While “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” at first strikes the reader as among the more dated of Hannah Arendt’s remarkable corpus, with its emphasis on space shots and the splitting of the atom, in all its most important respects the essay remains remarkably relevant. Its main themes — the question of the “stature” or dignity of the human being in an age of scientific manipulation, the threat of science to the common life and lawfulness of humanity, and the question of the viability of the human species in an era of scientific mastery over nature — remain fresh and urgent. In all its main points, Arendt’s essay is as topical today as when it was penned.
A Half-Century in Space
- The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man
- Nature, Man, and Common Sense
- Science and Totalitarianism
- Thumos in Space
- Chariots in the Sky
- Our Proud Human Future
Indeed, one could add that the grounds for Arendt’s disquiet over the nature of the modern scientific project and the threat it poses to the very idea of human dignity have become only more worrisome: her conclusion looks today more like a prediction than a surmise. At the end of the essay she wonders whether a time will come when humans will “apply the Archimedean point to ourselves,” that is, whether we will “appear to ourselves as no more than ‘overt behavior,’ which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats.” This speculation seems almost quaint in an age in which human brain activity is measured to ascertain whether ethical decision-making can be reduced to a certain sequential firing of synapses, an era in which human behavior is increasingly controlled and normalized by pharmaceutical intervention. Arendt further speculates that the effort to reduce all human accomplishment to mere “biological process” will cause all grounds for our pride to disappear, and will ultimately threaten not only to lower the stature of man, but to destroy it. Having since had a succession of authors like E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett strive to explain all human phenomena by means of evolutionary impulses, it appears incontrovertible that we have arrived even closer to the point of destruction of “human stature” that Arendt thought us already “perilously close” to nearly a half century ago.
