3

PLURALITY AS THE LAW OF THE EARTH

Arendt

Human beings in the true sense of the term can exist only where there is a world, and there can be a world in the true sense of the term only where the plurality of the human race is more than a simple multiplication of a single species.

—HANNAH ARENDT, THE PROMISE OF POLITICS

Like Kant’s doctrine of right, which is circumscribed by the spherical shape of the earth, Arendt’s notion of politics is similarly based on “the limited space for the movement of men” determined by the surface of the earth (Arendt 1958a, 52). As we have seen in our analysis of Kant, however, the earth remains in excess of Kant’s doctrine of right insofar as it is based on private property. The earth cannot be contained within his theory of property. Indeed, the earth with all of its inhabitants exceeds his notion of the right to hospitality and his limited cosmopolitanism as guarantees for peace, or, more accurately, we might say Kant’s extraterrestrial relation to the earth makes his cosmopolitanism itself exceed the boundaries that he tries to set for it insofar as ultimately it requires that all rational beings, be they human or not, earthlings or not, throughout all of time and all of space, be united in a general will.

Whereas Kant imagines a distant future in which the human species will have evolved into a peaceful race of citizens of the world, Arendt, respects the need for international law, even while she abhors cosmopolitanism, which she imagines as a nightmarish tyranny of one government over the “whole earth” (Arendt 1968a, 81). Like Kant, Arendt is more comfortable with a federation of nation-states than a world government. Furthermore, she warns against thinking of human beings as a species when talking about politics. Although, unlike Kant, Arendt makes the earth a central theme in her writings, the figure of the earth, and the work that it does in her philosophy, exceeds and outstrips the limitations of her political theory. Taking up the related themes of earth and world, home and statelessness, and witnessing and imagination helps to develop an ethics of earth conservation through analyzing, extending, and sometimes deconstructing those pairs in Arendt’s political philosophy. Analyzing Arendt’s comments about war and world, we can extend Arendt’s insistence on cohabitation and sharing the earth as the ground of politics into the sphere of ethics by putting pressure on her distinction between just war and total war. Finally, expanding Arendt’s notion of amor mundi, ultimately politics must be grounded not only on love of world, but also on love of earth, through which Arendt’s care for the world is extended to the Earth and all of its inhabitants. For, even if we do not share a world with others radically different from ourselves, we do share the earth.

Arendt’s notion of plurality comes up against its limit when we consider the “right” to cohabit the earth. Our coexistence on earth is prior to Arendt’s “right to have rights.” Whatever the problems with Arendt’s theory of rights, taken to its limits, her insistence on plurality as “the law of the earth” entails embracing not only individual and cultural differences but also species difference and biodiversity. Moreover, the question of where to draw the line in terms of what constitutes plurality or a world becomes the sore spot in Arendt’s endorsement of just war. Engaging with Arendt’s arguments against what she calls “total war,” or genocide, as we did with Kant’s theory of property, pushes her theory to its limits by questioning what counts as plurality or “a people.” Whereas Kant’s justification for private property ultimately necessitates implicit acceptance by a general will that unites all rational beings not only on earth but also across the universe and time and space, which taken to its limit makes any justification for private property untenable, Arendt’s justification for war between nation-states ultimately rests on the destruction of any human being as the annihilation of a world, and perhaps even of “a people,” such that any justification for war becomes untenable. In other words, just as, once we follow Kant’s expanding universe, any defense of private property becomes questionable, once we follow Arendt’s shrinking world from “a people,” to a nation-state, to a family or perhaps a couple, to that singular newborn conjured by natality, any justification for killing even one human being becomes questionable. And, if we extend her notion of cohabitation and plurality to other species, then killing even one living being destroys not only a world but also the possibility of the world. For, “total war” is what Arendt calls a “mortal sin” precisely because it not only destroys a world but also threatens to destroy the very structure of world.

Several scholars have used Arendt’s theories, particularly those of earth and world, along with their alienation, to discuss environmental ethics.¹ This chapter takes another turn toward the role of Earth as both a limit concept and a concept of limit that has the potential not only to transform our thinking about political responsibility but also to ground politics in an ethical obligation conceptually, if not chronologically, prior to the possibility of politics. Arendt’s philosophy is essentially about limits and borders.² It is about the borders between concepts, and it is about the limitations—even dangers—of importing a concept from one realm of life into another realm. It is about maintaining borders between nations and the dangers of abolishing nation-states, while, at the same time, it is about limiting state sovereignty and abolishing nationalism. It is about human freedom as necessarily a limited freedom.³ And, it is about protecting our private lives within the four walls of a home where we are safe. For Arendt, limits and borders provide protection from dangers on all sides. And protection is a central concern in her thinking, understandably, perhaps, given that she fled for her life first from Nazi Germany and then from Nazi-occupied France.⁴

PLURALITY OF WORLDS AS THE LAW OF THE EARTH

Arendt opens The Human Condition with a description of the earth as “the very quintessence of the human condition” since it is most probably the only planet where we can “move and breathe without effort and artifice” (Arendt 1958a, 2). She defines the world, as opposed to the earth, as human artifice or what she calls our “man-made home erected on earth” (1958a, 134). In between earth and world, she introduces a third term, nature, which is associated with organic life “outside this artificial world,” and through which “man remains related to all other living organisms” (1958a, 2). Although the earth provides the raw materials with which man builds his home, and nature supports life, both are indifferent to the plight of humans. Only our created world shields us from this indifference and protects us from the many dangers inherent in life on earth. And for Arendt, protection, security, and safety are the building blocks of home, which come through a sense of belonging. The earth itself, then, is not our home until we make it home; before then (if we can imagine a time before the world, which would be a time when we were animals and not yet human) while we lived on the earth, it was not home. And although this is where we belong in the sense that our bodies cannot live any place else, in Arendt’s account, as animals, we do not yet have the sense of belonging inherent in feeling at home. Belonging, it seems, is a property of the world and not of the earth.⁵ And world is distinctive of humankind. In the end, Arendt’s sharp distinction between earth and world, particularly in terms of the association between earth and animal or body and world and human or mind, is problematic.

In an important sense, for Arendt, we do not share the earth, but only the world. Again, as animals on the earth, we share the planet with other species, but for Arendt, like Heidegger, animals are never properly mit-sein, and therefore sharing, properly speaking, is reserved for the human world, which by its nature is necessarily shared (e.g., Arendt 1958a, 176). Whereas in relation to the earth, homo sapiens are an animal species living among other animal species, in relation to the world we are human beings relating in meaningful ways to other human subjects. The world is always plural and shared; there is no private world in isolation. Arendt says, “No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings. All human activities are conditioned by the fact that men live together” (1958a, 22). As an animal species, however, what she calls animal laborans, we are “worldless and herdlike” and therefore “incapable of building or inhabiting a public, worldly realm” (1958a, 160, my emphasis). As an animal species we live on the earth, and only as human beings do we inhabit a world. The world is what makes the earth a home for human beings. In other words, our life on earth—if we can imagine life apart from world—may be necessary for sheer survival, but only when we create a world is it a meaningful life.

The world, says Arendt, “is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (1958a, 55). The world is described in terms of temporality, past, present and future. The earth, on the other hand, is the “limited space for the movement of men” and not identical with the world (1958a, 52). The earth is described in spatial terms as a limit to movement. Given that for Arendt stable products are the building blocks of the world, the world also takes up space. Even if earth and world exist in the same space and the same time, however, they are conceptually distinct, and the implications of this separation are profound. The earth is a limit condition on the world. It limits where we can move. It limits the natural resources with which we construct our world. It limits the conditions of life. Perhaps more important, as we will see, it limits the conceptual resources with which we build our world–and our worlds.

Arendt takes her analysis of the relation between earth, world, life, and home one step further when she maintains, “In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech” (1958a, 173). The earth, then, is the realm of zoë, or biological life, while the world is the realm of bios, or biographical life. And it is through narratives that we share a world.⁶ In terms of the tripartite division of The Human Condition, we could say that labor or animal laborans gives us life, work or homo faber gives us humanity, but only deeds and speech or action gives us a home. Labor converts earth into nourishment for our bodies, work converts earth into natural resources and raw materials to build shelters and a stable world, but only action makes both earth and world a human home and a home for humanity. Action, says Arendt, “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (1958a, 7, my emphasis). Action is possible because of plurality, because as human beings we are not only social beings but also diverse. The relationship becomes more complex when Arendt suggests that while politics is created by men and not by nature, men themselves are products of nature and of the earth: “Politics is based on the fact of human plurality,” but “men are a human, earthly product, the product of human nature” (2005, 93). Given that we become properly human only by building a world in which we can act and speak—that is we become political—the phrase “human nature” is a an oxymoron for Arendt, which is why she talks of the human condition.

