1. 1
ARENDT’S ANIMAL FARM: SCIENCE AS ANTI-POLITICAL PHENOMENON
Given the infamy of some of the events in the historical struggle between science and
religion – stretching from Galileo through Darwin up to the latest intelligent design
pseudo-controversy – one may be forgiven for assuming the science/religion conflict
to be the most fundamental divide underlying the Western humanist tradition. For
Hannah Arendt however, Western modernity is haunted by a deeper division still: that
between science and the political. The article considers Arendt’s views on the
relationship between science and the political in the light of renewed arguments in
favour of grounding the values governing the human life-world in the empirical
sciences, and argues that it is possible to see a certain component of radical scientism
as a genuine threat to the autonomy of the political realm. Since Darwin first published
The Origin of the Species in 1859, it has been taken for granted that the price man
had to pay for an increased awareness of his animal status had been the loss of God.
From an Arendtian perspective however, the true risk lay in the potential of science to
reduce man from the status of political animal to that of animal alone. For Arendt,
modernity harbours ‘danger signs that man may be willing and, indeed, is on the point
of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has
come. 1 ’For the purposes of this article, ‘science’ is defined as the system of
propositions, tested by rigorous method and committed to values like objectivity,
precision, neutrality and coherence. Even among less conventional scientific thinkers
like Thomas Kuhn, it is usually seen as a coherent and predictive force, which, even if
not perfectly ‘neutral’, is valued for aiming for this state and whose socio-political and
moral dimensions are generally considered irrelevant.
It would hardly have proven surprising had Arendt joined the long-standing Romantic
strain in late modern thought or the Frankfurt School in lamenting how the modern
subject has estranged itself from both Nature and its own traditions. However, Arendt’s
approach is quite different: she focuses on the role that science and technology plays
in unifying the human self with nature, and how this leads to an existence as labouring
animals rather than an authentic experience of liberty. Unlike Rousseau and the
Romantics, she did not regard the embrace of Nature in modern thought as either
innocent or an answer to world-alienation. On the contrary, the late modern attempt to
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:Chicago University Press,1958),p. 322.

2. 2
find a substitute for God in Nature or History as all-encompassing explanatory
substitute is precisely what made the determinist ideology of Nazism or communism
possible. Whereas it was possible to admonish traditional Machiavellian tyranny in
terms of a prideful denial of God, or at least some vaguely defined transcendental
authority, totalitarianism’s radical evil is to be found precisely in its confidence in
unlocking the ‘ultimate meaning of Nature’ and hence to unify it with its own policies.
That is to say, they were able to ‘naturalize’ its policies as the inevitable outcome of
an inevitable Grand Narrative, unfolding beyond individual lives, rendering challenge
or disagreement virtually impossible. For Arendt, this amounted to an abdication of the
uniquely human privilege of exercising freedom on the political stage.
The events of WWII – not only the Holocaust, but the anonymizing power of mindless
mechanized slaughter – have left the West in a stunned consensus over the dark side
of the Enlightenment for a considerable time. The benchmark text in this respect is
arguably Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which found
alongside the Kantian ideal of communicative rationality a darker, more instrumental
version, which eventually contributed to the horrors of WWII. Heidegger’s Letter on
Humanism comes to a similar conclusion. Like the Dialectic, it appeared in 1947, and
traced the origins of the misfortunes of the twentieth century to an even longer history
of Seinsvergessenheit. For Heidegger, the forces unleashed by modernity – capitalism
and its handmaidens science and technology – have rendered the late modern human
‘homeless’, a stranger in his own lifeworld, and reduced the world to the status of
‘standing reserve’ (Gestell).
To some extent, Jürgen Habermas’s philosophical project may be seen as retrieving
the emancipatory dimension of the Enlightenment. Disturbed by the nonchalant way
in which Heidegger ‘had stepped on stage, like a phoenix rising from the ashes’ in a
‘felicitous de-Nazified form’, Habermas’ ultimate conclusion has much in common with
that of Horkheimer and Adorno, but at the same time he refuses to give up on the ideal
of communicative reason. He continued to maintain this position in the face of Peter
Sloterdijk’s controversial challenge to humanism delivered at the Exodus from Being:
Philosophy after Heidegger conference held in Bavaria in 2002. In his provocatively
titled paper ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’ Sloterdijk stated that the classic humanist
project of ‘civilizing through literature’ has, if not exactly failed, been eclipsed by the
leaps made in communication technologies and more recently, biotechnology. For
Sloterdijk, the task of shaping of human beings into civilized citizens no longer

3. 3
belonged to the humanities alone: henceforth the natural sciences will play a
constitutive role.2
Given that the debate occurred in Germany, and sprang from a paper on Heidegger
no less, controversy was only to be expected. Aside from Habermas’ dismissal of this
‘amusing ghost story’, Die Zeit’s Thomas Assheuer was alarmed by what he saw as
‘elitist’ and ‘facistoid’ elements in Sloterdijk’s vision of the ‘artificial selection’ that might
in future determine the identity of at least the ruling classes.3 However, in the Anglo-
Saxon world the ideal of a world shaped by science rather than the humanities has
also been around for a considerable time.
I
Forgoing for the sake of brevity the important early antecedents in the form of Darwin-
inspired thinkers like T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer and even Virginia Woolf, the key
text in the ‘biological turn’ is arguably E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
in which he argued that certain forms of human behaviour can best be explained in
genetic terms. Published in the late 1970’s, it caused such a furore that the American
Anthropological Association considered censure and leading scientists (including
Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould formed ‘The Sociobiology Study Group’,
stating in the New York Review of Books that ‘theories that attempted to establish a
biological foundation for social behaviour provided an important basis… for the
eugenic policies which led to the establishment of the gas chambers in Nazi
Germany.’4 More than thirty years after the publication of Sociobiology it has become
so acceptable to discuss human conduct in fundamentally biological terms that Wilson
was able to embrace full-blown reductionism in his 1998 book Consillience, and it has
since then become part of standard philosophical vocabulary. With respect to the
biopolitical, one has to go as least as far as Peter Singer’s justification of the
euthanasia of severely incapacitated infants to create genuine controversy. 5 The
2 Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht Gerettet: Versuche Nach Heidegger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001).
3 See Mark Peacock: ‘Philosophical Rumblingsin theGerman Republic’ Philosophy Now.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/26/Philosophical_Rumblings_in_the_German_Republic_Der_Philosophenstr
eit.
4 Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, What Philosophers Think (London: Continuum, 2003),p. 67.
5 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),p. 152.See also,
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/09/13/are-peter-singers-ideas-too-dangerous-to-hear.html.

