The Human Condition

This chapter focuses on one of the three decisive events of the pre-modern world outlined by Arendt in Chapter 35: the invention of the telescope by Galileo and the subsequent changes to physics and astronomy that persist to this day.

The chapter title refers to Archimedes, the third century BCE Greek polymath. His “point” refers to the notion of a hypothetical perspective on the world from outside, that is to say, the standpoint of the universe as a whole. If ever reached, this point would represent the perspective of completely certain and objective knowledge, a kind of “God’s eye view” of the world. Arendt argues that Galileo’s contributions to science and the history of ideas functioned as an achievement of this ideal. With the development of the telescope, Galileo delivered “the secrets of the universe […] to human cognition,” thereby putting “within the grasp of an earth-bound creature and its body-bound senses what had seemed forever beyond his reach” (260): the Archimedean point.

Although one would think that the vast enlargement of the human capacity to understand the world produced an effusion of optimism, Arendt argues that a certain pessimism and skepticism also set in. By opening the path to an infinite wealth of detail about the universe beyond this world, Galileo challenged “the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality” (261). To know anything from the Archimedean point, we must use artificial scientific instruments that always present the danger of simply reflecting our own biases and limitations back at us. We strive to view everything from the Archimedean point, and yet find that this is unattainable.

For Arendt, the “earth alienation” (264) created by this “centerless world view” (263) has dominated natural science after Galileo. Neither the beauty of nature nor the powers of the mind are affirmed by the reduction of the universe to the human-made experimental constructs made up of abstract formulae and mathematical symbols. The result is “suspicion, outrage, and despair” (267) at the lack of meaning that the universe gives back to us in exchange for our advancements in understanding it.

Chapter 37 provides a brief restatement of many of the central themes of Chapter 36 while also offering a bridge to the discussion of the philosophical consequences of modern science undertaken in Chapter 38.

Arendt reformulates the achievement of the Archimedean point of knowledge represented by the accomplishments of Galileo as the exchange of a natural scientific worldview for a universal one. The former “looks upon nature from a universal standpoint and thus acquires complete mastery over her,” while the latter is “a truly ‘universal’ science […] which imports cosmic processes into nature even at the obvious risk of destroying her” (268). In short, the attainment of the Archimedean point through modern advances in physics and astronomy has displaced the standpoint of earth-bound nature from scientific investigation. We are now able to summon the processes that govern the universe but not our immediate experience of nature into earth (i.e., atomic power, the breakdown of matter into energy).

Arendt believes that this change in perspective has had important philosophical and cultural consequences. The central paradox is that we remain tied to the earth and the human condition (at least for now); man has developed the “universal standpoint without changing his location” (270). For Arendt, this paradox constitutes an uneasy combination of absolute objectivity with limited human subjectivity. We see the universe from the cosmic standpoint of God, and can even harness its forces on earth, and yet we are not God. The examination of this problem is for Arendt a central theme of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes.

In this chapter, Arendt argues that Rene Descartes’s work best represents the true philosophical implications of the modern worldview inaugurated by Galileo. Where ancient Greek philosophy set out from the notion of wonder at the grandeur of the world and nature, Descartes’s re-oriented philosophical reflection around the problem of doubt.

According to Arendt with Galileo, “it was not reason but a man-made instrument, the telescope, which actually changed the physical world view […] the active stepping in of homo faber, of making and fabricating” (274). For Arendt, this corresponds to the death of “self-evidence,” the idea that the human being can discern truth and reality through either senses or reason. The relationship between us and the world is now forever defined by the intervention of appearance, which is always open to doubt.

Descartes encapsulates this loss of faith in the self-evidence of all knowledge through what Arendt calls the two nightmares he posits in his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy. The nightmares are “that everything is a dream and there is no reality and that not God but an evil spirit rules the world and mocks man” (279). There is no longer any guarantee that the intellectual powers of the human being correspond to an objective reality that opens itself to them. Everything may be an illusion, therefore everything must be doubted.

