This paper on Arendt and the Anthropocene was presented at the conference, “Post-Truth and Politics,” hosted and organized by the Berlin ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry in col­laboration with the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and Bard College Berlin on April 29, 2017. The conference departed from Arendt’s 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics,” which responded to historical exigencies that seem, some fifty years later, to resonate with those presented by the advent of the so-called “post-truth society.”

In contrast with the political theoretical perspective assumed in the first two essays, “Home to Roost” – perhaps because it was intended as a political address rather than a theoretical exercise – is very different in tone, at once more despondent and more urgent. It is also, however, a scathing attack on the very posture of “theory,” which, in its modern manifestation, Arendt associates with the kind of loss of contact with reality that is propa­gated and supported by the mass media production of what she calls “images.” Theories operate upon the basis of the plausibility of their hypotheses, while reality, for better or worse, is in no way so constrained. Whence the critical significance of that aspect of real­ity that she calls, “the unbelievable,” which “cannot be anticipated by either hope or fear” (ibid., 261). “I think,” she writes, “that most people who have watched the frantic, panic­stricken end of the Vietnam war thought that what they saw on their television screens was ‘unbelievable,’ as indeed it was” (ibid., 261). The apparition of the “unbelievable” fi­nally gave the lie to the plausible theories and images that had in fact served to prolong the war. As Arendt observes, “If it is in the nature of appearances to hide ‘deeper’ causes, it is in the nature of speculation about such hidden causes to hide and to make us forget the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are” (ibid., 261).

What I find particularly intriguing about this last essay of Arendt’s is her use of the say­ing cited in her title as she reflects on contemporary history:

I said before that in the cataclysm of recent events it was as if ‘all the chickens had come home to roost,’ and I used this common saying because it indicates the boomerang effect, the unexpected and ruinous backfiring of evil deeds on the doer, of which imperialist politicians of former generations were so afraid. Indeed anticipat­ing this effect actually restrained them decisively from whatever they were doing in faraway lands to strange and foreign people. (ibid., 271)

It is “as if” the imperialist venture on which the United States had speculatively em­barked and that was supposed to affect only “faraway lands” and “strange and foreign people,” had been brought home in the form of hard facts. The implausible, and therefore anti-theoretical, “hypothesis” of Arendt’s essay is that flight from the world, ignorance of the actual state of affairs, and disavowal of the unforeseen consequences of one’s actions, cannot ultimately escape from reality. “When the facts come home to us,” she implores in conclusion, “let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into utopias—images, theories, or sheer follies” (ibid., 275).

In The Human Condition this new political possibility “to overpower and destroy not man himself but the conditions under which life was given to him,” is raised without be­ing conclusively addressed – perhaps because of its radical implications for the human condition itself (Arendt 1958a, 238). For action into nature, while it shares the absence of sovereign control and so the dangerous frailty characteristic of all action, is without the always fragile remedies that are available to strictly human action. While the capricious­ness of the processes set in motion among humans can be stabilized to some degree by promises, there are no promises with nature nor for that matter with technology. While the irrevocability of actions can be attenuated to the extent that they can be forgiven, act­ing into nature is, in contrast, unforgivable. Since it can no longer be a matter of attempt­ing to preserve or recuperate the limited space of human action – if such a space ever ex­isted in pristine form – the question posed by the post-human condition in its increasing implication with the processes of nature is whether there are criteria for political judg­ment that can be developed and analyzed internal to this dynamic. It is in this direction that Arendt’s last essay seems to point.

In “Home to Roost,” Arendt draws on the common saying in order to make a suggestive and non-speculative claim – perhaps therefore a political one – about the character of facts and the description of reality. The claim is ironic: even as it remarks on the ironic stubbornness of facts in the face of the pretension of human intentions, it does so in a tongue-in-cheek manner that ironizes the superstitious philosophy of history it seems to present. The claim is persuasive, however, only insofar as it implicitly relates to the inten­sification of global and globalizing processes contributing to what Arendt, already in the 1950s, had described as “the emergence of one world on a planetary scale” (Arendt 1994, 433; see also Arendt 1951, 297). If the facts came home to roost, this owed to and empha­sized the reality that a planet of limited resources was shared by a growing plurality of people, the actions among whom were increasingly and consequentially interconnected.

