Man Confronts Himself Alone: Hannah Arendt and the Entanglements of Science, Technology, Economics, and Politics in Modern Life

Introduction

It is customary to call the period in which we live today in late modernity the age of technology, technoscience, etc., because of the unprecedented rate of development of technology and science and their dominant presence in all areas of our lives, which is only increasing.¹ In recent decades, this has led to a literary—scientific and popular—flood on this topic, which in general can be divided into two approaches: utopian, which sees it as, if not the fulfillment of redemption, at least the path to it, with a futuristic tone; for example, among post-humanists, high-tech people, and scientists of exact sciences. And dystopian, which sees it as a serious deterioration in relation to the present, an approach with an apocalyptic tone.²

In the present book, I discuss Hannah Arendt’s considerations on this topic in the fifties and early sixties,³ which offer enlightening critical tools for thinking about science and politics from an approach that combines feelings of despair and hope.⁴

Arendt’s The Human Condition, the main source for my investigation here, is essentially about alienation from the world as expressed through the relationship between science, technology, and politics. At the basis of the thesis in this book is the premise that throughout recorded history, for more than two thousand years, the human condition has been characterized by a split. On the one hand, humans are earthly creatures; we were born into a world that is beyond our control, and like the rest of the living creatures, we are subject to fate. On the other hand, we built an artificial world within nature according to our will and image. This is the political world. The split manifests itself in the fact that we are not completely free, yet we mortals have built our own world that will endure after our death. However, man also had a wish from time immemorial to escape this human condition and disconnect himself from his bond to Earth. The conditions for the realization of this dream have matured through modern science with the invention of instruments (telescopes) by means of which man moved the center point from the earth to space. For some time now, modern scientists have been talking about the emergence of a new human species a century from now that will be completely free, which means that the human condition as we know it is about to change into something else. Indeed, much of it is already a reality. The new universal science born from Galileo’s discoveries enabled man to insert cosmic forces into the household of nature—for example, the splitting of the atom and the fabrication of new man-made materials.

Yet, in Arendt’s account, the entire modern scientific project is hypothetical in its entirety. Galileo’s victory in realizing that the earth is not an absolute center was accompanied by a sense of embarrassment and a growing lack of faith in the reality perceived by the senses and in the notions of truth and certainty. In response, rationality and reason have become modern thought’s unwavering pillars. As Descartes put it, I think, therefore I exist with absolute certainty. This method, coupled with the idea that the only way to know the truth about nature is through mathematics, gave rise to a new experimental science in which scientists formulate their hypotheses, organize their experiments, and use those experiments to verify those very hypotheses. Meaning that science cannot say anything about the behavior of nature per se, but only reports the impressions of the instruments on it. Hence, technology is employed to prove that the craziest abstract scientific concepts that mathematics allows by its nature can be applied with results. Thus, the hypotheses are authentic. It simply works! Arendt concludes that this is a sign that thought has separated from reality. Scientists are capable of doing things that they do not understand.

The question, according to Arendt, is, What does this mean for our humanity?⁵ Does it increase human stature? Arendt reminds us that it is not a scientific question because the technology to execute it is there, but a political one, meaning something that each of us should decide if we really want to conform with science’s adoption of the place of God in an attempt to expand our traditional man-made political world to literally all the earth, that is, to recreate nature—with the risk of destroying it completely—and move even further in space as far as we can reach. Arendt saw a striking description of where we have arrived at in the words of physicist Werner Heisenberg: Man confronts himself alone. And remarked on this: The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man—the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things.⁶

At the same time, what is actually wrong with changing the human condition? What is wrong with the comfort that modern science has undoubtedly brought with it? Well, Arendt is not opposed to the progress of science and technology per se. She appreciates their astonishing, unprecedented achievements in modernity. But in her opinion, there is something more important than pride in human triumph over the boundaries of nature, or comfort. Specifically, our political culture. And this is where science and technology pose a threat.

Modern science’s adoption of a worldview from an Archimedean point in the universe, which allows us to regard Earth as merely another optional detail in a big picture as if we were the inhabitants of some planet in the universe, is a package deal. On the one hand, an Archimedean point, as its name indicates, allowed man to gain unprecedented control over earthly nature in the first place. However, such control is only possible if man distances himself from the world, which is another way of saying he alienates himself from it. This universal science transformed the human world into a laboratory in which the potentiality of cosmic processes to destroy not only every human artifice but also humanity as such is tested. Indeed, scientists became actors with enormous political power.

This brought about a series of dramatic reversals of social, economic, and political priorities in modernity that eventually degraded human society to the lowest level ever. A mass society that cultivates behaviorism, indifference to the immediate environment, thoughtlessness, and cares only about private interests—in short, it lacks all the human capacities necessary for the building of the political culture that Arendt values and advocates through all her writings, namely participatory democracy. And if this is not enough, we are preached to love this kind of people and idealize their needs.

In view of the continuing intervention in nature and society according to scientific laws in liberal democratic countries today, that promotes the technocracy of the social sphere, the awareness and responsibility that Arendt expects from the ordinary citizen is not a simple matter. This universally alienated attitude dominates both governments and mass society, the consumer society that in fact enjoys the toys and comfort that technology provides.

Despite everything, Arendt believes that humanity has not completely lost its ability to change the world. Although the highest activity—political action—has become perverted, the ability to act exists. Yet those who are still able to act in the authentic sense of starting something new, albeit poorly, are not the professional politicians but rather the scientists, that small minority who have always operated far from the spotlight and whose opinion was not considered by the majority. But according to Arendt, the fate of politics must not be left in their hands because they act from a point of view that is outside the world, and therefore it is not possible to derive a common historical meaning from their action. Since the modern world is already profoundly shaped by technoscience, meaning that we moderns have developed an irreversible dependence on technology, the task