4. 4
central idea of Wilson’s book is the now widely-accepted thesis that everything in the
human life-world could in principle be explained at the hand of a small number of
irreducible laws and that consequently, rock-solid theoretical foundations were within
our reach.
Updated versions of this ideal are reiterated with increasing frequency in both
academic and popular intellectual spheres. Philosophy in the so-called ‘analytical’
tradition has for quite some time begun to exhibit impatience at what was often
perceived as wilful obscurantism, promotion of relativism and obsessionwith language
in the Continental tradition. This impatience was amplified by unprecedented leaps
made in the biological sciences. From the initial discovery of DNA in 1958 by Crick
and Watson, to the more recent mapping of the human genome, natural science
appears to be able to provide concrete answers to questions over which philosophers
needlessly struggled for centuries. Of particular importance for our purposes is the
growing attempt to equate ‘morality’ with altruism and the concomitant tendency to
ground it in pure biology.
Whereas physics was the field that dominated as the public ‘face’ of science during
the Cold War, the biological sciences came into their own during the final quarter of
the twentieth century. With the explosion of communication technology from the late
1990’s, the relationship between the human being and the tools that he uses to make
sense of the world underwent a significant change: science was more intimately
interwoven with the life-world than ever before. Prima facie, its most important recent
accomplishments seem largely benign: Smartphones are infinitely preferable to
nuclear arms. Arendt’s famous description of Sputnik I with which she opens The
Human Condition may well seem slightly dated in the light of the turn towards the less
abstract life sciences and the immediacy of recent advances made in these fields: [It
was] ‘an event second in importance to no other, not even the splitting of the atom.
One is struck by the sense of relief apparently experienced by the onlookers at the
thought that the first step towards escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth’.6
Today, humans seem to be less interested in escaping the earth than in ‘connecting’
with each other and redefining their ‘nature’. In fact, there is a growing trend
(intellectual as well as popular) towards a stance that appears to be as critical towards
the desire for any supraterrestial existence as Nietzsche and Arendt had been. The
6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:Chicago University Press,1958),p. 1.

5. 5
attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 and the wars that followed in its wake led
to a renewed awareness of the dangers of religious fundamentalism, and a number of
prominent analytical thinkers and scientists like Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia
Churchland, Victor Stenger, Derek Parfit, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker and the Nobel-
Prizewinning scientist Lawrence Krauss appear to make a case for the necessity of a
‘new Enlightenment’, firmly based upon the rejection of any form of ‘superstition’ and
with a particular emphasis on the accomplishments of the empirical sciences. Krauss
goes as far as to say that science has usurped the role of philosophy: ‘[P]hilosophy
and theology are ultimately incapable of addressing by themselves the truly
fundamental questions that perplex us about our existence. Until we open our eyes
and let nature call the shots, we are bound to wallow in myopia’.7 A. C. Grayling
appears to agree, and even Daniel Dennett points to the extraordinary features of the
universe we as late moderns can teach Aristotle.8 Thinkers like Krauss (perhaps
Dennett to a lesser extent) may well be horrified to find themselves included in a long
tradition of Platonic anti-worldliness, and is likely to respond with a sharp insistence
upon their empiricist and materialist credentials. As the late Victor Stenger for example
saw it, nothing could be further removed from Platonic otherworldliness than
commonsensical materialism: he defined matter – the object of study for the physical
sciences – as ‘the stuff that kicks back when you kick it’.9 However, for political
purposes, the hard-nosed materialist and the otherworldly Platonist share a number
of crucial traits: In the first instance, it depends upon a strong distinction between the
real and illusional, the true and the false, often viewing the ‘real’ and the ‘true’ as under
perpetual threat by the ‘illusional’ and the false’. Concomitant with this fundamental
trait is a deep-seated suspicion towards the world of opinion. Importantly, science is
committed to the transcendental subject in the form of the disinterested contemplation
of scientific observer. Despite Hume (and more recently Daniel Dennett’s) attempts to
7 Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 176.
8 In his endorsement of Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing, Grayling writes that ‘How could the universe’s
existence arisefrom nothing? It is a question that philosophy and theology get themselves into a muddle over,
but thatsciencecan offer real answers to,as Krauss' lucid explanation shows.’In an interviewwith Julian Baggini
in the Guardian of 22 May 2013 Daniel Dennett describes his enthusiasmfor sciencein terms that confirms the
justification of Nietzsche’s critiqueof thosethatconsider themselves superior to the Greeks simply becausethey
happen to appear later on the historical stage. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/may/22/daniel-
dennett-aristotle-flaming-idiot.
9 Victor Stenger, The New Atheism: Taking A Stand For Science And Reason (New York: Prometheus Books,
2009),p. 162.

