Nuclear warfare and the end of mankind
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 4, 2022
In 1958, Karl Jaspers publishes a book under the title The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man in which he intends to radically question — as the subtitle reads — The political consciousness in our time. The atomic bomb — he begins in the introduction — has produced an absolutely new situation in the history of humanity, placing it in front to the inescapable alternative: “either all mankind will physically perish or there will be a change in the moral-political condition of man”. If in the past, as happened in the early Christian communities, men made up “unreal representations” of an end of the world, today, for the first time in its history, humanity has the “real possibility” of annihilating itself and any life on earth. This possibility, though mankind does not seem to fully realise it, can only mark a new beginning for political awareness and imply “a turning point in the whole of human history”.
Almost seventy years later, the “real possibility” of a self-destruction of humanity, that appeared to shake the conscience of the philosopher and involve his readers immediately (the book was widely discussed) seems to have become an obvious fact, which newspapers and politicians evoke every day as an absolutely normal eventuality. By dint of talking about emergency — in which, as we know, the exception becomes the rule — the event that Jaspers regarded as unprecedented presents itself as an altogether banal occurrence about which the experts must evaluate the opportunity and imminence. Since the bomb has ceased to be a decisive “possibility” for the history of humanity and instead concerns us closely as a “casualty” among others that define a war situation, it will be good then tp reconsider the question from the beginning, which perhaps was not appreciated in its most proper terms.
Thirteen years later, in an essay significantly titled The Apocalypse Is Disappointing, Maurice Blanchot got back to wondering about the problem of the end of humanity. And he did so by subjecting Jaspers’s theses to a discreet bur effective criticism. If the theme of the book was the need for a sea change, it is surprising that “in regard to Jaspers, in the very book that should be the consciousness, the summing up of the change and its commentary, nothing has changed — neither in the language, nor in the thinking, nor in the political formulations that are maintained and even drawn more tightly around the biases of a lifetime, some of them very noble, others very narrow-minded... Why does a question so serious — since it holds the future of humanity in its sway — a question such that to answer it would suppose a radically new thinking, why does it not renew the language that conveys it, and why does it only give rise to remarks that are either biased and, in any case, partial when they are of a political order, or moving and urgent when they are of a spiritual order, but identical to those that we have heard in vain for two thousand years?”. The objection is certainly relevant, because not only does Jaspers’s book present itself as an extensive academic monograph aimed at examining the problem in all its aspects, but what the author intends to oppose to the destruction is the cliché of “an universal peace without atomic bombs, with a new life economically founded on nuclear energy”. No less peculiar is that the atomic bomb is equated, as an equally deadly danger, to the totalitarian domination of Bolshevism, with which it is impossible to come to terms.
The fact is, Blanchot seems to suggest, that such an apocalyptic perspective is necessarily disappointing, because it presents as a power in the hands of humanity something that, in truth, is not such. It is, in fact, “a power that is not in our power, that only points to a possibility without mastery, a probability — which is, let us say, probable-improbable — that would be our power, a power in us and power over us, only if we dominated it with certainty. But for the moment we are just as incapable of mastering it as we are of wanting it, and for an obvious reason: we are not in control of ourselves because this humanity, capable of being totally destroyed, does not yet exist as a whole”. On the one hand a power that cannot be, and on the other an existence — a human community — “that can be wiped out but not affirmed, or that could be affirmed, in some sense, only after its disappearance and by the void, impossible to grasp, of this disappearance; consequently something that cannot even be destroyed, because it does not exist” (p. 124).
If, as it seems undeniable, the destruction of humanity is not a possibility that humanity consciously disposes of, but it remains entrusted to the contingency of mainly random decisions and evaluations by this or that head of state, Jaspers’s argumentation is then destroyed from the foundations, because men who do not actually have the ability to destroy themselves cannot even become aware of this possibility to transform their consciousness morally and politically. Jaspers appears here to be repeating the same mistake that Husserl made when, at a 1935 conference on “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man”, although identifying the cause of the crisis in the “deviations of rationalism”, has nevertheless entrusted to an undefined European “reason” the task of guiding humanity through its infinite progress towards maturity. The alternative here already clearly formulated between “the ruin of a Europe alienated from its rational sense of life” and a “rebirth of Europe” by virtue of “a heroism of reason”, betrays the unconfessable awareness that where there is a need for a “heroism” there is no longer any place for that “rational sense of life” (by which European humanity should distinguish itself “from the wild Papuan”, at least as far as he differs from a beast).
