Archimedes and the Anthropocene

Source: YouTube

By Jeffrey Champlin

“Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand (dos moi pou sto), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point. And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature's household.”

-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

The final chapter of The Human Condition takes an apparently disheartening turn beyond Arendt's core development of the concepts of labor, work, and action. While Chapter 4 on "Action" offers the hope of people coming together to start something new in a reinvigorated sense of the political, Chapter 5 seems to narrate the inevitable decline of "the modern age's triumphal world alienation." In particular, her use of the way science can now "act on the earth" fundamentally challenges the optimistic sense with which she discussed "action" earlier in the book.

[caption id="attachment_15038" align="aligncenter" width="530"] Galileo and his telescope (Source: Heritage History)[/caption]

Throughout Chapter 5, Arendt uses the "Archimedean point" as shorthand for a universal standpoint. Boasting of the power of the lever, the Greek mathematician Archimedes famously proclaimed: "Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." Arendt expands upon this position primarily to refer to Galileo's proof that the Earth rotated around the Sun, which he demonstrated using the perceptual evidence provided by his telescope.

Arendt's formulations in this section often read smoothly as a kind of general cultural pessimism. Even so, it reveals complex insights upon closer examination. Here, for example, she explains a position that works through a subjunctive "as though." Humanity has set up a relay in thinking that takes us away from the Earth while still locating us on it. This structure reminds us of irony in aesthetics or self-consciousness in epistemology. As in these fields, Arendt elucidates a model where we are in two places at once, both inside a frame of reference and able to see this frame from the outside.

Irony and extreme self-consciousness are often taken to imply an abstract denial of the outside world when taken to the extreme. However, the assumption of the Archimedean point has concrete implications. It endangers, in Arendt’s mind, the entire system, the "natural life processes" as a whole. These are the organic workings of nature, its self-regulation. In other words, world alienation, always a western cultural tendency since Christianity in Arendt's view, becomes nature alienation when Galileo demonstrates the workings of the universe to the technologically aided eye.

[caption id="attachment_15873" align="aligncenter" width="531"] Source: Pix Good[/caption]

Why does Arendt insist on using the term "act" in the final chapter in a way that dilutes the tentative optimistic promise she gave the verb in Chapter 4? Arendt again and again refers to the ability of scientists to "act on the earth," or, in another formulation, to "act into" nature. While political action, as described in Chapter 4, has the power to break the chains of the past and start anew, the use of "act" in Chapter 5 takes on an irreversible sense. On one level, she refers to biological change as genetic manipulation and cloning, but on another, she emphasizes the threat of nuclear war to the entire planet. In both of these cases, it is not a question of merely changing life within a fixed frame but also of changing the very frame of nature itself.

Today, Arendt's prescience regarding the effects of humanity acting into nature are as essential as her insights into the paradoxes of human rights and the mechanisms of power. The dangers associated with genetic manipulation have only grown, whereas the nuclear threat, while diminished, has retained its relevance .

Additionally, Arendt helps us reflect on the new scale of environmental challenges. Climate scientists have recently proposed the term "Anthropocene" to refer to a new geological period in which human activity affects the earth as a whole rather than specific ecosystems. Despite scientific evidence of the devastating results of unchecked climate change, politics seems to have reached an impasse of key temporal and aesthetic dimensions: because of the delay in global processes, by the time enough people see the effects of our actions to the extent that they are motivated to demand change, it will be too late.

Though the Human Condition seems to end with a pessimistic view of technological action, the book as a whole challenges us to marshal political action instead of "acting on the earth." Natality offers an alternative model of reflection, one that requires not that we act on the earth as if we where outside it but that we take political action at this moment as if we were in the future. Conceptually and temporally, it does not simply deny the present or return to the past, but it also assumes a responsibility for the future.