Reading the Human Condition with Prof. Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt Center Virtual Reading Group on
“The Human Condition”
“The Human Condition”
Prof. Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt Center Members, at all levels, are eligible to participate in the monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website (BlueJeans) by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
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The following is a transcript of my class notes in draft of the Virtual Reading Group on "The Human Condition" by Hannah Arendt (*). Each lesson is recorded and archived on Vimeo, with access allowed to members. I have been following the live lessons since session 10 and viewed the previous ones from the video recordings.
Each lesson is about 60 minutes duration, it consists of the lecture of Prof. Roger Berkowitz on "The Human Condition" chapters, mixed with questions & answers.
Many thanks to Prof. Berkowitz for letting me publish these personal notes. All omissions, mistakes or interpretations of his thought are under my sole responsibility.
Being myself committed on a research dedicated to Arendt's philosophy, this document of the first twelve reading lessons about this very specific and important book, is a testimony of a work in progress, nothing less, nothing more.
(*) The University of Chicago Press, 2nd Edition, 1998, with an introduction by Margaret Canovan
Each lesson is about 60 minutes duration, it consists of the lecture of Prof. Roger Berkowitz on "The Human Condition" chapters, mixed with questions & answers.
Many thanks to Prof. Berkowitz for letting me publish these personal notes. All omissions, mistakes or interpretations of his thought are under my sole responsibility.
Being myself committed on a research dedicated to Arendt's philosophy, this document of the first twelve reading lessons about this very specific and important book, is a testimony of a work in progress, nothing less, nothing more.
(*) The University of Chicago Press, 2nd Edition, 1998, with an introduction by Margaret Canovan
Christo Datso
Brussels, Sept. 21st, 2015
Brussels, Sept. 21st, 2015
Session 2, 5th Dec. 2014. Chapters 1-3................................................................
Session 3, 9th Jan. 2015. Chapters 4-6.................................................................
Session 4, 6th Feb. 2015. Chapters 7-9................................................................
Session 5, 6th Mar. 2015. Chapters 10-13............................................................
Session 6, 3rd Apr. 2015. Chapters 14-17.............................................................
Session 7, 25th Apr. 2015. Chapters 18-20..........................................................
Session 8, 15th May 2015. Chapters 21-23..........................................................
Session 9, 5th June 2015. Chapters 24-26............................................................
Session 10, 10th July 2015. Chapters 27-30.........................................................
Session 11, 31st July 2015. Chapters 31-34.........................................................
Session 12, 11th Sept. 2015. Chapters
35-37.......................................................
Session 1, 7th Nov. 2014. Prologue
Two themes: earthliness and earth
alienation.
Questions: science alienating the human
condition; the automation of work; the elevation of labor and life above action
and thinking.
“Thinking” becomes Arendt’s answer to the
changes in human condition over 25 centuries.
The launch of the Sputnik versus the split
of the atom is a controversial comparison.
Earth is the quintessence of what means to
be human. This is not about “human nature”.
Human condition is about humans who live in
a world of artifices. It is conditioned by that world. Humans make the world
through their work: they create buildings, languages, stories, and polities.
Animals live in the world.
Humans are artificial and connected to the
world through life, which is given to us through birth. This is the “nature”
both animal and human of the human condition. It goes back to Greece.
The earthliness is this life element. But there
are dreams of genetic engineering.
Ray Kurzweil Trans-humanism. It’s the same
desire that sends Sputnik into space, to fly away from earthliness, and changes
life. “The Singularity is Near” projects it into 2050-2060, one century after
“The Human Condition”.
But there are limits: life, earthliness.
Suddenly we rebel against nature, against the earthliness of human existence.
Why? Because we think all of this, is not good enough. This desire is the most
important drive of the 20th century.
Remaking the human condition is not a
scientific but a political question. If we don’t ask it, it will be answered
for us. Quoting Kurzweil: “those who don’t want to follow the trend will be
left down the road like pieces of museum”. We’ll become slaves to our machines.
This language of technology is beyond understanding.
On automation
The vast majority of people will become
economically superfluous. Will we keep them alive?
Rebellion against labor is old. What we do,
our labor, defines ourselves in the public space.
The loss of earthliness and the rise of
automation define the Modern Age.
Politics is about persuasion and agreement.