6. 6
resolve the self into a stream of impressions or mental content, the possibility for
science depends upon the existence of a subject prior to experience, stable and
rational enough to make sense of the series of data that flows into it. Its actions of
observation and reflection detaches it from the world and establishes it into a
subject/object relationship. Furthermore, despite attempts at refining the scientific
endeavour, it ultimately remains committed to finding fundamental truths and grand
explanatory narratives. It must be emphasized, however, that many within said
narrative eschew a blunt materialist approach and reject the role of ‘scientist as ‘heir
to God.’ Important examples stretch from Alexander Koyre, Paul Feyerabend and
Thomas Kuhn to contemporary thinkers like Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson.
It is particularly significant to note though, that a fellow refugee from a totalitarian
regime, Karl Popper, shared many of Arendt’s concerns. However, even in joining her
rejection of ‘historicism’ he appears to fail to grasp the full implications of his scientific
optimism. Like many scientists, Popper easily overlooked the natural sciences’
tendency to fall into a narrative structure. In 1972, he wrote that ‘science is perhaps
the most powerful tool for biological adaptation that has ever emerged in the course
of organic evolution’.10 In other words, science is a better tool, better than the natural
tools hitherto available to ‘nature’. Science appears to be not only self-correcting, but
as Mary Midgley has demonstrated in the aptly titled Science As Salvation, it ultimately
falls into a progressive metanarrative: new discoveries are legitimized by their factual
improvement upon the existing pool of knowledge. Although scientific practice is
extremely broad and appears open-ended, it remains haunted by the ideal of absolute
health, a state of perfection that is in principle achievable by the human body. It is
difficult to avoid reading a messianic pattern in this success story: Descartes’ dream
of finding a cure for death, lives on in every groundbreaking latter-day discovery.
In other words, rather than to render the religious experience completely irrelevant
with an entirely new vocabulary, science appears to have usurped many of the
traditional ideals of religion, in particular the Christian religion. The most disturbing
aspect of the rise of evolutionary biology was perhaps not that it challenged the
religious ideal of immortality but that it became a competitor as to the best means of
achieving immortality. Robert Jay Lifton suggests that the question of death had been
central to the quest of science ever since the advance of modernity. It translated the
10 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1972),p.237.

7. 7
old Christian dream of personal immortality into the ideal of the immortality of the
species and, in a certain sense, the immortality of science as an infinitely growing field.
Lifton writes:
The biological mode of (conceiving immortality) in no way began with Darwinism
– it is perhaps the most fundamental of all images of immortality… But, as the
images took hold, man’s sense of biological continuity was extended back into the
infinite past and therefore into the infinite future…it was a coming of age of the
scientific endeavour to assert its version of the mode of immortality via man’s
works.11
The belief that it could make a difference to humanity’s status as mortal beings, either
by improving the physical health of individuals, or by offering at least the theoretical
immortality of the species, makes science in effect one of the most optimistic
metanarratives of the modern era. Indeed, Daniel Dennett describes science itself as
essentially optimistic, emphasizing its self-corrective and progressive character. He
writes: ‘[T]here is a built-in tradition—across the spectrum of human activity—of
reflection and criticism, a habit of re-evaluation that is designed to look for flaws and
problems, opportunities to improve, signs that a midcourse correction is called for.
Science sets the gold standard for this, with its layers and layers of review, evaluation,
testing, and policing.’12
However, optimism is far from the one-dimensional virtue for which it is often taken.
Optimism implies a change for the positive in the future. This however, means that
there is something wrong with the status quo. This, among others, why Nietzsche was
sceptical about the value of optimism.13 Furthermore, the very optimism of science
easily lends itself to growth into a narrative of totality. C. H. Waddington writes that
Science by itself is able to provide mankind with a way of life which is firstly, self-
consistent and harmonious, and, secondly, free for the exercise of that objective
11 Robert J. Lifton and Eric Olson,‘Symbolic Immortality’in Living and Dying (London: Wildwood House, 1974),
p. 32.
12 Daniel Dennett, Preface to What Are You Optimistic About? Edited by John Brockman (New York: Harper-
Collins,2007),p.II.
13 Indeed, Nietzsche finds somethinginherently nihilistic aboutSocrates’hope to unravel the mysteries of the
universe.

8. 8
reason on which our material progress depends. So far as I can see, the scientific
attitude of mind is the only one which is, at the present day, adequate in both these
respects. There are many other worthy ideals which might supplement it, but I cannot
see that any of them could take its place as a basis for progressing and enriching
society.14
II
Arendt’s disowning of the epithet ‘philosopher’ goes back to the traditional gulf
between philosophy and politics, a division that she traces back to Plato. Unlike Hegel
and Nietzsche, Arendt makes a sharp distinction between Socrates and Plato. For
Socrates, philosophy was as much about world-creation than finding truth. In
‘Philosophy and Politics’ Arendt writes: ‘Socrates seems to have believed that the
political function of the philosopher was to establish a kind of common world, built on
the understanding of friendship, in which no ruler is needed’. 15 For Socrates,
philosophy had a maieutic character: rather than engaging in dialogue with the aim of
eliminating falsehood or to discover shared purposes through critical deliberation, he
drew out the element of truth in in every opinion and instead of correcting his
interlocutors, challenged them to refine their viewpoints. In other words, Socrates
found epistēmē (knowledge) in doxa (opinion). What set Socrates apart from the
Sophists – although during his life he was often taken for one of them – is that he
distinguished between limitless falsehoods – falsa infinita – and the limited view of a
single perspective. In contrast to Plato’s belief in in pure, apodictic and absolute
knowledge that cannot be altered by any further reflection or experience, Socrates
acknowledged that knowledge is determined by context and therefore subject to
transformation. Through his dialegesthai, the ‘talking through’ of something with
someone, Socrates discovered the limitations of his own perspectives, leading to his
famous conclusion that his one certainty was that he knew nothing. Arendt describes
it as follows:
14 C. H. Waddington, The Scientific Attitude (West Drayton, Penguin, 1941), p.170.
15 Hannah Arendt, ‘Philosophy and Politics,’in Social Research 57 (1990), p.73.

