to think what we are doing," she also makes clear that what she
has in mind is not just a general analysis of human activity, but
"a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage
point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears." What
experiences and fears?
II
The prologue opens with reflections on one of those events that
reveal the human capacity for making new beginnings: the
launch of the first space satellite in 1957, which Arendt describes
as an "event, second in importance to no other, not even to the
splitting of the atom." Like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956,
which also occurred while she was working on the book, this un-
expected event led her to rearrange her ideas, but was at the same
time a vindication of observations already made. For, noting that
this amazing demonstration of human power was greeted on all
sides not with pride or awe but rather as a sign that mankind
might escape from the earth, she comments that this "rebellion
against human existence as it has been given" had been under
way for some time. By escaping from the earth into the skies,
and through enterprises such as nuclear technology, human be-
ings are successfully challenging natural limits, posing political
questions made vastly more difficult by the inaccessibility of
modern science to public discussion.
Arendt's prologue moves from this theme to "another no less
threatening event" that seems at first sight strangely unconnec-
ted: the advent of automation. While liberating us from the bur-
den of hard labor, automation is causing unemployment in a "so-
ciety of laborers" where all occupations are conceived of as ways
of making a living. Over the course of the book, framing the
phenomenological analysis of human activities, a dialectical con-
trast between these two apparently unrelated topics is gradually
developed. On the one hand, the dawn of the space age demon-
strates that human beings literally transcend nature. As a result
of modern science's "alienation from the earth" the human ca-
pacity to start new things calls all natural limits into question,
[ * ]