We repeat truths, (clichés), and don’t think about it.
Arendt’s book is an attempt to think about
what we are doing.
Q&A
On social technologies and bureaucracies
Statistics is dangerous. The idea of
statistics is a way to govern society for 80-90% of people, and the others are
outliers. People outside the norm are ignored. It makes also impossible to
create great actions, which people will notice. Bureaucracy is the rule of
nobody. Arendt thinks about social sciences from the perspective of science,
opposed to action.
Data driven system, common core of knowledge
Overcoming our limitations, it’s perfectly
compatible with what is means to be human.
Homo
ludens. We don’t believe anymore on meaningful
things. Art has lost the ability to move the majority of people.
Session 2, 5th Dec.
2014. Chapters 1-3
The three fundamental human activities,
labor, work, action, became central in being human. Compare to another “triad”:
nativity, thinking, and mortality.
Human condition (HC) is not same things as
human nature.
We can indeed live without working. We should
still be humans according to Nature. The activities emerged from the last 25
centuries of history.
Labor is associated with biology and life,
things that don’t last, consumer goods, it’s a cyclical phenomena. It is part
of our species; labor does not create a world.
Work creates objects that we share, which
connect us; it creates an artificial world that lasts. The highest work objects
are Art.
Action is the dignity of being human, it is about speaking and doing things in public, where your acts become noticed. They create
meaning and history. Action relates to the differences between us, that we
recognize and begin to talk, that we group ourselves into a common polity, a
city; action is politics.
Q: what about feelings in labor and work?
Need and happiness relate to labor through
consumption of goods.
The joy of doing something new in a way
that is surprising relates to action, the freedom of acting.
Being at home in a common world, could
relate to work.
Q: does it relate to Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs?
For Arendt, there is no hierarchy between
the activities of labor, work and action. They are all part of the human
condition. The actor needs the homo faber
in order to act. Action is in a way an elevation over work. Those distinctions
relate intrinsically one with another; they are more philosophical than
practical concepts. Arendt’s specialists have long argued about them.
Q: is the work of Art the highest form of
work?
Yes, because these works of art are
beautiful and meaningful. The “Human Condition” is such an example, which
connects people who read it and discuss about Arendt.
Performing arts and theatre.
Poetry has the ability to last for infinite
duration.
Aristotle’s bios politikos relates to Augustine’s Vita activa. But Augustine opposes it to the Vita contemplativa; he gives the Vita activa a negative sense. Arendt uses the concept in a
different way; she gives some explanation from history.
After Socrates, philosophy and politics
start to separate. The question “What is Man?” can only be answered by God (or
the Creator). The question “Who are Men?” is something we can address. It is
not about Nature (the “what”). The fear driving Arendt is the loss of actions
and work, and the human condition being reduced to labor (and consumption), through
science and automation.
Eternity versus Immortality
Vita Contemplativa is fundamentally
different from Immortality. Gods are immortal, humans are mortal, but can build
a world which is eternal through Arts or Politics, and remember people’s names
which last forever.
Page 19: it is a very strong sentence.
From Socrates, the aim of philosophy is
switching from immortality to eternity; this way it re-enters the world,
philosophy is part of the worldliness of the world. Action is also shocking and
dangerous. The highest political virtue is courage. Philosophers engage in
Truth and not actions, and lack of courage. Philosophy moves from immortality
to eternity. Arendt’s fear is the retreat of action, which leads to loss of
immortality in profit of necessity, consumption, and happiness and to thinking
or greatness.
Q: what does she mean with the ‘best’ (the aristoi)?
To act in a public world, in a way which
matters to other people.
Q: why should we assume people should do
great things?
What does that mean if we lose this
ability?
Session 3, 9th Jan.
2015. Chapters 4-6
The public and the private
The social and the political
Definition of the social: group of people
who are together at home, as one.
The public realm is where we engage with
others through action and speech. The rise of the social in the 19th
century comes with the diminishing role, the loss, of the public and the
private.
The household and privacy
By nature we are un-equal. The great
achievement of politics is to make us equal. Equality, is to be freed from
tyranny, it is freedom. Going from private and households to the public and the
sacred, requires courage.
Political economy (oxymoron) is a big
problem because it opposes the One (home, oikos), and the plurality. In German,
it is ‘social economy’.
