The Human Condition

p. 259: […] neither the speculations of philosophers nor the imaginings of astronomers has ever constituted an Event. >> event

Prior to the telescopic discoveries of Galileo, Giordano Bruno's philosophy attracted little attention even among learned men, and without the factual confirmation they bestowed upon the Copernican revolution, not only the theologians but all "sensible men … would have pronounced it a wild appeal … of an uncontrolled imagination." (E. A. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Science (Anchor ed.), p. 38 (cf. Koyre, op. cit., p. 55, who states that Bruno's influence made itself felt "only after the great telescopic discoveries of Galileo").)

In the realm of ideas there are only originality and depth, both personal qualities, but no absolute, objective novelty; ideas come and go, they have a permanence, even an immortality of their own, depending upon their inherent power of illumination, which is and endures independently of time and history. Ideas, moreover, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented, and empirically unconfirmed speculations about the earth's movement around the sun were no more unprecedented than contemporary theories about atoms would be if they had no basis in experiments and no consequences in the factual world. >> idea event

The first "to save the phenomena by the assumption that the heaven is at rest, but that the earth revolves in an oblique orbit, while also rotating about its own axis" was Aristarchus of Samos in the third century B.C., and the first to conceive of an atomic structure of matter was Democritus of Abdera in the fifth century B.C. A very instructive account of the Greek physical world from the viewpoint of modern science is given by S. Sambursky, The Physical World of the Greeks (1956).

p. 259–260: What Galileo did and what nobody had done before was to use the telescope in such a way that the secrets of the universe were delivered to human cognition "with the certainty of sense-perception";

Galileo {op. cit.) himself stressed this point: "Any one can know with the certainty of sense-perception that the moon is by no means endowed with a smooth and polished surface, etc." (quoted from Koyre, op. cit., p. 89).

that is, he put within the grasp of an earth-bound creature and its body-bound senses what had seemed forever beyond his reach, at best open to the uncertainties of speculation and imagination.

p. 260: This difference in relevance between the Copernican system and Galileo's discoveries was quite clearly understood by the Catholic Church, which raised no objections to the pre-Galilean theory of an immobile sun and a moving earth as long as the astronomers used it as a convenient hypothesis for mathematical purposes; but, as Cardinal Bellarmine pointed out to Galileo, "to prove that the hypothesis … saves the appearances is not at all the same thing as to demonstrate the reality of the movement of the earth." […]

p. 261 (/332 de): For many centuries the consequences of this Event, again not unlike the consequences of the Nativity, remained contradictory and inconclusive, and even today the conflict between the event itself and its almost immediate consequences is far from resolved. >> event conflict

The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-quickening increase inhuman knowledge and power; shortly before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and—in the words of Eddington—"the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." (As quoted by J. W. N. Sullivan, Limitations of Science (Mentor ed.), p. 141.)

Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe—in the words of Heisenberg—man encounters only himself.

The German physicist Werner Heisenberg has expressed this thought in a number of recent publications. For instance: "Wenn man versucht, von der Situation in der modernen Naturwissenschaft ausgehend, sich zu den in Bewegung geratenen Fundamenten vorzutasten, so hat man den Eindruck, … dass zum erstenmal im Laufe der Geschichte der Mensch auf dieser Erde nur noch sich selbst gegenübersteht … , dass wir gewissermassen immer nur uns selbst begegnen" (Das Naturbild der heutigen Pkysik [1955], pp. 17-18). Heisenberg's point is that the observed object has no existence independent of the observing subject: "Durch die Art der Beobachtung wird entschieden, welche Züge der Natur bestimmt werden und welche wir durch unsere Beobachtungen verwischen" (Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft [1949], p. 67).

p. 262 (/333 de): The point, in our context, is that both despair and triumph are inherent in the same event. If we wish to put this into historical perspective, it is as if Galileo's discovery proved in demonstrable fact that both the worst fear and the most presumptuous hope of human speculation, the ancient fear that our senses, our very organs for the reception of reality, might betray us, and the Archimedean wish for a point outside the earth from which to unhinge the world, could only come true together, as though the wish would be granted only provided that we lost reality and the fear was to be consummated only if compensated by the acquisition of supramundane powers. >> archimedean wish point outside earth

For whatever we do today in physics whether we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or penetrate with the help of telescopes the cosmic space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature, or attain speeds in atomic accelerators which approach the speed of light, or produce elements not to be found in nature, or disperse radioactive particles, created by us through the use of cosmic radiation, on the earth—we always handle nature from a point in the universe Outside the earth. Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand (…), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean Point. And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature's household. >> dispose outside earth risk

p. 262–263: While these achievements were anticipated by no one, and while most present-day theories flatly contradict those formulated during the first centuries of the modern age, this development itself was possible only because at the beginning the old dichotomy between earth and sky was abolished and a unification of the universe effected, so that from then on nothing occurring in earthly nature was viewed as a mere earthly happening. All events were considered to be subject to a universally valid law in the fullest sense of the word, which means, among other things, valid beyond the reach of human sense experience (even of the sense experiences made with the help of the finest instruments), valid beyond the reach of human memory and the appearance of mankind on earth, valid even beyond the coming into existence of organic life and the earth herself. All laws of the new astrophysical science are formulated from the Archimedean Point, and this point probably lies much farther away from the earth and exerts much more power over her than Archimedes or Galileo ever dared to think. >> dichotomy earth sky archimedean point

p. 263–264 (/335 de): If scientists today point out that we may assume with equal validity that the earth turns around the sun or the sun turns around the earth, that both assumptions are in agreement with observed phenomena and the difference is only a difference of the chosen point of reference, it by no means indicates a return to Cardinal Bellarmine's or Copernicus' position, where the astronomers dealt with mere hypotheses. It rather signifies that we have moved the Archimedean Point one step farther away from the earth to a point in the universe where neither earth nor sun are centers of a universal system. It means that we no longer feel bound even to the sun, that we move freely in the universe, choosing our point of reference wherever it may be convenient for a specific purpose. >> difference point reference center universal system

