“Archimedes Point” and the Crisis of Western Political Modernity—On Hannah Arendt’s Criticism of Information Alienation ^†

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s “Archimedes point” theory comes from her magnum opus “Human Condition” which described the character of modern society and criticized the phenomenon of information alienation in modern society. When people put themselves on the “Archimedes point”, the information obtained by observation and thinking is divorced from their living life and true conditions. This alienated way of generating and processing information is the reason for the crisis of western political modernity. Firstly, Arendt uses the concept of “Archimedes point” to explain the characteristics of the second stage of the phenomenon of “world alienation”, that is, people treat things around them in a state of alienation and indifference. Secondly, Arendt analyzes the influence of modern science of “Archimedes point” on the way people produce and process information, that is, when modern natural science processes information, it makes the information content singular and digitization and the understanding of information in all process-oriented ways, all the characteristics rooted in people’s minds made people deal with human affairs in the same way. Arendt further explains how the “Archimedes point” mode of generating and processing information threatens modern western politics, that is, this mode will lead to the assimilation of human beings, people will lose reflective ability and obey the “historical law” that humans create by themselves, then fall into the ideological control of totalitarian governments. Based on the study of all this, it can be seen that in the “Archimedes point” mode, the way modern natural science processes information, has led to a series of political crises that may escalate into totalitarian phenomena.

1. Introduction

The Renaissance, especially since the enlightenment, led to the development of modern science and technology and brought great wealth to humans, but also created a huge risk. This is because, as a result of the science and technology revolution and the enlightenment, rationality gradually spread to the principle of subjectivity, to every field in modern society, and became the evaluation criteria for everything and the principle behind system arrangement. Since modern times, there have emerged a group of scholars who hold a negative attitude to modern science and technology. They generally believe that modern science and technology put human beings on the opposite side of nature, no longer conforming to nature, but conquering nature. The root cause of the crisis in modern society is modern science and technology. Karl Marx believed that capitalism is driven by a strong impulse for capital appreciation, constantly stimulating the improvement of production technology, which is the source of power for the development of modern science and technology, and modern industrialism also develops and expands accordingly. Later, western scholars set off a wave of analysis of the influence of modern industrialism on the basis of Marx’s theory. For example, Durkheim believed that the technical logic of industrialism ruled the rhythm and order of modern society, and Lukacs believed that the materialized production of capitalism that eliminated personality gradually materialized workers’ consciousness. Weber believes that modern science has brought about a “disenchantment” world without objective value, in which faith, redemption and meaning have been lost, and the progress of science and technology has not brought about human freedom and liberation, but brought about the restriction of human nature. Against the pessimism of modern science and technology color is more obvious in the Frankfurt school: they intensify Weber’s opinion about the people’s liberation and the development of science and technology strengthening the modernity paradox, and believe that as people dominate, the power of natural growth, system control, and the power of the people also gradually increase. Fascist dictators of human wanton manipulation is the embodiment of the extreme human control of nature. Therefore, the Frankfurt School rejects the whole enlightenment technology and modernity marked by “instrumental reason”. In addition to the above rational critical approach, which focuses on the ideological control of human beings by technological rationality, there is another irrational critical approach to the criticism of modern science and technology, which is represented by Heidegger’s “poetic” technological view and Foucault’s genealogy of scientific and technological power. When they are criticizing and examining modern science and technology, the above scholars generally believe that scientists regard the whole of nature as an object that can be disposed of at will by human beings, and technology is a tool for human beings to conquer nature, which is an “anthropocentric” perspective. When Hannah Arendt [1,2,3] analyzed the impact of modern technology on politics, she offered a different perspective. She agrees that the way modern science thinks can influence politics [3,4], but argues that modern science is a way for human beings to get rid of “anthropocentrism”, the modern scientist is not concerned with being ”human“ or with human affairs, but simply exists as an ”observer“ standing at the Archimedes point. Therefore, in order to understand her reflection and criticism on modern politics, we must start with the idea of “Archimedes point” and study her criticism [5,6,7] of modern technology.

2. The Loss of the Common World

“Alienation world”; this concept comes from “one” in the sixth chapter. This chapter content was named the “Positive and Modern life”. Arendt analyses the significance of numbers and determines the nature of the “modern” event, these events in various fields such as philosophy, science, and politics caused a series of influences to reveal the various crises of the modern world. As it appeared in the world, people lived contemplating life and positive interpretations of phenomenology and the important point of thinking of modern concrete political events. The “alienation of the world” means that modern people are divorced from the situation and existence conditions of mankind’s own state. “Alienation of the world” can be divided into two phases, the first stage is people leaving the world as a condition of human life. In the second stage people flee the earth as a condition of existence.