In order for humans to be at home on earth or in the world, we need the stable structures built by homo faber, along with the political rights built through collective action. Rights to equality and property are not gifts from nature or God, but rather gifts we give ourselves: “This voluntary guarantee of, and concession to, a claim of legal equality recognizes the plurality of men, who can thank themselves for their plurality” (Arendt 2005, 94). As political groups, we create the basis for equality, property, and all other rights that we extend to ourselves and to others. Although some have criticized Arendt for denigrating and devaluing the private social sphere in The Human Condition, it becomes clear in her later work that an essential feature of politics is to ensure the right to privacy to protect this realm. For Arendt this includes owning private property, to escape the public world, and have a place safe from prying eyes and from government intervention (1954, 186). Property for Arendt is not about dividing up the limited surface of the earth, but rather about having a place of one’s own, a safe place to hide, a home. Certainly this need for home, for a safe haven, is something that we share with all of earth’s creatures. The need for home is not unique to human beings. If we expand our horizons to include dens, nests, lairs, caves, burrows, digs, and holes, we realize that all animals need a safe haven to call home, whether or not their calls refer to anything as abstract as our notion of home (assuming that all human beings share a common notion of home, which, while we all may need or want one, does not mean that we share the same concept of home). Furthermore, if we extend our notion of home to include our environment and our natural habitat, then home eventually expands to include the earth itself and, in this case, home becomes the place we share with all living beings.

If Kant maintains that everyone has the right to property in the sense of the equal right to attain it, Arendt goes further and suggests that everyone has an equal right to private property in the sense of owning a place with four walls to call home. Everyone has a right to a place of her own. So too, Arendt insists on nation-states to ensure these rights. Although she is deeply critical of the homogenizing effects of nationalism and of defining the good in terms of patriotism—she criticizes Hitler for saying that what is good is good for the German people—she does not endorse a world constitution or global citizenship (1966, 300–302). On the contrary, she argues that cosmopolitanism risks the worst kind of world domination and tyranny and that only a plurality of nations can keep each other in check (1966). Politics is based on both the plurality of human individuals and the plurality of nation-states. Plurality operates as both a balance between individuals and states and a limit to individual and state sovereignty. “No man can be sovereign,” says Arendt, “because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth” (1958a, 234; note that here Arendt says that we “inhabit the earth,” whereas earlier we merely lived on the earth and inhabited a world). The same could be said of nation-states. No one state is sovereign over the entire earth because not one state but many exist on the planet. Only through the balance and limitation provided by plurality can we prevent totalitarianism and protect concrete rights. And, for Arendt, natality is what guarantees both plurality and diversity. Each one born is new and brings something unique to the world.

Arendt argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism that appeals to abstract human rights without recourse to concrete rights guaranteed by a state leave individuals unprotected: “The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps … could see … that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger … a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (1966, 300). Fellow men, it seems, are seen as such only when they share in the protections of a state, when they share in the sovereignty of a nation, balanced and limited by others. The human being qua human is not limited by the plurality and diversity of all people, but rather it is an abstraction, an extraction, of the most universal, generalizable, and therefore lowest common denominator, which for Arendt also makes it most like an animal in its mere membership in a species.⁷ This is not necessarily to say that, stripped of its individuality or its nationality, the human is like an animal per se, but reduced to a mere member of a species, homo sapiens, or human being, its status becomes no more than any other animal. Stripped of its distinguishing features and of its nationality, it is no longer our “fellow.”

Fellowship or recognition of our fellows, it seems, comes through political institutions that unite us with common goals or interests. When one is reduced to nothing more than a human being without those shared goals or interests, or, more accurately, shared rights and responsibilities circumscribed by civil codes, then one loses the fellowship of others. Insofar as fellowship is both social and political, it does not adhere to mere species being. Even while outlining the limitations and promise of the human condition, Arendt refuses to endorse a human nature that brings with it any natural rights. Rights are political and not natural. And yet human beings are naturally political beings, if not political animals, on Arendt’s terms. For our shared animality is not what makes us political. Nor can it be the basis for fellowship. Rather, history, traditions, cultures, national identities, can be the basis for fellowship. Ironically, animals, too, share histories, traditions, and cultures, if not national identities. But, even the fellowship of animals cannot be reduced to their membership in a species. Following this Arendtian path, the growing attention to the many examples of cross-species altruism is noteworthy.

Continuing on this route, it is possible to think of our shared earthly home as a common goal and interest. The earth itself can become the basis for shared fellowship insofar as it is our home—our only home. And we all share it. The welfare of the earth, its health and sustainability, is in all of our interests. And, more than ever before, the environmental crisis and threat of climate change may bring humankind together as a species with a shared history and a shared future, which may depend upon coming together as a species, with concern for other species, to attend to our shared home, planet earth. Perhaps the cloud of climate change hanging over all human beings can bring us together beyond nation-states towards cosmopolitanism, not in the sense of a world government, but in the sense of a common cause, protecting and nurturing the earth. Perhaps Arendt’s right to have rights can be grounded on the earth, not because of its limited surface, but rather because it is our home, our only home, the home that we share with all other living beings.

Arendt’s insistence on both private property and nation-states is motivated by her concern with protection, security, and home. Both homelessness and statelessness leave people vulnerable, with no place to “hide” from the glaring intrusions of public life or the arbitrary dictates of the most powerful. Arendt insists that our safety depends on having places to hide (cf. Arendt 1958a, 71). The safety of the body depends on protecting it from the dangers of the inhospitable environment, including storms, heat, and freezing temperatures. But the safety of the body also depends on protecting it from the violence of other people, including crime and war. Arendt calls our bodies our most private property: “the body becomes indeed the quintessence of all property because it is the only thing one could not share even if one wanted to. Nothing, in fact, is less common and less communicable, and therefore more securely shielded against the visibility and audibility of the public realm, than what goes on within the confines of the body” (Arendt 1958a, 112). Just as the surface of the skin “hides and protects the inner organs that are [our] source of life,” so too the walls of our house hide and protect our private lives (Arendt 1981, 25, 29). Arendt says, “These four walls, within which people’s private family life is lived, constitute a shield against the world and specifically against the public aspect of the world. They enclose a secure place, without which no living thing can thrive” (1954, 186; my emphasis). Private property, or home, hides and protects the uniqueness of each human life. Every living thing needs a secure place, an enclosure that shields it. Every living being needs a home, whether it is a house or den, an apartment or nest, a tent or tree-stump. Indeed, it is telling that Arendt associates home with a place to hide, which we usually associate with animals. Like animals, we need a place to hide. Or all animals, including human animals, need a place to hide. And this place is a home. Home as a place to hide and a place to hide as home. We return to the issue of home in relation to all living creatures at the end of this chapter.

Both the private sphere of unique differences and the public political sphere of equality need to be protected.⁸ In themselves the differences that makes us unique individuals, differences Arendt embraces as the essence of natality, threaten the political sphere, based, as it is, on equality. With her theory of natality, she brings together what makes each newborn radically unique—there never was or ever will be anyone else like that one—and the fact that each of us is born into a world of others, a world of plurality, a world we share.⁹ She argues that because we are born we act, and, because we speak, plurality is the condition of our existence.¹⁰ While natality is the hope for world renewal insofar as “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew,” this radical uniqueness seems in tension with plurality (Arendt 1958a, 9). Arendt puts it this way: “In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctiveness, which he shares with everything alive, becomes uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (1958a, 176, my emphasis). Plurality rests on the fact of natality, through which our world is constantly renewed.¹¹ And yet the tension between the singularity of each one and the equality of all is productive insofar as plurality is possible only by virtue of natality, which is to say equality is possible only by virtue of singularity. Equality born out of plurality cannot be a principle that levels individuality and makes each one the same. Rather, equality must confer on each—that is to say we must confer equality on each—the same rights not just in spite of our differences but rather because of them. “Plurality,” says Arendt, “is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (1958a, 8). And, because we are plural, we are political.

Natality makes each individual unique and singular, but our social and political existence is based on our plurality.¹² In an important sense, much of Arendt’s work is an attempt to navigate between the private realm of radical singularity and the public realm of radical equality. The private realm is not a protection for individualism, but rather for uniqueness and difference, for singularity. Arendt is clear that no individual exists in isolation from others. And the equality guaranteed by public state laws is not the equality of the lowest common denominator. Arendt distinguishes political equality from the leveling effects of statistics that turn people into populations and science that treats humans as nothing more than members of a common species.

Yet, in order to keep the private realm from becoming individualism or each against all, and in order to keep the public realm from reducing human beings to numbers, data, or specimens, we need a balance such that each limits the other. Again for Arendt the key to properly negotiating the various facets of human life is limits. Without the public sphere or the world, our earthly existence as unique beings has no meaning. And, without the private sphere wherein we attend to our existence, we are vulnerable to the harsh conditions of homelessness that threaten our very survival through the violence of nature. Statelessness, like homelessness, makes people vulnerable to violence: in this case, the violence of war, torture, and oppression. For Arendt, it goes without saying that animals are both homeless and stateless; they have neither private nor public lives. And yet it seems that, on Arendt’s account, if animals have social codes and rituals that could be interpreted as political, then they too are world makers. And they too transform the given into the made, not only in terms of building or using tools but also in terms of forming a social structure with rules, or we could say with rights and responsibilities.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt describes the necessary tension between differences from birth that are given, on the one hand, and the equalizing of those differences that comes from being a citizen of a state and having rights that are made, on the other:

The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to live outside the common world is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation. They lack that tremendous equalizing of differences, which comes from being citizens of some commonwealth, and yet, since they are no longer allowed to partake in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in much the same ways as animals belong to a specific animal species. The paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general—without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself—and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance.

