Who Speaks for Nature?

On the Politics of Science

Laura Ephraim

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780812294682
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Politik

When natural scientists speak up in public about the material phenomena they have observed, measured, and analyzed in the lab or the field, they embody a distinctive version of political authority. Where does science derive its remarkably resilient, though often contested, capacity to give voice to nature? What efforts on the part of scientists and nonscientists alike determine who is regarded as a legitimate witness to material reality and whose speech is discounted as idle chatter, mere opinion, or noise?In Who Speaks for Nature?, Laura Ephraim reveals the roots of scientific authority in what she calls "world-building politics": the collection of practices through which scientists and citizens collaborate with and struggle against each other to engage natural things and events and to construct a shared yet heterogeneous world. Through innovative readings of some of the most important thinkers of science and politics of the near and distant past, including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Giambattista Vico, and Hannah Arendt, Ephraim argues that the natural sciences are political because they are crucial sites in which the worldly relationships that bind together the human and nonhuman are inherited, augmented, and reconstructed. Who Speaks for Nature? opens a novel conversation between political theory, science, and technology studies and augments existing efforts by feminists, environmentalists, and democratic theorists to challenge the traditional binary separating nature and politics. In an age of climate change and climate-change denial, Ephraim brings theoretical understandings of politics to bear on real-world events and decisions and uncovers fresh insights into the place of scientists in public life.

CHAPTER 1

Earth to Arendt

“The world” is arguably the central category of Hannah Arendt’s political thought and the locus of her hopes and fears about the fate of politics in modernity.¹ As she defines it, the world consists of the physical assemblage of things that appear between men and women, “in the plural,” attracting their mutual attention and concern and eliciting their speech, action, and judgment. Arendt’s account of the centrality of worldly things (tables, buildings, and artworks, to name a few of her examples) to politics helped to inspire what I call in this book—with Arendt’s influence in mind—the “the worldly turn,” the recent movement to re-center matter, corporeality, sensation, and affect in political thought. In this chapter, I show how an Arendtian orientation to the world as the material home for politics enables us to recast both nature and the natural sciences as political phenomena of the first order and moves us a few steps beyond the two-sciences settlement—the view that natural and political science should respect the essential differences between their respective objects of study.

Many of Arendt’s readers will likely see the intention to politicize nature and the natural sciences in her name as confused or illegitimate. With good reason, Arendt is well known for using the category of the world to exclude nature and its sway over the human body from politics.² In The Human Condition, for instance, she contrasts the world—the artificial product of human work and the site of human action—with “the earth”—the natural givens that humans labor upon and consume in order to survive. Generations of readers have seen Arendt’s labor-work-action triad in “ ‘territorial’ terms” (as Patchen Markell aptly puts it), as a way of protecting action against the instrumentalism of work and the necessity of labor.³ Within this territorial frame, Arendt’s earth-world dyad seems to further protect action from labor by assigning them to separate ontological spheres. It is tempting to conclude that Arendt’s concepts of earth and world reflect a dualistic view of nature and politics.⁴ This impression may be reinforced by Arendt’s criticisms of political scientists who emulate the methods of natural science for flattening the differences between nature and politics—criticisms that ostensibly capitulate to the oppositional logic of the two-sciences settlement.⁵

But a closer look at Arendt’s critical appraisal of the natural sciences complicates this territorial impression of the earth-world relationship and reveals tensions between her vision of politics and the two-sciences settlement. While Arendt charges behaviorist social sciences with conflating nature and politics, her primary concern with the natural sciences is their tendency to disconnect us from the reality of nature on earth: “Earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science.”⁶ Arendt did not accept the two-sciences settlement’s reassuring message that natural science is politically irrelevant or benign so long as its techniques are applied exclusively to the study of nature. On the contrary, as the readings to come will show, Arendt faulted the natural sciences for encouraging estrangement from earthly nature, an earth-loss she considered to endanger our political relationships with one another and thus to the common world. According to the genealogy of the modern decline of politics she provides in the final chapter of The Human Condition (hereafter cited parenthetically as HC), earth alienation and world alienation began together at the birth of the natural sciences, when Galileo first looked through the telescope. In other words, Arendt’s discussion of labor in that text is not the end of her story about the earth’s significance for the human condition.⁷ In the course of this chapter, I excavate the deeper meaning of “earth” to Arendt in order to clarify why she considers scientific alienation from earthly reality so troubling for politics.