What are the political questions to Arendt?
What do we believe in: Freedom, equality, privacy? What do we share? Political
economy brings the confusion between the Polis and the household.
The rise of the social
In Antiquity, private is privative, being a
slave, in need, in privation of freedom. In modern times, privacy becomes
opposed to social and to conformism. Privacy emerges as a shelter, it
corresponds to the decline of the family, it puts the individual against the
social, and it carries the destruction of individual families and the emergence
of ONE family. This is no-man’s rule; it is the rule of the Mass bureaucracy
and technocrats, the most social form of government. To be a good citizen (or a
good mother, good father…), becomes a rational way to act, being in the norm.
Politics is more meaningful, it concerns
discussing our differences; but political economy is prescriptive: what we
should want, what we should do, what is rational, how we, as individuals,
should behave.
Adam Smith, the Physiocrats
What is economics? It is about rationality.
It is linked to the rise of statistics (pages 42-43), uniformity.
“Tea Party”, “Occupy Wall Street”, become
irregularities that do not matter.
Session 4, 6th Feb.
2015. Chapters 7-9
Earth is the quintessence of the human
condition, earthliness being the state of human life; which is not controlled
(birth, death…)
Public / private realms are absolutely
essentials to being human and are threatened by the rise of the social.
Public realm is the Common
Page 50: Appearance gives reality, is the
cornerstone of Arendt’s philosophy (not Truth or Being). The way we appear to
ourselves and to the others is the reality. She opposes Plato, Descartes, and
Kant, science where truth is not what is seeing. This is an essential
disagreement with the history of philosophy and the rise of science. What
appears can be artificial but what appears is what is real (art, stories).
Private is a place we need to hide from the
public, such as love, wisdom, goodness, which are not to be made to the public.
Page 52: world is different from Nature
Public is what appears as what humans make,
it’s the political world, the art
Page 53: metaphor of the table
The common things of the world gather us.
One of the dangers of the common world is mass society (everybody has his “own
table”, everyone being equal, thus excluding the others from his table, thus
not being related to the others). “Who are you to judge my work of art, my
subjectivity?”
We lose sight of truth and beautiful being
subject to (???)
We replace the world of lasting things with
our own things. Greatness has given way to the charm, the pleasure of little
things.
Page 54: wordlessness
Christian abstention from the world;
consumerism is another response to the loss of the public world, without the
idea of impermanence, or immortality, without transcendence.
Page 58: tyranny, by isolating individuals,
and the radical subjectivism of mass society and mass hysteria, when everybody
pursues his own dreams, ambitions etc, is the two ways to destroy the common
world.
Q: intersubjectivity
Plurality is the pre-supposition of
political action, with sameness (equality) as citizens; the world is built by
uniqueness and interactions.
Habermas / Arendt: all claims are opinions
and are “pushed” to the others through persuasion
Group interests rule the “social”, which is
being part of one family. Arendt likes “disagreement”.
The private realm, property
Four ideas of the private
Privative idea
The non-privative, wealth and property are
not the same. Property is the proper, own, it gives a kind of place in the
world, it gives location to the world, it has a kind of sacredness, and it
passes generations.
Problems of modern age of wealth has taken
the place of property, transformed it even into intangibles (money).
Property is a boundary line separating us
from others, separate each houses from one another, separate private and public
worlds.
Wealth destroy both property and privacy
(page 64)
Privacy is important to individuals and to
freedom.
Q: is social (and conformism) opposed to
the intimate?
The intimate rises with Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, it relates to developing our inner life, it is important but not the
same as privacy (as the private realm, where were hiding, where we are secured
with our property).
The intimate is a reaction against social
conformism. Private is the place where you can develop your own.
Modern times start with the expropriation
of peasants by capitalism.
Q: elimination of the private realm
Common wealth versus Welfare State
Loss of a hiding place
The Internet and connectivity all around is
a kind of “arendtien” creation of a public world, but it is in fact a
discriminatory public world (which is ok); the problem is, the Internet
replaces a true public world. It’s part of the rise of the social.
Session 5, 6th Mar.
2015. Chapters 10-13
On goodness
Labor was once the lowest value of the Vita
Activa. Now it is the highest because of life’s goal being happiness through
consumption, acquiring things, and wealth.
