projection of a “fixed ground plan” or object realm, rigorous procedure (methodology), and ongoing, institutionalized activity. With this approximation of the “essence” of modern science, Heidegger now asks, “What understanding of what is and what concept of truth provide the basis for the fact that science is being transformed into research?”54
Research, whether scientific or historical, aims at calculating the future or verifying the past. Such calculation and verification presume that “nature and history [can] become the objects of a representing that explains. Such representing counts on nature and takes account of history.”55 The transformation of science into research presumes that “the Being of whatever is, is sought in objectiveness.”56 It presumes, moreover, that “truth has been transformed into the certainty of representation.”57 The “objectifying of whatever is,” accomplished in “a setting before, a representing, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure of that being,” constitutes the metaphysical ground of science as research.58
This objectifying of whatever is through representation does not merely make science as research possible; according to Heidegger, it determines “first and long beforehand” the essence of the modern age generally. How so?
In answering this question, Heidegger returns to the theme of self-assertion as self-grounding. The objectifying of whatever is signifies that man “frees himself to himself,” extricating himself from the web of obligations built into a teleological ordo.59 Yet this “freeing”—the self-assertion of the modern age—while “correct” as a characterization of modernity, is not “decisive.” In fact, Heidegger states, it “leads to those errors that prevent us from comprehending the essential foundations of the modern age.”60 What is “decisive” is not that such objectification dissolves the encompassing teleological hierarchy of the Middle Ages, but that with this objectification “the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject.”61 This means that man becomes subiectum (the translation of hypokeimenon), the “that-which-lies-before,” which, “as ground, gathers everything onto itself.”62 Man becomes the “relational center of that which is as such”; but this event, according to Heidegger, is possible “only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes.”63
Heidegger’s transcendental argument seems, at this point, to become dangerously circular. Qua research, science presumes the objectification of whatever is and the transformation of truth into certainty of representation. This transformation, in turn, points to the fact that man (and not God or physis) has become subiectum, the being upon which all that is “is grounded as regards the manner of its Being.” However, we are now told that this shift in ground rests on a prior change in “the comprehension of what is as a whole.”
In fact, there is a circle here, but of the hermeneutic sort. The change in “the comprehension of what is as a whole” that makes man as subiectum possible is that the world becomes “picture.”64 In claiming this, Heidegger is not saying that the “world” (a name for “what is in its entirety”) becomes an object susceptible to representation; rather, he is saying that the horizon of world is itself transformed. By “becoming picture,” this horizon phenomenon frames the Being of that which is as representedness, a transformation that makes possible the emergence of man as subject and the objectification of whatever is.65
The “becoming picture of the world” thus signifies the most fundamental transformation of the modern age, a transformation in the way the world provides a space of disclosure or unconcealment. In modernity, the world “worlds” as picture. Within such a space, that which is can appear only as something represented and set before:
… world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it is in being and only in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.66
In modernity, things come to presence otherwise, as picture. This is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age; namely, “the fact that the world becomes picture at all.”67 Modernity is distinguished from other ages not by the character of its world picture, but by the fact that it has a world picture. For the Middle Ages, that which is appears as ens creatum (God-created entity); for the Greeks, that which is “is that which arises and opens itself”—physis. In neither age is the being of what is understood as, first and foremost, something that can be represented by man.
Representation thus constitutes the uniquely modern mode of comprehending the real. For modern man, to represent means “to bring what is present at hand before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm.”68 It is through this type of representation that modern man “gets into the picture,” and in a peculiarly hegemonic way: “man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth present itself, i.e., be picture.”69 Such universal setting-before makes the world appear as picture for us, as a coherent and systemic whole framed in accordance with human needs, as something that is at our disposal.70 As the setting in which the world, as picture, presences as objective, man takes on a distinctive status: he becomes, in Heidegger’s words, “the representative [der Repräsentant] of that which is.”71
It is tempting to read Heidegger’s characterization of the modern understanding of what is as implying no more than a change in the relative position of humanity vis-à-vis the real. Thus, assuming Heidegger’s broad descriptions of the medieval and Greek understandings of Being to be correct, one might say that what distinguishes modernity is a more detached or alienated perspective: we are no longer “looked upon” by Being (as were the Greeks), nor implicated in its hierarchical structure (as was medieval Christendom). Instead we comprehend the real in terms of a relation of representation, as object for a subject. The problem with this simplified way of putting things is that it implies that here is a “position” of man in relation to the real in all epochs; moreover, it implies that the comprehension of what is has always been, at base, a matter of representation. Heidegger vigorously disputes this reading, challenging the idea that what is at stake is distinguishing the modern world picture from the world pictures of the Middle Ages or antiquity.72 Only modernity has a world picture, and only in modernity can there be such a thing as a “position” of man:
The newness of this event by no means consists in the fact that now the position of man in the midst of what is, is an entirely different one in contrast to that of ancient and medieval man. What is decisive is that mankind himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself, that he intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and that he makes it secure as the solid footing for the development of humanity. Now for the first time is there any such thing as a “position” of man.73
For Heidegger, the radical novelty of modernity consists in the fact that this epoch, in contrast to all others, defines itself through an explicit and self-conscious redrawing of its ontological horizon. All ages have a comprehension of what is; only in modernity is this comprehension thematized and placed in service of a project; namely, “gaining mastery over that which is as a whole.”74 Hence, Heidegger’s emphasis, in the passage cited above, on the “decisive” fact that man “expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself,” that he “intentionally maintains it” and “makes it secure.” The self-conscious and purposive reduction of Being to that which can be represented—a reduction accomplished through the projection of methodologically rigorous “ground plans”—ensures that humanity will encounter only that for which it is “prepared.”75 What metaphysics had previously attempted only “in theory,” modernity accomplishes in fact: the imposition of an ontological horizon that, at every point, refers back to the “solid footing” as its maker. “What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.”76
The transformation of the world into picture is thus equivalent to its anthropologization. The life of man, qua subiectum, becomes the assumed reference point for everything. The ultimate effect is to extend Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” to all spheres. It is just such an extension that Heidegger depicts at the outset of his essay: art moves in the purview of aesthetics, and is considered as the object of subjective experience or as an “expression” of human life; similarly, the relation to the divine is transformed into “religious experience.”77 Thus, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, the loss of metaphysical comfort arising from the demise of a teleological, anthropocentric world order is more than compensated for by modernity’s relentless anthropologism—its reduction of the world to “experience.”
The transformation of the world into picture is also inseparable from the conquest of the world. The imperialism of the subject leads Heidegger to declare that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”78 The world picture is “the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before”; which calculates, plans, and molds all things; and which “secures, organizes, and articulates itself” as world view.79 The productionist interpretation of Being installed by the Platonic eidos comes full circle as the eidos, qua world view, is made a creature of the productivity of life. “To be” still means “to be produced,” but to be produced by the animal species mankind in accordance with the ranking of needs and appetites systematized in world views. Thereby, reality is fully instrumentalized; metaphysics comes to culmination in the technological remaking of the world.
Technology as a Mode of Revealing: The “Brink of a Precipitous Fall”
The essay “The Age of the Word Picture” traces the process by which Kantian schematization is taken off the drawing board, so to speak, and put to work. The result is an instrumentalized reality approximating the “totality of equipmental relations” described in Heidegger’s Being and Time.80 Yet this instrumentalist mode of revealing, in which human positing and “setting before” create the illusion of mastery, is rapidly subsumed by a different, more comprehensive ordering, the “enframing” (Gestell) of technology. For Heidegger, the advent of the technological world signals the culmination of the metaphysical project of grasping and securing all that is; but it also signals the “death of the subject” insofar as it marks the transformation of anthropocentric instrumentalism into a “framing” that attacks or “challenges” humanity itself. With the advent of the technological world-ordering, “self-assertive man,” the initiator of the modern project, becomes “the functionary of technology,” the creature of an “ordering revealing.”81
It is the irony of the modern project—the fact that self-assertion drives humanity to “regulate and secure” itself—that forms the underlying theme of “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954).82 Heidegger’s explicit purpose in this essay is twofold. First, he wants to disabuse us of the current “correct” (instrumental and anthropocentic) conception of technology. Technology, he argues in the first half of the essay, is something quite different from a means, or an instrument. Second, Heidegger wants to show how an unbounded instrumentalism outstrips itself, creating a world in which the means/end category is no longer meaningful. The new reality is more accurately characterized by the “inclusive rubric” of “standing reserve.”83 In the technological framing of the world, Heidegger argues, everything that is comes to presence as essentially raw material. Humanity is not exempt from this framing; indeed, “The Question Concerning Technology” seeks to illuminate how technological revealing threatens humanity with a loss or dis-essencing of its disclosive capacity. According to Heidegger, the attempt to ground and solidify the place of humanity amidst that which is (the metaphysical project) leads, in its technological form, to the “brink of a precipitous fall”84—to the “fixing” of man as laboring animal.