(1966, 302, MY EMPHASIS)

In this passage Arendt indicates that what is at stake in political rights is not just protection from the violence of homelessness and statelessness but also the protection of a shared common world and access to the world of meaning. When she compares statelessness to animality, she is emphasizing the difference between biological life, or zoë, and biographical life, or bios, without which we are worldless. At stake, then, is not just homelessness or statelessness but also worldlessness. Worldlessness is the consequence of not having or respecting limits. In the case of homeless peoples, they are missing the limits to public surveillance provided by the rights to privacy and property. In the case of stateless peoples, they are missing the limits to dictatorial control of their bodies provided by law. At the extreme, in these cases they may be missing the limits to torture and genocide provided by international laws governing war.

TOTAL WAR AND THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS

Arendt argues that there are limits inherent even in war.¹³ Following Kant, and thinking of war crimes, she maintains that nothing done in war should prevent future peace. But, thinking of nuclear war and genocide, she goes further than Kant and claims that nothing done in war should eliminate an entire world. What she calls “Total War,” which aims to annihilate a race of people from the face of the earth, “oversteps” the limits of war, “limits that declared that the destruction brought about by brute force must always be only partial, affecting only certain portions of the world and taking only a certain number, however that number might be determined, of human lives, but never annihilating a whole nation or a whole people” (2005, 160). This genocidal war also oversteps the limits of politics to the point of annihilating the very possibility of politics because the “sheer existence of a nation and its people” is what is at stake (2005, 159). When this happens, then war is no longer a “means of politics” but rather “annihilates politics itself” (2005, 159). For Arendt, war must remain a means for nations and peoples to settle disputes through force that allows for the coexistence of the hostile parties and the continuation of their nations and their peoples. In other words, any war that puts an end to the possibility of war falls outside the bounds of the political.

For Arendt, the political is “based on plurality, diversity, and mutual limitations” (1968a, 81). Thus, if the aim of war is to annihilate human plurality and diversity, it has gone beyond the limits of what Arendt considers just war because it has gone beyond political aims. Moreover, genocidal war threatens the very possibility of politics. Given that an essential aspect of the human condition is that we are political beings who share a world(s) of our own making, to wage war on an entire subset of the human population is to deny one of the fundamental conditions of our own possibility as human beings, namely the plurality of our cohabitation. The “mortal sin,” as she calls it, of this form of war is that it targets whole worlds, not only in the form of the products resulting from those worlds but also in terms of the culture, history, and traditions that make a meaningful world out of those products: “What perished in this case is not a world resulting from production, but one of action and speech created by human relationships…. This entire truly human world, which in a narrower sense forms the political realm, can indeed be destroyed by brute force” (2005, 161–162). This passage suggests that both a world and the world are destroyed by total war or genocide. While Arendt warns against the total annihilation of all human life and the destruction of the earth itself made possible by nuclear war, this is not what she means when she says that this entire truly human world can be destroyed. A world is destroyed when a culture and its people are destroyed. The world is destroyed when its witnessing structure based on the possibility of dialogic relations between diverse individuals and groups of people is destroyed. Moreover, when a world in its entirety comes under attack, the world comes under attack, not just because every world contributes to the world but also and moreover because trying to eliminate any particular world from the world undermines the very structure of world itself. The structure of world depends upon dialogic relations across diversity. Or, in Arendt’s terms, the structure of the world depends upon speech and action, which are possible only because of human plurality.

Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann and the Nazis can help clarify the relation between a world and the world. Arendt claims that because Eichmann “had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated” (1992, 277).¹⁴ It is important to note that in her remarks on Eichmann she suggests that a genocidal project may be the only one that justifies the use of the death penalty. As if speaking directly to Eichmann, Arendt concludes, “And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang” (1992, 279).

In her extension of Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann, Judith Butler argues that Eichmann’s crime was thinking that he and his fellow Nazis could choose with whom to share the earth. Butler makes the case that human freedom is based on the fact that we cannot choose with whom to share the earth and that the unchosen quality of our cohabitation is essential to both the ethical and political demands of living together: “unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence,” which brings with them “the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes modes of equality for a necessarily heterogeneous population” (Butler 2012b, 24). Even if we can choose with whom to associate, none of us have the right to choose with whom to inhabit the earth. Moreover, we have an obligation to affirm the existence of all others insofar as their very existence is a precondition for politics and we are political creatures. Prior to any contracts or deliberative volition or actions, we cohabit the planet with diverse others. And this cohabitation brings with it both political and ethical obligations to “actively preserve and affirm the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation” (125).

We might add that the reason we cannot choose with whom to cohabit the earth is because earth is our only habitat. As the only habitable planet for all earthlings, earth is not only our habitat and home but also that of every other living being. As earthlings, we have a singular bond to the earth. And, as such, we have ethical responsibilities to it and to its inhabitants. If we cannot choose with whom to cohabit the earth, this applies not only to fellow humans but also to all living beings, to all earthlings. Further complicating the ethical normativity of this cohabitation is that although we do not choose it, we have an obligation to choose it. We have an obligation to preserve and affirm it as actively choosing what we do not choose. That is to say, we have the paradoxical responsibility to choose the unchosen, which is the seat of ethics.

This is the ethical prescription inherent in Arendt’s politics of plurality. If we are dependent upon others for the very possibility of having a world, then we are ethically obligated to sustain them, even if for our own sake. We might ask of Arendt and Butler whether we are required to actively preserve and affirm everyone with whom, and every world with which, we inhabit the earth. It is clear that Arendt does not think that we are required to affirm our cohabitation with Eichmann. Indeed, because he chooses not to share the earth or the world, no one should share with him. It seems, then, that at least in the case of those people or groups whose worldview includes the annihilation of another worldview, we are not obligated to preserve and affirm them. Yet we may still be required to preserve and affirm the unchosen character of the people of the earth in all of their diversity and plurality. In other words, we need to preserve and affirm the unchosen, diverse, and plural character of peoples and world that exist on the earth, even if we are not required by this ethical principle to preserve and affirm specific individuals or groups whose worldview includes denying or disavowing the unchosen, diverse, and plural character of peoples and worlds that coexist on the earth.

Moreover, just as equality is not given, but rather made by political institutions and guaranteed by civil laws, so too cohabitation must be affirmed as an ethical choice. This is to say that although the ethical ground of politics may be that we share the limited surface of the earth and that we do not choose with whom to share the earth, that ground becomes ethical only when we avow cohabitation and affirm it as an ethical decision. In other words, the facts of cohabitation alone are not enough to ensure ethical relationships or political equality or freedom. The facts of cohabitation must be continually interrogated, interpreted, and reaffirmed through questioning and analysis. In this way they become meaningful. For example, we might push the notion of cohabitation beyond the human sphere and talk about our cohabitation with animals or other living things. We could reinterpret cohabitation in a more expansive way that includes all the creatures of the earth. When we do so, our sense of ethical and political obligations shifts dramatically.

By returning to Arendt’s texts in terms of the relation between earth and world, we might develop a more robust account of the ethical and political obligations inherent in the notion of plurality, namely sharing the earth and cohabiting the world.¹⁵ In the passage from Eichmann in Jerusalem in which Arendt suggest that no one has the right to determine with whom to share the earth, she makes a subtle distinction between earth and world. She talks of sharing the earth and inhabiting the world, which is consistent with her discussion of earth and world in The Human Condition where she says that we live on the earth and inhabit the world. But Arendt also formulates the distinction in terms of desires and determinations, namely in terms of the Nazi’s not wanting to share the earth and determining with whom they would inhabit the world. Obviously the two are related since she also speculates that because the Nazis did not want to share the earth with the Jews and certain others they acted as if they had the right to determine with whom to inhabit the world.

Returning to Arendt’s articulation of the distinction between earth and world in The Human Condition, while we can, in a significant sense, determine our world, we cannot determine the earth. For Arendt, the earth is given whereas the world is made, or we could say that the earth corresponds to being whereas the world corresponds to meaning. There is a necessary gap between given and made, being and meaning, which should prevent totalizing ideologies such as Nazism. For when we mistake meaning for being we confuse world and earth, made and given. We mistake our worldview for the natural world and take our world to be the only possible world, the true and correct world opposed to all others. Naturalizing the norms and values of our culture or tradition can be used to justify eliminating anything that is “unnatural.” Taken to the extreme, the collapse of meaning into being can lead to deadly justifications for killing others who do not share the same worldview, all in the name of eliminating what is unnatural or inferior by nature.