Adam Smith invisible hand promotes growth.
Marx moves from individuals to class and Society’s interest seen as growth,
dominance over Nature. Arendt reads Marx in the same way that Adam Smith read
the Physiocrats, which is in the perspective of the social. Labor is out of
necessity to do things. Marx introduces the process into the social. Arendt
reads him as a scientist who sees the world as a series of processes that can
ever be automated. Human volition and action are put out of the system. Growth
equals happiness because we accumulate more things.
Understand the focus between labor and
life, which are cyclical processes, growth and survival of the species; i.e.
for Eternity of the species, not for individuals.
Chapter 11 is about Marx
Chapters 13-14 are the central sections on
Labor with chapter 17
Labor’s life: it’s production and
consumption (Marx)
In the modern world of processes, the only
way to act is to introduce, insert, a new process into the world, a new theory,
a new idea. Scientists are the only people who can act today (like Marx, or
Einstein).
Individual actions become more like
exceptions and they are irrelevant (statistics and the law of large numbers).
Labor became, as production of life, has
the highest value in the modern age because of the rise of the processes. “It
is better to be kept alive than it is to live meaningful” (refugee camps). We
see a transformation of humans being not meaningful anymore, but simply as
humans, kept alive for the sake of its own end.
Comment: labor, work, action, are
constantly mixed.
Session 6, 3rd Apr.
2015. Chapters 14-17
Life: activity of the body
Work: activities of the brain and the hands
Labor: same as consumption, same as life
Labor is the production of things
responding to necessities, not specifically human way of life; it’s a
zoological process.
Labor and fertility
Contradiction in Marx between labor as an
external necessity and communist revolution, which will free up man from labor
To Arendt, Marx raises labor to the highest
activity, leading to happiness. “Good” life is not the same as “great” or
“moral” life.
Idea of natural processes (page 105)
Human life is not cyclical, it is linear,
and it has a beginning and an end. Processes are cyclical: money, power, they
demand always more. By rising above labor we turn the highest activities of
human life into animal fertility.
Chapter 15. Privacy of ‘dead’ property and
‘living’ wealth
Property is to own something in the world,
people are related to it; it becomes associated with who we are. It makes us
separating and connecting to the world.
Moving from a property owning regime to a
wealth owning regime has consequences, it creates a process of accumulation.
Property is inconsistent with un-ending
labor, and is replaced by wealth, as social men replace humans. Marx follows
Darwin’s idea of natural evolution. Processes follow the same idea of a
socialized emergence that is neither private nor public or political.
The animal
laborans (page 117)
What do you do with your free time?
Hobbies, all activities help ‘passing the
time’ by providing fun.
The common world is increasingly lost; we
live in worldliness.
Everyone becomes a laborer: presidents,
academics, we all keep the economy growing.
Chapter 16. The instruments of work, we
create tools, labor provides vitality and liveliness. We now have robots,
tools, and machines.
Page 121, men cannot be free if they do not
know that they are subject to necessity. There is a reduction in freedom where
machines provide everything we need. Freedom is meaningful as we get the
impulse to get out of necessity, otherwise is becomes meaningless.
Does the division of labor lead to loss of
freedom?
Rise of the service economy is one
illustration of the limits of tools to ease labor.
We actually need live assistance, people
who do certain tasks and not others. A world of such abundance is created where
we must discard some of it in order to keep pushing the economy. Endless
production, endless consumption. Objects must be designed now NOT to last (page
125).
Humans become tools to be used and
consumed, used objects, i.e. “human resources”.
Page 131. Marx’s utopia
Leisure as the shadow of antiquity
Page 133. Spare time of the animal laborans
is spent on consumption, on superfluities. Culture itself becomes a
sophisticated consumption elevating our status. Pursuing higher goals, such as
culture, religion, politics, is not another form of consumption activities.
Page 126. Playfulness becomes the source of
freedom.
Do we read Arendt as leisure or a serious
work?
A laboring society does not recognize it.
Session 7, 25th Apr.
2015. Chapters 18-20
Durability and lastingness characterizes
work, which populates the world.
Stories are the highest and most worldly
and durable forms of work. Poets and historians are the highest form of these
manifestations.
There are three conditions of being human,
being part of the Vita Activa
(inversion of the metaphysical view of the Vita
Contemplativa).
