Meaning and the Duplicity of Nature

10-25-2024

“It is only within the human world that nature's cyclical movement manifests itself as growth and decay. Like birth and death, they, too, are not natural occurrences, properly speaking; they have no place in the unceasing, indefatigable cycle in which the whole household of nature swings perpetually”
(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 97).

Nature has always presented itself to human beings as a sort of paradox. It is, simultaneously, the green of the valley and the shock of the earthquake, the cleansing rain and the terrifying flood. It is something to be respected, cultivated, and protected, as well as feared, harnessed, and battled. From our earliest stories, we have understood ourselves in the midst of this tension. In the Enūma Eliš, Tiamat and her waters of chaos are channeled into the fertile rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the lush divine garden is surrounded by a salty ocean of death. Even in Genesis, whose God speaks all things into being ex nihilo, the formless nothing that precedes the emergence of creation is depicted as water. For us, nature is life, and it is death.

Recently, the storm surge for Hurricane Helene was estimated to have reached fifteen feet. It killed dozens of people and razed cities to the ground. Today we have come to recognize that the increasingly dire threats we face from natural occurrences – storms and floods, fires and droughts – are themselves symptoms of the threat that humans pose to nature. The Anthropocene, whatever else it may be, is a name for the paradox of nature redoubled. Not only do we remain, as ever, subject to the “unceasing, indefatigable cycle” of nature; we are also subject to the manipulations of nature that we have wrought.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt attempts to do justice to the curious relationship between human beings and nature by way of a fundamental distinction between two activities: labor and work. Put simply, labor describes the biological dimension of human life, caring for the needs of the body and all the necessities of an embodied existence. It is private and it is privative. Traditionally, those who have shouldered the collective burdens of labor have also been excluded from public life, consigned to the anonymity of the household. Work, on the other hand, describes the artificial dimension of human life. It produces a “human artifice,” removing materials from the natural environment and transforming them into an objective world to inhabit, which outlasts any individual human life.

Critics of Arendt have sometimes targeted the labor/work dichotomy as the product of an anthropocentric view of nature. It appears to suggest that we must extricate ourselves from nature as much as possible in order to carry out anything resembling a human life. Moreover, it appears exploitative. If “violation and violence is present in all fabrication,” and “the creator of the human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature,” what can nature be but a standing reserve of resources to be tapped and mustered for human purposes? Is it not reductive, and even irresponsible, to consider nature only from the perspective of the human?

Such a criticism, however, would be a misunderstanding. In fact, Arendt invites us to consider that to speak of ‘nature’ at all, is already to make sense of it in relation to the kind of being that stands apart from it. “Only we who have erected the objectivity of a world of our own from what nature gives us,” she writes, “can look upon nature as something ‘objective.’ Without a world between [humans] and nature, there is eternal movement, but no objectivity.” Nature is, in other words, a category for worldly beings. Indeed, Arendt later, in her interview with Günter Gaus describes a world as “as the space in which things become public, as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable. […] In which all kinds of things appear.” To appear is to appear as meaningful, to be disclosed or uncovered as this or that thing. All living things – indeed, not only humans – inhabit a world in which they appear to each other. To them, Arendt writes, in The Life of the Mind, “Being and Appearing coincide.”

Work carves out this space of appearance. Is it so surprising that the dominant symbols in ancient accounts of nature are order and chaos? Order is not always mastery and control. Rather, to order is to make sense to what appears, to assign places in relation to other things, to bestow meaning. Meaninglessness is chaos. For Arendt, the boundary between the world and what lies beyond it is not a boundary between the natural and the artificial. Rather, it is between the space where things can appear as meaningful, and the dark, silent ground of the earth.

The earth is, of course, the planet Earth. But more fundamentally, the earth is that upon which the existence of every (known) living thing depends, and that to which every living thing is and has been bound. It is the condition of life itself, “the very quintessence of the human condition,” to be earthbound. It is no digression when Arendt begins her book by invoking the radical uncertainty that would accompany any attempt to carry out a human existence beyond the earth. It makes life possible, but it does not appear. It lies forever and necessarily outside of the boundary of the world of appearances, as their enabling condition.

What about labor? Labor maintains this boundary. Labor is pruning plants and pulling weeds. Labor is sweeping the floor because otherwise the dust would continue to build up until the space became uninhabitable. Labor is stacking sandbags one upon the other, year after year, to keep the wind and the water at bay. Labor, in other words, makes life possible within the world. To labor is to navigate the space in which the cycles of nature become arcs: growth and decay, birth and death. Labor enacts, within the world, our hidden and ever-present belongingness to the earth. If this is anthropocentrism, perhaps it should not be written off so quickly. In the face of the – quite literally – earth-shattering revelation that human beings can destroy the most basic condition of their own existence, any thought of nature must be accompanied by a hefty portion of self-understanding.
 
About the Author: 
Jared Highlen is a lecturer in Philosophy at Boston College and Boston University. His research concerns the relationship between interpretive practices and the formation of political communities. Jared recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy with a dissertation entitled “Hermeneutics of the Polis: Arendt and Gadamer on the Political World."