The world was in fact, as another common saying goes, getting smaller. In this respect, Arendt’s remarks about American imperialism present the culmination of the tendency she described in The Origins of Totalitarianism about the European imperial project a century or so earlier. The dogma of European imperialism had been “expansion for ex­pansion’s sake” but this process, itself arguably provoked by a sense of constraint, in­evitably ran up against the objective limits presented by the finitude of the earth. Those chickens came home to roost in 1914.

The awakening of environmental awareness that Arendt applauds in 1975 is a conse­quence of the globalizing world getting smaller, if no less divided, just as the realities and prospects of environmental devastation across national and ideological boundaries ap­peared to be getting bigger – and more urgent. For environmental awareness is an awak­ening not only to the limitedness of the earth but also, I would suggest, to a particular ex­perience of time, namely, the finitude of natural-historical time. The doctrine of progress, even in the deflationary and apparently mundane contemporary form of so-called “eco­nomic development,” transposes the imperial “expansion for expansion’s sake” into time. Accordingly, the ecological ramifications of “progress” disproportionately affect “faraway lands” and “strange and foreign people” not just across space but far into the future. And while the spatial limitedness of the earth is commensurate, to some degree, with the “common sense” of human measure and comprehension and can for that reason become “political,” the temporality of ecological events in no way corresponds to the finitude of human senses or the time-span and temporality of human life. Environmental awakening has to do with becoming sensible to the fact that the irrevocability and unpredictability of human interaction with nature does not simply unfold in time but can become a determining factor of the ordering of time – natural-historical time – for which we lack a common sense measure.

It is around such concerns that the relation of our generation to Arendt’s comes into question. For indeed the problem of inheritance between generations is one of the defin­ing preoccupations of Arendt’s thought. She considered the breakdown of the continuity between generations, or what she called “the tradition,” to be the decisive historical and theoretical event of her generation. While she traced the attrition of the tradition through­out modernity, it was the European generation following the First World War that in her account experienced the final break. And it is with this at once liberating and bewildering experience that Arendt opens her book of exercises in political thought with a citation from René Char: “our inheritance was left to us by no testament” (Arendt 1968a, 3). For the break in tradition opened up and brought into focus the gap “between past and future” invoked in its title. The experience of this gap is the properly political experience of time, the experience of the way in which each new human inserts themself “into the small non-time-space in the very heart of time […] between an infinite past and an infinite future” (Arendt 1968a, 13). With the historical demise of the tradition, the gap was, fur­thermore, democratized: “it became a tangible reality and perplexity for all, that is, it be­came a fact of political relevance” (ibid., 14). Henceforth at stake in politics will always also be a determination of the ways in which the past is handed on to the future. Historic­ity has been politicized.

In Men in Dark Times (1968), Arendt borrowed the phrase “dark times” from a poem by Brecht to characterize the particular confusion of this historical moment marked by the decisive breakdown of tradition. In Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen,” which Arendt translates as “To Posterity” (Arendt 1968b, viii), the concern is with the judgment of future generations. It ends with a plea for leniency: “Gedenkt unsrer / Mit Nachsicht” – “Remember us with forbearance” (ibid., 225). For Arendt, in contrast, the darkness of the times presented itself first and foremost as a question of the past – how to inherit without testament and recover such historical “pearls” as might enable one to carry on in the face of the catastrophes of the century (see Arendt 1968b, 205-6). For us, in contrast, as the inheritors of this crisis of the tradition, it has become a matter of how to address the un­warranted and unwilled inheritance that we threaten to bestow on the future. If, as Arendt claims, the exercise of political thought is a matter of learning “how to move in this gap” (Arendt 1968a, 14), our problem turns out to be the opposite of the preceding generation, namely, how to orient ourselves between future and past. We need an exer­cise that reflects on this gap not only with regard to the indeterminacy of our relation to the past, but all the more so with regard to the indeterminacy that characterizes our rela­tion to the future. And this needs to be done without resorting to a philosophy of history that would neutralize politics.