Approaching the question of the gap between being and meaning from the other side, so to speak, in Natality and Finitude, Anne O’Byrne argues that the gap between what she calls being and knowing or nature and history protects our freedom. She is concerned with how this gap prevents the human world from being a deterministic one governed simply by laws of nature. O’Byrne argues that although the modern worldview threatens to close the protective gap between being and knowing, Arendt maintains that it will never succeed because “the protective dividing line is never quite eliminated from our conceptual scheme and the human and natural worlds are never co-extensive” (O’Byrne 2010, 102; cf. Arendt 1958a, 324). O’Byrne invokes the notion of natality to explain why. In her brilliant analysis O’Byrne describes Arendt’s natality as a “syncopated temporality” that opens a gap between nature and history through the future anterior tense of birth. In other words, since, in the phenomenological sense, no one is present at his or her own birth, each person’s relation to his origin is subject to a retroactive temporality through which the event of his birth becomes meaningful. O’Byrne says that the fact that the moment of my birth is “irretrievably lost to my experience” makes the claim that we never have direct or complete access to our origins not only a philosophical claim but also “an indication of the very concreteness of the unreachable origin” (104). Furthermore, since this origin is structurally lost to any firsthand experience, it always necessarily comes to me through others. This means that I am for others before they are for me. “The origin from which I am removed is certainly mine, but it also belongs in an important sense to others. Our coming to be is therefore never a singular or solitary emerging into being; it is always, from the very start, a matter of plurality” (106). O’Byrne argues that the syncopated temporality inherent in natality is inherent in all of our experience insofar as every fact or event becomes meaningful to us only through interpretation. The time lag between the event and its meaning is also an ongoing one insofar as we can and do continue to reinterpret the past. In this sense, our origin is never past but always coming to be. O’Byrne concludes, “Action, not only in the political realm but also in the realm of nature, turns out to be belated in such a way that it holds open the gap between event and meaning. Action awaits its meaning in the same way that … birth only later comes to be my birth” (100). O’Byrne’s account of syncopated temporality will become important for later discussions of the origins of both earth and world. For now, however, let’s return to the dangers inherent in closing the gap between them.

In The Human Condition Arendt sets out some of the dangers of closing the gap between event, or being, and meaning, or knowing, which in the terms of this project we could call the gap between the earth and the world. We could describe closing the gap as a kind of confusion between being and meaning, given and made, or earth and world. This confusion is a dangerous category mistake that has practical and conceptual consequences that we should avoid. Perhaps we need further clarification on the distinction between worlds and World before we can understand the distinction between, and relationship of, earth and world. For, as we have seen, it is unclear whether Arendt thinks that we inhabit the earth at all or whether this mode of being is reserved for the habitable world that we create. And we still do not know what Arendt means by the world as opposed to a world. Indeed, to speak of our world, what does that mean? What makes a world mine or ours? How many people does it take to make a world or a people? And with whom do I share a/the world? How many worlds are there: one or many?

Arendt’s analysis suggests that there is one and many. Although she repeatedly uses the phrase “a world” when discussing what human beings create, she also refers to “the world” as what human beings inhabit together. The possibility of different worlds may be most apparent when she says that, through the child, the lovers “insert a new world into the existing world” (1958a, 242). As we have seen, however, she insists that any world is shared; no one has a world of her own. Yet it is unclear how many it takes to constitute a world. How many people make up a world? Is the child a world unto itself, or do the lovers and the child make up their own world? Allowing that there is no plurality of one, how many does it take to make a plurality? This question is crucial in terms of Arendt’s analysis of “total war” wherein she indicates that what is wrong with this type of war, as opposed to other forms, is that it attempts to eradicate an entire population along with its world. Presumably, what she would consider “just war,” on the other hand, kills some members of a race or a group but does not set out to annihilate all of them. Recall that the “mortal sin” of total war is that it annihilates a world, its products, its people, and, more significantly, its history and culture, what Jacques Derrida might call its archive (cf. Derrida 1984). The question remains, how many can be killed without destroying a people or its world? When does a just war turn into total war? How can we draw the line between just war and total war?

In The Promise of Politics Arendt argues that although the Greeks totally destroyed Troy, in a sense Troy and the Trojans still live on in the tales of Homer, who keeps their memory alive. There Arendt maintains that Homer’s song bears witness to both the victor and the vanquished alike—so in a sense the Trojan’s do not perish. Rather they live in Homer’s tales. And thereby “in a certain sense—that is, in the sense of poetical and historical recollection—he undoes that very annihilation” (2005, 163). In a nostalgic tone Arendt seems to lament that the heroic warriors and wars of old have been replaced by genocidal urges to wipe out entire civilizations and completely erase them from the face of the earth. The risk of massacring all members of a race or culture is one horrifying aspect of this type of war; another is the risk of erasing all memory of it. And it is the latter as much as the former that leads Arendt to reject genocide as beyond the limits of both war and politics. In other words, eradicating a population from the face of the earth is the terrible possibility that confronts us in total war and, arguably, in every war. But this horrifying prospect is distinct from destroying their world, which is to say destroying a world and its place in the world. A people may be destroyed or disappear, but their artifacts, literature, and/or pieces of their culture may remain. In a sense lost civilizations can be reclaimed through archeology and history and interpretations and reinterpretations of relics from the past. If a people can be destroyed, but their culture can live on, then we must again ask what constitutes a plurality for Arendt. Does politics require a plurality of people, or a plurality of cultures, or both? If some killing and war is justified, then does a plurality require merely representatives of every culture to satisfy the diversity requirement? If so, how many representatives ensure plurality? Here again, returning to the relation between earth and world may help think through and beyond these questions.

When Arendt insists that what total war threatens is the loss of an entire world, and thereby the loss of politics itself, she is not talking about sharing the earth. Rather, she is talking about inhabiting a world. When Arendt claims that the Nazis thought that they had the right to determine with whom to inhabit the world, what does she mean? Given her insistence on the diversity and plurality of cultures (along with individuals), we can imagine that the Nazis and Jews did not inhabit the same worlds, but rather inhabited radically different worlds. And yet these different worlds also coexist in the world. As we have seen, Arendt defines the world as “what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (1958a, 55). The world, as opposed to a world, is what we share with all human beings, past, future, and present. A world, as opposed to the world, is what we share with some subset, or subsets, of all people on earth, past, present, and future. The world, then, is what we share with all people who ever lived and ever will live on earth (or elsewhere).

Arendt further specifies what she means by “having the world in common” when she describes the combined effect of multitudes of perspectives that together yield the real world: “For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everyone sees and hears from a different position…. Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear” (1958a, 57). Here Arendt specifies that the real, true reliable world is one that exists within various perspectives or, we might say, various worlds. The world is what these various worlds have in common. And each world is a “position” within the world. There could be some worlds, then, that do not have anything, or very little, in common with the real world, for example, the world of a person undergoing a psychotic episode. Note that Arendt does not say that the world is the sum of all other worlds or all perspectives, but only variety of perspectives. Again, we might ask how many perspectives her plurality criterion requires. How many perspectives must converge before we have a true, real, reliable world?

It is helpful to consider that Arendt’s radical perspectivism not only comes out of a Nietzschean embrace of different perspectives but also a phenomenological approach to the world of objects as the combination of all possible perspectives on it. Whereas Husserl thought that through transcendental deduction and imaginative variation we could extrapolate from materials given to our senses to fill in whatever perspectives might be missing in order to get an idea of the thing as it appears to us, Arendt seems to insist on actual historical perspectives, which can be given only by different people through their various narratives or stories. In other words, the philosopher, cannot alone in her study, deduce all sides of any given object and thereby deduce how it appears to us. Yet, like Husserl, Arendt is concerned with how things appear to us. And, like Husserl, she emphasizes the role of imagination in constructing this world of appearances (see Arendt 1953, 391–392).¹⁶

As Anne O’Byrne explains in Natality and Finitude, Arendt is a historical phenomenologist. Her approach is one of taking up various perspectives from history and assessing how things appear in different historical epochs, along with presenting a phenomenological account of the meaning or essence of those epochs. Her historical approach to phenomenology operates to unsettle many aspects of the world that we take for granted or at least various parts of traditions that we may have thought we understood. In other words, Arendt uses history to show us different perspectives on the same thing, concept, or experience. Her appeals to history create an uncanny relation to what we think we know or understand. And yet, as we will see, it is through this uncanny and strange understanding that we may hope to create a home, not once and for all, but continually through questioning what we believe and what we take to be real, true, and reliable in our world.

There is a world only because there are perspectives. And there are perspectives only because there is plurality. Because human beings are diverse and relate to each other across differences, there is a world. “The world comes into being only if there are perspectives” (Arendt 2005, 175). And the more perspectives there are, the more world we have, not just in the sense of understanding the whole or the true world, or the real world, but also in the sense of enriching the meaning of the world. Arendt says, “the more peoples there are in the world who stand in some particular relationship with one another, the more world there is to form between them, and the larger and richer that world will be” (176). For Arendt, human beings are human by virtue of existing together in a world. And a world exists only through the plurality of human relationships. If this plurality or diversity disappears or is annihilated through war, then the world disappears. She couldn’t be more forceful when she claims, “Human beings in the true sense of the term can exist only where there is a world, and there can be a world in the true sense of the term only where the plurality of the human race is more than a simple multiplication of a single species” (176). Without plurality, we are worldless.

