The Human Condition: Second Edition by Arendt Hannah

Author:Arendt, Hannah [Arendt, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226924571
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

32

THE PROCESS CHARACTER OF ACTION

The instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else has of course never really succeeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being one of the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether. We saw before that in our world the seeming elimination of labor, as the painful effort to which all human life is bound, had first of all the consequence that work is now performed in the mode of laboring, and the products of work, objects for use, are consumed as though they were mere consumer goods. Similarly, the attempt to eliminate action because of its uncertainty and to save human affairs from their frailty by dealing with them as though they were or could become the planned products of human making has first of all resulted in channeling the human capacity for action, for beginning new and spontaneous processes which without men never would come into existence, into an attitude toward nature which up to the latest stage of the modern age had been one of exploring natural laws and fabricating objects out of natural material. To what an extent we have begun to act into nature, in the literal sense of the word, is perhaps best illustrated by a recent, casual remark of a scientist who quite seriously suggested that “basic research is when I am doing what I don’t know what I am doing.”72

This started harmlessly enough with the experiment in which men were no longer content to observe, to register, and contemplate whatever nature was willing to yield in her own appearance, but began to prescribe conditions and to provoke natural processes. What then developed into an ever-increasing skill in unchaining elemental processes, which, without the interference of men, would have lain dormant and perhaps never have come to pass, has finally ended in a veritable art of “making” nature, that is, of creating “natural” processes which without men would never exist and which earthly nature by herself seems incapable of accomplishing, although similar or identical processes may be commonplace phenomena in the universe surrounding the earth. Through the introduction of the experiment, in which we prescribed man-thought conditions to natural processes and forced them to fall into man-made patterns, we eventually learned how to “repeat the process that goes on in the sun,” that is, how to win from natural processes on the earth those energies which without us develop only in the universe.

The very fact that natural sciences have become exclusively sciences of process and, in their last stage, sciences of potentially irreversible, irremediable “processes of no return” is a clear indication that, whatever the brain power necessary to start them, the actual underlying human capacity which alone could bring about this development is no “theoretical” capacity, neither contemplation nor reason, but the human ability to act—to start new unprecedented processes whose outcome remains uncertain and unpredictable whether they are let loose in the human or the natural realm.

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