| Soon after the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957, Hannah Arendt observed in The Human Condition that for the first time 'an earth-born object made by m a n . . . moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company', an event which she described as 'second in importance to no other, not even the splitting of the atom' (1989, p. 1). For Arendt, the significance of Sputnik was as much to do with the reaction it provoked as with the 'uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it', a response which she noted was not one of triumph, but of relief — relief, in the words of one American newspaper, that we might at last 'escape' from our 'imprisonment [on] the earth' (ibid. ). 'The banality of this statement', she writes, 'should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was'; for notwithstanding the Christian longing for other-worldly salvation, according to Arendt 'nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men's bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon' (ibid., p. 2). The broader significance of this drive to escape the earth is understood by Arendt in terms of a fundamental rearrangement of human vision. |