For Arendt, the result is that mere truthfulness seems to be all that our understanding is capable of, not truth itself. We cannot attain reliable certainty about our knowledge, but instead the pragmatic reliability of what tends to work or succeed in practice. We cannot know reality as such, but only reality as it appears to us. Philosophy after Descartes accordingly retreats from the world, which can always deceive us, to introspective reflection on our conditions of knowledge.

This chapter continues the analysis of modern philosophy, particularly Descartes, begun in Chapter 38. Left with only paralyzing doubt about the correspondence between the mind and reality, Arendt argues that modern philosophy fell back upon its sole remaining criterion of certainty: the “I-am” captured by Descartes’s famous dictum cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) (280). This concept is what Arendt refers to as introspection, the retreat to “the reality of processes which go on in the mind” (280). If faith in the harmony between human knowledge and the world is impossible after Galileo, then the only firm principle of understanding left is the analysis of thinking itself.

The limitation of this approach to philosophy is of course that the objective, mind-independent reality of the world is forsaken: “The seen tree may be real enough for the sensation of vision just as the dreamed tree is real enough for the dreamer as long as the dream lasts, but neither can ever become a real tree” (281).

Arendt ties the introspective exchange of the limited reality of the “seen tree” for the inaccessible reality of the “tree itself” to the loss of common sense, a technical philosophical term that goes back to Aristotle. For Arendt as for Aristotle, common sense refers to the idea of an unofficial sixth sense that fits the private sensations of every individual into a world of shared perceptions and meanings. With Descartes, however, Arendt says that common sense no longer refers to the shared world of our experiences, but rather the structure of the mind and its productions. While human beings do possess the same cognitive structure through which we experience the world, Arendt says that this is understood strictly in terms of “logical relations between man-made symbols” (284), for instance, mathematics.

Put another way, there is no common sense by which we can each access a world of shared meaning and significance, just abstract laws of thought that ensure the truth of propositions like 2 + 2 = 4. This solves the problem of Cartesian doubt, but, for Arendt, is also entails an impoverished conception of existence fundamentally alienated from the world.

This chapter carries forward the themes of Chapters 36 through 39 by expanding on the repercussions of the attainment of the Archimedean point of knowledge as it pertains to modern physics.

For Arendt, the trajectory of modern physics hinges on mathematization of nature through science (reductio scientiae ad mathematicam), a phrase she mentions a few times in previous chapters of Part 6. While science has been remarkably successful at showing the correspondence between human-made mathematical models and observable phenomena in the world, Arendt argues that this approach remains trapped in the Cartesian model of introspection:

[W]hile technology demonstrates the ‘truth’ of modern science’s most abstract concepts, it demonstrates no more than that man can always apply the results of his mind, that no matter which system he uses for the explanation of natural phenomena he will always be able to adopt it as a guiding principle for making and acting (287).

Modern scientists have been very successful at producing hypotheses verified by certain experimental models, but “they obviously deal with a hypothetical nature” (287). As for the preceding chapters of Part 6, Arendt has in mind developments like quantum physics and non-Euclidean geometry that are able to describe complex mathematical relations in nature, but which have no obvious bearing on, or concrete point of verification in, human experience itself. The world of scientific experiment, she concludes, is in danger of becoming a “man-made reality” irreconcilably divorced from “the reality of what he himself is not” (288), that is to say, the actual world or nature.

Chapter 41 functions as a pivot to the second half of Arendt’s argument in Part 6 of The Human Condition. Having outlined the broad historical development and intellectual consequences of the modern scientific worldview inaugurated by the research of Galileo, she goes on to situate these themes in terms of her categories of the vita activa.

Arendt argues that the achievement of the Archimedean point and the resultant ascendance of Cartesian doubt and introspection significantly undermined the role of the vita contemplativa. If the potentially deceptive character of appearance will always intervene between truth and being, then passive contemplation and observation must be forsaken for the activities of doing and fabrication. Human beings can fully control what they make, and therefore ensure that the artificial conditions under which they investigate the universe generate a reliable form of result, even if these aren’t mind-independent, objective truths. Knowledge, as Arendt puts it, is therefore: first, self-made, and second, testable through doing or experiment.

