Video Archives - Roger Berkowitz L&T Lecture (2010)

08-07-2014

Monday, August 16, 2010: “Earth Alienation: From Galileo to Google”

Lecturer: Roger Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities.

In this lecture, Roger Berkowitz welcomes the incoming Class of 2014 at Bard College with an important question: “Is humanity important?” The human race has witnessed impressive scientific and technological achievements, some of the most remarkable of which have occurred in the past 50 years. While some of these have advanced the history of humanity, others threaten to dampen its spark. Nuclear and biological weapons are capable of killing untold millions of people, and the urge to embrace automation in our everyday lives cultivates the fear that society may one day embrace euthanization as a way to rid itself of “superfluous persons”. Acknowledging this increasingly dangerous world we live in, Berkowitz argues it is imperative that we at this moment in time take a closer look at ourselves and consider our significance. He proposes two sources that can help us in our task: Galileo and Google.

[caption id="attachment_13948" align="alignleft" width="300"] Galileo and his telescope[/caption]

Galileo invented the telescope, confirmed Copernicus’ model of heliocentrism, and helped secularize the Christian world by launching the Scientific Revolution. However, underlying these contributions was a philosophy rarely recognized: that of the paradoxical devaluation of sensory observation. Galileo intended to use his telescope and learn the mysteries of the universe via the “certainty of his senses.” However, in the process of testing and improving our sensible observations, he discovered that our senses betray us, that they cannot fully be trusted. Turning to Hannah Arendt, Berkowitz shows that Galileo stands for the modern faith that scientific experimentation surpasses sense data as the arbiter of truth. Galileo represents the moment of transformation when we humans recognized that we must submit our senses to correction via the use of technology, abstract thinking, and reasoning. Galileo and the scientific revolution have thus led to a radical devaluation of the human understanding of the world in favor of knowledge of the world aided by tools, experiments, and computers.

[caption id="attachment_13949" align="alignright" width="300"] The Hudson River[/caption]

To explore this alienation from the humanly knowable world, Berkowitz considers the example of our knowledge of the Hudson River, which flows through Bard’s campus. He asks: what is a river anymore? The natural state of the Hudson River, like most waterways, has ceased to be. It is now a garbage dump, a way of commerce, an environmental disaster. We can change it, re-route it, or even destroy it. In this sense, the Hudson has become a human creation that we allow to be, to exist. All things in this world are therefore human creations, inevitably linked to the scientist who uses arithmetic and math to place nature outside of itself.

But there is a problem. Not only has science elevated humanity’s role in the world; it has also diminished it. Biology, chemistry, physics, politics…each of these divisions of thought have a rational explanation for what otherwise might make mankind “unique” or “special” in the universe. Humans are deficient and unimportant, but they strive not to be so. Given this inclination, author Ray Kurzweil and others have embraced the notion of “singularity”, where in order to overcome their limits, humans are inventing computation to ultimately be able to merge with machines, a coming together which would help create a single cosmic intelligence and in the process make humans more exemplary.

The question is, as Berkowitz observes, would humans still be “human” in this case?

[caption id="attachment_13951" align="alignleft" width="300"] (Source: SXSW)[/caption]

To arrive at an answer, Berkowitz steers us in the direction of Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition, Arendt observes, “The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice.” Berkowitz dissects this quote, revealing that Earth is humankind’s natural environment, its home that allows for humans to live naturally. However, Arendt is not finished: “The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms.” In this quotation, Arendt tells us that humans are naturally artificial and related to all that exists in the natural world. This creates a paradox: humankind is of artifice, but as humans create all other beings in the natural (Earth) world, artifice cannot exist in human life. It is this contradiction that lies at the heart of human existence.

Berkowitz concludes his lecture by investigating Arendt’s delineation of “life” in her paradox. As he observes, mankind is extraordinary, terrifying, and beautiful. He carries the seeds of birth and destruction of all things, including himself, and is therefore like a god. But his mortality, his finitude, separates him from the heavens. Ultimately, this duality, this constant convergence of creating and being created as played out between humankind and the rest of the world, explains humanity’s importance.

Analysis by David Bisson

You can watch Roger Berkowitz’s lecture in full as well as a Q&A session below:

Roger Berkowitz At Language & Thinking Part 1 of 2 from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.

Roger Berkowitz at Language & Thinking Part 2 from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.