What a right-thinking reason does not have the courage to accept is that the end of European humanity or of humanity itself, delivered to anodyne and vain aspirations, which leave intact the principle that is responsible for it, ends up overturning, as Blanchot guessed, in “a simple fact about which there is nothing to say, except that it is insignificance itself — something that deserves neither exaltation nor despair nor even attention”. No historical event — neither atomic war (or, for Husserl, the First World War), nor the extermination of the Jews nor certainly the pandemic — can be hypostatized in an epochal event, if one does not want it to become an incomprehensible and vacuous idolum historiae, which one can no longer think or face.
Therefore, Jaspers’s argumentation must be dropped without any hesitation, as it pays for the inability of Western reason to think about the problem of an end that it itself produced, but which is in no way capable of mastering. Faced with the reality of its own end, it tries to gain time, transforming this reality into a possibility which refers to a future realisation, to an atomic war that reason can still avert. It would have been perhaps more coherent to suppose that a humanity that produced the bomb is already spiritually dead and that we must begin to think of the awareness of reality and not of the possibility of this death. If thought cannot reasonably pose the problem of the end of the world it is because thought is always situated in the end, it is in every instant an experience of reality and not of the possibility of the end. The war we fear is ever ongoing and never over, just as the bomb once thrown in Hiroshima and Nagasaki never stopped being thrown. Only starting from this awareness, the end of humanity, the atomic war, the climatic catastrophes cease to be ghosts that terrify and paralyse a reason incapace of dealing with them and appear instead for what they are: political phenomena already always current in their contingency and in their absurdity, that just for this reason we no longer have to fear as fatalities without alternatives, but which we can face from time to time according to the concrete instances in which they arise and the forces we have at our disposal to counter them or escape them. This is what we have learned in the past two years and, in the face of the powerfuls who are increasingly unable to govern the emergency that they themselves have produced, we intend to treasure it.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 4, 2022
In 1958, Karl Jaspers publishes a book under the title The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man in which he intends to radically question — as the subtitle reads — The political consciousness in our time. The atomic bomb — he begins in the introduction — has produced an absolutely new situation in the history of humanity, placing it in front to the inescapable alternative: “either all mankind will physically perish or there will be a change in the moral-political condition of man”. If in the past, as happened in the early Christian communities, men made up “unreal representations” of an end of the world, today, for the first time in its history, humanity has the “real possibility” of annihilating itself and any life on earth. This possibility, though mankind does not seem to fully realise it, can only mark a new beginning for political awareness and imply “a turning point in the whole of human history”.
Almost seventy years later, the “real possibility” of a self-destruction of humanity, that appeared to shake the conscience of the philosopher and involve his readers immediately (the book was widely discussed) seems to have become an obvious fact, which newspapers and politicians evoke every day as an absolutely normal eventuality. By dint of talking about emergency — in which, as we know, the exception becomes the rule — the event that Jaspers regarded as unprecedented presents itself as an altogether banal occurrence about which the experts must evaluate the opportunity and imminence. Since the bomb has ceased to be a decisive “possibility” for the history of humanity and instead concerns us closely as a “casualty” among others that define a war situation, it will be good then tp reconsider the question from the beginning, which perhaps was not appreciated in its most proper terms.
Thirteen years later, in an essay significantly titled The Apocalypse Is Disappointing, Maurice Blanchot got back to wondering about the problem of the end of humanity. And he did so by subjecting Jaspers’s theses to a discreet bur effective criticism. If the theme of the book was the need for a sea change, it is surprising that “in regard to Jaspers, in the very book that should be the consciousness, the summing up of the change and its commentary, nothing has changed — neither in the language, nor in the thinking, nor in the political formulations that are maintained and even drawn more tightly around the biases of a lifetime, some of them very noble, others very narrow-minded... Why does a question so serious — since it holds the future of humanity in its sway — a question such that to answer it would suppose a radically new thinking, why does it not renew the language that conveys it, and why does it only give rise to remarks that are either biased and, in any case, partial when they are of a political order, or moving and urgent when they are of a spiritual order, but identical to those that we have heard in vain for two thousand years?”. The objection is certainly relevant, because not only does Jaspers’s book present itself as an extensive academic monograph aimed at examining the problem in all its aspects, but what the author intends to oppose to the destruction is the cliché of “an universal peace without atomic bombs, with a new life economically founded on nuclear energy”. No less peculiar is that the atomic bomb is equated, as an equally deadly danger, to the totalitarian domination of Bolshevism, with which it is impossible to come to terms.