One of the persistent preoccupations among both critics and proponents of historical progress has been the devaluation and effacement of individual lives and histories under the tide of historical processes and the progress of mankind. In “The Concept of History,” Arendt cites Kant’s reservation: “It will always remain bewildering . . . that the earlier generations seem to carry on their burdensome business only for the sake of the later . . . and that only the last should have the good fortune to dwell in the [completed] building” (Arendt 1968a, 83). And in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” Walter Ben­jamin would refer to the nineteenth century philosopher Hermann Lotze’s remark on “the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future” in developing his influ­ential counter-concept to historical progress (Benjamin 1968, 253). Attention to our “envy” towards missed possibilities discloses a “weak Messianic power” by which what was lost in the past may be recovered through remembrance (ibid., 254). For Arendt, very much in the spirit of Benjamin, the modern doctrine of progress could be contested only by recovering deeds and events that had been cast by the wayside or had disappeared into the flow of historical process and the narrative of historical progress. One way of articulat­ing the reorientation between future and past solicited by the turning of the Anthro­pocene would be: How to attend to the singularity of lives and times that are yet to be lived and can hardly be conceived? How to “remember” – how to become sensible to and speak about – what, on account of human activity, has been and is being lost in the fu­ture?

 What is needed, it seems to me, is a concept of historicity that provides parameters in time that correspond to the constraints in space imposed by the limits of the earth. For the future is limited, and limited in ways that are not independent of the processes in which we are currently engaged. Arendt was sympathetic to Heidegger’s concept of “his­toricity,” which, by acknowledging that thinking itself is historical, finally overcame the sovereign pretension of philosophy to survey the sphere of human history and activities. But she nonetheless thought that Heidegger’s thought remained captivated by an ancient anti-political philosophical prejudice insofar as it failed or forgot to address “man as an acting being” (Arendt 1994, 432). When, however, Arendt attempts to re-situate politics as a “futile,” that is, limited and transient, activity among mortals she fails adequately to take into account what she identifies as the process character, which constitutes the “fall out” of all action and in particular of what she calls “acting into nature.” Arendt’s attempt to wrestle politics back from the modern historical consciousness with which she felt it had fatefully been confounded produces a strangely ahistorical conception of politics. Furthermore, it comes at the expense of a clearer articulation of the historicity or rather the natural-historicity of political action insofar as it is not simply coextensive with the finitude of the human condition.

It is not by chance that Arendt’s most sustained reflection on acting into nature beyond The Human Condition is in her essay on “The Modern Concept of History” (1958), which she republished under the title “History and Nature” as the first part of “The Concept of History” in Between Past and Future (1961). She concludes the exercise in political thought on a sobering note of profound ambivalence about action. If, as she argues in The Human Condition, throughout modernity politics had been occluded, deformed, or de­graded by mistaking action for making or for laboring, the great danger now was whether action itself would destroy the fragile realm of politics along with the world on which it depends:

It is beyond doubt that the capacity to act is the most dangerous of all human abilities and possibilities, and it is also beyond doubt that the self-created risks mankind faces today have never been faced before. Considerations like these are not at all meant to offer solutions or to give advice. At best, they might encourage sustained and closer reflection on the nature and the intrinsic potentialities of action, which never before has revealed its greatness and its dangers so openly. (Arendt 1968a, 63)