9. 9
Every man has his own doxa, his own opening to the world, and Socrates must
therefore always begin with questions; he cannot know beforehand what kind of
dokei moi, of it-appears-to-me, the other possesses. He must make sure of the
other’s position in the common world. Yet, just as nobody can know beforehand
the other’s doxa, so nobody can know by himself and without effort the inherent
truth of his own opinion. Socrates wanted to bring out this truth which everyone
potentially possesses.16
It is precisely doxa, opinion, which Arendt identifies as ‘the stuff of political life’. It is
our plural existence ‘the presence of others that see what we see and hear what we
hear’ that makes the experience of reality possible, and saves us from the prison of
solipsism: ‘only where things can be seen by many and in a variety of aspects without
changing their identity . . . can worldly reality truly and reliably appear’.17 Without
perspective, one may say that the human being would simply be engaging in ‘brain
power’, the engagement in logical processes for the aim of mere survival. That is not
to say that Arendt is a relativist or apologist for subjectivism. Opinion in this instance
does not indicate the arbitrary, but rather point towards the politically significant fact
that the world appears differently to each person according to her or his position in it.
It is through speech that gaps in such positions may be overcome.
In contrast to Plato, Socrates and Aristotle saw friendship, and not justice (dikē) as
the true glue that held communities together. As Arendt points out, ‘[f]or Aristotle,
friendship is higher than justice, because justice is no longer necessary between
friends’.18 It is only necessary to appeal to justice where no common ground can
otherwise be found between sparring individuals. One of the most significant elements
of friendship, political as well as otherwise, is trust. By engaging in conversation with
his various interlocutors – Athenian nobles, slaves, strangers, even a midwife –
Socrates implicitly trusted the other to overcome his or her prejudices and to share an
aspect of their lives with him. This made Athens’ betrayal of Socrates all the worse.
For Arendt, the traditional division between philosophy and politics can be traced to
the death of Socrates. This traumatic event transformed Plato forever: that Athens
16 Hannah Arendt, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Social Research 57 (1990), p. 81.
17 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:Chicago University Press,1958),p. 57.
18 “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57 (1990), p. 83. Without explaining further, Arendt writes that
‘great parts of Aristotle’s political philosophy, especially those in which he is in explicit opposition to Plato, go
back to Socrates’,p.82.

10. 10
could condemn her wisest, noblest and most just citizen to death by hemlock, was
enough to make him despair of worldly justice. Henceforth he would describe the
domain of worldly virtue in terms of shadow, darkness and confusion and advise those
looking for Truth to find it in the pure, painless world of the Eternal Forms.
As a result – with a few noteworthy exceptions such as Machiavelli – Western thought
would be characterized by a strict hierarchical distinction between epistemeand doxa,
knowledge and opinion, with a firm bias in favour of the former and exhibiting at times
downright contempt for the latter. Arendt identifies a distinct ‘revaluation of values’ with
the advent of Platonism concomitant with the privileging of knowledge over opinion.
As action occurs among a plurality of participants and is thus subject to what Arendt
calls its ‘futility, boundlessness and uncertainty of outcome’,19 it has generated the
need to develop a greater degree of control over politics. Plato managed to achieve
the neutering of the domain of plurality and contingency by redrafting politics or acting
in the language of making.
Through this ‘re-valuation of all values’ Plato took truth out of the realm of contingency
and turned it into a single, elusive hypokeimenon behind the world of ordinary
experience, something that requires the expertise of a well-trained elite to access. For
Arendt, this means that the philosophical endeavour is unpolitical in essence. She
writes: ‘Since philosophical truth concerns man in his singularity, it is unpolitical by
nature’.20 Truth belonged to the domain of cognition, the realm of mathematics, logic
and the strict sciences, it always carried with it the whiff of coercion, since it demanded
acceptance by every rational subject in control of his or her faculties. Despite its
professed commitment to value-neutrality, it is possible to detect occasional emotional
blackmail in the popular defence of science: either you agree with the experts, or you
are backwards and a general problem. After the fall of communism in the late twentieth
century, the tendency to wed the notion of scientific progress to a particular political
ideology seems dated, even absurd. However, in 1939, a skilled polymath like J.D.
Bernal could easily make the case that nothing short of objective science gives
credibility to the inevitable fate of mankind:
19 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:Chicago University Press,1958),p. 175.
20 Hannah Arendt, Hannah. Between Past And Future: Eight Exercises In Political Thought. (New York: Penguin,
1978),p. 244.

