Preliminary Notes on Hannah Arendt, Prometheanism, and Human Nature

Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, is quick to make sure that we understand that the human condition as such is not equivalent to human nature. For her, while the latter consists of “essential characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence would no longer be human,”¹⁾Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [HC] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 10. the human condition as such is a structuring principle: “conditions of human existence […that] can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely.”²⁾HC, 11. Indeed, for her, human nature is likely both inexplicable without recourse to theology — she notes that “[t]he question about the nature of man is no less a theological question than the question about the nature of God; both can be settled only within the framework of a divinely revealed answer”³⁾Ibid., 11 f. 2. — and, perhaps, non-existent: “the fact that attempts to define the nature of man lead so easily into an idea which definitely strikes us as ‘superhuman’ and therefore is identified with the divine may cast suspicion upon the very concept of ‘human nature.'”⁴⁾Ibid., 11.

It is my contention, however, that not only does Arendt (perhaps unconsciously) smuggle human nature and/or essentialism back into the picture despite being nominally anti-essentialist, but she also ontologizes human finitude in the same way Ray Brassier accuses Heidegger of doing. In this short post, what I want to try to do is explicate Arendt’s supposed anti-essentialism in The Human Condition, recapitulate Ray Brassier’s critique of anti-Prometheans in his 2014 essay “Prometheanism and its Critics,”⁵⁾Ray Brassier, “Prometheanism and its Critics” [“PC”], in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. R. Mackay and A. Avanessian. (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014.): 467-487. and ultimately argue that despite Arendt’s claims, there is a latent essentialism in her work.

Hannah Arendt by Ben Northern

To start with, it seems prudent to briefly note the context in which The Human Condition was written. Following the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (arguably her magnum opus) in 1951 wherein she lays out a) what totalitarianism as seen in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia was, b) how it operated on the masses so as to totally dominate them, and c) what it sought to achieve — namely, the domination of the world and, most importantly, the destruction of human spontaneity (something she identifies with natality — a concept she originally works with in her 1929 doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine), she published The Human Condition in 1958.

The Human Condition can, in many respects, be seen as a continued response to Promethean tendencies she saw cropping up in the early 20th century.⁶⁾Prometheanism, in this case, is defined by Brassier as such: “the claim that there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and our world.” “PC,” 470. She first isolates these tendencies of Prometheanism in her doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine. Popping up numerous times through the book, she locates these tendencies in the human desire to imitate God⁷⁾Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine [LSA], trans. The Literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Blücher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 54. and in her reflections on the nature of pride, wherein she says “[i]f man loves himself according to his own will, he does not love what he finds created by God, but what he makes of himself on his own.”⁸⁾LSA, 81, 90. Later in her career, she isolates these same tendencies in The Origins of Totalitarianism, this time in her meditations on the supposed omnipotence of humans under totalitarian visions — she says of totalitarian leaders that “[t]heir faith in human omnipotence, their conviction that everything can be done through organization, carries them into experiments which human imaginations may have outlined but human activity certainly never realized”⁹⁾Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [OT], (Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1994), 436. — and her discussion on “total domination.”¹⁰⁾OT, 437-459.

Likely prompted (at least in part) by the 1957 launch of Sputnik 1, an event she describes as “second in importance to no other,”¹¹⁾HC, 1. she publishes The Human Condition wherein she worries deeply about the influence of science on human life, especially with the advent of our ability to leave Earth — something she defines as “the very quintessence of the human condition”¹²⁾Ibid., 2. –, the development of life-extension technologies, the rise of automation, and more.

In her attempt to combat these potentially inhuman tendencies, she proposes a sustained meditation on “the conditions of human existence”: “life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth.”¹³⁾Ibid., 11. While she wants to affirm conditions of existence, she does not want to affirm an essential human nature. To solidify the distinction between the two, she notes that were we to go to another planet — “[t]he most radical change in the human condition we can imagine”¹⁴⁾Ibid., 10 –, we would not cease to be human. While we would no longer live under human conditions, we would live under “man-made conditions” (what the distinction between “human” and “man-made” is, I could not tell you).¹⁵⁾Ibid., 10. Indeed, for her, the activities which typify the vita activa, the active life that she sees as vital to the human condition, would no longer make sense. As she says, “[n]either labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer.”¹⁶⁾Ibid. While I’m inclined to disbelieve this claim, that is not the point of this essay.

