Arendt is particularly concerned with understanding the human condition in the modern age. Beginning in the twentieth century there was a desire to escape the human condition; rockets were sent into space; automation allowed a laboring society to be free from labor; and the sciences began to adopt a mathematical language where human speech, that which defined the human existence in all its complexities, lost its power.[1] Yet those questions of the human existence, which had been pondered by philosophers and theologians for centuries, could not be answered through science alone; such questions were fundamentally political and could not be solved through experimentation or mathematical equations.[2]

Jonas, similar to Arendt, tried to understand the complex and dynamic new age in which he was living. He determined that as human action changed, the ethics that guided their behavior must also change.[3] Science has eroded the foundation upon which human normative values were built; the old religious values simply could not hold in a new age of supreme human, technological, and scientific capabilities. In particular, Jonas places great emphasis on the future and the role that our present decisions will play in the quality of future life for humankind.[4] As such, politics is inherently unfit to meet the demands of the future, as politicians are solely concerned with the present.

Activist scholarship thus grants the ability to understand this new and unknown age. Our old modes of thinking, those based on religious values and traditions, cannot hold in a world where humans can send man into space or create immortality or alter human behavior. Activist scholarship can give us the vocabulary to understand and explain this new age. In a world where nothing makes sense, activist scholarship grants humans the tools by which to create the language and capability to create a better world; one based on sound ethics that can be applicable to the modern age; one that actively protects future generations from the sins of the present.

In a world that desperately desires science to solve its problems, to give some objective solution to the woes of humankind, Sarewitz argues that the search for objectivity has only resulted in an excess of it.[5] The very nature of science and politics are so fundamentally different that they cannot be reconciled by the scientific method. Science, unable to provide the answers to our greatest and most contentious political debates, serves merely as a veil from which to hide our true values.[6] Thus, activist scholarship grants us the ability to use the science we so claim to value to actually fight for our values and morals. For Sarewitz, science should be a tool of politics, used to advance preferred goals.

Although I see the merit in activist scholarship, indeed I fundamentally believe that we can never fully separate our values from our scholarship, I also understand the concerns of activist scholarship. I worry that science will try to become the basis upon which we place our values. Science cannot give us sound values and morals on how to direct and live our lives. Just because humans may have the ability to provide vaccinations, does not necessarily mean that we will use them. In addition, activist scholarship seems to believe that scholarship must have some tangible ends that will affect the human experience here on earth. Scholarship, that which seeks to know for the sake of knowing, will be lost in the eternal struggle for meaningful, impactful work. While meaningful, impactful work is important, scholarship does not need to play this role, indeed there are many instances where scholarship should not play this role.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago University Press, 1958.

Jonas, Hans. “Technology and Responsibility: The New Task of Ethics.” Bell and Howell Information and Learning Company (2000).

Sarewitz, Daniel. “Science and Environmental Policy: An Excess of Qbjectivity.” In Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community, n.d.

[1] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago University Press, 1958), 2-4.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Hans Jonas, “Technology and Responsibility: The New Task of Ethics,” Bell and Howell Information and Learning Company (2000).

[4] Ibid., 51.

[5] Daniel Sarewitz, “Science and Environmental Policy: An Excess of Qbjectivity,” in Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community, n.d.

[6] Ibid., 91.