For Heidegger, it is the possibility of such “fixing” that makes technological revealing a “threat” to humanity’s disclosive nature.85 The question concerning technology is, ultimately, a question about human dignity. What is at stake is the preservation of a sense of humanity’s disclosive (nonteleological) relation to Being, a relation that has been concealed by the metaphysical tropes of correspondence and self-grounding. This relation, Heidegger maintains, is all but destroyed by technological enframing, an economy of presence that provides a truly definitive (that is, final) answer to the metaphysical question of why man exists.86
“Human dignity” may seem an odd category for Heidegger, the critic of humanism, to invoke. The confusion here, however, arises from a superficial reading. When, in the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger famously (some would say, notoriously) suggests abandoning humanism to its fate, he does so precisely because this humanism, in its metaphysical determination, “does not set the humanity of man high enough.”87 Metaphysical humanism reifies the “open possibility” of human existence into a “what,” the better to provide an answer to the question “Why is it necessary for man to exist at all?” This question—a degrading question, as Kateb notes88—lies at the root of all metaphysical attempts to “jump over our own shadows” and delimit humanity from a God’s-eye perspective. Metaphysical humanism presumes that existence must be redeemed by essence; that the world has value only in relation to this essence; and that human inessentiality is equal to nihilism.89 In these ways, such humanism promotes what Heidegger calls “forgetfulness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit). Heidegger’s point in “The Age of the World Picture” is that the modern anthropologizing version of metaphysical humanism sets the stage for an even more radical forgetting: the “fixing” of humanity not as subject, but as “the most important raw material.”90 It is this more radical forgetting that Heidegger addresses in “The Question Concerning Technology” and elsewhere, under the somewhat misleading rubric of the “threat” to man’s “free essence.”91
Heidegger’s stated aim in QCT is to prepare a “free relationship” to the “essence” of technology (QCT, 4). To inquire into the essence of something means, traditionally, to ask what that thing is. The answer given to the question What is technology? is, typically, one of two statements: technology is a means to an end; it is a human activity (QCT, 4). These broad characterizations belong together, according to Heidegger, since “to posit ends and procure and utilize the means is a human activity” (QCT, 4). And this is how we normally think of technology, namely, as a “complex of contrivances” for the achievement of human ends. Technology is “the manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and the ends they serve” (QCT, 4). This description of the “what” of technology Heidegger calls “the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology,” a definition that possesses an “uncanny” correctness insofar as it applies to modern as well as older handwork technology (QCT, 5). Who, after all, would question that to “power plant with its turbines and generators is a man-made means to an end established by man” or that the “jet aircraft and the high frequency apparatus are means to ends”? (QCT, 5). Technology, whether primitive or advanced, is a tool, an instrumentum.
It is in terms of the “correct” definition of technology (as a means to an end) that the “problem” of modern technology has been framed as an issue of control. Since the industrial revolution, man’s tools have appeared to take on a life of their own: means have transformed themselves into ends, and humanity has become the servant of its instruments. This is the phenomenon that Marx addressed as reification, and that Weber analyzed under the rubric of rationalization.92 Where means become ends, it is a question of reasserting human control—of regaining our alienated subjectivity, as Marx would say. In this way, the instrumental conception of technology conditions “every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology”: everything seems to depend upon our manipulating technology in the proper manner as means (QCT, 5). Thus, the task we set for ourselves: “we will, as we say, ‘get’ technology ‘spiritually in hand.’” We will master it” (QCT, 5). The more technology threatens to slip from control, the more urgent becomes the will to mastery.
Heidegger, however, poses an unsettling question: “Suppose that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it?” (QCT, 5). This question implies that the “correct” definition conceals at least as much as it reveals. And indeed, according to Heidegger, “the correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology’s essence” (QCT, 6). But this essence—the “true”—can be pursued only by way of the “correct.” Accordingly, the question concerning technology must proceed by first inquiring into the nature of the instrumental as such: “Within what do such things as means and ends belong?” (QCT, 6). The answer to this question is that a means “effects” or “attains” something; it is a cause. Likewise, the end that determines the choice of means in also considered a cause. Thus, “wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality.” (QCT, 6).
Heidegger, at this stage in his argument, departs on what seems an inexplicable tangent. He inquires into the Greek understanding of causality, an understanding that, he argues, has been obscured by the tradition’s reification of Aristotle’s doctrine of fourfold causality. Underlying the instrumental or teleological understanding of causality as effect or goal is an older, “poetic” notion of causality: “The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else” (QCT, 7). Thus, for the Greeks, a silver sacrificial chalice is not produced by an artisan who imposes form on material, in order to create an object that fulfills a particular purpose. Rather, the “material,” silver, and the “form,” the “aspect of chaliceness,” are contained in advance within the realm of “consecration and bestowal” (QCT, 8). This “bounding” determines what the thing will be: it is the space out of which the sacrificial chalice is what it is. This bounding, together with the silver itself and the “aspect” of chaliceness, are “coresponsible” for the presencing of the chalice. The silversmith “gathers” these three modes of responsibility together, indebting himself to them as he participates in the “bringing-forth” of the vessel (QCT, 9).
Heidegger’s description of the “fourfold coresponsible bringing-forth” at work in the presencing of the sacrificial vessel appears, at first glance, to be a classic example of Heideggerian kitsch. Causality is transformed into something mysterious through the invocation of the primordial powers of the pastoral and the sacred. The description, however, has a point; namely, to show that causality experienced as “bringing-forth” is a form of poiēsis or presencing (QCT, 10). Poiēsis, thought of primordially, is a bringing into appearance, just as physis is. Both involve the “bringing-forth” out of concealment into unconcealment; both are forms of revealing, or aletheia (QCT, 12).
What does this have to do with causality as effecting and instrumentality? What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? (QCT, 12). The answer, of course, is everything. For not only is every bringing-forth a revealing, but all causality, all instrumentality, and all technology arise from this “domain” of bringing-forth. Technology, thought of “correctly” as means, refers us to causality, and the essence of causality lies in bringing-forth, in revealing: “If we inquire, step by step, into what technology represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing” (QCT, 12). Thus, technology is no mere means; technology is a way of revealing (QCT, 12).
The essence of technology may lie in revealing, in bringing to presence, but it is clear that the mode of unconcealment that rules in technology is radically different from a “bringing-forth in the sense of poiēsis” (QCT, 14). The latter was harmonious with physis; indeed, Heidegger describes physis as “poiēsis in the highest sense” (QCT, 12). In contrast, “the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (QCT, 14). Heidegger deploys a set of contrasts designed to underline this challenging. The windmill, for example, did not “unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it,” whereas “a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore” (QCT, 14). Similarly, the work of the peasant did not “challenge the soil of the field,” whereas the “mechanized food industry” sets upon nature to set it in order, to make it deliver up the resources necessary to keep the endless cycle of production and consumption going (QCT, 15).
If Heidegger were simply bemoaning the loss of pastoral wholeness, it would be easy to dismiss his analysis with Adorno-esque contempt. But the German romantic examples—culminating in Heidegger’s horror that the Rhine of Hölderlin’s hymns has become a “water power supplier”—serve a larger purpose. They help to elucidate the kind of revealing that holds sway in our world:
The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing (QCT, 16).
The world created by technological revealing imposes an inclusive instrumental grid, in which the activities of unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about occur. What distinguishes this world from the more familiar equipmental totality of Being and Time is that the ends of the nexus of instrumental relations have been transferred to the level of the system as a whole. The result is that a continual (and, strictly speaking, endless) “regulating and securing” subsumes purposive activity per se. The instrumental totality is automatized in the perpetual self-activity that constitutes the different modes of regulating and securing. This has a peculiar—and, from Heidegger’s point of view, decisive—consequence. When the only “goal” is that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering,” then everything presences—is revealed—as “standing-reserve” (QCT, 17). With this “inclusive rubric,” Heidegger designates “nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing” (QCT, 17).
Heidegger’s thesis, then, is that the revealing of technology projects an ontological horizon limited to the standing-reserve. As an inclusive ontological rubric, standing-reserve designates a fundamental transformation. Things no longer stand over against us, as objects; rather, they stand by us (QCT, 17). Tools and instruments lose whatever residual autonomy they might have had as their “standing” is framed by the “ordering of the orderable.” Of course, machines can still be represented as objects; for example, the airliner on a runway. But such a representation acts to conceal what and how the machine now is: the airliner stands ready to provide transportation. It is not a tool, but part of the “stock” of the transportation industry.
