Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958) says, the common world is ‘what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die’.

The key striking note Hannah Arendt provides us with reaches its zenith with the most wonderful definition of ‘common’, never been said more beautifully complete nor left with any other room for the slightest refutation possible. What we have with those who live with us, those who were here before and with those who will come after us is what it is to be in common – in a common world. This, Hanna Arendt calls ‘common’. The common world establishes the biological immortality of our species. There is individual mortality yet the common world brings about the existence of a biological immortality. Interesting to note is - death is not a part of the common world – when one dies ‘the common world is left behind’. Montaigne says ‘death is always outside life’. Hannah Arendt says the common world ‘survives the death of every individual’. However, without the essence of the concept of death or knowledge of individual immortality and distancing of common world from death, one would not know what the very idea of living in a common world means.

Further, to live in the public realm or common world is to be able to transcend – ‘transcend our life-span into past and future alike’. Jonathan Schell author of ‘The Fate of the Earth’ subscribes to Hannah Arendt’s explanation that to live in the common world is integration of the past for today’s fulfillment in relation to the promise of future growth. This ‘common world’ for Schell is the assurance of a future. Everything one does in life, through happiness or tears – the life in time before death is continuously being carried out with one constant driving force embedded deep within the back of one’s mind – the glorious promise of a future, for which life would otherwise possess no meaning. It is this threat to the future promise of the common world Schell greatly fears and is concerned with in The Fate of the Earth. Death of a future entails the ‘possible cancellation of people who do not yet exist’. A startling question faces us today – Can we lose what we do not even have? Schell tells us in his essay that the nuclear peril is one of the most dangerous possibilities that could easily fit into the answer one would most likely not appreciate from such a question. He says ‘nuclear peril threatens life…at the level of everything that individuals hold in common’. The piercing truth of raw reality and horror hits one like no other than the results of what a nuclear holocaust could bring about. It is extinction – that Schell refers to as ‘the more radical nothingness; compared to death. He leaves us with a bell ringing in our ears that ‘Death is only death; Extinction is the death of death’.

The nuclear peril is a crisis of life in the common world that Schell says ‘assails everything that people hold in common’. The shared human community of a common world that Hannah Arendt extends from the Greek term ‘polis’ is one not only indebted to communication through language but association with ‘others’ of past tradition. It is the wisdom of the past that the present uses and makes the present what it is because of the promise of a future. It is by nature that the human world lives by such an order but which can also be disrupted by threats of ‘radical evil’, another term coined by Hannah Arendt that borders on thoughtlessness. She coins this term in a book she wrote titled Eichmann in Jerusalem (A Report on the banality of Evil 1963). It is a disturbing study of character arrived at during the trial of Adolf Eichmann against his insufferable crimes against the Jews. ‘Thoughtlessness’ is a phenomenon that cannot be explained for there can never be a rational explanation to such ‘radical evil’ since it does not even have a base of thought in the first place. And it is in this ugly baselessness of radical evil that the common world faces a threat of everyday - a threat which according to Schell is the most frightening one looming above our heads today – the nuclear holocaust, the bearer of death and extinction.

Schell in The Fate of the Earth believes death to be an inevitable ‘nothingness’. Having established this concept based on Epicurus’ philosophy of death, Schell counters a problem faced by many in the ‘common world’ – ‘the denial of death’. According to Schell, the threat of death although it lies outside the boundaries of the common world has to be faced head on. This is because death is the ultimate ‘other’. One becomes a separate self or bounded self. And where there’s ‘self’ there’s ‘other’ and where there’s ‘other’ there’s ‘conflict’. Where there’s no ‘other’ there’s ‘peace’. Hannah Arendt herself tells us ‘A common world can survive the coming and going of the generations only to the extent that it appears in public’. Schell says the world is made a common one by ‘publicity’- a term Arendt uses and it ensures that ‘everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody’. This stresses the necessity of a communion and fellowship or knocking down boundaries of the self and living in the public realm. However, of more significance is the felt need that ‘everybody sees and hears from a different position’ (The Human Condition). Being in ‘common nature’ is not to see sameness but ‘see sameness in utter diversity’. Further, Arendt says that the conditions of a common world should see that ‘everybody is always concerned with the same object’, notwithstanding the differences of position and variety of perspectives. Because, Hannah Arendt says ‘If the sameness of object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of man…can prevent the destruction of the common world’(The Human Condition). Keeping that in mind when we move onto Schell’s stream of purpose in The Fate of the Earth one notices he takes up a pro-Montaigne position which he believes should be everyone’s response to the philosophy of death in the common world. Of utmost importance to be discerned by one and all is to ‘learn how to die’. Schell brings to us the idea of Montaigne in order to stress the importance of facing death as a ‘part of life’ – in fact an even more integral essential part of life and viewed not just as a fearful or untouchable boundary outside the common world. However, Montaigne reveals another startling revelation that death affects the living people in the common world much more roughly than the dead. The general response would be the denial of such a confrontation since death is a ‘nothingness’. Yet Montaigne says ‘Death is to be feared less than nothing, if there is anything less than nothing’. The necessary transcendence of life in the common world would therefore mean acknowledging the conditioning that death very much plays in our life, then only can one truly understand the perils of what a nuclear holocaust or genocide and extinction implies upon the whole of the ‘human world’ or ‘common world’. Would this not then lead us to harbour even tiny seeds of hope that such unprecedented doom could be averted, and thus make way for a better ‘Fate of the Earth’?