Arendt on earth

Abstract

This article rethinks the semantic constellation circulating around nature and artifice, earth and world, ‘the given’ and ‘the made’ in Hannah Arendt’s thought. The conventional reading conflates nature and earth, associating both with the given in opposition to the made. I offer an alternative account, one that surfaces an overlooked aspect of The Human Condition: a capsule genealogy of the natural world as the historically variable counterpart of the human artifice. Rather than eliding earth into nature, I suggest we think in terms of a twofold concept: earth as given ground and the Earth as revealed planet. This move offers three advantages. First, it extricates us from an untenable binary distinction between nature and artifice. Second, it denaturalizes the concept of the given and shows that its ambit is considerably wider than is generally appreciated. Third, it loosens the grip of the morality tale that structures the narrative arc of The Human Condition. Contemporary Arendtian environmental theory remains constrained by what I call Holocene thinking. By examining how Arendt’s conception of earth as both ground and planet might help us face our new planetary dispensation, I suggest resources for thinking beyond the limits of both Holocene nostalgia and cosmic abstraction.