Arendt wrote the prologue to The Human Condition not long after the successful launch of Sputnik raised the first realistic prospect of humanity taking its first steps off-planet, and in the shadow of threatening and perplexing developments in atomic and quantum physics (see her comments on the crisis of language in the sciences).
It’s a book about the conditions of human life and our lives together, and in some way about the futility of our attempts to escape them. Arendt explicitly writes that she does not set out to offer definitive answers to contemporary political questions: “Such answers are given every day, and they are a matter of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible.”
She’s erudite, perceptive and funny, and the book is well worth your time.
This future [selectively bred, long-lived, spacebound super-]man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.
There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.
While such possibilities still may lie in a distant future, the first boomerang effects of science’s great triumphs have made themselves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that the “truths” of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these “truths” are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be “not perhaps as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle,’ but much more so than a ‘winged lion’ ” (Erwin Schrodinger).
We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.
In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.
However, even apart from these last and yet uncertain consequences, the situation created by the sciences is of great political significance. Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. If we would follow the advice, so frequently urged upon us, to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement, we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful. For the sciences today have been forced to adopt a “language” of mathematical symbols which, though it was originally meant only as an abbreviation for spoken statements, now contains statements that in no way can be translated back into speech.
The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of “character” — that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons — or their naivete — that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use — but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power. And whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about.
There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.
Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition
See also:
Hannah Arendt on action, story, history and invisible hands
Hannah Arendt on speech and action, equality and distinction
Hannah Arendt on labour and consumption, automation and Utopia
Hannah Arendt on Marx’s equivocal view of labour
Hannah Arendt on the abolition of distance, abstraction and alienation
Darwin among the machines: Samuel Butler (1863) on the mechanical master race
Sustainability and Final Solutions
Technological Solutions
Technology (1): Second Nature
Technology (2): Artifice-ial Beings
Technology (3): A history of augmentation
Neal Stephenson on augmentation as amputation
The unforgiving minute (2): the hard part / the meaning of sustainability