For the actual accomplishments of modern science this change from the earlier heliocentric system to a system without a fixed center is, no doubt, as important as the original shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric world view. Only now have we established ourselves as "universal" beings, as creatures who are terrestrial not by nature and essence but only by the condition of being alive, and who therefore by virtue of reasoning can overcome this condition not in mere speculation but in actual fact.

Yet the general relativism that results automatically from the shift from a heliocentric to a centerless world view—conceptualized in Einstein's theory of relativity with its denial that "at a definite present instant all matter is simultaneously real" (Whitehead, op. tit., p. 120.) and the concomitant, implied denial that Being which appears in time and space possesses an absolute reality—was already contained in, or at least preceded by, those seventeenth-century theories according to which blue is nothing but a "relation to a seeing eye" and heaviness nothing but a "relation of reciprocal acceleration." >> present instant relation

Ernst Cassirer's early essay, Einstein's Theory of Relativity (Dover Publications, 1953), strongly emphasizes this continuity between twentieth-century and seventeenth-century science.

The parentage of modern relativism is not in Einstein but in Galileo and Newton.

p. 264: What ushered in the modern age was not the age-old desire of astronomers for simplicity, harmony, and Beauty, which made Copernicus look upon the orbits of the planets from the sun instead of the earth, nor the Renaissance's new-awakened love for the earth and the world, with its rebellion against the rationalism of medieval scholasticism; this love of the world, on the contrary, was the first to fall victim to the modern age's triumphal world alienation. It was rather the discovery, due to the new instrument, that Copernicus' image of "the virile man standing in the sun … overlooking the planets" was much more than an image or a gesture, was in fact an indication of the astounding human capacity to think in terms of the universe while remaining on the earth, and the perhaps even more astounding human ability to use cosmic laws as guiding principles for terrestrial action. Compared with the earth alienation underlying the whole development of natural science in the modern age, the withdrawal from terrestrial proximity contained in the discovery of the globe as a whole and the world alienation produced in the twofold process of expropriation and wealth accumulation are of minor significance.

J. Bronowski, in an article "Science and Human Values," points out the great role the metaphor played in the mind of important scientists (see Nation, December 29, 1956). >> metaphor

p. 264–265: At any event, while world alienation determined the course and the development of modern society, Earth Alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science. Under the sign of earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural science, so radically changed its innermost content that one may doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science existed at all. This is perhaps clearest in the development of the new science's most important mental instrument, the devices of modern algebra, by which mathematics "succeeded in freeing itself from the shackles of spatiality," that is, from geometry, which, as the name indicates, depends on terrestrial measures and measurements. Modern mathematics freed man from the shackles of earth-bound experience and his power of cognition from the shackles of finitude. >> world alienation earth alienation algebra geometry finitude

p. 265: The decisive point here is not that men at the beginning of the modern age still believed with Plato in the mathematical structure of the universe nor that, one generation later, they believed with Descartes that certain knowledge is possible only where the mind plays with its own forms and formulas.

What is decisive is the entirely un-Platonic subjection of geometry to algebraic treatment, which discloses the modern ideal of reducing terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical symbols. Without this non-spatial symbolic language Newton would not have been able to unite astronomy and physics into a single science or, to put it another way, to formulate a law of gravitation where the same equation will cover the movements of heavenly bodies in the sky and the motion of terrestrial bodies on earth.

Even then it was clear that modern mathematics, in an already breathtaking development, had discovered the amazing human faculty to grasp in symbols those dimensions and concepts which at most had been thought of as Negations and hence limitations of the mind, because their immensity seemed to transcend the minds of mere mortals, whose existence lasts an insignificant time and remains bound to a not too important corner of the universe. >> negation

Yet even more significant than this possibility—to reckon with entities which could not be "seen" by the eye of the mind—was the fact that the new mental instrument, in this respect even newer and more significant than all the scientific tools it helped to devise, opened the way for an altogether novel mode of meeting and approaching nature in the experiment. In the Experiment man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, he placed nature under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical Viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself. >> experiment viewpoint

p. 266: For mathematics (that is, geometry) was the proper introduction to that sky of ideas where no mere images (eidola) and shadows, no perishable matter, could any longer interfere with the appearing of eternal being, where these appearances are saved (sozein ta phainomena) and safe, as purified of human sensuality and mortality as of material perishability.

Yet mathematical and ideal forms were not the products of the intellect, but given to the eyes of the mind as sense data were given to the organs of the senses; and those who were trained to perceive what was hidden from the eyes of bodily vision and the untrained mind of the many perceived true being, or rather being in its true appearance. With the rise of modernity, mathematics does not simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at all. It is no longer the beginning of philosophy, of the "science" of Being in its true appearance, but becomes instead the science of the structure of the human mind.

~

ARENDT, Hannah, 1998. The human condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-02599-5. wikipedia

ARENDT, Hannah, 1972/2015. Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben. Ungekürzte Taschenbuchausgabe, 15. Auflage. München Berlin Zürich: Piper. Serie Piper, 3623. ISBN 978-3-492-23623-2.