Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.116.3.602
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)World Systems and Global Transformations
ResumoIN 1990, THE GERMAN ASTRONOMERS Freimut Bo ¨rngen and Lutz Schmadel named an asteroid after one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century, the German Jewish e ´migre ´Hannah Arendt. 1 Whether Arendt would have appreciated the gesture is uncertain. 2After all, she opened her philosophical masterpiece The Human Condition (1958) by voicing grave concerns about a second satellite-Sputnik.In 1957, man had for the first time propelled his artifacts into the beyond, and he was likely to follow by propelling himself as well.But to desire to depart from the scene of the world, she felt, meant also to think of the world as something worth leaving.To emancipate ourselves from its physical limits-gravity-meant also to emancipate ourselves from the gravity of its existential claims upon us.Sputnik therefore embodied an impulse already much in evidence on Earth-to create an artificial planet.In Sputnik the ambitions of modern man lay revealed. 3 These ambitions were ominous.They had also in part been realized.The Human Condition appeared not long after Arendt's famous study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and she advanced through Sputnik some of the themes broached in that earlier effort.Totalitarianism, it turns out, shared something important with the Russian satellite.Sputnik embodied a desire to fabricate an artificial substitute for the living Earth.Totalitarianism, in turn, distinguished itself from every other form of rule in its ambition to create a new world fit to compete with this one, the nontotalitarian world, and its success was to be measured in the consistency of its artful fiction.Totalitarian regimes create an "artificially fabricated insanity," and "their art consists in using and at the same time transcending the elements of reality.
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