11. 11
Already we have in the practice of science the prototype for all common human
action…The methods by which this task is attempted, however imperfectly they
are realized, are the methods by which humanity are most likely to secure its own
future. In its endeavour, science is communism.21
Communism as economic theory may be buried, but the ideal that there is a common
humanity, and that this collective identity needs to be ‘redeemed’ and ‘united’ appear
to be as alive as ever. Science is often roped in to fulfil this role. As the popular science
educator Bill Nye bluntly phrases it: ‘Science is the key to our future, and if you don't
believe in science, then you're holding everybody back’.22 The strong emphasis on
‘progress’ is also tends to be one of the most salient features of conversations on
morality, particularly in the popular sphere. Recent bestsellers addressing the nature
and character of morality consistently emphasizes the progressive nature of morality.
In his bestselling The Better Angels of Our Nature cognitive scientist Steven Pinker,
for example, claims that violence has dropped both in the short and long run, and
attributes this to the rise of the ‘right’ factors’, such as the emergence of the nation
state, the growth of commerce, feminization of Western culture and the ‘escalation’ of
reason. He attributes the decline of violence to the ‘intensifying application of
knowledge and rationality to human affairs’, which he alleges ‘can force people to
recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own
interests over others’.23 Bestselling author Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape is
likewise committed to achieving ‘moral progress’ – a progress which appears to be
conceived in purely utilitarian terms. To reduce morality to a simple utilitarian ethic is
problematic enough, but to place it within a single teleological narrative with only one
satisfactory outcome, amounts to toying with the suicide of the political itself. Although
Arendt would not take it as far as Jacques Derrida’s diagnoses of the ‘logocentricism’
of Western philosophy, she too held that Truth had an undeniable despotic character.
It demanded universal assent, eliminated diverse opinion, and in so doing, reduced
21 J.D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1939),p.3.
22 Whileused in the context of the admirableendeavour of defending the correct teaching of evolutionary
theory, the choiceof phraseology should indicatethe speaker’s propoundingof the common notion of science
as a narrativethat could potentially leavesome behind. https://ncse.com/news/2011/02/bill-nye-teaching-
evolution-006473.
23 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2011),p. 13.

12. 12
the richness and complexity of human discourse. In other words, philosophy kills
politics.
Although it is Plato that first managed to direct the substitution of making for acting,24
it is Aristotle that formally distinguished between ποίησις (poiēsis) and πρᾶξις (praxis).
For him, there were three basic human activities: theoria (thinking), poiēsis (making),
and praxis (doing). Each activity had its own distinct form of knowledge: theoretical,
with the ultimate aim of reaching knowledge; ‘poietical’ (the word would later become
‘poetical’), with the end goal being production or ‘forming something into being’; and
practical, the end goal being action. Important for our purpose, Aristotle divided the
knowledge derived from praxis into ethics, economics and politics. Politics was thus a
practical matter. In The Nicomachean Ethics (1140b 3-8) Aristotle distinguished
between poiēsis and praxis as follows: ‘doing and making are generically different ...
since making (ποίησις, poiēsis) aims at an end distinct from the act of making, whereas
in doing the end cannot be other than the act itself’.25 In other words, Aristotle is talking
about an activity whose end or telos (τέλος) is distinct from the activity, and contrasting
it with an activity where the telos is the activity itself, namely praxis (πρᾶξις).
Aristotle further distinguished between three activities of which the ‘human condition’
consists. In the most basic sense basic level they designate the fundamental human
activities to be found in the active life, the vita activa, and each of them corresponds
to one of the basic conditions which allows for a human life to be led. The human
condition of labor is life itself. Essentially the activity of the oikos or household, labor
concerns the bodily processes of production and re-production. It is necessary and as
unavoidable as explanatory notes in a student edition of Shakespeare. It involves the
production of consumer goods of ephemeral value such as food, that is consumed as
soon as it is produced, and then the process, by necessity, repeats itself, leaving
nothing of a more permanent nature behind. Labour sees man at his most animal-like,
because as the youthful Marx held, labour is the metabolism man shares with nature.
As such, animal laborans is characterized by behaviour, not action, as his actions are
not free, but inculcated as responses to need and bodily stimuli. Although animal
24 See for example Diotima’s use of ποίησις in the context of overcoming the natural cycleof birth and decay
in the Symposium where she describes human strivingin terms of a variety of ‘making’: ‘Such a movement can
occur in three kinds of poiēsis: (1) Natural poiēsis through sexual procreation, poiēsis in the city through the
attainment of heroic fame, and, finally, poiēsis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge.
25 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Translated by Roger Crisp (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,2000),p.
207.

13. 13
laborans is capable of rational thought, if his capacities for inference and deduction
are used merely for purposes of survival or comfort, he or she does not rise above
animal status, and performs merely what may be called ‘brain work’.26
This is ultimately the object of study for the biological sciences. Although labour is
seldom performed alone, it is the one activity that does not need the presence of others
to be practiced: it is not subject to evaluation and is therefore man at his most one-
dimensional. That Marx chose to essentialize this dimension is something for which
Arendt could never forgive him.27
As soon as man began to erect permanent structures between himself and nature
however, he became homo faber, fabricating man. While labour conforms to the
unceasing natural rhythms of growth and decay, the activity of work offers a limited
degree of mastership over the world and a measure of stability over nature’s ceaseless
flux. Work is artificial: by surrounding himself with a large number of fabricated goods,
man is able to create a world if not exactly immortal, at any rate less mortal than
himself. Without homo faber, no space for the unfolding of the drama that is human
life would be available. Politics demands a degree of permanence, and a stage for the
performance of the play of the political.
III
Although making or manufacturing man is involved in creating a stabilized unity of
potentially immortal objects (or objects at least less mortal than himself), he is still not
26 See for example Nietzsche on the status of the animal:‘It is truly a harsh punishmentto livein the manner of
an animal,subjectto hunger and desires,and yet without arrivingatany insightinto the nature of this life,and
we can conceive of no harsher fate than that of the beast of prey, who is driven through the desert by its
gnawing torment, is seldomsatisfied,and this only in such a way that this satisfaction turns into agony in the
flesh-tearingstrugglewith other beasts,or from nauseatinggreediness and oversatiation.To clingso blindly
and madly to life,for no higher reward, far from knowing that one is punished or why one is punished in this
way, but instead to thirstwith the inanity of a horribledesirefor precisely this punishmentas though it were
happiness –that is whatit means to be an animal.’Friedrich Nietzsche,‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ in
Untimely Meditions section V. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997),p.
157,
27 Arendt is notdenying the significanceof animal laborans. As a refugee she was fully awareof the
vulnerability of the human body. She would most likely haveshared her Marxistcontemporary Bertold
Brecht’s view on the priorities engendered by bodily existence in Der Dreigroschenoper: ‘Erst kommt das
Fressen und dann die Moral’. One has to eat before one begins to philosophize.Or act. What she objected to
was the tendency – rife among Marxists –to define the human purely in materialist,and therefore rigid
deterministic and ultimately unpolitical terms.