When Arendt applied the category of “world”, she actually divided the “world” in a broad sense into “earth” and “world” in a narrow sense, which are the living conditions of human beings. Man has built his man-made home on earth, erecting a barrier between nature and his own world. Natural objects mean “they exist without human help… meaning that they are not ‘made’ but grow into what they become [1] (p. 15)”. Thus, “earth” or “nature” in Arendt’s view refers to the natural conditions given before the birth of human beings and will still exist after the extinction of human beings, which are not embedded in human activities. In other words, the world is independent of human activities. Human beings are placed in these natural conditions and restricted by them, but they can create their own, artificial “world” by their own activities and these become the conditions of human life. Anything that enters or is pulled into the man-made world becomes part of it, an integral part of the human condition. The “human world” is the place where what happens to human activities is about when we were born into it, and death is when we leave, so it should exceed the length of our life. At the same time it is open to the past and the future. The world is not only owned by people living together with us together, but also with our predecessors, and future generations have it in common. Arendt called it the common world. It should be realness, which is guaranteed by the common sense of people and determined by the identity of one’s “appearance” to share the world with others. It should be immortal, offer durability and stability that insulates the world from nature’s never-ending metabolic process, the inevitability of life.

3. The Founding of the “Archimedes Point”

A man, as a mortal being, who wants to find his place in the universe and pursue his own immortality, must possess a territory in the common world in which private things can be hidden, that is, property. This means that a person occupies a place in a particular part of the world, and thus belongs to a political body, which is why “owning property” is a condition of “owning citizenship”. The dispossession of church and monastic property by the European Reformation, and the subsequent dispossession of the peasant class, actually resulted in an increasing number of “toiled masses” losing the opportunity to enter the common world and being subject to the necessities of life. When people are naked and exposed to the life’s cruel process, they are inevitably involved in it, and the vast and ongoing accumulation of wealth in modern society, due to its excellent ability to multiply wealth, is undoubtedly exacerbated by its similarity to the ability to reproduce life. This loss of the common world and the situation in which people are forced into the inevitability of life is the first stage of world alienation.

If the alienation of the loss of the first stage, the public world, by depriving people in private all part of the world together, allowing people to involved in “passive” just like the capitalism in the process of wealth accumulation of life, so the second phase of the alienation-earth alienation, by the “archimedean point” in mind. Thus prompting people to “actively” escape the earth as a human living conditions of space.

This phase began with the discovery of the American continent and the subsequent exploitation of the entire earth. Since ancient times, man’s passion for exploring the earth as his dwelling place on earth has never diminished, and in modern times, people’s study of earth has finally reached its peak, “Only now has man taken full possession of his mortal dwelling place and gathered the infinite horizons, which were temptingly and forbiddingly open to all previous ages, into a globe whose majestic outlines and detailed surface he knows as he knows the lines in the palm of his hand [1] (p. 250)”. Mapping continents never heard of, exploring oceans never dreamed of, was clearly one of the most exciting events in human history, yet “Precisely when the immensity of available space on earth was discovered, the famous shrinkage of the globe began, until eventually in our world (which, though the result of the modern age, is by no means identical with the modern age’s world) each man is as much an inhabitant of the earth as he is an inhabitant of his country” [1] (p. 250). For two reasons, one is “measuring” the human ability, in order to guarantee the precision of the result. This requires people to completely ignore the state of the objectand and only pay attention to the distance between objects. That is to say, when the measured object is “earth”, people will have to get away from the earth’s environment. An accurate grasp of the earth comes at the cost of removing man from his immediate earthly environment. Second, if anything is used to measure, it may not be infinite. The measurement of human ability is actually “Prior to the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through railroads, steamships, and airplanes. There is the infinitely greater and more effective shrinkage which comes about through the surveying capacity of the human mind, whose use of numbers, symbols, and models can condense and scale earthly physical distance down to the size of the human body’s natural sense and understanding [1] (pp. 250–251)”. In other words, the more accurately the earth is explored and grasped, the greater the distance and compression of the earth, so that people can look down on it, even as if it were rotating before our eyes. But that’s just the beginning, because for now, at least, the place where the measurements are taking place is on Earth.

The truly epoch-making event was the invention of the telescope, a seemingly “insignificant” addition to mankind’s arsenal, which in fact “created a new world and set the course of other events.” “What Galileo did and what nobody had done before, was to use the telescope in such a way that the secrets of the universe were delivered to human cognition ‘with the certainty of sense-perception’ [1] (p. 260)”. Whereas scientists and philosophers had previously relied on “the courage of thought” and “the audacity of imagination” to seek out the infinite and eternal secrets beyond the senses, Galileo’s telescope could establish a fact by “verifying its predecessors”. This “fact” goes like this: The Earth is just one part of a vast universe, and everything on earth, including people and human affairs, is subject to a “universal cosmic force”. In other words, while we are still confined to the Earth, we can seek an “Archimedes point” in the universe to understand it. This “Archimedes point” was clearly a foothold in the universe beyond earth, and this ability to think in cosmic terms, and even apply cosmic laws to “earth affairs”, became a hallmark of modern science, what Arendt called “earth alienation”.