We might push Arendt further at this point and argue that the human race is dependent upon the plurality of species and there is a human world only where there are interrelations between humans and other species. The plurality that is constitutive of the human condition extends beyond human diversity and into biodiversity. Even if, with Arendt, we separate world and earth by associating world with the human world of meaning and earth with our given physical limitations or animal bodies, still both the human world of meaning and our existence on the physical earth are dependent upon not just human diversity but also biodiversity. Our imaginations are fueled by our cohabitation with difference species, evidenced by our mythologies, literatures, and even our scientific research, inherently involved as they are with animals. Indeed, animal metaphors fill our language. And it is impossible to imagine what our world or worlds would be like without other animal species sharing our planet. Without our animal cohabitants, the life of the mind, as Arendt calls it, would be severely impoverished, and perhaps even impossible. In terms of our embodied existence, our very survival depends on other species, especially an entire universe of microscopic organisms with whom we share a symbiotic relationship not only on the planet but also within our very bodies. Without a much broader notion of plurality beyond mere human plurality, we cannot begin to understand what it means to inhabit either world(s) or earth. It is clear that Arendt’s notion of plurality needs to expand to include other species, but the question remains of whether or not Arendt’s demand for plurality as essential to the human condition applies to individuals, whether human or nonhuman. This problem is especially acute when we return to her insistence that some war can be justified so long as it is not a total war aimed at annihilating an entire race or people. And what of attempts by human to eradicate entire species, especially those seen as invasive, pests, or life-threatening such as bacteria and viruses?

Although in The Human Condition and throughout her writings she appeals to different historical periods and their worldviews, and only individual lives insofar as they are “heroic,” Arendt’s stance on total war suggests that she is also concerned with the survival of different perspectives in the mundane persons who hold them. On the other hand, in her analysis of Homer, she maintains that the Trojans—or, more accurately, their world—survive in the tales told about them. Given the passage from The Human Condition quoted earlier, we can conclude that only in a variety of different perspectives and what they have in common will we have the true and real world. Yet, taken to its limit, Arendt’s definition of the world as encompassing past, present, and future entails that the world is in process and cannot be true and real until the end of humankind. In other words, the true or real world, like natality itself, is a matter of retroactive temporality or what Anne O’Byrne identifies with the future anterior tense, namely “it will have been.” It “will have been” the real world only from the perspective of the sum of all perspectives, an impossible perspective at the end of time reminiscent of Kant’s perpetual peace. For Arendt suggests, we only know the meaning of an event or a person’s life after it has ended and so, too, we only know the meaning of humankind after the end of humankind: “The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself has come to an end” (1958a, 233). We might conclude, then, that the real world is a concept but never a reality. Or that it is a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense. Or, perhaps, as Kant sometimes suggests, only aliens from another planet can see us as we truly are. Luckily we can skirt some of these thorny problems by recalling that the phenomenological approach teaches us to leave aside the metaphysical status of the real world and attend to how the real world appears to us. For, as we have seen, Arendt claims that it appears to us as what we share in common between various perspectives. Of course, the turn to phenomenology does not solve the problem of what counts as the real world. Moreover, it does not address the political question of who counts as us. When we consider how the world appears to us, does this us include all human beings, or even all earthlings, or just the ones most like ourselves?

Returning to the political question that drives much of her work, in this vein we might ask, what does Arendt mean when she suggests that genocide is an attack on the world and not just an attack on a world? This specifically political question not only falls more squarely into our present concerns than general reflections on the status of the world but also following this line of inquiry may shed light on the general problem of the world versus worlds. What genocide attacks, in addition to the physical bodies of members of certain groups or races of people, is the witnessing structure of the world itself. This means that by attacking a world in its entirety, we also attack the world, and not just because the world is the sum of many, or all, worlds. Rather, by attacking a world, we are also attacking the structure of the world and of world making. This means that we are attacking the ability of people or a people to construct meaningful narratives about their lives and thereby foreclosing the possibility of those lives becoming meaningful, which for Arendt also means becoming human. When she says, “This entire truly human world, which in a narrower sense forms the political realm, can indeed be destroyed by brute force,” she is pointing out that the possibility of witnessing itself can be destroyed by brute force.

If we are by virtue of the plurality of others upon whom we depend, both proximally and structurally, then by cutting off the possibility of those relationships we undermine the ability of people or a people to formulate their own identities. If the structure of subjectivity, and thus the meaning of human life, is dependent upon witnessing or narrative, then by destroying the possibility of testimony as the story we tell about ourselves, we destroy the very possibility of being human beings. And, while this destruction is rarely ever complete, the risk is the annihilation not only a world but also the annihilation of the very possibility of the world or the possibility of any human worlds. The mortal sin, then, of total genocidal war is the attempt to destroy a world and thereby foreclose the witnessing structure of the world.

As I argued in Witnessing (2001), oppression and torture damage, even annihilate, what Dori Laub identifies as the inner witness necessary for the process of narrative or testimony to support itself (Felman and Laub 1992). The inner witness is produced and sustained by dialogic interaction with other people; dialogue with others makes dialogue with oneself possible. In The Life of the Mind Arendt emphasizes the importance of this inner dialogue to critical thinking. In order to think, speak, or act, we need the inner witness, which develops in our dialogic relations with others, what Arendt calls plurality. Address and response are possible because the interpersonal dialogue is interiorized. And, through this inner witness, we have a sense of ourselves as subjects. A sense of identity and subjectivity is possible by virtue of the structure of witnessing as the possibility of address and response has been set up in dialogic relations with others. Total war or genocide targets not only the narratives, stories, and archives of a people but also the very structure of witnessing that enables those people to speak to themselves about themselves, the structure of subjectivity and therefore the structure of the world.

In light of this explication of the witnessing structure of the world, what can we make of Arendt’s indictment of Eichmann and the Third Reich? Recall that she says that they did not want to share the earth and acted as if they had the right to determine with whom they inhabited the world. They acted as if their perspectives determined the world and that they could eliminate from the world a certain perspective or perspectives that did not fit with their own. If, for Arendt, the world is a variety of perspectives, then they attempted to destroy not only a world or the world of the Jews, but also the world insofar as it includes the Jews and their world(s). Moreover, insofar as the Nazis tried to annihilate the Jews, they attacked the witnessing structure not only of the world of the Jews, who were literally and metaphorically rendered speechless, but also of the real and “entire truly human” world insofar as it is the result of the witnessing structure of human life. Resonant with Arendt’s claims about the Nazis, in their analysis of survivors’ testimonies Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue that the events of the concentration camps and mass murders ultimately became a Holocaust because they annihilated the possibility of witnesses and targeted the witnessing structure of subjectivity itself:

The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the possibly of appealing, or of turning to another. But when one cannot turn to a “you” one cannot say “thou” even to oneself. The Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself. The Nazi system turned out therefore to be fool-proof, not only in the sense that it convinced its victims, the potential witnesses from the inside, that what was affirmed about their “otherness” and their inhumanity was correct and that their experiences were no longer communicable even to themselves, and therefore perhaps never took place. This loss of the capacity to be witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well.

(FELMAN AND LAUB 1992, 82, CF. 211)

Felman and Laub argue that the Holocaust attempted to annihilate the history of a people; and it did annihilate the history of individuals. The Nazis not only targeted the Jewish people and killed individuals but also annihilated the possibility of witnessing by destroying the address and response structure of subjectivity. In so doing they destroyed—or attempted to destroy—not only a world but also the world. Insofar as the world, the “entire truly human world,” is constituted through interrelationality born of response-ability or the ability to respond, and insofar as the Holocaust destroyed the possibility of bearing witness even to oneself, it also attacked the very possibility of world. Thus, when Felman and Laub say that the Holocaust created a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself, they are talking about a worldless world, a world in which the very possibility of world is called into question, a world turned against itself, in what Derrida would call the logic of autoimmunity: a world bent on destroying itself. As we will see in the next chapter, insofar as witnessing is based on address and response, it extends beyond human narrative and stories and encompasses the responsiveness of all earthlings along with various modes of address well beyond human understanding or human perception. But for now, let’s return to Arendt’s claim that the Nazis did not want to share the earth and the suggestion that the unchosen nature of earthly cohabitation is the ground of both ethical and political freedom. One way to approach these questions is from the perspective of “the given” as the unchosen in Arendt’s thought. The unchosen and unchangeable given reminds us of our own limitations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt describes the relationship between the given and politics: “The dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature, breaks into the political scene as the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity—which are identical with the limitations of human equality.” (1966, 301). For our purposes, we could say that the earth, and what is associated with it, is what is given, while the world, and what is associated with it, is what is made. What is given operates as a limit condition for what is or can be made. Certainly, Arendt thinks that we cannot change what is given. Indeed, she suggests that we need to find ways to accept—even to be grateful for—what is given.¹⁷

The given, like the earth, is a limit to the world and therefore to politics.¹⁸ And only by respecting its borders, namely what is given and cannot be changed, are we free.¹⁹ Freedom is not the freedom to do anything that we want. Rather, freedom is freedom only because it is bounded by what we cannot control and what we do not and cannot master. And even while our relationship to the given may change and evolve, and even while we have a responsibility to interpret the given as it affects our lives, we do not have the power to control or master it, perhaps not even to understand and know it. Even if we cannot distinguish the given from the made, even as we challenge this distinction and the limits between the two, we must acknowledge our own limitations insofar as we are not the masters of either. In Arendt’s terms, living with the limitation of the given is an essential part of the human condition. The earth is the ultimate given in that we are all earthly embodied creatures who depend entirely on the earth for our existence and for our freedom. In Between Past and Future Arendt says, “Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand, the sky that stretches above us” (1954, 263–264).