14. 14
entirely free in the fully political sense of the word. Whereas the Sisyphusian futility of
labor robs it of meaning, the hegemony of the telos of work denies this activity of
independent value: ‘isonly a means to produce this end’. Note that Arendt is not saying
that works of art themselves are without meaning, but that its value lies in the finished
object, not the activity, making it strictly speaking irrelevant for the political realm.
The privilege of complete freedom is only to be found in action. Aristotle, the ancient
sage, read a unified hierarchy unto the relationship between the polis and the oikos.
The post-WWII thinker, by contrast, saw a radical discontinuity between the two realms.
Where Aristotle saw politics as the final realization of the good life and an end in itself,
Arendt takes it a step further: the political community is the arena for the realization of
freedom, the very reason for the existence of political life. ‘Freedom, moreover, is not
only one among the many problems and phenomena of the political realm properly
speaking, such as justice, or power, or equality; freedom is actually the reason that
men live in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be
meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is
action.’28 Politics, where speech and action meet, is ultimately the realization of the
potential contained in human plurality, the very place where different opinions escape
the tyranny of a singular episteme. ‘the fact that men and not Man live on earth and
inhabit the world’. It makes possible a freedom that is at once worldly, limited and non-
sovereign.29 Worldly, because it occurs between people, it is the domain of a plural
‘We’ engaging in changing a common world through an agonistic interplay of
viewpoints. It is the very antithesis of a Sartrean inner freedom, a freedom into which
one could seemingly escape from external coercion and think oneself into freedom.
Limited, because action of the self is restricted by the actions of others, the limits of
the political stage, and the limits of language itself. Non-sovereign, because like her
‘postmodern’ contemporaries, she opposes the unity and self-sufficiency of the
Cartesian conception of self, claiming instead that the ego’s experience of itself is frail
and that self-certainty is ultimately dependent on ‘fellow creatures to assure us that
what was perceived by us was perceived by them too’, without which ‘we would not
even be able to put faith in the way we appear to each other’.30 The plurality and
28 Hannah Arendt, Between Past And Future: Eight Exercises In Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1978,
p.146
29 Dana Villa Arendtand Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1996),
p.227.
30 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking (London: HarcourtBrace 1978),p.46.

15. 15
differences experienced in the public realm is the very opposite of the uniformity of
biological bodies, whose very similitude allows it to be expressed in terms of the
universal scientific laws of biology and medicine. Referring to the private workings of
the human body, Arendt writes: ‘If this inside were to appear, we would all look alike’.31
Under conditions of plurality, one always acts in a pre-established network of human
relationships, with the accompanying contingencies that cannot be mastered by the
sujet-maître. This is why entry into the public realm inevitably opens up possibilities
for tragedy. Arendt writes: ‘It requires courage even to leave the protective security of
our four walls and enter the public realm, not because of particular dangers which may
lie in wait for us, but because we have arrived in a realm where the concern for life
has lost its validity’.32 Aside from the danger involved in stepping into the limelight,
engaging in action has the distinct feature of bringing something new into the world,
something that did not exist before. Arendt locates freedom in the feature of natality,
the fact that man is born into an already existing web of relationships, but is capable
of saving it from a state of reification by enacting change upon it, initializing something
new in a world which has hitherto existed without experiencing such an act. Arendt
also differs from Aristotle in firmly associating action with its performative dimension.
There is a distinctly Platonic strain left in Aristotle’s concern with distinguishing
genuine political action with those only appearing to be virtuous. He therefore insists
that every good action must be rooted in good character; otherwise, it would be ‘false’
and no longer qualify as good. This is a concern that would haunt Rousseau and the
Romantics, and has had a debilitating effect upon late modern political life. By framing
freedom in terms of virtuosity, Arendt locates freedom firmly in the realm of
appearance. She grants freedom an autonomy from morality unknown even to the
Greeks, and places politics beyond all forms of teleology.
Taking her cue from the Greeks, Arendt manages this by upon a ‘second self’ beyond
the control of the intending or willing ‘I’ as well as his or her biological constituents –
the ‘what’ of a person. By contrast, the ‘who’ of a person is not an essential self but
rather a ‘revealed’ persona - a ‘who’ revealed through a lifetime of deeds and action,
and a ‘who’ who is known better by others than through itself. Shakespeare depicts
this in Julius Caesar where he has Cassius say to Brutus that ‘[s]ince you cannot see
31 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:Chicago University Press,1958),p. 152.
32 Hannah Arendt, Between Past And Future: Eight Exercises In Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977),
p156.

