Key Arguments

• “technology demonstrates the ‘truth’ of modern science’s most abstract concepts,” but in fact “demonstrates no more than that man can always apply the results of his mind.”
• Arendt formulates a vicious circle: “scientists formulate their hypotheses to arrange their experiments and then use these experiments to verify their hypotheses,” dealing with “a hypothetical nature.”
• Consequently, “the world of the experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality,” which “puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind.”

Source Quotes

But the mathematization of physics, by which the absolute renunciation of the senses for the purpose of knowing was carried through, had in its last stages the unexpected and yet plausible consequence that every question man puts to nature is answered in terms of mathematical patterns to which no model can ever be adequate, since one would have to be shaped after our sense experiences. At this point, the connection between thought and sense experience, inherent in the human condition, seems to take its revenge: while technology demonstrates the “truth” of modern science’s most abstract concepts, it demonstrates no more than that man can always apply the results of his mind, that no matter which system he uses for the explanation of natural phenomena he will always be able to adopt it as a guiding principle for making and acting. This possibility was latent even in the beginnings of modern mathematics, when it turned out that numerical truths can be fully translated into spatial relationships.

This possibility was latent even in the beginnings of modern mathematics, when it turned out that numerical truths can be fully translated into spatial relationships. If, therefore, present-day science in its perplexity points to technical achievements to “prove” that we deal with an “authentic order” given in nature, it seems it has fallen into a vicious circle, which can be formulated as follows: scientists formulate their hypotheses to arrange their experiments and then use these experiments to verify their hypotheses; during this whole enterprise, they obviously deal with a hypothetical nature. In other words, the world of the experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality, and this, while it may increase man’s power of making and acting, even of creating a world, far beyond what any previous age dared to imagine in dream and phantasy, unfortunately puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he himself created.

If, therefore, present-day science in its perplexity points to technical achievements to “prove” that we deal with an “authentic order” given in nature, it seems it has fallen into a vicious circle, which can be formulated as follows: scientists formulate their hypotheses to arrange their experiments and then use these experiments to verify their hypotheses; during this whole enterprise, they obviously deal with a hypothetical nature. In other words, the world of the experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality, and this, while it may increase man’s power of making and acting, even of creating a world, far beyond what any previous age dared to imagine in dream and phantasy, unfortunately puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he himself created. The moment he wants what all ages before him were capable of achieving, that is, to experience the reality of what he himself is not, he will find that nature and the universe “escape him” and that a universe construed according to the behavior of nature in the experiment and in accordance with the very principles which man can translate technically into a working reality lacks all possible representation.

Key Concepts

• technology demonstrates the “truth” of modern science’s most abstract concepts, it demonstrates no more than that man can always apply the results of his mind
• it has fallen into a vicious circle, which can be formulated as follows: scientists formulate their hypotheses to arrange their experiments and then use these experiments to verify their hypotheses; during this whole enterprise, they obviously deal with a hypothetical nature.
• the world of the experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality
• puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind

Context

Section 40; Arendt critiques the evidential status of technological success and experimental method as self-confirming rather than reality-disclosing.