A second inversion has been the primacy of
labor over work and action. Animal
laborans takes preeminence with the modern age.
Chapter 18. Durability of the world
Objects (ob-jectum) are things we create which stand against us (gegen-stand). Example of the table: a
family object which that passes to the next generation; “something” about the
table writes upon us, its durability, its lastingness is part of us. Art works
are those objects we look at; we tell stories upon them, which have no usage.
The world is made of artificial objects; it makes us political by uniting us.
Labor, work, action, are flexible
categories. The end product of laboring is not important. The end product of
work is durable, it is created, it has a begin and an end, it is not a cyclical
process. It creates linearity.
Q: work and violence
You have to stabilize something. It comes
with a violation of a natural process: cut a tree, chop the wood, and make a
table.
Same reasoning on the motion of history by
violating its flows to isolate an event, a story (Paul Revere, Socrates)…
Human violence (violation) on the process
of nature is absolutely essential. Violence is a necessary corollary of work.
The victory of labor over work and action
destroys the humanly built common world.
Chapter 19. Reification
Res (thing) “to thingify”
The essence of the world is that is creates
things. There is a difference between the medieval way of creating things,
versus the modern practice where we create things according to our own laws,
and not in relation to God’s purpose.
Plato’s idea: we make things according to
schemes outside of our brain, called models, plans. More durable than the table
is the idea of the table, which creates a common background.
Chapter 20. Instrumentality and Animal laborans
Page 144: in labor there is a loss of
distinction between means and ends.
Rhythmicity of labor
Labor is a reduction of human work to the
body.
Page 157: tools of workmanship; the tool
remains the servant of my brain and of my hands, but machines reverse this
relationship. Adjustment to “not-machine like” tools and machine tools are not
the same.
1. The steam engine imitates a natural
process increasing the power of our hands (turn of a wheel).
2. Electricity is not ‘natural’; it is
created. Things will emerge that would have not emerged otherwise.
Manufacturing has become a continuous process.
3. Automation (p. 149) eliminates the whole
history of machines. Today we’re in the process to add Artificial Intelligence.
Q: on the automation of the death machine
(Eichmann), de-humanization of the world. We keep the processes running,
without thinking on what we are doing.
p. 151: machines rule and destroy world and
things.
Machine standards versus human standards
Q: superfluity of human beings (in Origins
of Totalitarianism)
Human labor becomes superfluous.
“Most of the world will become superfluous
because of automation and computer. People will be economically superfluous.
Altruism will become the key question of our time” (Larry Ellisson, CEO Oracle
Corp.)
In bureaucratic societies, responsibility
increases as you are further from doing the act (of killing for instance) –
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Session 8, 15th May
2015. Chapters 21-23
One of the most important chapters
Page 173. Work becomes important as a
transition to politics. “Acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber”.
Chapter 21. Instrumentality and homo faber
Work is made for some end, and the end
guides the process. The danger is that all ends become means to something else,
work loses its meaning and becomes part of a chain of utilities.
Distinction between meaning and utility
We lose the idea of “for the sake of”.
Meaning is reduced to utility. Kant and Plato’s efforts to discover some Ends
for themselves not reduced to a function. The means-end category’s aim is to
build a world. It is to provide meaning, not means.
The ultimate danger is that all things,
including humans, become means, resources.
Chapter 22. The exchange market
Instead of forums, we’ve markets to trade
Chapter 23. The source of artwork is in
thought not in feelings, because it is connected to man’ social existence, it’s
a matter of emanation rather than of creation. We need to transform feelings
and wants into thoughts.
Session 9, 5th June
2015. Chapters 24-26
Without speech and action, men are dead to
the world.
I become a man in this world insofar as
stories are told about me; and for this, I need to act and take the risk of
action.
Human plurality, the condition of politics,
and the action of action and speech
Plurality, not diversity
It has equality and distinction
Otherness (alteritas)
Uniqueness: what makes us unique which
comes from the private
Action and speech reveal this uniqueness to
the world. To act is to start something new. Miraculous is part of the modern
world (cfr. Essay on Freedom)
Something new will also emerge as long as
there are humans.
You have to act in a way that will create
attention that people will notice. Invisibility of the poor is the greatest
danger to politics.
Slavery is the ultimate human death (OT).