16. 16
yourself/ I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself/that of yourself you know not
of’ (I.ii.50). For this reason, the Greeks established such a strong link between
friendship, ethics and politics: friends existed to draw out what is best in each other.
This ‘political’ friendship’ was regarded as indispensable to the good life, and a
phenomenon that has become almost alien to those living in the age of intimacy. For
the Greeks, the capacity for political life (bios politikos) allowed for the existence of a
nobler, second life beyond the restrictions of necessity and the baseness of biology.
The emergence of the polis as political unit was preceded by the disintegration of units
based on familial kinship, favoring the larger, impersonal space of freedom. In other
words, the polis (for Arendt the human world of civilization and politics) emerged
through a pushing back of the intimate natural realm of bodily cohabitation, a notion
that many of Arendt’s feminist critics have found decidedly problematic, as many
feminist concerns emerge precisely within the private realm.
Modernity is in many respects the opposite of antiquity. It is significant to note that the
speculative model of history emerged only within well-developed industrial societies –
itself a latecomer to the history it seeks to narrate. Speculative history shares with
empirical science a commitment to a linear model of history and faith in human ability
to shape humanity’s destiny as a whole. For Arendt, this approach to history has had
a significant impact on the Western understanding of human agency. When a deed or
an act is reduced to a manifestation of abstract laws or movements, the raison d’être
of the world – the public space that unites thousands of ‘appearing individuals’ –
withers away and we are left with a mass of anonymous subjects that no longer
exercise any claim on one another. The result is a general, though far from shared
experience of loneliness. Life in modernity is characterized by a withdrawal into the
private, and a decided acceleration of the process of interiorization that characterized
Western life at least since the birth of Christianity. In this respect, Nietzsche’s grand
hopes for a more worldly existence after the death of God were severely disappointed.
Unlike the popular reading that reads secularization as a continuation of Christianity
by worldly means (the reading by Karl Löwith and Wolfhart Pannenberg attacked by
Hans Blumenberg), Arendt holds that secularism did not imply a more worldly
existence.
Whatever the world ‘secular’ is meant to signify in current usage, historically it
cannot possibly be equated with worldliness; modern man at any rate did not gain

17. 17
this world when he lost the other world; and he did not gain life strictly speaking,
either; he was thrust back upon it, thrown into the closed inwardness of
introspection, where the highest it could experience were the empty processes of
reckoning of mind, its play with itself.33
Arendt recognized the hubris belonging to its limitless humanization of the world in
Heisenberg’s claim that, to look at the world through the optics of modern science is
to encounter only oneself.34 In her view, the most disastrous consequences of the loss
of the shared world of speech and action has been the rise of totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is the ultimate manifestation of the abdicationfrom exercising judgment,
as it is bound up in a movement from a general premise to an inevitable conclusion,
which reduces all thought-processes to a pre-determined result. Race-based
ideologies have proven particularly susceptible to this pattern of thought. The notion
that ‘there is motion inherent in the very idea of race’35 and that this motion ‘has a
determined direction and goal and that whatever hinders the achievements of this end
ought to be corrected or destroyed’ has proven to be the monstrous result of
developmental thinking in the realm of politics. The ‘best’ tool for realizing this
‘inevitable’ goal of history has proven to be terror, which seeks to stabilize men in order
to liberate the forces of nature or history’.36 In order to achieve this stabilization, action
– the interruption of the domain of logical necessity by the spontaneous interruption of
the unexpected – has to be pressed into obeying the laws of a suprahuman process,
whose ultimate aim is ‘not the welfare of men or the interests of one man (as one might
have said of traditional tyranny) but the fabrication of mankind.’37
As Nietzsche has also shown, the West has been suspicious of contingency ever since
Plato and has since then either been trying to find another realm in the great beyond,
or to create an artificial realm between himself and ‘Nature’. As the epistemological
tipping point shifted from theology to the natural sciences in early modernity, the
identity of this elite and the content of ‘real’ knowledge underwent considerable
changes. Gradually, this pursuit would be modified by acknowledging the empirical
33 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1958),p. 45.
34 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:Chicago University Press,1958) p, 261. See also Between
Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1977),p. 277.
35 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian) p. 479.
36 Ibid,p. 465.
37 Ibid,p. 457.

18. 18
and the scientific as legitimate means to this Supreme Goal. The key figure in this
regard is of course Francis Bacon, who, despite his Aristotelian vocabulary, was as
committed to the search for the elusive ‘real’ world as any of his predecessors. In his
case, he put a greater emphasis on method than on contemplation.
While this may seem like the defining act of distancing humanity from Nature, it is
important to note that instrumentalization does not imply humanization. Modernity
began by privileging only one kind of human, or the human in only one mode of
existence: homo faber. The scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries had ultimately redefined worldly existence. Rather than to challenge the
literal-mindedness of religious believers, it confirmed the ancient Platonic prejudice
against the senses: ‘the most significant invention of the modern was the age was the
invention of the telescope, which provided demonstrable proof of the inadequacy of
our sensory experience as a basis for certain, or even adequate knowledge about the
world’.38
The only way to respond to this sensual failure was to shift the locus of certainty from
the transcendent to the interior in the form of the rational subject. Repeating Plato’s
move, Descartes sought to overcome the despair experienced at being thrown into a
radically contingent world by fixing the rational subject as an interior Archimedean
point, which gradually widened the subject-object division and set inhumane standards
for rational thought. Thinking about the world within such a radical subject-object
division had an inevitable effect on the West’s approach to history, which first became
evident in the thought of Giambiatista Vico. In his La Nuova Scienzia of 1725 he
approaches history as a fabricated object, susceptible to rigorous scientific analysis.
During the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
fabricating and laboring man increasingly converged, leading to the occlusion of the
political actor. The open political stage of the eighteenth century increasingly gave way
to a national identity and the notion of history as fabricated construct and the scientific
metanarrative we have encountered above.
According to Arendt, the appeal of this approach was to be found in the degree of
control it appeared to present. Unlike the things of the natural world – indeed even
unlike the individual lives that formed the long stream of history, this formalized history
was seen as being entirely under human control, a very product of our own handiwork
38 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition p. 26. See also p.273.