As a result, contemplation of the transcendent, eternal truths of reality, which is most explicitly modelled as the highest human function in the history of philosophy by the work of Plato and Aristotle, is “altogether eliminated” (291). It is incoherent to ponder the ultimate mysteries of the universe disclosed to us because there is simply no guarantee that these figments of the mind are not entirely illusory. For Arendt, contemplation is entirely different from thinking, which she refers to as a kind of inner dialogue analogous to introspection. Thinking becomes the “the handmaiden of doing” subjugated to the demands of the human-made experiment while the previously superior activity of contemplation is rendered “meaningless” (292).

For Arendt, this “meaninglessness” is a more radical “spiritual consequence” for the human being than any of the traditional conceptual reversals (i.e., idealism v. materialism) that constitute the history of Western philosophy (292-93). Philosophy suffers a seemingly irreparable “world loss” that has decisively severed it from the chief cultural and intellectual advancements of the modern age. It loses all independent importance and simply becomes a method of commenting on developments in other domains of knowledge. In short, the vita activa is victorious.

This chapter continues Arendt’s discussion of the relationship between the modern scientific worldview and the active and contemplative lives.

With the decline of the vita contemplativa brought about by the proverbial discovery of the Archimedean point of knowledge after Galileo, Arendt argues that its place at the pinnacle of human function was taken by homo faber. It was homo faber, the instrument and toolmaker, that had opened the path to the Archimedean point through the invention of the telescope. Even the concept of the modern scientific experiment, Arendt argues, is decisively influenced by the standards of work: we no longer ask “why” or “what” of that which we wish to know, just the “how” of its operations as if it were an object of fabrication.

According to Arendt, the ascendance of homo faber, signaled by the modern age of human-made experimental constructs, involves a further development. The shift to “how” as the primary interrogative of modern knowledge “implies that the actual objects of knowledge can no longer be things or eternal motions but must be processes” (296). The reality of a given object of scientific investigation, call it x, is no longer knowable as a certain truth. Instead, science focuses on the history and becoming of x as it emerges in a process governed by human-made experimental conditions. This focus, Arendt emphasizes, is actually a departure from homo faber: it is not the end of fabrication, the finished product itself, that is most important, but rather the means, the artificial process itself; a reversal within the vita activa.

After a digression on the application of this new, process-centered method of science to the spheres of history and politics in the work of Vico and Hobbes, Arendt circles back to one of the main thematic touchstones of The Human Condition, the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. She argues that the emphasis on the vita contemplativa articulated by these three thinkers corresponds to an elevation of work over action.

This work over action involves what Arendt calls the “inner affinity” between contemplation and fabricatio. Both contemplation and work involve the notion of an objective and transcendent idea or form: the eternal truth of the philosopher and the ideal model of a given product that the craftsman must draw upon in order to make an artifact through work. According to Arendt, the similarity between the philosopher and homo faber on this point allows the former to denigrate all activity as an imperfect representation of an idea. No single chair produced by human hands will ever measure up to the perfect ideal of a chair that exists in the mind. The reliance of philosophy on work in explicating its ideal of contemplation is homo faber’s victory.

However, the philosophy of the Socratic school preaches a speechless wonder at the grandeur of the idea, a wonder in which one must remain in motionless awe: “[I]t is through the conscious cessation of activity, the activity of making, that the contemplative state is reached” (303). For Arendt, the modern worldview destroys this speechless wonder of contemplation and its substitution of objective truths for artificial processes is an ends for the means.

This chapter continues the discussion of vita activa’s evolution in the modern age. Arendt traces the downfall of the standard of homo faber after its victory over both action and contemplation described in Chapter 42. Just as action and contemplation fell to homo faber, so too will the latter give way to the ascendency of labor and the animal laborans in the Chapters 44 and 45.