Given our analysis so far, we could say that what we cannot change is not just metaphorically the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us but also literally the earth and the sky, or more precisely, our dependence on them. The problem comes when we try to change the earth and make it in our own image like we make the world and worlds. When we do so, we do not respect the limits of our own will, that is to say, the limitations of the human condition. The Nazis did not respect the limits of the human condition. In their arrogance, they believed that they could master the world and the earth. Rather than limit their own will, they exercised their will as if they could decide with whom to inhabit the earth; as if their world were the only world, which they would prove by annihilating all others. As Arendt makes clear, politics necessitates limits and respect for borders, conceptual, national, and individual. By imagining themselves limitless, the Nazis not only took the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals and attempted to annihilate an entire people, but also threatened to destroy the very possibility of politics and, along with it, what makes the world an “entire truly human world.” They broke the fundamental “law of the earth,” namely, plurality.

EARTH AND WORLD ALIENATION

The lack of limits leads to both what Arendt calls earth alienation and what she calls world alienation.²⁰ Taking a closer look at these two concepts and the differences between them again shows us how Arendt’s is a philosophy of limits and why we need to think earth and world together. In The Human Condition Arendt concludes, “while world alienation determined the course and development of modern society, earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science” (1958a, 264). She describes world alienation as the result of confusing private and public, social and political, and labor and work. Although these spheres—or we might even say worlds—cannot be easily separated in our experience, Arendt insists that conceptually they must be limited and contained in order to maintain distinctions between them. Although they may exist in the same space and time, they are not the same. And there are dangers associated with confusing them, which is why Arendt identifies the purpose of her historical analysis as tracing modern world alienation’s “twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self” (1958a, 6). Arendt associates the flight from the world into the self with modern philosophy and its turn inward, on the one hand, and the turn to the body as the focus of public life, on the other. Specifically, Arendt argues that the reductive focus on the body as a biological specimen over all other aspects of life reduces the meaning of life to mere survival, evidenced perhaps in contemporary culture by the discourse of “survivors,” as if life can be defined in terms of mere survival. Indeed, for Arendt to define life in terms of survival is to evacuate it of its meaning and render us worldless. To have a world is to have meaning and to have meaning is to have a world. Worlds—plural—are the meaningful frameworks, literal and metaphorical, through which we interpret the world.

Arendt describes world alienation as the loss of a stable world of man-made meaning and therefore the loss of a common world that we all share. This loss of a shared world, or worlds, comes about through confusion between life and world or what she calls labor and work. Life and labor deal with the nourishment and survival of the body based on consumption of perishable goods; while the world and work deal with durable products whose stability provides the space in which we can speak and act. Ideally, products of labor are thoroughly consumed and perishable such that they are part of an ecosystem in which all waste produced by this consumption can be reabsorbed. The products of work, on the other hand, can be used, even used up, but never completely consumed or destroyed.²¹ When we confuse the two, we seek abundance through accumulation and consumption, on the one hand, and turn durable goods into consumer goods, on the other.²² It is telling that today what Arendt identified as a consumable good, bread, in some cases lasts longer than what she identified as a durable good, furniture. The preservatives in our food can make it last for years, but compromise the health of our bodies and the planet. While durable goods such as electronics, by design, become obsolete nearly as soon as they are released into the market. And both contribute to pollution; the first in terms of chemical waste, the second in terms of material waste piling up in landfills.²³

Another Arendtian limit is that between the family, or the social, and the political. Again, although in our experience they are lived together, like labor and work, or perishable goods and durable goods, conceptually we must keep them separate. The state should not be considered one big family with the head of state as the patriarchal authority. Otherwise we risk totalitarianism. Moreover, when the nation is seen as one big family, the result is nationalism and patriotism that excludes some. Confusing these realms can be dangerous for those stateless peoples who have lost the protections of the state (see Arendt 1958a, 256). In a sense, Arendt’s distinctions are based on her historical phenomenological account of the essence of different activities and historical eras. And to confuse these activities can have dangerous consequences for both earth and world.

What Arendt calls earth alienation is caused by the scientific worldview symbolized by Einstein’s “observer who is poised freely in space” (195, 273). The view from the universe gives us the illusion that we are not earthbound creatures, but universal citizens who can leave earth. Arendt warns that we split atoms and take elements from outside earth into earth at its own peril: “And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature’s household” (1958a, 262). Earth alienation, like world alienation, comes through confusion between labor and work. With science, we think that the given world is man-made or can become man-made. We think that we create the earth and its raw materials. We mistakenly think that we are the masters of the universe and we do not acknowledge that we neither know the consequences of our actions, which are unpredictable, nor that we cannot undo what we have done. In a sense, earth alienation is the result of scientific hubris and the disavowal of the limits of the human condition.

Specifically, Einstein’s free-floating observer is a denial of the fact that human beings can live only on earth. Moreover, the idea that we might someday find another planetary home is a denial of the fact that the human life span, at least today, is not long enough, even traveling at the speed of light, to escape our galaxy (Arendt 1954, 276). Furthermore, Arendt argues that even if we were to reach another standpoint from which to view Earth, whether it is literally another planet or Einstein’s metaphorical observer, the scientific drive to master the entire universe will not stop there but demand ever further standpoints. The conquest of space as “the search for a point outside earth from which it would be possible to move, to unhinge, as it were, the planet itself” is never ending. “In other words,” says Arendt, “man can only get lost in the immensity of the universe, for the only true Archimedean point would be the absolute void behind the universe” (Arendt 1954, 278). But, this view from nowhere is not only physically and intellectually impossible but also dangerous in that it presumes that man can take a God’s eye view of the universe. This hubris does not respect the limits of the human condition. Furthermore, it risks not respecting the limits of the earth and of our world in relation to it.

THE “CONQUEST” OF THE UNIVERSE WITHIN

Our “conquest” of space, as Arendt calls it, has lead to attempts to harness extraterrestrial energies and bring them back to Earth, presumably where they do not belong. Unlike the authors of the Time article from 1969 honoring the Apollo 8 astronauts, for Arendt “conquering space” does not have a positive valence. To the contrary, Arendt warns of its dangers: “we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature” (Arendt 1954, 279). Today scientists are more focused on the universe within the human body than the universe beyond earth. Still, genetic engineering and DNA manipulations exhibit the same conquering tendencies diagnosed by Arendt. Man fancies himself master of his own creation such that he can create new human beings through genetic science that are “better” than what nature makes. Bioethicist John Harris makes this type of argument (Harris 2010). Parents are becoming patents in a world where DNA can be patented (cf. Oliver 2012).

For example, in 2013, the Supreme Court heard a case that may decide the future of DNA patents. The DNA in question involves two genes that significantly increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancers. The Myriad Corporation has patented the genes and a set of diagnostic tests to detect their presence (Kevles 2013). Patent law, which dates back to debates between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, stipulates that patents can be obtained for “any new and useful art” or “process” (Kevles 2013). The requirement of newness and innovation excludes “products made by nature, which were held to belong to everyone, [and] were not to be removed from common possession” (Kevles 2013). Natural elements, creatures of earth, and natural laws are excluded from patents. For example, “natural elements taken from the earth, even if they had to be chemically isolated from other substances, [do] not constitute patentable subject matter under Section 101, if only because they were not new” (Kevles 2013). At issue in the case of the two genes patented by Myriad is whether the DNA sequences count as natural or man-made and, new to patent law, whether patent monopolies pose dangers to the rights of many versus the rights of few. The court ruled that DNA cannot be patented. From an Arendtian perspective, the attempt to patent DNA seems like a confusion of the given and the made and comes up against rights to private property. Indeed, patent law itself seems to push up against property law, which, as we have seen in terms of our analysis of Kant, is based on original acquisition of portions of the surface of the earth. If the earth itself can be delimited into private property, we might ask, then why can’t DNA?²⁴

Arendt, the philosopher of limits, insists that whatever new property we claim, whether outer space or the inner space of genetic code, this property will be limited by the facts that the earth is our home and we are mortal.²⁵ For, whatever our scientific achievements, these two facts do not change. We are limited mortal creatures of the earth. Even if the Mars One project succeeds in its plans to send earthlings on a one-way trip to Mars in 2023, everything they experience there will be judged and understood in terms of their experience on Earth. Even if we set up colonies on Mars, we are still creatures of the Earth, at least for the foreseeable future. For now, earth is our only home. And, both earth alienation and world alienation leave us homeless. When we are alienated from the world, we disavow or deny that the meaning of life comes through our relationships to others. Our world becomes meaningless, a worldless desert that is barren and isolating. Worldlessness is a loss of meaning between human beings. When we are alienated from the earth, we disavow or deny that we survive and thrive as a result of our unique and irreplaceable bond to the earth and its creatures. When this happens, we are truly homeless insofar as we no longer feel at home on the earth. Both forms of alienation are maladies of perspective that result from a loss of limits. When we refuse to acknowledge and respect our limitations, then we risk the homelessness that results from both earth and world alienation. When we mistaken believe that we can master, control, and manage earth and world, we lose our home in both. As Arendt suggests, only from some perspective outside of earth or outside of world can we imagine grasping them as we might an object and subjecting them to our technologies in order to master them. And, while we do this all the time, the risk is that we will forget, or deny, that earth and world are more than objects for our control, manipulation, or management—they are also our home. In a sense, the earth nourishes our bodies, while the world nourishes our souls. By denying our limitations and continually trying to overcome them, we deny the human condition, bounded as it is by both earth and world. Returning home, then, would be a process of acknowledging our limitations and exercising self-restraint. This is particularly apt in terms of our relationship with the earth and the environment. Finding our way home is what Arendt calls the “strange enterprise” of imagination through which we can change perspectives and change worlds.²⁶

UNDERSTANDING HEART

In Understanding and Politics Arendt gives imagination the central function of putting things in their “proper perspective” by negotiating between the immediacy of experience and the distant abstraction of knowledge, negotiating between the living body and that free-floating point in space. She describes this “proper perspective” as neither too close nor too far away. Imagination allows us to “see” what is close to us as if it were at a distance, but it also allows us to see what is far away as if “it were our own affair.” She says, “This ‘distancing’ of some things and bridging the abysses to others is part of the dialogue of understanding for whose purposes direct experience established too close a contact and mere knowledge erects artificial barriers “(1953, 392). Suspicious of her notion of a “proper” perspective and our ability to understand completely or once and for all, I agree that imagination is crucial to taking up varying perspectives that allow us to continue to question and interpret our experience and our relationships with others and with the world.

Arendt places imagination between feeling and reflection as the dynamic flowing blood pulsing through what she calls an “understanding heart.” She identifies the acceptance of the given as an affirmation of what is, an affirmation that can lead to gratitude, provided we have an “understanding heart” (1953, 391). Only through the “strange enterprise” of understanding, dependent as it is on imagination, can we “come to terms with what irrevocably happened and be reconciled with what unavoidably exists … only an ‘understanding heart,’ and not mere reflection nor mere feeling, makes it bearable for us to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world, and makes it possible for them to bear with us” (391). In order to live amongst others and embrace our plurality, we need an understanding heart. We must create our world and worlds with this understanding heart such that we accept, even embrace, the given, most especially the diversity of human existence and, I would add, the biodiversity of our shared planet. Furthermore, adding the force of an ethical imperative, we could say that we have an obligation to create worlds—and thereby the world—in such a way that we embrace what is given, most especially our unchosen cohabitation with other people and other creatures of the earth. Ethics starts when we embrace our limitations and humble ourselves before the magnificence of earth and its inhabitants. Only when we attend to the earth and other earthlings with whom we share our planet in ways that open up rather than close off the possibility of response, can we begin to act responsibly. Reconciliation to the limits of the human condition, is not, then, giving up or throwing up one’s hands in the face of what cannot be changed. Rather, it is embracing and affirming it, but not in an unreflective or naive way. Moreover, it is always a matter of interpretation. The given is never merely or purely given. Facts always require interpretation, and this is where imagination and understanding interplay with perception and the basis of perception in the limitations of our bodies. Certainly, our relationships with other people—and with other creatures of the earth—is not merely a matter of perception alone. If we associate what is given with the earth and what is made with the world, this means that for us the earth always requires a world in terms of which to view it. There is no view from nowhere, no disembodied astronaut viewing the earth from an abstracted point in space. Rather, there are only specific locations in space and time from which we view the earth, and everything on it, from our place in the world. This is why Arendt’s separation of earth from world is a conceptual distinction that functions in a particular worldview she develops out of her historical phenomenology. So, when she proclaims, “plurality is the law of the earth,” that pronouncement is part of a world in which the earth itself is considered both the ground and limit to politics and, we could add, to ethics (1981, 19).

For Arendt, finding our home may involve an endless journey visiting different worldviews in order to find ourselves situated—and, more to the point, situating ourselves—amongst them. It may involve wandering to the ends of the earth, metaphorically if not also literally. Although the earth operates as a limit concept in Arendt’s philosophy, it is also a planet and the only one upon which we can live and build our home/s. It is noteworthy in this context that the word planet is from the Greek planetes, meaning “wanderer.”²⁷ What might it mean to think that a wanderer is our home? Or that we have a wandering home? Or even that we are wanderers on this wandering planet that is our home? Perhaps there is a necessary element of the alien or foreign in every home; as Julia Kristeva says, we are strangers to ourselves. Moreover, we could imagine that being too much at home may lead to inaction or a contentedness that runs contrary to both ethics and politics in terms of the struggle for social justice. After all, Arendt imagines that “the danger lies in becoming true inhabitants of the desert and feeling at home in it,” when this desert is “the growth of modern wordlessness, the withering away for everything between us” (2005, 201). She is clear that we should not become reconciled to the desert; rather we must protect the “life-giving oases” “that let us live in the desert without becoming reconciled to it” (203). These life-giving oases are love and friendship, which allow us to endure the desert of public and political life. And, in a way, that love and friendship carries over into our world-building activity as what Arendt calls our amor mundi (love of world).²⁸ She concludes, “In the last analysis, the human world is always the product of man’s amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of those who come to live in it” (203).²⁹

But, we might ask, what does Arendt mean by amor mundi? And what kind of love is love of the world? Arendt is clear that romantic or sentimental love is a private affair and not part of the political world. Yet, she also names love, along with friendship, as one of the oases in the desert of worldlessness that can restore the meaning of the world. Furthermore, she acknowledges the importance of intimate relations to sustain one’s ability to enter into the public world and perform in the world of politics. What then is the relationship between love and politics if what binds us to the public world is love, amor mundi? Perhaps love of world is the primary political virtue. We might answer that love of the world is necessary in order that politics becomes ethical. And that love of the world is the foundation for Arendt’s famous claim for “the right to have rights,” which is to say, ultimately amor mundi is the force behind universal or transnational norms.³⁰ For “the right to have rights” goes beyond any legal authority, national or transnational, and takes us into the realm of ethical norms grounded in our very belonging together on the earth and in the world.³¹ This is the ethics based on our shared home, our cohabitation on the earth, and the unchosen nature of that cohabitation that compels us to choose it—even to love it. Love of world is the embrace of this plurality that makes world and worlds possible.

Insofar as Arendt emphasizes the importance of forgiveness, along with promises, to the political bond, her invocation of love, at least implicitly, resonates with the notion of agape as forgiveness. And yet her appeal to Augustine and his proclamation “I want you to be” suggests a form of love beyond forgiveness and moving toward acceptance. Yet even acceptance of the existence of the other or stranger is not enough to make the claim “I want you to be.” Otherwise, Augustine could say, “I accept that you are.” Embracing the existence of the other and our coexistence or cohabitation with others, including other creatures, takes us beyond either forgiveness or acceptance and toward love. To be political and, in our framework, also ethical, this love is more than romantic or sentimental love. Rather, love of those with whom we cohabit the earth—along with love of other living beings and perhaps even nonliving things—is an ethical and political choice. The paradoxical situation in which we find ourselves, which is essential to the human condition, is that although we do not choose with whom to inhabit the earth ethical and political bonds require making that choice. Choosing to love. This is to say, ethical relations to others require the Augustinean proclamation “I want you to be,” and political bonds require extending this proclamation to whole groups of people, perhaps including nonhuman animals. Imagine what it would be mean to say to all animals or all earthlings, “I want you to be.” This would be an ethics of affirmation of all and each. In this regard, Arendt’s extension of the Augustinean proclamation becomes the basis for an ethics of coexistence or cohabitation that grounds all political claims. Arendt’s notion of amor mundi signals not only a love of one’s own world but also, and moreover, a love of the world of others. For Arendt, worldliness is always a matter of difference, diversity, and coexistence or cohabitation with others unlike myself. Amor mundi is an embrace of the diversity of the world and of worlds.³² It is also an acknowledgment of our deep dependence on the plurality of the earth.

In this regard, we may think of love in terms of eros as the life force that compels us to bond with others.³³ Eros takes us out of our selves and toward others, and through connections with others, human and nonhuman, we not only survive but also thrive as individuals and as species. For Plato, Eros is a form of love as passion that gives rise to creativity and the highest forms of contemplation. The tensions inherent in Eros move us toward something beyond ourselves. For Arendt, it is our relationships with other people that give rise to creativity, contemplation, and move us toward the political bonds through which we peacefully, more or less, cohabit. This creativity born from love provides an oasis of meaning in the desert of meaninglessness. That meaninglessness ensues from denying relationality, plurality, and the dynamic nature of the political world. Ultimately, for Arendt natality is the concept that signifies the plurality and diversity of the world as enabling both creativity and contemplation. The unpredictability of birth, which even in the most controlled and usual of circumstances results in the birth of a unique individual who is a stranger to her parents, becomes the symbol for the uncanny strangeness of the world. We might compare this aspect of natality, namely the necessity to choose the unchosen, to Emmanuel Lévinas’s notion of “paternal election,” which is the choice of this particular unchosen, even unbidden, child (1969; cf. Oliver 2011). Can we expand this election of one particular child to every human being and beyond? Can we elect each and every earthling because it is born, hatched, spawned, and therefore unique? Certainly, Arendt would never go so far since she reserves birth and uniqueness for human beings alone (e.g. Arendt 1958a, 176). Yet what is more uncanny than an encounter with another species?

