Homo Faber & Nature: permanence and decay in Arendt and Claerbout

[Work's] constant, unending fight against the processes of growth and decay through which nature forever invades the human artifice, threatens the durability of the world and its fitness for human use.

- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p.100

My dissertation, An Arendtian Model of Intergenerational Responsibility, examines Arendt's political theory and considers how it might contribute to the intergenerational question: what do we owe to future generations and why?

I hope to post the full dissertation on this blog someday, but for now, I consider a tangent from this topic. Included in §5, on the model's implications, is a discussion of human consumption, climate collapse, and sustainability. Indeed, this topic is perhaps the most prevalent application of intergenerational political philosophy.

Arendt's reluctant ecology distances itself from typically 'green' thought. Arendtian humanity is distinct from nature due to our political capacities, opposing the nature-culture monism that views humans as just another animal species. Further, it is distinct from intrinsic value theory (e.g. Arne Naess' deep ecology). Instead, it examines the human vita activa (active life) and its relationship to the world in which it is embedded.

Work is the second of the vita activa's three modes of being. Work consists of production towards ends: a pursuit of artifacts and permanence. It is intrinsically violent in its destructive methods: it must extract resources from nature in order to fabricate ends. In this sense, work's teleology is the antithesis of nature's cyclicality.

This tension, between homo faber (man as maker) striving for sempiternal legacy and nature as constant change, is captured not only in Arendt, but in David Claerbout's Olympia,

"the real time disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic stadium over the course of a thousand years".

The Olympiastadion was emblematic of the Nazi vision of a 'thousand year Reich'. Olympia re-imagines the degeneration of the Olympiastadion, not in the hands of the Nazis or any other human force, but in the hands of nature. It uses live meteorological data to simulate natural decay: weeds growing between concrete slabs, rust, and erosion.

The stadium's construction began in 1934, only months after Hannah Arendt fled Germany due to her precarity as a Jewish intellectual. As the author of the seminal Origins of Totalitarianism, the link I raise in this post is certainly fitting.

Having visited Berlin aged 16, I was fortunate to have the chance to capture the following photos, which I have enjoyed looking back on.

Claerbout's Olympia

https://davidclaerbout.com/Olympia-The-real-time-disintegration-into-ruins-of-the-Berlin-Olympic