Arendt on Humanity's Cosmic Awareness

10-13-2014

(Featured Image: An aerial view of a jumble of cars, Source: Slickzine)

“If, in concluding, we return once more to the discovery of the Archimedean point and apply it, as Kafka warned us not to do, to man himself and to what he is doing on this earth, it at once becomes manifest that all of his activities, watched from a sufficiently removed vantage point in the universe, would appear not as activities of any kind but as processes, so that, as a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel.”

--Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 322-3.

In the preface to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt not only starts provocatively with the point of view of an “earth born object made by man,” but describes this object, the recently launched Sputnik satellite, as the realization of the dream of science fiction literature that illuminates “mass sentiments and mass desires”. In this passage quoted above from the very last section of the book, Arendt returns to space and for a moment herself sounds like a science fiction writer, inviting the reader to look with her from a number of challenging perspectives.

This concluding section brings the threat to action that Arendt has been developing conceptually back to society of her time, where people as “job holders” are nearly reduced to automatic patterns that avoid all “active decision.” Humanity is in danger of “developing into that animal species, which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come”. With this ironic phrase, Arendt twists perspectives, saying that a conceptual space remains between human and animal, one out of which we “develop” only by going backward in terms of our capacity for freedom.

[caption id="attachment_14579" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Is technology dehumanizing the workforce? (Source: The Takeaway)[/caption]

The jolt of this strange developmental dislocation brings Arendt back to the satellite view of the book’s opening sentence, this time with a reference to the Archimedean point. Arendt distinguishes between the “activity” (which we should read with an emphasis on “act”) and “processes” that follow automatically. More specifically, she describes “modern motorization” in a way that combines the technological with the biological, thereby articulating a vision of all of humanity becoming cyborgs.

This blending of the technological with the biological makes mutation a part of a process, one which we have refined through a variety of different perspectives. In a broad sense, “mutation” arises from Latin mutare, “to change.” With respect to science, our understanding of how mutation works developed from earlier biologists including Darwin, who held the theory of “blending” inheritance. We moved next to a theory of discontinuous inheritance, and then to the double helix structure of DNA in 1953--the same decade as The Human Condition (1958). From the point of view of evolution, mutation does play a key role in the development of species, but only by changing them.

[caption id="attachment_14580" align="aligncenter" width="549"] Genetic mutation (Source: Xenlogic)[/caption]

Arendt’s melding of the biological and technological makes sense when one considers her earlier reference to Arnold Gehlen, a philosophical anthropologist who considered technology ranging from the stick to the skyscraper as essential to the survival of the species. To be precise, though, mechanical shells–the image primarily suggests vehicles–are not a biological mutation since the car is not the same material. Perhaps the melding of flesh and metal is the point, though, as in May Swenson’s 1963 poem “Southbound On The Freeway.” Swenson recounts the visit of an alien to traffic on earth and ends with the question: “Those soft shapes,/ shadowy inside /the hard bodies--are they /their guts or their brains?”

The important point for Arendt is that technology would “appear like” biology. Arendt sets the reader before the viewfinder of “a scientist” to make this point, though she emphasizes the general worldview of the profession rather than citing an individual directly. With this background, the phrase “process of mutation” takes on a strange ring, since mutation strictly speaking diverts the expected genetic process by inserting variation and randomness. It is not an aspect of freewill but nonetheless disrupts automatic development and to that extent parallels the action of humans.

[caption id="attachment_14581" align="aligncenter" width="550"] "A Portrait of Determinism” by Mathew S. Bailey (Source: Art of Eric Wayne)[/caption]

Arendt’s work on action and the faculty of natality that enables it recasts the long philosophical debate of free will versus determinism. Throughout The Human Condition, she implicitly and explicitly struggles with the models of self-awareness familiar from the philosophical tradition of Descartes, which in her view leads to isolation of the subject. Her visions of cosmic awareness update this tradition but only further highlight the ‘world alienation’ the tradition encourages. Arendt confronts the challenge of finding a liberating way to see ourselves throughout the book and offers natality as the way to do so, though this idea does not neatly fit into self-perspective traditions.

Arendt confronts the challenge of finding a liberating way to see ourselves throughout the book and offers natality as the way to do so. Natality, though, does not neatly fit into self-perspective traditions that arrive at schematic definitions such as “I think therefore I am” (Descartes) or “ It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations“ (Kant). Instead, Arendt repeatedly returns to an insistence on natality as “the fact of birth.” Her deployment of this phrase challenges the borders of the literal and figurative in modes that lead to narrative strategies for opening human freedom through common action.

-- Jeffrey Champlin