Through friendship and love we not only come to terms with this uncanny strangeness but also learn to embrace it, which is possible only when we give up the fantasy of being able to control or master it. Interpreting Augustine’s love as affirmation of existence and cohabitation, Arendt says, “This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine ‘Volo ut sis (I want you to be),’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation” (1966, 301). The ethical affirmation of each that grounds the political bond comes from the heart and not reason alone. Through natality, which Arendt calls a miracle that saves the world, this affirmation renews the bonds of the political world.³⁴ Although it is not always the case in practice, in principle, through the birth of each unique being, we come to accept, even love, the newcomer who is at first always a stranger. Natality renews the political world by injecting plurality with diversity since every individual is unique. And plurality, says Arendt, “is the law of the earth” (1981, 19).

If plurality is the law of the earth, and politics is based on this plurality and diversity as the affirmation of each one, what are the implications of shrinking biodiversity for politics? What happens when climate change leads to the spread of a literal desert along with Arendt’s metaphorical one? Indeed, what do these metaphors of an inhospitable world tell us about our need for protection from the violence and harshness of both nature and culture, both earth and world? Could the earth itself become the “you” in Augustine’s “I want you to be”? To answer these questions, we must extend Arendt’s philosophy of limits in order to develop a sustainable ethics of conservation through which we impose limits on ourselves for the sake of both earth and world in an attempt to actively engage in what Heidegger calls the “letting be” of beings. In “The Crisis of Education,” Arendt claims, “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable” (1954b, 196). We might ask, what would it mean to love not only the world but also the earth enough to assume responsibility for it? Can we imagine a world in which the earth matters enough that we take responsibility for it? Perhaps only a cosmopolitanism of citizens of the earth can assume such responsibility, a responsibility that Arendt finds daunting. And yet the environmental crisis may require a world of this magnitude. Can we imagine a cosmopolitanism that does not deny differences or level diversity, but rather one through which we embrace the singularity—the natality—of each living being? Moving from Kant to Arendt, and through Heidegger and Derrida, hopefully, this is the path that we are following.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN SOLIDARITY

In her analysis of Karl Jaspers’s cosmopolitanism, even while she rejects the notion of world citizens, Arendt is sympathetic to the idea of human solidarity.³⁵ And even while she is critical of the unity of mankind, she supports the inherent connections between men: “A philosophy of mankind is distinguished from a philosophy of man by its insistence on the fact that not Man, talking to himself in the dialogue of solitude, but men talking and communicating with each other inhabit the earth” (Arendt 1968a, 90). This is why she says, “plurality is the law of the earth” (1981, 19). In the end she comes close to endorsing Jasper’s historical and political concept of mankind and world citizenship, which she contrasts with Kant’s ahistorical and Hegel’s apolitical views (Arendt 1968a). She imagines Jasperian unity brought about by “technical mastery over the earth,” symbolized by the “possibility that atomic weapons used by one country according to the political wisdom of a few might ultimately come to be the end of all human life on earth” (83). While she maintains her belief in the protective checks and balances on any nation-state by all the others, she entertains the idea that some sort of “world-wide federated structure,” and at least international law, is necessary to address the crisis of the possibility of nuclear destruction, which threatens all of humankind and the earth itself. North Korea and Iran notwithstanding, we may wonder whether the environmental crisis and climate change have replaced the destructive threat of total annihilation by atomic bombs and that, even more than the nuclear threat, the environmental threat requires some notion of world citizenship, not only with its rights but also with its responsibilities.

Discussing Jasper’s call for a politics of human solidarity, with some approval Arendt says, “Just as, according to Kant, nothing should ever happen in war which would make a future peace and reconciliation impossible, so nothing, according to the implications of Jasper’s philosophy, should happen today in politics which would be contrary to the actually existing solidarity of mankind” (Arendt 1968a, 93). This view of human solidarity, however, entails that no war is justifiable “not only because the possibility of an atomic war may endanger the existence of all mankind, but because each war, no matter how limited in the use of means and in territory, immediately and directly affects all mankind” (Arendt 1968a, 93). Arendt worries about the complete abolition of war as a political means of maintaining a balance between nation-states. She sees the option of war as a protection against totalitarianism. When war is about annihilation rather than about politics, however, it exceeds its own limits and the limits of politics in an absolute way that she argues makes it impermissible. Yet, insofar as all war “affects all mankind,” it is not permissible. This is to say, insofar as war goes beyond a political means of settling a dispute between nation-states, it oversteps its bounds. In our increasingly globalized world, the affects of war in one part of the world are felt in various ways in others. In addition, as recent United States history has shown, the rhetoric of fighting totalitarianism or overthrowing dictatorship can become a call to war for all sorts of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with liberating people from totalitarianism.

Moreover, taking this thinking further, insofar as every war threatens the structure of the world, all war is impermissible. All war threatens the existence of politics. As we have seen, Arendt argues against “total war” on the basis of its attack on entire worlds and peoples and its attempt to annihilate histories and traditions along with killing enemies. But it is impossible to draw the line between just war and total war on these terms. For how many or how few can be killed before we risk destroying “a people” or a culture? How many does it take to make up a plurality? How many does it take to make a world? Furthermore, insofar as war threatens not just the lives of others but also their ability to response, insofar as it destroys their inner witness and therefore their ability to bear witness for themselves, war threatens the very structure that makes living in a world possible. All war, then, threatens the “entire truly human world.” Taking Arendt’s discussion to its limit, we could say that there is no war that can respect that plurality is the law of the earth.

While Arendt comes close to endorsing Jaspers’s view that human solidarity should guide politics in order that no state act in such a way that human solidarity becomes impossible, she stops short of arguing for the abolition of all war. Yet, if we cannot define plurality in terms of absolute numbers, then it is difficult to maintain both Arendt’s insistence on war as a political option at the same time as her adherence to a principle of plurality based on cohabitation. In other words, if, as Arendt insists, war that seeks to annihilate an entire people or race and destroy its culture is a hard limit for politics because it attacks an entire world, then again we must ask, how many does it take to make a world? Arendt discusses plurality and diversity, but does not stipulate how many different people are necessary to form a political union and make up a people or a world. Indeed, as we move through Heidegger to Derrida, the question whether each singular individual living being constitutes not only a world but also the world is definitive. Even for Arendt, however, the self-definition of groups is not dependent upon their numbers. Rather, worlds are formed through relationships between people (including nonhumans and the environment). Don’t we have to consider, then, the ways in which worlds may be threatened and destroyed by any war?

If, as Arendt suggests, we must make war in ways that always allow not only for future peace (as Kant might say), but also for future wars, then we must make everything we make in ways that allow for future production. Certainly, war should not be the only renewable resource. War affects not just human beings but many other beings on the planet. And the war machines of the military industrial complexes across the globe impact not only our natural habitat but also that of other earthlings. Moreover, if we adopt human solidarity as our guiding political principle, then it is not only war that threatens worlds. Today, more than the threat of nuclear war, the threat of environmental crisis threatens human worlds, along with nonhuman worlds, whatever they may be. Indeed, the notion of human solidarity born from seeing the first images of earth from space, images that inspired environmentalism, can perhaps become more than the cold war rhetoric justifying one nation’s technological advances over another. Rather, the realization that not only do we share the earth with all other humans, and all other living beings, but also that it is our only home expands the notion of human solidarity.

Human solidarity becomes grounded on the earth to which we belong. The connection between peoples and nations across this planet means that actions by one can affect distant others in ways that threaten human solidarity. Given that all humans inhabit the earth, and that, in spite of our differences, we share a special bond to this planet and none other, the possibility for human solidarity is bound up with the ways in which we cohabit the earth. And, yet, the realization that this is not just our home, a human home, but also home to every other living creature enlarges human solidarity beyond the human. Now we must imagine the solidarity of earthly creatures, earthling solidarity. Earthling solidarity requires imagination associated with the understanding heart, this is to say, imagination that reaches beyond the self and toward others, now not only human others but also nonhuman others, by first acknowledging that we live on this planet together. In this regard, loving the world enough to take responsibility for it entails loving the earth enough to take responsibility for it.

Arendt argues that only through this understanding heart or loving imagination can we take our bearing in the world. She calls this loving heart our only “inner compass.” And she concludes, “If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with its essence” (1953, 392). If we want to be at home on this earth, perhaps we cannot be at home in this century if it means alienation from both earth and world. Indeed, thinking with the earth requires thinking beyond this century and imagining the future of the planet and of our world(s). Furthermore, perhaps the possibility of being at home is bought at the price of continual wandering through the deserts and oases of our imaginations and of our planet. Not an aimless wandering, but a journey whose goal is to create a world in which we love the earth enough to take responsibility for it. This would be a world of sustainable ethics in which we limit ourselves in order to protect the literal and metaphorical ground of any possible world, which is the shared planet Earth.