The claim that things no longer presence essentially as objects or tools implies that the subject or producer has, somehow, disappeared. This raises the question of “who accomplishes the challenging setting-upon through which what we call the real is revealed as standing-reserve?” (QCT, 18). The answer, obviously enough, is man. Through his “conceiving, fashioning and carrying through,” man “accomplishes” this revealing. However—and the point is key for Heidegger—man “does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws” (QCT, 18). But what does it mean to accomplish a revealing without controlling it? Heidegger gestures here to one of the fundamental tenets of his historical ontology, a thought explicitly at odds with all forms of metaphysical humanism. Particular epochal economies of presence are never consciously deployed by man; rather, they form that outermost horizon within which humanity orients itself, structuring its practices and projects. Against the Cartesian assumptions of the moderns, the network of background assumptions and practices that form a “world” cannot be rendered transparent or reduced to an object of manipulation. In other words, the “light” in which Being reveals itself is not reducible to the projection of the subject. Heidegger expresses this thought metaphorically when he states that such precomprehensions of what is are “sent” us, and “send” us on a way of revealing (QCT, 24).
As a mode of revealing, then, modern technology is “no merely human doing” (QCT, 19). Through it, man is “challenged” to reveal the real in a particular way, as standing-reserve. Just as the “bringing-forth” of poiēsis called or “gathered” man to reveal the real as physis, so the “challenging claim” of technology “gathers” man into an ordering, and concentrates him “upon ordering the real as standing-reserve” (QCT, 19). The name Heidegger gives to this challenging claim is Gestell, Enframing: “Enframing means the way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological” (QCT, 20). As the “challenging ordering” that “sets upon” man to reveal the real as standing-reserve, Enframing stands in the starkest possible contrast to the bringing forth of poiēsis. Yet, Heidegger reminds us, they “remain related in their essence,” as modes of revealing (QCT, 21).
Enframing designates “nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine” (QCT, 23). It is a mode of revealing that “sets upon” man and thereby “puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve” (QCT, 24). The self-understanding of the moderns, in which science enables man to assume a position, a kind of Archimedean point, from which the world can be reduced to the representable and “disposed” of, is revealed as an illusion. We are “in the picture,” to be sure, but not in the hegemonic way presumed by the modern subjectification of the real. Man “stands within the essential realm of Enframing. He can never take up a relationship to it only subsequently” (QCT, 24). In other words, he is always already “framed, claimed, and challenged” by a destining that sends him into this way of revealing: “Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over man” (QCT, 25). But, as Heidegger gnomically adds, “that destining is never a fate that compels” (QCT, 25).
The paradoxical nature of this statement is lessened when Heidegger reminds us of the nature of freedom understood from his ontological perspective. This freedom, the freedom of revealing, is the freedom that governs the open space of any “clearing” (QCT, 25). It consists “neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws,” but in “the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way” (QCT, 25). Only within a space so destined does a set of possibilities emerge, and do practices and projects appear. In this sense, every revealing, every clearing, is a “destining” in that it situates man in a particular world and furnishes a field for his disclosive activity. Yet in addition to being the site of primordial (ontological) freedom, the “destining of revealing” is also a danger (QCT, 26): it raises the possibility that man may reify a given set of practices/possibilities and thereby lose sight of—“forget”—his disclosive character. Beyond this essential (one could say, structural) danger lies what Heidegger calls the “supreme danger”:
… when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall: that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always only encounters himself. In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. (QCT, 27; the first emphasis is mine)
Enframing is the “supreme danger” because, more than any other mode of revealing, it thrusts the phenomenon of revealing into oblivion. It radicalizes Verfallenheit (fallenness) by enabling the regulating and securing of both man and world as standing-reserve. With this securing, the dream of metaphysical humanism is realized: the “open possibility” of Dasein (there-being) is replaced by a grounded actuality, a humanity that encounters only itself when it looks upon nature or the world. Technology is thus the vehicle of Geist’s (spirit’s) return to itself. But what appears, from a Marxian or Hegelian standpoint, as the moment of reconciliation is, in fact, the extreme degree of alienation or “homelessness,” or of disconnection from the essential contingency of disclosure. As “lord of the earth,” the subject extends its instrumental horizon through “uncreative positing” and the reduction of the real to the representable. The “brink of a precipitous fall” is reached when this disclosure no longer even takes the form of a relentless objectification. The step beyond modern self-assertion is Western humanity’s late modern submission to the regime of ordering as such. The contingency of this regime is lost sight of as the “orderer of the standing-reserve” accepts its “fate” as “the subject of all consumption,” as the “most important raw material.”
The irony of the subjectification of the real reveals itself. The framing of the world as picture turns out to be merely the prologue to the universalizing of Gestell (Enframing), of the technologizing attitude that “drives out every other possibility of revealing” (QCT, 27). “Banished” into an ordering revealing, man seems to encounter only himself; in fact, Western humanity’s acceptance of the “fate” of technology and its role in the ordering revealing ensures that it will never encounter itself, its disclosive essence, within the frame of technology. Western humanity gets what metaphysics has always desired: a release from “guilt” (finitude), a secure basis, and the constant presence of all that is (as standing-reserve). Metaphysics’s will to ground, power, and security culminates in the technological framing/dis-essencing of man as standing-reserve. The “completely humanized world” is, in fact, a technonihilistic world—a world driven by the demand for increased power and orderability, a world in which global cycles of production and consumption “fix” man as the laboring animal.
III. ARENDT ON MODERNITY: WORLD ALIENATION AND THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE POLITICAL
Modern World Alienation and the Subjectification of the Real
At first glance, Arendt’s critique of modernity seems to have little in common with Heidegger’s. Arendt’s analysis is determined, largely, by her desire to preserve the autonomy of action from the instrumentalizing attitude of homo faber. This, needless to say, is not Heidegger’s worry. Indeed, viewed from the perspective of Gestell, all forms of human activity—acting as well as making—appear as expressions of the “will to will.” For Heidegger, the only “cure” for modernity’s will-to-will is Gelassenheit, letting beings be (a kind of “will-to-not-will,” as Arendt puts it). Praxis provides no response to the pathologies of modernity; rather, it is part of the problem. Hence Heidegger’s statement in “Overcoming Metaphysics” that “no mere action will change the world,” a sentiment he echoes in the Spiegel interview.93
The gap between Arendt and Heidegger seems to widen when we note that Heidegger’s entire story about the modern subjectification of the real is presented in terms of Seinsgeschichte; that is, in terms of a metanarrative about Being’s self-withdrawal. The idealism of this metanarrative (in which the history of metaphysics provides the trace of a secret, “all-determining” history of Being) stands in stark contrast to Arendt’s focus on specific phenomena and events.94 Moreover, Arendt’s hostility to narrative structures of the Hegelian sort rules out any easy assimilation of her story to Heidegger’s.
The differences, however, ought not to hide the continuities. Arendt’s The Human Condition can be read a number of ways; for example, as a phenomenology of action, or as a contribution to public realm theory. Yet such readings become misreadings if they try to detach what Arendt has to say about action or the public realm from her narrative about the “loss,” “destruction,” and “disappearance” of the public world in modernity.95 Everything Arendt has to say about action and the public realm is framed in terms of an analysis of the de-worldling of the public world in the modern age. The fact from which she begins is the loss of this specific reality, what she calls “the eclipse of the common public world.”96 This is not to say that Arendt denies that we late moderns have a public realm; rather, her point is that this realm has “lost its power” to gather us together, to “relate and separate” us as a world properly should.97 In our public realm, being and appearance hardly coincide: the plurality of perspectives necessary for such a space of disclosure has both fragmented and flattened into the uniform gaze of mass society.98 The reasons for this state of affairs are complex and constitute the heart of HC; the result is more straightforward. According to Arendt, the human condition of late modernity is characterized by the deprivation of an authentically public reality: the “shining brightness” has become an obscuring glare.99
The “innermost story of the modern age,” then, concerns the destruction of this common world, the public reality, and the correspondingly fugitive nature of the political.100 The ontological thrust of Arendt’s analysis in HC is that the events and energies of modernity have worked to undermine and finally destroy the “durability” and “tangibility” of the public world. Thus, an epoch that appears to usher in a new worldliness—and new opportunities for a “groundless” politics (see On Revolution)—in fact carries world alienation to its farthest possible extreme. In describing the animal laborans as “worldless,” Arendt designates a creature bereft of the specific reality necessary for a “truly human life.”101
What is modern world alienation and what connection, if any, does it have to Heidegger’s thesis concerning the subjectification of the real?
In the last chapter of The Human Condition Arendt cites “three great events” that “stand at the threshold of the modern age and determine its character”: the discovery of America, the Reformation, and (most peculiarly) the invention of the telescope.102 The fear that one is in for a World Civilization lesson is dispelled when Arendt describes what gives these events their emblematic significance. The discovery of America is important not because it opens the New World, but rather because it signals the moment at which the earth, “the quintessence of the human condition,” becomes subject to “the human surveying capacity.” With this discovery, man’s earthly surroundings are conceivable as object. The Reformation is significant not because of its contribution to secularization and loss of faith, but because with it began the process of expropriation through which millions ultimately lost their property, their “place in the world,” and became subject to an unlimited, socialized accumulation of wealth. Finally, Galileo’s invention of the telescope looms large because it “confirmed” the Copernican theory and demonstrated that man had indeed been deceived by his senses. With this confirmation the traditional concept of truth was destroyed.103
From Arendt’s perspective, each of these events figures as an origin of modern world alienation. As a constellation, they mark a fundamental transformation in Western man’s relation to his surroundings, his “being-in-the-world.” Thus, the discovery of America begins the process of shrinkage by which the vastness of the earth is reduced to objectifiable dimensions—a process recently completed: “Only now has man taken full possession of his mortal dwelling place and gathered the infinite horizons into a globe whose majestic outlines and detailed surface he knows as the lines in the palm of his hand.”104 With the discovery of America, in other words, the earth becomes a representable object. Henceforth, man can alienate himself from his “immediate earthly surroundings” in order to picture the world; this picturing, in turn, is the sine qua non of its conquest: “Before we knew how to circle the earth, how to circumscribe the sphere of human habitation in days and hours, we had brought the globe into our living room to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes.”105
The Reformation presents us with an “altogether different event” from the shrinkage of the world, yet it “eventually confronts us with a similar phenomenon of alienation.”106 Arendt sees the innerworldly alienation analyzed by Weber as equally present in the expropriation of the peasantry, an event that was an “unforeseen consequence” of the expropriation of the church. This expropriation, through which “certain strata of the population” are deprived of their “privately owned share of a common world,” sets the stage for further appropriation, and for a process of wealth accumulation that has become both social and endless:
Expropriation, the deprivation for certain groups of their place in the world and their naked exposure to the exigencies of life, created both the original accumulation of wealth and the possibility of transforming this wealth into capital through labor. These together constituted the conditions for the rise of a capitalist economy. What distinguished this development at the beginning of the modern age from similar occurrences in the past is that expropriation and wealth accumulation did not simply result in new property or lead to a new redistribution of wealth, but were fed back into the process to generate further expropriations, greater productivity, and more appropriation.107
The “self-expansion of value” under capitalism can continue only so long as no boundaries hem in the accumulation process. No “worldly durability and stability” can be permitted to interfere with the cyclical, expanding nature of this process.108 In Arendt’s terms, “the process of wealth accumulation, as we know it … is possible only if the world and the very worldliness of man are sacrificed.”109 Property, in the sense of a “privately owned share of the common world,” must be largely abolished; things, use objects, must be replaced by consumer goods; the bulk of the population, finally, transformed into nomadic labor-power. Expropriation is thus the first step in the progressive undermining of the durability and tangibility of the world.110
The invention of the telescope stands for the last great origin of modern world alienation, the “universal” standpoint of modern science. What Galileo’s invention did was to underline the necessity of taking up a position outside the world if one wanted to avoid being deceived by the senses. Copernicus had imaginatively attained such an Archimedean point: Galileo’s confirmation makes the adoption of such a speculative standpoint imperative. Henceforth, knowledge must adopt the standpoint of the universe, and view the earth as but one more object within that frame. Arendt describes the ambivalent nature of this withdrawal into the universe:
Both despair and triumph are inherent in the same event … it is as if Galileo’s discovery proved in demonstrable fact that both the worst fear and most presumptuous hope of human speculation, the ancient fear that our senses, our very organs for the reception of reality, might betray us, and the Archimedean wish for a point outside the earth from which to unhinge the world, could only come true together, as though the wish would be granted only provided that we lost reality and the fear was to be consummated only if compensated by the acquisition of supermundane powers.111
The “despair and triumph” manifest in this withdrawal has faded as the universal standpoint is increasingly taken for granted. As Arendt remarks, “Whatever we do today in physics … we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth.”112 To be sure, we have not found an actual Archimedean point; yet it is clear that we “have found a way to act on earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside.”113 The modern scientific project is “Archimedean” in essence: as knowers and manipulators of natural processes, we are “universal,” rather than worldly, beings. Our knowledge and power arise out of a rigorously maintained alienation from the world, the necessity and utility of which first announced itself with Galileo.
In modern science, as with the conquest of the globe, we encounter world alienation in its triumphal form. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two. The world picture of modern science places the representing subject at an infinitely vaster imaginary distance from the earth. Thus, according to Arendt, “earth alienation,” rather than mere world alienation, is the “hallmark of modern science.”114 Indeed, “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.”115 Only the withdrawal into the universe by modern sciences fully accomplishes the objectification of the earth, allowing it to appear as a fit candidate for “completion” (Kant), alteration, or destruction. As Kateb observes, the fruit of the Archimedean project—of the desire to dispose of the earth from the outside—is nuclear weapons.116
Each of Arendt’s “three great events,” then, illuminate a dimension of the modern withdrawal from the world. But what does this withdrawal, this alienation, have to do with the “subjectification of the real”? Once more, the answer is everything. The threshold traced by these events marks nothing less than a fundamental transformation in our “comprehension of Being” and our mode of comportment toward the real. The “twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self” is a reactive move, but it is also the precondition for the “becoming picture of the world” (a fact driven home by Arendt’s theme of the “Archimedean point”). And, as with Heidegger, this “becoming picture” is prelude to the conquest of the world by homo faber, whom Arendt refers to throughout The Human Condition as “lord and master.” Like Heidegger, Arendt sees the will to ground underlying this retreat as inseparable from the will to power. Modernity’s relentless subjectification of the real—its reduction of the world of appearances to (on the one hand) subjective experience and (on the other) the “objective” constructions of modern science—terminates in a world, a nature, and a universe in which man again and again “only encounters himself.”117 Like Heidegger, Arendt sees this total humanization of reality as the most extreme form of alienation.
There are, of course, differences. Heidegger concentrates on the “fundamental metaphysical position” of the modern age, on the way the figure of the subject swallows the entire horizon of the real. Arendt is concerned with the same general phenomenon, but from the point of view of its implications for the vita activa. Thus she concentrates on the modern reduction of freedom to will, property to the laboring subject, and the phenomenal world to the constructs of the knowing subject.118 Throughout, her emphasis is upon the way the theory and self-understanding of the modern age have consistently worked to undermine the durability and tangibility—the worldliness—of these phenomena. Hence, for the modern mind, “freedom is never understood as an objective state of human existence”; nor is property understood to have any other ground than the living, laboring individual; nor, finally, is the “objectivity” of the world, its common character, understood to have any other ground than the patterns of the human mind itself.119 Science, philosophy, economic and political theory: all conspire to cover over both the phenomenon of world and the worldliness of phenomena.
