Sad Mondays #3.5
Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, March, 2020.
This future man, whom 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. (Arendt, The Human Condition, 2-3)
There is something truly astonishing about Hannah Arendt’s prologue to her 1958 book, ‘The Human Condition’ from which the above quote is taken. I was only first made aware of this text recently, when reading Ray Brassier’s essay on Prometheanism in the 2014 compilation of essays, #accelerate#. A large part of Brassier’s argument involves the reading of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s work on human enhancement and transhumanism and it is Dupuy, who uses Arendt’s distinction between the ‘made’ and the ‘given’ when formulating his distinction between existential condition and essential nature.
In his essay Brassier refers to Arendt directly four times. Each time, he wishes to show how Dupuy’s wariness of the Promethean impulse is determined by Arendt’s thinking of the human condition. For Arendt, the human condition consists of an equilibrium: on the one side, there are the things given to humans, and on the other, things that are human made. Belonging uniquely to the human, is his finite kind of transcendence, which conditions how he determines the given as an essence. The process of cognising the given is the process of objectivisation.
This delicate balance between the given and the made is disturbed if we, as human, turn inwards and try to cognise the condition which makes us human. For as human beings we cannot objectify the condition of objectivisation. It would be, as Arendt so memorably put it, “like jumping over our own shadows”(10). To wish to do so—to be determined to jump—is to exchange our gift of existence for something we have made ourselves. According to Brassier’s interpretation, the Promethean trespass consists of us humans “making the given” (478).
But this is precisely what we do. Arendt’s prologue begins with a description of the 1958 Sputnik launch, a moment in human progress as significant for Arendt as the dropping of the atomic bomb. For the first time, something human-made shared orbit with other celestial bodies: what was earth-bound now soared through the heavens and from our human perspective, the earth-bound and the heavenly became indistinguishable. For Arendt, it was our human response to this fact that was worth noting. Instead of celebration, the news was greeted with an overwhelming feeling of relief. For us it seemed to be a relief to be able to escape earth, to refuse this gift we were offered, to choose the man-made over the given.
For Arendt, this technological development has further implications, especially for human communication. She describes a future world, which is technologically advanced to such a degree, that is now beyond normal expression in thought and in speech, confined instead to mathematical formulas. In such a technological world we would become heavenly dwellers, but such, who are nevertheless incapable of understanding what they do. As she writes,
…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 technologically possible, no matter how murderous it is.
It would seem that with the reliance on our laptops, tablets and smartphones, we have already become those thoughtless creatures that Arendt feared. No wonder an existential tradition of philosophy has deemed it wise to suppress the Promethean impulse! How arrogant to think we can remake the world and ourselves! Yet not to do so is its own kind of arrogance. It is to say we are different to nature - that we cannot be thought of in the same terms.
