What would an “Arendtian naturalism” look like?

08-08-2024

“The origin of life from inorganic matter is an infinite improbability of inorganic processes, as is the coming into being of the earth viewed from the standpoint of processes in the universe, or the evolution of human out of animal life” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 178).

I have always been intrigued by Arendt’s relationship to materialism and the natural sciences. On a first reading, Arendt seems to be a committed humanist, in the sense that she sees human beings as possessing a distinct set of qualities that are the basis of morality and politics. As a consequence, she is distrustful of observing human affairs through the lenses of the natural sciences, which disregard freedom and spontaneity. This quote, however, shows that things are not so simple. Arendt considered the possibility that the qualities that make us human are part of nature itself. The most distinctively human capacity, namely, the capacity to do something unpredictable and start a new process is present in nature, even in inorganic matter.

Of course, Arendt’s well-known division of the human activities into labor, work, and action suggests a stark separation between nature and freedom—we labor as part of nature, and we act on the basis of freedom. But what if the freedom that we experience as a liberation from the circular movement of nature is produced by nature itself? What if nature sometimes interrupts its own linear and circular motions and becomes “unnatural”? This is clearly what Arendt is implying when she claims that the origin of life stems from an “infinite improbability of inorganic processes.” Just like action consists in doing something highly improbable, not deducible from anything prior to it, so the origin of life is not deducible from inorganic processes. Similarly, the evolution of life into a human form is highly improbable if we follow any linear biological process. This means that freedom, which Arendt associates with the generation of the new “against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability,” may take place in nature itself.

This quote from The Human Condition is not an isolated thought. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, reflecting on the totalitarian attempt at eliminating spontaneity, Arendt claims that “spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive.” Clearly, the idea that the capacity to begin belongs to nature was in her thoughts from early on. In her much later The Life of the Mind, she claims that there is an “urge toward self-display,” which “seems to be common to men and animals.” So the projection of inherently human capacities into nature runs through Arendt’s thought from beginning to end. It is not an issue she ever examined systematically, probably because of her distrust of the natural sciences for addressing moral and political questions. However, it is clear that she did not see the human/nature divide as fixed and immutable.

What would an “Arendtian naturalism” look like, if we follow the implications of the quote? It would certainly not see nature as entirely contained within either the linear motion of physics or the cyclical motion of biology, but as opening up the possibility of novelty, that is, of new beginnings. It would turn to perspectives within the natural sciences that avoid hard determinism—such as that of Swiss biologist Adolf Portman, whose views on the external shape of living creatures Arendt praises in The Life of the Mind. It would identify spaces of freedom, morality, and politics in the animal world and perhaps even the inorganic world. It would not turn to our experience of nature to understand what it means to be human, but rather start with our experience of being human and look for its source in nature. Arendt’s words invite us to imagine how ‘the human condition’ may be larger than the human itself, in such a way that the nature/human distinction is internal to the very movement of nature.

About the author:
Javier Burdman is Research Fellow at the National University of San Martin in Argentina, appointed by the National Research Council (CONICET). He is the author of The Shadow of Totalitarianism: Action, Judgment, and Evil in Politics (SUNY Press, 2021), as well as of a number of articles on Kant, Arendt, Lyotard, Derrida, Nietzsche, and critical theory. He was Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Strasbourg and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Center ‘Normative Orders’, Goethe University Frankfurt.