Arendt begins by recapitulating the argument of Chapter 42: The discoveries of Galileo and the attainment of the Archimedean point of knowledge are especially amenable to structure of work. In contrast to ancient Greek and medieval conceptions of the vita contemplativa as the highest human function, modern science models the fabrication process of homo faber by identifying knowledge through artificial experimental paradigms accessed with human-made instruments. As much as this elevates the work of homo faber, Arendt argues that it also contains the seed of its own decline: it is not the end products of fabrication, concrete things, that are valued by the modern age, but the means or process itself (307). In other words, the very worldliness of work emphasized by Arendt through The Human Condition is lost in the world alienation of the modern human being.

For Arendt, the downfall of homo faber appears in the waning of the principle of utility. The principle of utility holds that human beings should maximize use or usefulness; this is the essential standpoint of work, to produce things with a definite use or function. According to Arendt, however, the principle of happiness eclipses the principle of utility, a transition that she associates with the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Despite its name, utilitarianism is concerned with maximizing happiness. Bentham’s utilitarianism is a species of hedonism, that is, a moral philosophy that claims that the avoidance of pain and the enjoyment of pleasure constitute the ultimate human good.

However, Arendt claims that the kind of utilitarian hedonism represented by Bentham is not really about happiness at all, but “the promotion of individual life or a guaranty of the survival of mankind” (311). For Arendt, this signals the return of animal laborans and the accompanying notion that the mere process of biological life is the highest human good.

Chapter 44 continues the thread of development begun in Chapter 41 concerning the shifts in the vita activa that followed from the modern scientific worldview. As detailed in the previous chapter, the decline of homo faber has given way to the principle of happiness as the ultimate standard of the human condition, which itself is just a concealed affirmation of the value of biological life as the highest good.

Arendt locates the modern apotheosis of life as the highest good in the doctrines of Christianity, as eternal life beyond this world is the core of Christianity, a complete reversal of the ancient conception of the immortal as the product of great words and deeds performed in the world (think again of Achilles). For Arendt, Christianity is thus responsible for the devaluation of the world as the stage of action and work in favor of the importance of mere life, which, as her analysis of labor indicates, is largely separate from action and work. If a Roman sees the political community as the one eternal thing that will outlive her, the Christian disdains such vulgar, worldly affairs and emphasizes the everlasting life of her individual soul through faith.

Despite all the upheavals of the modern age, Arendt thinks that this belief in the supremacy of human life has persisted into our present. Although she is clear that Christianity shared some of the same negative presuppositions as antiquity regarding labor, the legacy of the Christian worldview is the installment of labor as the highest form of the vita activa. This is the final topic of The Human Condition.

This brief final chapter of The Human Condition offers some concluding remarks to Arendt’s argument and a few suggestions for further thinking.

Although it is Christianity that has facilitated the elevation of human life to the highest good, Arendt claims that the concomitant rise of the animal laborans would have been impossible without secularization: “Modern man,” she writes, “when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real” (320). In the wake of the epoch of Cartesian doubt, the decline of religious faith leaves us nothing solid to hold on to except for the self.

Arendt then returns to the major argument of Part 3 by situating the transition from the egoistic, self-interested viewpoint of utilitarian introspection to the rise of society and “socialized man” (321) with Marx. Marx, she says, dissolved the self-interested standpoint of the individual into that of a class. A class is in turn part of a society made up of other classes, while a society is just an expression of the successive stages of the relationship between labor and nature that constitute the history of the species. For Arendt, authentic action is thereby eclipsed in the hierarchy of the vita activa in favor of labor and the life process.    

After finishing the thread of her argument in Part 6, Arendt offers some concluding reflections on the further consequences of the victory of the animal laborans. She claims that the remaining vestiges of other human functions like work, action, and even thought, are being increasingly subordinated to the life process of labor. Even labor itself runs the risk of a radical transformation by automation and technology, so that the individualized experience of toil and effort will erode. Her final words serve as a transition to the unfinished sequel to The Human Condition, The Life of Mind. Thought, she says, may have the potential to accomplish more than the vita activa for the future of the human being.