The effects of this pervasive subjectification cannot be undone by a revised self-understanding: for Arendt, it is hardly a question of theorizing ourselves into a more “worldly” form of existence. Modern theory’s reduction of freedom, property, and the phenomenal realm to subjective structures or capacities is not the problem so much as a symptom. The real problem, for Heidegger as well as for Arendt, is the existential resentment that drives modern humanity to take itself so far out of the world, to ascribe to itself a position from which the world might be disposed of. The “radical novelty” of modernity consists in the fact that “now, for the first time is there any such thing as a ‘position’ of man.” Now, “for the first time,” there is a distance, an alienation, that encourages and makes plausible the Archimedean project of utterly transforming the conditions of human existence.120
From Homo Faber to the Animal Laborans: Instrumentality, Technology, and the “Destruction of the Common World”
Arendt sees the two sides of modernity’s “flight” from the world as intimately connected. The universal standpoint of modern science demands the transcendence of the limits imposed by earthbound experience and the evidence of the senses. This transcendence is achieved, according to Arendt, by the mathematization of science and the real, and by the deployment of the experiment.121 The former reduces terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical symbols; the latter assertively subjects nature to conditions imposed by the human mind, eschewing what Kant called “accidental observation.”122 The result of the modern reductio scientiae ad mathematicam is the translation of “all that man is not” into “patterns that are identical with human, mental structures.”123 Echoing Heidegger’s insight in “The Age of the World Picture,” Arendt emphasizes how the projection of such a mathematical “ground plan” of nature guarantees that man could “risk himself into space and be certain that he would not encounter anything but himself, nothing that could not be reduced to patterns present in him.”124
Thus, the “condition of remoteness” demanded by the Archimedean point is attained by purely mental means. But this trick, if we can call it that, carries its own dangers. On the one hand, it frees humanity from the “shackles of finitude” and earthbound experience; on the other, it seems to deprive humanity of any possible certainty, of any firm ground for knowledge of or action upon the world. The thoroughgoing reduction of appearances by mathematical and experimental means achieves a standpoint that is at once everywhere and nowhere, unmoored and apparently arbitrary. The relativity built into modernity’s “flight” to a universal standpoint is an aspect of the Copernican revolution and the discovery of the Archimedean point that has only recently come to widespread consciousness.125 The result is that we are haunted by the arbitrariness of our projections, and by the suspicion that a mathematical order can be “discovered” for even the most clearly haphazard array of elements. This suspicion, and the “outrage and despair” that accompany it, are unavoidable consequences of Galileo’s discovery, a discovery that demonstrates, through its “confirmation” of the Copernican hypothesis, that Being and Appearance have parted company for good.126 In Arendt’s view, the world we live in is determined by this event—by the disappearance of a truth that reveals itself and by the “radical change of mind” this disappearance entails. The suspected groundlessness of the “universal standpoint”—which has become today a “politically demonstrable reality”—first yielded its existential significance to Descartes.127
Descartes’s philosophy is “haunted by two nightmares which in a sense became the nightmares of the whole modern age”: first, the fear that “everything is a dream and there is no reality”; second, that “not God but an evil spirit rules the world and mocks man,” specifically by giving him a notion of truth but not the capacities necessary to attain it.128 Descartes realized, according to Arendt, that the twin nightmares of the loss of the world and a permanent distrust of our faculties could be escaped only by completing the Archimedean withdrawal with a retreat to the self. The genius of Descartes resides in his explicit articulation of the epistemological assumption underlying modern science; namely, that “even if there is no truth, man can be truthful, and even if there is no reliable certainty, man can be reliable.”129 Whatever salvation there was could “only lie in man himself, and if there was a solution to doubting, it had to come from doubting.”130 The cogito draws the apparently inescapable conclusion: only the firm ground of the self, of introspection, can substitute for the lost certainty of a world fitted to our senses.
The cogito saves reality by shifting inwards, by making the representations of the subject the benchmark of the real: “Man … carries his certainty, the certainty of his existence, within himself; the sheer functioning of consciousness, though it cannot possibly assure a worldly reality given to the senses and to reason, confirms beyond doubt the reality of sensations and of reasoning, that is, the reality of processes which go on in the mind.”131
The ingenuity of Cartesian introspection is manifest in the way it uses “the nightmare of nonreality” as a means to submerge “all worldly objects into the stream of consciousness and its processes.”132 This reduction of the real to representation (Heidegger) not only secures reality; it reopens the possibility of truth and genuine knowledge, now as an “objective” ordering of representations. In making this move (the basis for Kant’s famous “Copernican revolution” in philosophy), Descartes explicitly articulates what Arendt calls “the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the new physical science: though one cannot know truth as something given and disclosed, man can at least know what he makes himself,” namely, the clear and distinct ideas of mathematical science.133
Arendt views the Cartesian subjectification of the real as a sign of “common sense in retreat”: “what men have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds.”134 Where our senses are no longer adequate to fit us into the world, where the reality they reveal is felt to be insufficiently genuine, only a “shared” faculty of formal/mathematical reasoning can provide the simulacrum of a common world. The career of this transcendental supplement, from Kant to Habermas, has been a long (and, for Arendt, unpersuasive) one.135 Nevertheless, it is precisely because Descartes presumes the eclipse of common sense, of our feeling for the world, that he is able to “solve” what Arendt calls “the perplexity inherent in the discovery of the Archimedean point.” It is only by “removing the Archimedean point into the mind of man” that the disorientation experienced by an “earth-bound creature” who has severed its cognitive standpoint from any worldly referent is rendered bearable.136 The Cartesian retreat to the self poses the “patterns of the human mind” as the “ultimate point of reference.” The will to power manifest in the triumphal earth alienation of modern science (the objectification of the real) is grounded by modern philosophy’s internalization of the Archimedean point. As Heidegger noted, for modernity, self-assertion and self-grounding go hand in hand.137
The Cartesian “removal” of the Archimedean point into “the mind of man” ameliorates the “disastrous blow to human confidence” dealt by Galileo’s discovery. Yet this removal, while helping to free man “from given reality altogether,” is finally less convincing than “the universal doubt from which it sprang and which it was supposed to dispel.”138 Cartesian doubt persists throughout the modern age—not, it is true, in the form of a lack of confidence, but rather as the unshakable suspicion that the mathematization performed by modern science and philosophy in order to “save” the real has, in fact, merely created a “dream world,” one that has the character of reality “only as long as the dream lasts.”139 The very success of the Cartesian schematization of the real in terms of a mathesis universalis comes at a price: “wherever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.”140 Such is the cost of ensuring that we encounter, in Heidegger’s words, only that for which we are prepared.
For many, this residual Cartesian doubt is assuaged by the tremendous increase in manipulative power born of modern science’s renunciation of the senses and experimental/mathematical approach to the real. Surely, such people reason, this increase in power demonstrates the essential truth or correctness of “modern science’s most abstract concepts.” The enormous technical accomplishments of modern science, it is presumed, could have been achieved only if experimental science indeed revealed the “authentic order” of nature.141 Yet, according to Arendt, this presumption is wishful, and unwarranted. It flows from the unfulfillable desire to break out of the “vicious circle” installed by the conditions man lays down for the presencing of nature in the experiment:
The world of the experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality, and this, while it may increase man’s power of making and acting, even of creating a world, for beyond what any previous age dared to imagine … unfortunately puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he himself has created.142
This entrapment, of course, is an inescapable consequence of the “constructivist” approach to knowledge made imperative by the demise of a truth that reveals itself. As Arendt writes, “after being and appearance parted company … there arose a veritable necessity to hunt for truth behind deceptive appearances … in order to know one had to do.”143 Foremost among the “spiritual consequences” of Galileo’s discovery, then, is a reversal of the traditional hierarchy between contemplation and action, since certain knowledge could concern only what man had done himself, and this knowledge in turn could be tested only through more doing.144
Strictly speaking, the “reversal of contemplation and action” is no reversal at all, since with the rise of a constructivist/experimental approach to knowledge contemplation, the “beholding” of truth, is rendered “altogether meaningless.”145 In fact, the reversal characteristic of the modern age concerns the relationship between thinking and doing: after Galileo, the latter takes an undeniable precedence. If man can know or be certain only of that which he, as representing subject, “produces and arranges,” then it follows that fabrication provides the new paradigm for securing truth. Thus, “first among the activities within the vita activa to rise to the position formerly occupied by contemplation were the activities of making and fabricating—the prerogatives of homo faber.”146 The ascendency of these productionist prerogatives is manifest not only in experimental science’s reliance upon the toolmaker for its instruments, but also—and more profoundly—in the way the experiment itself tacitly posits a homology between the fabrication of the Creator and the natural processes “reproduced” in the laboratory:
The experiment repeats the natural process as though man himself were about to make nature’s objects, and although in the early stages of the modern age no responsible scientist would have dreamt of the extent to which man actually is capable of “making” nature, he nevertheless from the onset approached it from the standpoint of the one who made it.147
The early modern predominance of a metaphorics of fabrication in science and philosophy (what Arendt calls “the modern blending of making and knowing”) is a direct result of the “shock” of Galileo’s discovery, as underlined by Descartes. Vico’s principle—that we can truly know only what we ourselves have made—becomes indisputable.