I derive an alternative perspective on the Arendtian earth and its significance for the fate of politics in the age of modern science from her unusual account of common sense and its role in organizing collective sensuous encounters with earth’s givens. Arendt seldom hews to the conventional meaning of “common sense” as a repository of, well, conventional meanings, beliefs, or opinions.⁸ Instead, she charges this “mysterious ‘sixth sense’ ” with fitting us into the world and granting to appearances an unshakable “realness” or “sheer thereness.”⁹ In these passages, earth’s elements and processes represent more than an opposite and a threat to “the world” and to the political activity that it enables and protects. Rather, Arendt emphasizes ways that the earth shares with the world the ontological propensity to appear between us. We not only relate to nature qua sustenance when we “metabolize” natural resources as laborers to satisfy the needs of life (HC 98); we also receive nature qua appearance as spectators and speak for it as actors, establishing the conditions for life in common. As I read her, Arendt is concerned not only with the risks of natural necessity overflowing its boundaries and invading the common world, but also with the risks of natural displays of diversity disappearing from public view.

By showing that earth, to Arendt, means more than just the condition for life, my readings reveal that more than “mere” survival is at stake for her in the earth alienation she associates with the natural sciences. Arendt’s critique casts the natural sciences as antagonistic toward common sense and the common world insofar as participants seek to destroy or obscure earth’s gifts of appearance. In her view, the primary political effect of the instruments, experiments, and mathematical techniques of the natural sciences has been to organize spaces of disappearance, where earth’s visible surfaces are violated and the range of possible perspectives from which they may be perceived is narrowed. She is concerned not only with the potentially life-altering and life-threatening contributions of the sciences to modern technology and industry—the concerns that occupy the few existing studies of Arendt’s critique of science.¹⁰ She is also concerned with the sciences’ world-threatening potential to devalue human plurality and erase or deface nonhuman alterity. Arendt’s analysis of earth alienation puts to one side concerns about the utility or validity of the sciences in order to press us to question the sciences’ implications for the building of a common world—a question that has largely gone unasked by critical thinkers of science and that has largely been overlooked in the secondary literature on Arendt’s political theory.

Coming chapters will show that these implications are more complicated than Arendt herself recognized—that the sciences have a promising, if risky, role to play in receiving earth’s appearances and augmenting common sense and the common world. But first, we need to better understand the depth and the importance of the concerns that Arendt brings into view when she reframes the politics of science in worldly terms. This chapter develops an Arendtian perspective on science and politics in two stages: In the first part, I discuss the vision of earth qua appearances that emerges from Arendt’s discussion of common sense. The second part builds on this revised understanding of the Arendtian earth to recover and extend her critique of natural scientific earth alienation.

Earth

Nature, Among Other Things

The close relationship that Arendt draws between earth alienation and world alienation in her account of the rise of modern science and the decline of modern politics at the close of The Human Condition is puzzling in light of the strong distinctions she draws earlier in that text between the concepts of earth and world. To give one example: “The world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us . . . is not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together” (HC 52). Such passages underscore the difference between the earth, cast as the source of life, and the world, cast as the product of human work and the object of collective political activity. But beyond the earth’s contributions to biological survival, Arendt helps us to see that earth qua appearance plays a crucial role in our political flourishing. By appearing, earth solicits our spectatorship and calls us to supplement its colorful displays of diversity by performing our plurality in speech and action.

