The Outdoor Condition

Reading Arendt on a Warming Planet

Bibliographic Data

ID10433865
AuthorsPatchen Markell (0009-0004-8846-6936, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume86
Issue4
Pages483-504
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Review of Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0034670524000226
OpenAlexW4396895773
LanguageEN
References cited26

Is Hannah Arendt's political thought relevant to the contemporary planetary situation? This article draws on The Human Condition and some of Arendt's ancient and modern sources to answer this question, using a phenomenological distinction between outdoors and indoors to make sense of three likely types of artificial adaptation to a warming planet. Arendt's account of the importance of the “body-bound senses” of an “earth-bound creature” need not result in the problematic fetishization of immediate rather than mediated knowledge, or of an “earthly nature” supposedly prior to and independent of the human artifice, but can draw attention to the narrowing of human beings’ “angle of receptivity” to a surprising and unpredictable reality. This perspective, however, also discloses the limits of Arendt's work in the face of ecological transformations that are simultaneously planetary in scale and highly unequal in their consequences

Astrobiology · Astronomy · Climate change · Global warming · Linguistics · Physics · Planet · Reading (process · Warming up · Geology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Medicine · Oceanography · Philosophy

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Open DOIOpen Access