The constructivist epistemological stance of modern science and philosophy presumes not only a different approach to the real (the “reversal”), but also a different concept of reality. Arendt follows Heidegger in stressing how modern epistemology is ontology carried on by other means, and how the “victory of homo faber” in the modern age depends, ultimately, upon a transformation in the understanding of that which is underlying the forms of human knowledge:
Nature, because it could be known only in processes which human ingenuity, the ingeniousness of homo faber, could repeat and remake in the experiment, became a process, and all particular natural things derived their significance and meaning solely from their functions in the overall process. In the place of the concept of Being we now find the concept of Process. And whereas it is the nature of Being to appear and to disclose itself, it is the nature of Process to remain invisible, to be something whose existence can only be inferred from the presence of certain phenomena. This process was originally the fabrication process which “disappears in the product,” and it was based on the experience of homo faber, who knew that a production process necessarily precedes the actual existence of every object.148
It is through this fundamental shift in the characterization of the real—a shift effected by the tacit installation of a fabrication metaphorics at the deepest levels—that modern science and philosophy give new life to the productionist prejudices of the tradition. Galileo’s discovery may have destroyed the anthropocentric comfort of a teleological world order, but it also created the opening for a radically instrumentalist anthropocentrism, one that inscribes the entire horizon of the real (both “natural” and “social”) in terms of concept of process. According to Arendt, the modern understanding of the real (which informs modern science, philosophy, economics, and political theory) elevates an aspect of the fabrication process to the status of a comprehensive ontological principle. The result is the “limitless instrumentalization of everything that exists.” The difference between this modern reification of the fabrication experience and the ancient is that the former shifts the focus away from the telos, the end or product, to the “means,” that is, the natural or human process of production itself. “From the standpoint of homo faber,” Arendt writes, “it is as though the means, the production process or development, was more important than the end, the finished product.”149
Paradoxically, it is the postteleological quality of the modern appropriation of the metaphorics of fabrication that both guarantees the “victory of homo faber” and ensures his eventual defeat. The “victory” is apparent in the mechanistic political philosophies of the seventeenth century, which attempted to invent the means by which (in Hobbes’s words) to “make an artificial animal … called a Commonwealth, or State.”150 But it is more generally manifest in the hegemony of a broad set of attitudes arising from the reversal of contemplation and fabrication:
Among the outstanding characteristics of the modern age from its beginning to our own time we find the typical attitudes of homo faber: his instrumentalization of the world, his confidence in tools and in the productivity of the maker of artificial objects; his trust in the all-comprehensive range of the means-end category, his conviction that every issue can be solved and every human motivation reduced to the principle of utility; his sovereignty, which regards everything given as material and thinks of the whole of nature as of “an immense fabric from which we can cut out whatever we want to resew it however we like”; his equation of intelligence with ingenuity …; finally, his matter-of-course identification of fabrication with action.151
What are the implications for politics, for our “attitude towards the world,” when the productionist prejudices of the tradition are stripped of their contemplative character and concretized in a totally instrumentalized reality? And what is the impact of the fact that, in the modern age, “the oldest conviction of homo faber—that ‘man is the measure of all things’—advanced to the rank of a universally accepted commonplace?”152
I have already discussed how Arendt thinks that it has become impossible for us to think about politics in terms other than means and ends. This impossibility flows, in part, from the antipolitical conceptualization of action, freedom, and agency performed by the tradition. Its stronger and more immediate ground, however, is this modern “victory of homo faber.” In the modern age, the mentality of homo faber ceases to be merely the source of a persuasive antidemocratic meta-phorics (as it was for Plato) and becomes—as the passage cited above suggests—an encompassing horizon for the presencing of things. This event (the “victory”) has two chief effects. The first concerns the relation between ethics and politics. Arendt thinks that the hegemony of the means/end category creates a situation in which the credo “the end justifies the means” retains a permanent plausibility as the first maxim of politics.153 The instrumentalization of politics narrows the moral syntax of politics along consequentialist lines, with predictably dire results.
The second effect of this “victory” flows from the internal logic of instrumentalization, and concerns our attitude toward the world. According to Arendt, the advent of an instrumentalist “world view” creates an endless chain of means and ends, in which “all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further end.”154 As we have seen, this promotes a confusion of utility and meaningfulness. Utilitarianism—for Arendt, the philosophy of the modern age—makes the “in order to” the content of the “for the sake of,” and this establishment of utility as meaning generates meaninglessness.155 Moreover, the utilitarianism of a victorious homo faber is haunted by the “perplexity” that it is unable to offer a convincing justification of either the means/end category or the principle of utility. This perplexity is exacerbated by the fact that “within the category of means and end … there is no way to end the chain of means and ends and prevent all ends from eventually being viewed again as means, except to declare that one thing or another is ‘an end in itself.’”156
The colonizing and nihilistic logic of instrumentalism demands that the user—man—be elevated to the position of “end in himself,” lest humanity fall under the rubric of “means.” Yet it is precisely this elevation of man (most famously performed by Kant) that, according to Arendt, issues in a corresponding degradation of the world:
The only way out of the dilemma of meaninglessness in all strictly utilitarian philosophy is to turn away from the objective world of use things and fall back upon the subjectivity of use itself. Only in a strictly anthropocentric world, where the user, that is, man himself, becomes the ultimate end which puts a stop to the unending chain of means and ends, can utility as such acquire the dignity of meaningfulness. Yet the tragedy is that in the moment homo faber seems to have found fulfillment in terms of his own activity, he begins to degrade the world of things, the end and end product of his own mind and hands; if man the user is the highest end, “the measure of all things,” then not only nature … but the “valuable” things themselves have become mere means, losing thereby their own intrinsic “value.”157
Arendt’s description of the “victory of homo faber” draws out the political consequences of Heidegger’s subjectification thesis through a radical shift in perspective. The “tragedy” referred to in the passage above is not the “oblivion of Being” but the degradation of the worldly in-between that accompanies any consistently anthropocentric outlook.158 Arendt’s quarrel with modernity is not that it deepens Seinsvergessenheit (forgetfulness of Being), but that its energies and outlook withdraw humanity from a worldly existence. Modernity’s “world picture” and instrumentalism have the effect of taking man out of the world. In terms of world alienation, modernity excels both the contemplative tradition and Christianity. Its worldlessness is greater because its existential resentment is active, transformative, empowered.
Of course, it is not instrumentality per se that is the root of this degradation of the world. As Arendt is careful to note, “the instrumentalization of the whole world and earth, this limitless devaluation of everything given,” does not “directly arise out of the fabrication process.”159 The problem, rather, lies in “the generalization of the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are established as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men.”160 For such a generalization to occur, the inherent limits of the means/end category must be overcome. Theoretically, the suspension of the telos is prepared by the introduction of process into making at the conceptual level. Practically, it is achieved by a transformation of the production process itself. The transition from “the limited instrumentality of homo faber” to the “limitless instrumentalization of everything that exists”—and thence to the “fixing” of humanity as animal laborans—occurs, as with Heidegger, through the medium of technology.
In Section 20 of The Human Condition Arendt critically engages the Marxian/Weberian theme of reification, noting “the frequent complaints we hear about the perversion of ends and means in modern society, about men becoming servants of the machines they themselves invented.” The problem with such complaints is not so much that they are wrong as that they are superficial. By focusing on the issue of control, they obscure a deeper and more troubling phenomenon, namely, that we are losing the capacity to “distinguish clearly between means and ends.”161 The loss of this faculty is one result of the modern assimilation of work to labor, and to the performance of all work in the mode of laboring. For where “production consists primarily in preparation for consumption,” as it does in laboring, there “the very distinction between means and ends … simply does not make sense.”162
How does work come to be “absorbed” by labor, and instrumentality thereby transformed through the “life process”? The mechanization of labor plays a key role, in Arendt’s view, insofar as it amplifies and extends the natural rhythms of man’s “metabolism with nature,” drawing fabrication into the repetitive cycles of production and consumption and stripping tools of their craft character (as implements or instruments rather than material or inputs). Indeed, according to Arendt, “nothing can be mechanized more easily and less artificially than the rhythm of the labor process, which in turn corresponds to the equally automatic repetitive rhythm of the life process and its metabolism with nature.”163 Nature’s automatism is enhanced by the machine.
Arendt identifies technology with the “replacement” of tools by machines, noting that the full implications of this replacement come to light only with the “latest stage” of technological development, the advent of automation.164 For Arendt, this “event” is “no less threatening” than the degradation of speech encouraged by the mathematization of the sciences.165 The tendency of modern science is to render speech superfluous; the tendency of technological automatism is to render humanity, qua laborers, superfluous. This tendency, however, is not the only, or even the primary, danger posed by technological automatism. Nor, for that matter, is the creation of an utterly mechanized/technologized world:
The danger of future automation is less the much deplored mechanization and artificialization of natural life than that, its artificiality notwithstanding, all human productivity would be sucked into an enormously intensified life process and would follow automatically, without pain or effort, its ever-recurrent natural cycle. The rhythm of machines would magnify and intensify the natural rhythm of life enormously, but it would not change, only make more deadly, life’s chief character with respect to the world, which is to wear down durability.166
Even before modern technology becomes capable of “channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth,” it radically undermines “the very worldliness of the human artifice” by shattering what Arendt refers to as “the very purposefulness of the world.”167 Technological automatism ushers in a mode of production in which “the distinction between operation and products as well as the product’s precedence over the operation …, no longer make sense and have become obsolete.”168 In other words, this automatism extends the “instrumentalization” of the world by eliding the distinction between end and means. The hallmark of the late modern technological real is precisely this dis-essencing of the “categories of homo faber.” Of course, this does not mean that we cease to apply these categories. Like Heidegger, Arendt believes that the late modern consciousness is irreducibly instrumentalist; but, also like Heidegger, she believes that the reality “brought to presence” by technology has rendered instrumental categories more or less anachronisms.
For Arendt, then, the “question concerning technology” is not, finally, about the famous “reversal” of ends and means. Nor is it an issue of regaining control over an instrumentality which, like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” has taken on a life of its own. Along with Heidegger, Arendt believes that such an instrumental/anthropocentric framing of the problem conceals more than it reveals:
The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and the world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. … The question … is not so much whether we are the masters or slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.169
With this passage we see both Arendt’s proximity to and distance from Heidegger. On the one hand, her identification of technology with mechanization and automation clearly commits what is for Heidegger the category mistake of thinking of the essence of technology as “something technological.” On the other hand, she clearly regards technology as something more than an instrument—as disclosive in the broad Heideggerian sense. Technology opens or “clears” a world, but it does so by dimming down, indeed destroying, the equipmental or reified character of “the human artifice.” What we are left with, according to Arendt, is something closer to an environment. Technology, culminating what had been initiated by capitalist expropriation, swamps the human artifice in a process reality, renaturalizing human existence by assimilating it, in all its aspects, to the rhythm of cycles of production and consumption. The “defeat” of homo faber and the victory of the animal laborans is guaranteed by the technological destruction of reification (in the sense of thinghood).170
In the final analysis, then, Arendt’s critique of technology is motivated by the fact that it makes artifice impossible, and thereby deprives humanity of a “proper space” for the exercise of its capacity for action. “Without a world between man and nature,” she writes, “there is external movement, but no objectivity.”171 The parallel between the unreified, unarticulated character of a technologized process reality and what Heidegger calls the “objectlessness” of the standing reserve is clear. Similarly, Arendt also sees humanity as thereby “fixed” qua animal laborans in that all human activities come to be performed in the mode of laboring. The difference between Arendt and Heidegger here is that, whereas for Heidegger we are “at the brink of a precipitous fall,” for Arendt we are clearly fallen:
Even now, laboring is too lofty, too ambitious a word for what we are doing, or think we are doing, in the world we have come to live in. The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the overall life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquillized,” functional type of behavior.172
Through its destruction of the world and its “naturalization” of human existence, technological automatism promotes the mass behavior of the “worldless” animal laborans. We return here to the Heideggerian theme of fallenness (Verfallenheit), albeit in radicalized form. For Arendt, technological automatism and the “rise of the social” combine to create a set of existential conditions that bode ill indeed for human beings as disclosive agents.173 Within the framework of a technologized “national household,” the capacity for spontaneous action shrinks, reducing the human status to that of “the most important raw material.” Hence the great irony of the modern age: the very “means” that help guarantee “the survival of the species … on a world-wide scale” can “at the same time threaten humanity with extinction.”174
IV. A “REJECTIONIST CRITIQUE”? THINKING THE PRESENT FROM AN ARENDTIAN PERSPECTIVE
Arendt’s appropriation of Heidegger’s subjectification thesis illuminates the decline of public reality and the withering of our capacity for action throughout the modern age. Admittedly, she qualifies her conclusions. In The Human Condition, for example, we are told that “the instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else has of course never really succeeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being one of the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether.”175 Moreover, as her interpretation of modern political action in On Revolution makes clear, Arendt thought that authentic political action was manifest in select moments of revolutionary upheaval and resistance. Yet these qualifications do little to mitigate the apprehensiveness and pessimism that colors her approach to late modernity. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she emphasized how totalitarian domination (itself an incarnation of the modernist credo “everything is possible”) attempted a refabrication of man that threatened his very humanity.176 What is unexpected, even shocking, is how this nightmare haunts her thinking about modernity at large. Arendt’s analysis of the destruction of the common world, the rise of technological automatism, and the “victory” of the animal laborans implies that, one way or another, existential resentment will triumph. Modernity will attain its goal of not only remaking the world, but man also.
This line of thought, which gives concrete shape to what in Heidegger remains a vague and somewhat opaque danger, leads Kateb and others to question the validity of Arendt’s critique. From Kateb’s perspective, Arendt’s critique of modernity is totalizing in the worst way: it leads to a rejection of the energies of the modern age on the basis of an essentially religious conviction that humanity exists to be at home in the world.177 Arendt’s emphasis upon the redemptive character of genuine political action hinges, Kateb observes, on the possibility (and desirability) of a nonalienated existence. Thus, “groups of people must be at home in the world first if the frame of memorable deeds, the frame of political action, is to be secured and strengthened.”178 Modernity, however, cultivates human capacities that produce world and earth alienation, and effectively prevent us from being at home and (thus) inhabiting such a frame. Arendt condemns modernity because it destroys the conditions that enable the existential achievement of political action: “The hope is that humanity could be at home rightly. The hope is dashed by modernity.”179
Kateb is right to emphasize the redemptive role political action plays for Arendt. Her desire for reconciliation flows from the tragic sensibility she shares with the Greeks, and it colors her entire approach to modernity. Yet I would suggest that Kateb’s exclusive focus upon the “existential achievement” of political action yields a distorted view of Arendt’s critique of modernity. For while Arendt, like Hegel, idealizes the Greeks as being uniquely at home in the world, she also shares Hegel’s conviction that there is no going back: diremption cannot be undone (this, I take it, is one of the reasons for her fondness for René Char’s aphorism: “Our inheritance was left to us by no testament”; and Tocqueville’s epigram: “Since the past has ceased to turn its light upon the Future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity”). Moreover, Arendt knows that no “rainbow bridge of concepts” will succeed in recovering such wholeness.180
Without the prospect of reconciliation, however, modernity looks like a downward spiral of increasing alienation. Arendt’s political theory, then, would simply be another expression of the “unhappy consciousness” that, as Judith Shklar pointed out long ago,181 followed the implosion of utopian hopes. In fact, it is difficult to avoid this conclusion so long as we, like Kateb, insist upon seeing Arendt driven by the desire to overcome alienation (a desire that transmutes into theoretical mournfulness with the demonstration of the impossibility of reconciliation). Kateb’s story is complicated, however, once we balance the “religious” hope for reconciliation with the weight Arendt gives to the “pagan” value of worldliness. For Arendt, modern existential resentment is bad not because it blocks reconciliation, but because it undermines worldliness. To be sure, “at home-ness” is one of the qualities Arendt attributes to a “worldly” (in Kateb’s terms, unalienated) existence. Yet it is precisely the artificiality, the reified quality, of this “home” that both Arendt’s liberal critics and her communitarian admirers must ignore. Full humanity does not require the absence of alienation, the availability of a homey Gemeinschaft in which one’s group identity provides a form of metaphysical comfort. The “frame” Kateb speaks of, as I have emphasized, is essentially a stage, and the worldly form of existence Arendt champions reserves an especially high place for theatricality. Kateb would have us elide the distinction between theatricality and community, the better to locate Arendt’s antimodernism in terms of familiar categories. However, the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau and beyond (one could include Heidegger in this regard), warns us against the apparent ease of this move. From the beginning, theatricality has been singled out as the enemy of community, artifice as the source of alienation.
