Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, March, 2020.

This future man, whom scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. (Arendt, The Human Condition, 2-3)

There is something truly astonishing about Hannah Arendt’s prologue to her 1958 book, ‘The Human Condition’ from which the above quote is taken. I was only first made aware of this text recently, when reading Ray Brassier’s essay on Prometheanism in the 2014 compilation of essays, #accelerate#. A large part of Brassier’s argument involves the reading of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s work on human enhancement and transhumanism and it is Dupuy, who uses Arendt’s distinction between the ‘made’ and the ‘given’ when formulating his distinction between existential condition and essential nature.

In his essay Brassier refers to Arendt directly four times. Each time, he wishes to show how Dupuy’s wariness of the Promethean impulse is determined by Arendt’s thinking of the human condition. For Arendt, the human condition consists of an equilibrium: on the one side, there are the things given to humans, and on the other, things that are human made. Belonging uniquely to the human, is his finite kind of transcendence, which conditions how he determines the given as an essence. The process of cognising the given is the process of objectivisation.

This delicate balance between the given and the made is disturbed if we, as human, turn inwards and try to cognise the condition which makes us human. For as human beings we cannot objectify the condition of objectivisation. It would be, as Arendt so memorably put it, “like jumping over our own shadows”(10). To wish to do so—to be determined to jump—is to exchange our gift of existence for something we have made ourselves. According to Brassier’s interpretation, the Promethean trespass consists of us humans “making the given” (478).

But this is precisely what we do. Arendt’s prologue begins with a description of the 1958 Sputnik launch, a moment in human progress as significant for Arendt as the dropping of the atomic bomb. For the first time, something human-made shared orbit with other celestial bodies: what was earth-bound now soared through the heavens and from our human perspective, the earth-bound and the heavenly became indistinguishable. For Arendt, it was our human response to this fact that was worth noting. Instead of celebration, the news was greeted with an overwhelming feeling of relief. For us it seemed to be a relief to be able to escape earth, to refuse this gift we were offered, to choose the man-made over the given.

For Arendt, this technological development has further implications, especially for human communication. She describes a future world, which is technologically advanced to such a degree, that is now beyond normal expression in thought and in speech, confined instead to mathematical formulas. In such a technological world we would become heavenly dwellers, but such, who are nevertheless incapable of understanding what they do. As she writes,

…then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technologically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, March, 2020.

…we can only know things insofar as what our minds make is combined with what the world gives. (Ray Brassier, ‘Prometheanism and its Critics’ in ‘#Accelerate: The Accelerations Reader,’ 475)

The above quote is taken from Ray Brassier’s short essay on Prometheanism, which examines some of the presuppositions underlying the philosophical critique of Enlightenment in order to redeem its Promethean impulse, the idea that we can remake the world and with it, ourselves. His question relates to the future: a future that was so prominent in the modernist project—what is the avant-garde other than the attempt to break with the past in order to establish bright, futuristic new—but which now, after the right’s promise to return to traditional values and the scaling down of the political ambition of the left, is left abandoned, dismissed, forgotten.

As part of his reappraisal, Brassier turns to Jean Pierre Dupuy, and his reading of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical voluntarism. Dupuy relates Heidegger’s distinction between the existential condition of the human being and his essential essence to the interplay of what is given and what is made, as presented by Hannah Arendt. If the human condition is a mix of things given and things made—man can shape things, and things shape man as a consequence, providing that an equilibrium is preserved—then the all-encompassing knowing of Prometheanism threatens the balance of this mix.

Key to Brassier’s argument are Kant’s ideas of intellectual intuition and the quote is a very good summary of the intrinsic finitude of human cognition, as understood by Kant. In Kant’s critical philosophy, God possesses intellectual intuition, meaning that God knows the objects he creates, because his thought creates them. His is an unconstrained infinite generative intelligence. His knowledge is absolute, immanent, constant. But man’s knowledge is limited by the fact that it relates to the given. Whatever our knowledge of reality, it is conditioned by our senses, in other words, we only know things insofar our thinking thinks in combination with the sensory. The thinking involved in knowledge-making is the ‘making’ and the world as presented by our senses is ‘the given.’ We therefore only know things as a combination of the made and the given. Our minds are finite and our knowledge of things, partial and incomplete.