Nevertheless, a full understanding of the Arendtian earth-world pairing must begin by taking seriously the dire consequences she sees for both life and life in common when certain important differences between earth and world are disregarded. First, Arendt warns that our very survival is imperiled when we allow work or action to unduly interfere with earth’s uniquely life-sustaining concatenation of elements, “a habitat” where terrestrial creatures like us “can move and breathe without effort and without artifice” (HC 2). She emphasizes that the material conditions of life are given on earth, both in the sense that they are not made and in the sense that they are precious, “a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking)” (HC 2) or (less secularly) a “chain of miracles” on par with the miracle of human freedom.¹¹ We must receive these gifts of life by cultivating, harvesting, breathing, eating, or otherwise metabolizing natural resources in order to survive. But in so doing, we must take care not to destroy our sanctuary in the universe. Arendt thinks it would be a perilous form of hubris to forget that our lives depend on earthly phenomena that we have no hand in making—soil, air, water, and the cyclical processes of birth, growth, death, and decay. Her key example of such forgetfulness is modern utilitarianism, which wrongly extends Homo faber’s emphasis on the usefulness of man-made tools to nature, as though these gifts were here for solely our benefit (HC 153–59).

Second and conversely, Arendt warns of dangers to life in common when animal laborans’ preoccupation with the exigencies of biological life supersedes concern for the durable world of our own making. Tables, houses, books, tools, and other human works constitute a world and enable the enactment of politics insofar as they separate and connect those who make and inherit them: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it” (HC 52). The world is what we have in common even as we contest its meaning or vie for its future. Thus it is the material situation and provocation for political speech and action and their aftermath in storytelling, judgment, and memory: “At the center of politics lies concern for the world. . . . Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-between space that all human affairs are conducted.”¹² Only in the midst of this in-between does “the human condition of plurality,” the “condition per quam” of politics, come to fruition, as men and women present themselves in their utter uniqueness, act in concert, and interpret, debate, and narrate what has transpired (HC 7). Arendt warns that we can fail to realize the contingent “fact” of plurality and destroy the prospects for politics if we let earthly concerns with the body’s needs supersede care for the common world. Such failure has been widespread in modernity, in her analysis, resulting in the displacement of politics by society, “the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance” (HC 46). The rise of mass society represents the “unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural,” as bodily urges and exigencies overtake the world and stifle political activity (HC 47).

Thus far, Arendt’s world-earth dyad aligns the two worldly activities of work and action while underscoring the importance of protecting both of them against the earthly activity of labor, adding credence to Markell’s recent amendment to territorial readings of her labor-work-action triad. As he points out, although Arendt is careful to distinguish the isolation and instrumentalism of work from the plurality and freedom of action, she also recognizes that work “is never merely instrumental, but implicates larger questions about, as Arendt would later say, ‘how [the world] is to look’ and ‘what kind of things are to appear in it.’ ”¹³ In a key passage for Arendt’s argument about the worldliness of work and Markell’s interpretation, she raises the example of the useless work of art to show that all works, apart from their (in)utility, are aesthetically valuable: “Everything that is must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen” (HC 172–73). Markell rightly argues that, for Arendt, work, like action, adds to the appearing in-between toward which human affairs are conducted, enhancing plurality and politics. Qua appearance, the thing, be it a useless sculpture or a useful chair, “gathers us together” into a thickly tangible public realm and calls to us to appear in word and deed (HC 52).

But this key passage also hints at the possibility of an affinity between earth and world—and a deeper challenge to territorial readings of Arendt than even Markell entertains. Trees and rivers, as much as sculptures and chairs, “must appear.” As appearances, it would seem, natural elements and processes implicate larger political questions concerning how the worldly in-between is to look. Insofar as earth’s givens, like man-made artifacts, transcend their usefulness in appearance, what could their aesthetic and political significance be? In what respects might earth’s natural materials and cycles contribute not merely to the survival of human and nonhuman animals, but also to the tangible texture of the common world?