The fact is, Blanchot seems to suggest, that such an apocalyptic perspective is necessarily disappointing, because it presents as a power in the hands of humanity something that, in truth, is not such. It is, in fact, “a power that is not in our power, that only points to a possibility without mastery, a probability — which is, let us say, probable-improbable — that would be our power, a power in us and power over us, only if we dominated it with certainty. But for the moment we are just as incapable of mastering it as we are of wanting it, and for an obvious reason: we are not in control of ourselves because this humanity, capable of being totally destroyed, does not yet exist as a whole”. On the one hand a power that cannot be, and on the other an existence — a human community — “that can be wiped out but not affirmed, or that could be affirmed, in some sense, only after its disappearance and by the void, impossible to grasp, of this disappearance; consequently something that cannot even be destroyed, because it does not exist” (p. 124).
If, as it seems undeniable, the destruction of humanity is not a possibility that humanity consciously disposes of, but it remains entrusted to the contingency of mainly random decisions and evaluations by this or that head of state, Jaspers’s argumentation is then destroyed from the foundations, because men who do not actually have the ability to destroy themselves cannot even become aware of this possibility to transform their consciousness morally and politically. Jaspers appears here to be repeating the same mistake that Husserl made when, at a 1935 conference on “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man”, although identifying the cause of the crisis in the “deviations of rationalism”, has nevertheless entrusted to an undefined European “reason” the task of guiding humanity through its infinite progress towards maturity. The alternative here already clearly formulated between “the ruin of a Europe alienated from its rational sense of life” and a “rebirth of Europe” by virtue of “a heroism of reason”, betrays the unconfessable awareness that where there is a need for a “heroism” there is no longer any place for that “rational sense of life” (by which European humanity should distinguish itself “from the wild Papuan”, at least as far as he differs from a beast).
What a right-thinking reason does not have the courage to accept is that the end of European humanity or of humanity itself, delivered to anodyne and vain aspirations, which leave intact the principle that is responsible for it, ends up overturning, as Blanchot guessed, in “a simple fact about which there is nothing to say, except that it is insignificance itself — something that deserves neither exaltation nor despair nor even attention”. No historical event — neither atomic war (or, for Husserl, the First World War), nor the extermination of the Jews nor certainly the pandemic — can be hypostatized in an epochal event, if one does not want it to become an incomprehensible and vacuous idolum historiae, which one can no longer think or face.
Therefore, Jaspers’s argumentation must be dropped without any hesitation, as it pays for the inability of Western reason to think about the problem of an end that it itself produced, but which is in no way capable of mastering. Faced with the reality of its own end, it tries to gain time, transforming this reality into a possibility which refers to a future realisation, to an atomic war that reason can still avert. It would have been perhaps more coherent to suppose that a humanity that produced the bomb is already spiritually dead and that we must begin to think of the awareness of reality and not of the possibility of this death. If thought cannot reasonably pose the problem of the end of the world it is because thought is always situated in the end, it is in every instant an experience of reality and not of the possibility of the end. The war we fear is ever ongoing and never over, just as the bomb once thrown in Hiroshima and Nagasaki never stopped being thrown. Only starting from this awareness, the end of humanity, the atomic war, the climatic catastrophes cease to be ghosts that terrify and paralyse a reason incapace of dealing with them and appear instead for what they are: political phenomena already always current in their contingency and in their absurdity, that just for this reason we no longer have to fear as fatalities without alternatives, but which we can face from time to time according to the concrete instances in which they arise and the forces we have at our disposal to counter them or escape them. This is what we have learned in the past two years and, in the face of the powerfuls who are increasingly unable to govern the emergency that they themselves have produced, we intend to treasure it.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Salvador Dalí, Leda Atomica, 1949. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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