19. 19
and therefore capable of offering certain knowledge. In other words, history ‘was no
longer composed of the deeds and sufferings of men, and no longer told the story of
events effecting the lives of men; it became a man-made process which owed its
existence exclusively to the human race’.39 In what may arguably be described as the
ultimate revolt against their status as beings subject to Geworfenheit – thrown into a
pre-existing network of relations with a history that long pre-dates the existence of the
new arrival – Western humanity appears to have come to believe that they can only
trust what they have made themselves, and that sustainable living-together is possible
only in world that is the product of deliberate prefabrication. In other words, a pre-
fabricated world populated by isolated rational subjects, each believing that they are
in control of their own destinies.
This set the preconditions for the rise of the social. The ‘social’, ultimately for Arendt
the defining characteristic of the modern, occurred when the public world of politics
was subsumed under the private world of the oikos during the revolutions of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, the roots of the social go back
much further, and are intimately intertwined with the rise of capitalism. The first assault
upon the public realm came in the form of ‘an organisation of property-owners who,
instead of claiming access to the public realm because of their wealth, demanded
protection from it for the accumulation of more wealth’40 This was significant, because
in addition to the re-conception of history as fabrication, the stasis of traditional landed
wealth was replaced by the semi-biological process of endless growth and expansion.
What permanence remains, was not the stable structures erected by the traditional
work of homo faber, but the omnipresence of biology: capitalism fundamentally exists
for the satisfaction and cultivation of bodily needs by products of ephemeral nature.
The Greeks had no equivalent to this state of affairs: distinguishing only between the
public world of the polis and the private realm of individual households, having no
notion of a realm devoted to collectively fulfilling the private needs of body and life.
‘Privacy’ originally had a negative connotation: the Latin private esse essentially
translates to ‘deprived’ (of public recognition), a life lived in the darkness (megaron)
and subject to the pain and dullness of what the Buddhists call the ‘meatwheel’:
consuming in order to survive in order to consume yet again.
39 Hannah Arendt, Beyond Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), p.
58.
40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p.68.

20. 20
Whereas equality in the Greek sense was understood as a formal construct that
allowed the participants in the agon to engage on a fair footing with each other, equality
forms the essence of the social realm. It is an equality derived from bodily existence
and it is an end rather than a means towards achieving distinction.
The social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has
let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural; and it is against this growth,
not merely against society but against a constantly growing social realm, that the
private and intimate, on the one hand, and the political (in the narrower sense of the
word), have proved incapable of defending themselves41 (HC 47
As it is predicated upon the relationships of the household, society is inclined to prefer
regularised behaviour over the unpredictability of action. Action is by definition
unpredictable, and it interrupts the ordinary with the extraordinary, and is therefore
experienced as a destabilizing element in the social realm. The members of society
expect from each other certain kinds of behaviour and impose rules in order to
normalize its members and control how they behave. – a theme that forms the
backbone of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical explorations. Above all,
society depends on sameness and changelessness in to function. For Nietzsche, there
is a link between the value society placed on changelessness, predictability and
ultimately, utility, which we should remember, are also the central values of the
empirical sciences. Picking up on strikingly similar themes to Arendt, Nietzsche writes:
Society is pleased to feel that the virtue of this person, the ambition of that one,
and the thoughtfulness and passion of the third provide it with a dependable
instrument.
That is always at hand; society honours this instrumental nature, this way of
remaining faithful to oneself, this unchangeability of views, aspirations and even
faults, and lavishes its highest honours upon it.42
41 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p.47.
42 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 296.

21. 21
Science flourishes in ‘society.’ For all the comforts and knowledge it brings, it is an
instrument of normalization: it derives its legitimacy by enquiring after the rule, not the
exception. The exceptional scientist, the Curies, Einsteins or Bohrs, derive their fame
by discovering rules, not legislating them. Because of the absolute uniformity of
scientific facts and the ease of their demonstrability, science makes for an authority to
which it is easy to appeal in the age of society. Consumer society is reluctant to
consider abstract ideals preferring the concrete as well as instant satisfaction.
Combined with the powers of capitalism through consumer technology, science today
enjoys unprecedented power. The benevolence of the order that renders this possible
is for Arendt irrelevant for political purposes. For her, one of the defining characteristics
of life in in late modern society is the incessant demand for ‘happiness’:
The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in or
society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most
persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough
labouring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans and neither the
craftsman nor the man of action has ever demanded to be ‘happy’ or thought that
mortal men could be happy.43
It should be clear that what Arendt describes here as ‘happiness’ does not refer to
classic notion of eudaimonia,a state achieved when a life is ‘lived well’, but the entirely
private notion of physical comfort which is measured by a utilitarian index. Life in late
modern society is characterized by an unprecedented emphasis on physical well-
being and an equally unprecedented fear of pain and discomfort. Much of
contemporary science, whether through medicine or through the comforts of late
modern technology is directed towards the elimination of pain and discomfort, the
value of which in turn tends to be measured purely in economic terms. In different
terms: the ‘happy human’ may be said to be the ‘behaved’ or ‘pacified’ human being
no longer capable of action. As a rule-governed activity, behaviour is inimitable and
thus never truly innovative. Arendt writes:
43 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:Chicago University Press, 1958),p.134.

22. 22
Unlike human behaviour – which the Greeks like all civilized people judged
according to ‘moral standards’ taking into account motives and intentions on the
one hand and aims and consequences on the other – action can be judged only
by the criterion of greatness, because it is its nature to break through the
commonly accepted and reach through the extraordinary where whatever is true
in common, and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is
unique and sui generis.
Science as activity is committed towards subsuming all that is sui generis under
general rules and categories. As such, it leaves little room for action and still less for
freedom. As the history of totalitarianism proves, where there is no room for the sui
generis, the attempt to identify and eliminate the para physin – the unnatural, the
unsuitable and the unwelcome too easily follows.