Any assessment of Arendt’s critique of modernity, then, must first consider the implications of her performance model of political action. As a crucial dimension of worldliness, theatricality exceeds—indeed, often stands in opposition to—the yearning for community, and for an unalienated existence. This, in turn, reminds us of the specificity of Arendt’s complaint: it is not alienation per se that she combats, but world alienation. One could go even further and say that to be worldly in Arendt’s sense is to inscribe a certain modality of alienation at the heart of one’s existence, and to give this alienation an extremely positive valorization. Arendt’s emphasis upon agonism, performance, virtuosity, persona, and “alienated” representative thinking renders Kateb’s identification of worldliness with the absence of alienation problematic, to say the least. To be at home in the world in Arendt’s sense means to be at home with the estrangement that permeates both the performative conception of action and the notion of “disinterested” judgment. Thus, Arendt is, in her own way, as much a champion of “moderate alienation” as the liberal modernist.182
This puts the “destruction of the common world” and the loss of the sensus communis in a different light. What the modern subjectification of the real and the instrumentalization of politics have done is to render a certain kind of distance, a certain kind of estrangement, supremely problematic. Where the instrumentalist considerations of homo faber or the needs of life dominate, the serious play of politics devolves into administration, coercion, or violence. Our capacity for spontaneous action and judgment resides, ultimately, upon a worldly form of estrangement (by no means the same as estrangement from the world), one that the “extremist exertions” of modernity have radically undermined. One can speak, in this regard, not only of our loss of feeling for the world, but of the world itself. For modernity’s will to will overwhelms the dimension of artifice that “frames” genuine action, destroying mediation and contributing to the growing “naturalization” of human existence.
Arendt’s antimodernism, then, is not totalizing, at least not in the sense of the cultural conservative who abhors the alienation of modern life and yearns for the rootedness of a premodern existence (for example, Heidegger at his most simplistic and loathsome, or Pope John Paul II). But if Arendt’s critique of modernity is not “rejectionist” in this sense, is it perhaps immanent in nature? This is the view taken by many of her admirers who, given their own political agendas, wish to give the widest possible currency to certain aspects of her thought. What are we to make of the claims of Habermasians, communitarians, and participatory democrats in light of the ontological implications of Arendt’s critique of modernity?
Speaking broadly, the members of each of these three schools of thought wish to enlist Arendt in the project of recovering a robust, comprehensive, and unitary public sphere. The explanations offered for how this sphere has been denatured, fragmented, or lost vary. For Habermas, the prerogatives of the public sphere have largely been usurped by the technocratic assertion of the “steering imperatives” of a complex political economy. For the communitarians, the fact that the public world has lost its power to “gather us together” is traceable to an undernourished sense of membership and the absence of animating, shared public purposes (hence the view of the liberal public sphere as a proceduralist shell). For participatory democrats, the framework of liberal constitutionalism combined with late capitalism and the rise of the national security state conspire to undercut democracy and render the title of citizen meaningless. The different diagnoses ought not conceal the fact that all are agreed that the res publica is in dire condition, and that each sees Arendt as providing support for its particular programs. Hence Habermas’s appeal to her “intersubjective” concept of political action, the communitarian appeal to her worldly, “rooted” conception of membership, and the participatory democrat’s appeal to the echoes of civic republicanism in her text. Each school hopes that the pursuit of one of these “Arendtian” avenues will bring us noticeably closer to a genuine—more democratic, just, and meaningful—public sphere.
The notion of a unitary or comprehensive public sphere has recently come in for a good deal of criticism, as scholars working from Foucauldian, feminist, or neo-Gramscian perspectives draw attention to the irreducibility of mechanisms of exclusion in the constitution of any discursive community.183 Arendt’s Greek, hypermasculinist conception of the public sphere would appear to mark her as an extreme example of public-realm theory’s general insensitivity to such concerns. The fact that her work inspires Habermas, the communitarians, and participatory democrats has done little to endear her to champions of difference who wish to expose the disciplinary techniques by which “virtuous” (read: docile) citizens are made, or the power relations implicit in the most resolutely intersubjective accounts of discursive rationality.
Interestingly, what binds Arendt’s contemporary critics and admirers together is the unquestioned assumption that she stands for the recovery of a single, institutionalized public sphere. Of course, Arendt’s work—with its idealization of the public realm of the polis and its invocation of the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition—more or less invites this reading. But, it seems to me, the admirers and critics are a little too fixated upon the “models” of the public sphere they find in Arendt’s text, models they decontextualize and treat as (laudatory or suffocating) normative ideals. One result of this fixation is a general disregard for the central argument of The Human Condition. As we have seen, this argument concerns the de-worlding of the public world manifest in modernity’s relentless subjectification of the real. The upshot of this argument is that, in late modernity, Being cannot possibly equal appearance. Modern world alienation dissolves the sensus communis, with the result that the only things “seen and heard by all” are the false appearances (Heidegger’s “semblances”) offered up under the single aspect of mass culture.184 The mistake of the Habermasians, the communitarians, and the participatory democrats is to assume that there may be a late-modern substitute for this feeling for the world. Arendt is under no such illusion.
In other words, we must take Arendt’s various pronouncements about the “end of the common world” seriously. After this event—for Arendt the defining event of the modern age—the prospects for an authentic, comprehensive, and relatively permanent public sphere fall to just about zero. This is not to say she gives up on action, politics, or “publicity” in the Kantian sense. Rather, it is to say that she is keenly aware of how the energies of modernity, which initially open the possibility of a groundless politics, wind up intensifying the paradox inherent in every revolutionary founding or spontaneous political action; namely, that the moment of “clearing” in which a space of freedom emerges is also the beginning of its disappearance.185 The combination of modern world alienation with the late-modern escalation of the automatism present in life itself renders the appearance of these “islands of freedom” an even more “miraculous” event.186 Late modernity heightens their evanescence; such spaces lead a “fugitive” existence (to use Sheldon Wolin’s phrase).187
It is not a question, therefore, of pretending that we can resurrect the agora or some approximation thereof by appealing to deliberation, intersubjectivity, or “acting in concert.” What matters is our ability to resist the demand for “functionalized behavior” and to preserve, as far as possible, our capacity for initiatory, agonistic action and spontaneous, independent judgment. This project of preservation occurs in a “world” where, as Arendt constantly reminds us, the supports for these activities have been radically undermined.
It is here that Arendt’s concerns intersect most sharply with those of certain “postmodern” theorists. An unlikely constellation appears when we view Arendt’s emphasis upon agonism, plurality, and performance against the backdrop of her more Heideggerian thoughts concerning the destruction of the common world. Seen through this lens, Arendt’s theory of political action, so clearly at odds with a Foucauldian politics of everyday life, links up with Foucault’s concept of resistance. For where the space of action is usurped (as both Arendt and Foucault argue it is), action in the strict sense is no longer possible. Resistance becomes the primary vehicle of spontaneity and agonistic subjectivity, a kind of successor concept to action.188 Similarly, where the public sphere is fragmented and the sensus communis a thing of the past, the autonomy of judgment is preserved by efforts such as Arendt’s and Lyotard’s, which resist the temptation to ground this faculty in a theoretical discourse, and which struggle to provide a phenomenology of judgment “outside of the concept and outside of habit.”189 Finally, in an age that has witnessed the withdrawal of the political, and its dispersion throughout the social body, Arendt’s tenacious effort to think the specificity of the political is hardly an anachronism, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have recognized.190 For where everything is political, nothing is.
Arendt’s critique of modernity, like her theory of political action, eludes easy classification. Too antinostalgic to be “rejectionist,” yet too radical to qualify as “immanent,” it fully displays Arendt’s uncanny ability to combine an Olympian perspective on an epoch with a phenomenology of contemporary existence. Among recent theorists, only Foucault can be said to match her Nietzschean capacity to distance herself from the unquestioned assumptions of the age. This ability is the source of equal embarrassment and frustration for those theorists who believe, with Michael Walzer, that the first duty of social or political critics is to identify with the hopes, fears, and basic values of their community.191 It also clashes with the current prejudice, ironically perpetuated by Foucault, which insists upon viewing theory as a kind of “toolbox,” to be judged and deployed according to strategic considerations.
It is possible, of course, to appropriate Arendt in this way, and to view her deconstruction of the traditional concept of action and her analysis of the “destruction of the common world” as somehow beside the point, as not political enough. The irony of this stance is that it reproduces the “technical” configuration of acting and thinking that she and Heidegger devoted so much energy to questioning. Moreover, it is extraordinarily shortsighted. Arendt’s central theoretical works are of value not because they offer an edifying affirmation of human agency in an age of ideology, or even a vehement repudiation of docility.192 What Arendt learned from the experience of totalitarianism is that all human capacities—and particularly the capacity for action and judgment—crucially depend upon the conditions of their exercise, and that it is indeed possible to uproot capacities that may appear to be part of our “nature.” The urgency of her attempt to “think what we are doing” in The Human Condition flows from this insight. For what Arendt suggests is that the existential resentment underlying much of the modern project may yet succeed where totalitarian ideologies could claim an only temporary victory. The extirpation of the human capacity for action by “peaceful” means is the danger that looms “after Auschwitz.” The light of the public can be extinguished by means other than terror.