At this point, we take a brief detour to Brassier. Brassier, critiquing attempts to “relinquish the intellectual project of Enlightenment [progress],” either from the Left or the Right, in the name of “scaling down” and localizing political activities so as to avoid “remaking the world according to the ideals of equality and justice,” an ideal that is “routinely denounced as a dangerous totalitarian fantasy,” launches a full-fledged assault on anti-Prometheans.¹⁷⁾“PC,” 469. Using Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “a disciple of Arendt,”¹⁸⁾Ibid., 474. as a target, he examines claims imbedded within not only Dupuy and Arendt, but also Heidegger. For Dupuy (following Heidegger and Arendt), humans are not only ontologically indeterminate, but fundamentally unique amongst animals. As Brassier recapitulating Heidegger notes, “humans are not simply different in kind from other entities, they are constituted by an other kind of difference”: “existence.“¹⁹⁾Ibid., 473. Arendt, in her discussions of mortality makes a similar claim. For her, what separates us from animals and makes us unique is our mortality defined as more than mere susceptibility to death. Other animals are ‘immortal’ in a certain sense insofar as they exist only “as members of a species whose immortal life is guaranteed through procreation.”²⁰⁾HC, 18-19. The mortality of humans on the other hand “lies in the fact that individual life, with a recognizable life-story from birth to death [a bio-graphy], rises out of biological life.”²¹⁾Ibid., 19.

Furthermore, Arendt, commenting directly on human nature, notes the following:

It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves — this would be like jumping over our own shadows.²²⁾Ibid., 10.

Thus, for Arendt, and later Dupuy, human existence — the human condition — is a careful balance, “an inextricable mixture of things given and things made,” of the world we are thrown into and the world we make around us via action.²³⁾“PC,” 474. For Brassier, herein lies the worry about Prometheanism. Quoting Dupuy:

[M]an, to a great extent, can shape that which shapes him [we can see similar themes in Arendt],²⁴⁾“Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence […] In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions.” HC, 9. condition that which conditions him, while still respecting the fragile equilibrium between the given and the made.²⁵⁾“PC,” 474.

Brassier takes his shot:

Now, I take this claim that we ought to respect the ‘fragile equilibrium’ between what is made and what is given to be fundamental for the philosophical critique of Prometheanism. It is this precarious equilibrium between human shaping, and that which shapes this shaping — whether given by God or Nature — that Prometheanism threatens.²⁶⁾Ibid., 474.

Furthermore, Brassier sees Dupuy (and Arendt) as “ontologizing finitude” — turning “the finitude of human existence [into] an ontological datum, rather than an epistemic condition.”²⁷⁾Ibid., 476. Arendt makes a similar move. In her discussion of the conditions of human existence outlined above, she ontologizes them by elevating them above merely contingent conditions to structuring conditions — seemingly conditions in the Kantian sense. This is a move first made in Love and Saint Augustine when she argues that being oriented towards death is the essential condition for humans to make meaning in their lives: “It takes death to direct man’s attention to the source of his life. This is the meaning of his transience and the meaning of being a creature.”²⁸⁾LSA, 72.

In addition to this ontologization of finitude, however, I also see Arendt smuggling essentialism and human nature through the backdoor of conditioning. Specifically, it seems that for Arendt, being a conditioned being becomes itself the essential attribute of human existence. Commenting on those “hypothetical wanders from the earth” following Sputnik, Arendt notes that “the only statement we could make regarding their ‘nature’ is that they still are conditioned beings.”²⁹⁾HC, 10.

Despite the veneer of anti-essentialism and a rejection of human nature, Arendt’s claim here betrays the fact that the very ‘act’ of being conditioned is, for her, a fundamentally quality of humanness. Thus, despite her protestations, Arendt seems to be unable to escape human naturalism.

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Postmortem: It ought to be noted, however, that these are only preliminary thoughts. Indeed, if one goes back and looks at the concept of “essence” throughout history, it seems to have undergone an inversion when Christianity showed up on the scene. So perhaps, if we take the original Greek formulation, to ti estin gar einai – that which is/that being which is by its was having been,³⁰⁾I owe thanks to Dr. Antonio Calcagno for pointing me on this path and for providing the Greek and its translation. This is, perhaps, part of a much larger project. we might get further. Aryeh Kosman’s The Activity of Being seems to be a book that will help in this pursuit, although I’ll admit that I’ve yet to read it.