In the second part of “The Concept of History” entitled “History and Earthly Immortal­ity,” Arendt suggests that what was new at the beginning of modernity was that humans found themselves in what she calls a “situation of absolute mortality” in which, she writes, “both life and world had become perishable, mortal, and futile” (ibid., 74). It seems to me that we find ourselves in this situation once again today – only now the chickens of the modern concept of history have come home to roost. Whereas, at the beginning of moder­nity, this moment presented the opportunity to realize radical finitude as the condition of politics, instead what Arendt calls an “escape from politics into history” was made (ibid., 83). Fleeing from the frailty and mortality of the human condition, moderns took refuge in the potential immortality of invisible historical and natural processes. And this was done with fateful consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. Today therefore it is not enough to recover politics from history as if the human condition itself has not since be­come entangled in the processes of natural-history. On the contrary, politics today has to be awake to the natural-historical consequence that all action and inaction has irrevocably acquired.

Despite the august invocation of humanity in its name, the Anthropocene in fact ex­poses in radical fashion the non-sovereign character of human action on which Arendt in­sisted throughout her work. We are not by any stretch of the imagination in control of what we are doing. And this lack of control cannot be reined in by returning to the con­fines of what remains of our common sense. Rather, as we have seen – because it by and large evades or surpasses the human senses as well as the sensitivities of our political col­lectivities – the Anthropocene solicits a politics at and even beyond the limits of common sense.

In all her political writings Arendt insisted on the singular significance of “common sense,” which she called, “the political sense par excellence” (Arendt 1994, 318), and em­phasized the political dangers – the danger to politics itself – of its loss. In The Human Condition, she associated this threat to common sense above all with the rise of modern epistemology and especially the modern sciences, which discredited the validity of the hu­man senses and demeaned the earthbound situation of human existence. “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” (1963), included as the final essay to the second edition of Between Past and Future (1968), takes up this critique of modern science as a kind of “earth alienation” (Arendt 1958, 264). As the space race only more dramatically showed, science is premised on the fantasy – albeit an extremely consequential one – of an “Archi­medean perspective” that transcends the finitude of corporal existence and earthly dwelling and so the confines of common sense altogether. Arendt concludes, however, with a reflection on the possibility – a sadly improbable one, she admits – of scientists finally returning to earth and to their humanity in the elaboration of a new scientific paradigm that would be “at once more geocentric and anthropomorphic” (Arendt 1968a, 278-9). This would be understood not “in the old sense of the earth being the center of the universe and of man being the highest being there is” (ibid., 279). Rather, it would be “geocentric in the sense that the earth, and not the universe, is the center and the home of mortal men, and it would be anthropomorphic in the sense that man would count his own factual mortality among the elementary conditions under which his scientific efforts are possible at all” (ibid.). The Anthropocene, for certain scientists and for certain sciences, seems to have brought about just such a turn in orientation. Indeed, faced with the Anthropocene, it is as if the unearthly pretensions of modern science have come home to roost.

In “Politics and Understanding,” Arendt turns to a curious “gift” that extends our un­derstanding beyond the sphere prescribed by the collective human sensorium, a capacity which structurally belongs to our faculty of originating action – the imagination. Imagina­tion is not concerned with unreality but with the residue of or resistance to reality in hu­man apprehension: “In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real” (ibid., 322). Imagination concerns what evades or is withheld from the delimited standpoint of common sense understanding, for which it is therefore also the enabling – and potentially enlarging – condition. It makes room for un­derstanding:

Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and under­stand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remote­ness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair. This distancing of some things and bridging the abysses to others is part of the dialogue of understanding, for whose purposes direct experience establishes too close a contact and mere knowledge erects artificial barriers. (ibid., 323)

The “recent sudden awakening to the threats to our environment” in which Arendt saw a “ray of hope” in 1975 has proved in fact to be a slow, sluggish, disconcerting process, still struggling to gain consciousness. This has much to do with a collective failure of imagina­tion in Arendt’s particular use of the term – a failure to imagine and a failure to acknowl­edge the validity of imagination for constituting a more sensible politics. For the moment, careful attention to the peculiar darkness that surrounds the thought of what we are doing to the life and times of “strange and foreign people” in “faraway lands,” distant from us in time, remains, perhaps unforgivably, beyond the pale of common sense.

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