Abstract

Today we live in a society in which hazards can no longer be regarded as mere side-effects of progress. How much more serious the problems we face today are is understood not only by seeing the magnitude of material or biological crises, but also by discerning what we may call our 'epistemic and moral inability' — a crisis in our ability to cope with uncertainty both in science and morality. The purpose of this paper is to trace the origin of this crisis, and to problematize it as a defect of the form of human self-understanding in contemporary scientific-technological culture with the help of Hannah Arendt's reflection on human activities.