In The Life of the Mind (hereafter cited parenthetically as LM), Arendt puts the issue of nature qua appearance and its worldly, aesthetic status squarely on the agenda from the very first sentence of the first chapter of the first volume: “The world men are born into contains many things, natural and artificial, living and dead, transient and sempiternal, all of which have in common that they appear and hence are meant to be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, to be perceived by sentient creatures endowed with the appropriate sense organs” (19, emphasis in the original unless otherwise noted). Arendt writes here of a single world, containing both the natural, organic entities and processes that she elsewhere associates with the earth, and the durable, artificial things that owe their existence to human work. Natural and artificial things are united by their shared propensity to appear and thereby to elicit the attention of sentient creatures, including, though not exclusively, human beings. Arendt’s immediate concern in describing this single, appearing world is to heal the traditional metaphysical divide between “(true) Being and (mere) Appearance” (LM 23); in a world where “Being and Appearing coincide,” philosophers’ habit of seeking true being above or behind mere appearance is misguided (LM 19). But this marriage between being and appearing also establishes an intimacy between (natural) earth and (artificial) world: Arendt posits that everything that is, given and made, also appears. Earth gives us not only the gift of life, but also the gifts of sights, smells, sounds, textures, and tastes; it calls us to receive its givens not only by metabolizing them in labor, but also by seeing, smelling, and otherwise perceiving them. Natural phenomena are meant to be consumed and “meant . . . to be perceived,” and this second, aesthetic purpose binds earth and world together in a shared fate.

Attending to earth’s aesthetic dimensions helps us to recognize that, as sentient creatures, our duties toward earth go beyond animal laborans’s self-interested concern to avoid damaging earth’s life-sustaining processes. While we depend on earth qua sustenance to survive, earth qua appearance depends on us to perceive and thereby to world it: “Dead matter, natural and artificial, changing and unchanging, depends in its being, that is, in its appearingness, on the presence of living creatures. Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. . . . [S]entient beings—men and animals, to whom things appear . . . as recipients guarantee their reality” (LM 19). Earth’s creatures are responsible for securing the very reality of the natural and artificial things they perceive; our spectatorship ensures the coincidence between being and appearing that is, for Arendt, characteristic of the world. This responsibility is inscribed in our bodies, in the “astounding diverseness of sense organs” given—as if a gift from nowhere—to earth’s diverse species, equipping us to receive and thereby to world “the almost infinite diversity of its appearances, the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells” (LM 20). Just as all appearing beings are meant to be perceived, all sentient beings are meant to perceive them. Arendt suggests that sentient life, human and otherwise, is always already implicated in worldly purposes that exceed, even as they presuppose, individual survival. The establishment of the world requires that the diverse creatures of the earth enjoy both its nutritive, survival value and its aesthetic, “entertainment” value.

The earth, Arendt reminds us, is the only planet known to be populated with “creatures able to acknowledge, recognize, and react to—in flight or desire, approval or disapproval, blame or praise—what is not merely there but appears to them” (LM 19). In this respect, the earth is a uniquely hospitable environment for the world, providing for both astoundingly diverse sentient life-forms and almost infinitely diverse spectacles. On a lifeless planet, other kinds of beings might well appear, but they would lack the fullness of being of the world sustained on earth. The two purposes that Arendt ascribes to all sentient creatures, to live and to perceive, are thus mutually entwined, for the struggle to live—including the toil of human labor—is always already a struggle to maintain the world’s fragile coincidence between appearing and being. We might call these struggles “the natural growth of the natural”: where Arendt warns that it is “unnatural” and dangerous to give undue priority to issues of natural necessity in politics, she also affirms our role as sentient creatures in guaranteeing the reality of nature’s appearances.

“Common sense” is Arendt’s name for our capacity to fulfill this responsibility to world the earth: “It is by virtue of common sense that the other sense perceptions are known to disclose reality and are not merely felt as irritations of our nerves ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. The Science Question in Political Theory
• Chapter 1. Earth to Arendt
• Chapter 2. Vico’s World of Nature
• Chapter 3. Descartes and Democracy
• Chapter 4. Hobbes’s Worldly Geometry of Politics
• Epilogue. Science and Politics at the End of the World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments