Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky: Acting into Nature versus Play and Experimentation: Arendt and Benjamin on the Relationship between Nature, History and Technique
Thursday | June 19, 2025 | 12:00-12:45
Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
In the 1950s, Arendt linked atomic physics and its technique to a change in the relationship between nature and history: humans were acting into nature in a way that they had previously only done in the realm of history. For Arendt, human actions are fundamentally transient, there effects unpredictable. When humans act into nature, they transfer this unpredictability from the realm of history to nature itself. The world is no longer the unchanging ground but becomes transitory itself. For Arendt, this reveals a centering of all worldly relationships on human action. Benjamin, on the other hand, sees in the emergence of the second technique, which he associated to the age of technological reproducibility, the possibility of overcoming a technique that has been centered on humans for centuries. His focus is not on human action but on play and experimentation. Following Arendt and Benjamin this presentation examines the relationality between nature, technique and the situatedness of humans in time.