The only truly human right is the right to act and speak in public.
“The holes of oblivion do not exist”
Slavery was the great crime of America (On
Revolution, Little Rock)
We don’t control our actions
Wanting to be seen
Dram and theater are the political acts
Unpredictability of action
Anonymous
Forgiveness
The frailty of human affairs
It’s so rational not to get involved.
Session 10, 10th July
2015. Chapters 27-30
Action is one of the three faculties of the
Vita Activa.
Action means to take initiative, to be
free, starting something new, about appearance, all things that live want to
appear to the world.
Two problems with action: boundless and
unpredictable (evil vs good)
The Greeks had a solution to the frailties
of action
Epic solution: Achilles dies early, whose
story is controlled by Homer
Philosophical solution: subordinate those
frailties to legislation (the philosopher-king: “here is the Truth, here’s how
to act”)
The development of the polis, the city
state (plainen: movement of circular
rings, politics is gathering a group of people around a center)
The Polis brings a solution because it
allows to make you immortal (memory) and to get fame (not to be forgotten).
Chapter 28. Power and the space of
appearance
Power is a potential, it cannot be
preserved, it appears; then disappears.
Political power is gathering people around
a circle, without that the politic is illegitimate and leads to revolution and
tyranny.
We need to create a political system that
creates power and keeps it alive. Today we distrust power (it corrupts). The US
innovation was the federalist and decentralized system of government, with
multiple power sources allowed to coexist under its Constitution.
The space of appearance is the Polis where
mean can act and be remembered, and their actions seen.
Page 205. On Pericles oration
Tyranny is not action because it erases the
public sphere
Tocqueville: in a tyranny, people’s minds
are free but their bodies are enslaved; while in a democracy, it is the
opposite through conformity.
Tyranny, by destroying power destroys
itself. The space of appearances lasts as longs as people gather on it.
Page 203. The rule of the mob
Nietzsche’s Will to Power (power wants more
power)
Chapter 29. Homo Faber and the space of
appearance
Two disagreements over the view of actions
to be remembered
1. Homo Faber needs a public space, a space
of appearance. In work, only the work appears on the public space, not the
actor who retreats. It leads to the commercial society according to Marx, to
self-alienation, the same alienation, which occurs with the idolization of the
genius.
2. Labor, Factory, consumer society is the
reign of the Masses, the opposite of public space where men appear individual,
unique, free. Men as men (men qua men), not men as objects, neither as work of
art.
Q: Kafka, classic work of Art, doesn’t do
justice to the artist
Was Arendt an actor?
She is an artist, and homo faber; she is also a thinker.
Thinking is not part of the Vita Activa. A
thinker can become an actor only in time of catastrophe.
Chapter 30. The labor movement
Trade-unionist movement
Political labor movement (Workers councils,
anarchist movement, radical education movement)
Page 219. Injustices made to the labor
movement.
Session 11, 31st July
2015. Chapters 31-34
Action is at the very center of what HA
means by being free.
Freedom as free will, sovereignty, is not
the same concept as used by Arendt: she means freedom to act, and actions are
unpredictable, and because of that freedom means giving up sovereignty; there
is danger in action.
The calamities of action, the
irreversibility of action; it’s about the strong sense of democracy, trying to
convince people. Plato and Aristotle say action is dangerous, it leads to
political chaos/
Plato: “We must limit action”: limit the
rule of the many who don’t know, by the few of those who know. Ruling is
dominated by knowledge, cognition.
Jürgen Habermas sits in this tradition;
same rise of technology, bureaucracy, and experts. We observe the substitution
of action by politics in making, electing a ruler who tells us what to do.
Politics is reduced as a means to some ends: safety, security, welfare etc… It
degrades into means for ends, and who is to decide about the means? All means
are possible.
Page 229, substitution of means to ends.
Q. The American Idea
Local government, town meetings, mobilizing
citizens into the public space
Multiplication of powers makes you more
protected from tyranny. This is not the same as in Montesquieu’s checks and
balances. We turn now to the federal government to tell us the truth or the
single definition of civil rights.
Should local governments have the rights to
govern, as they like?
Q. The role of utopia in the arendtien
sense of politics
Example: the Hungarian councils during the
revolution of 1956
Q. Jim Crowe laws and the federal
government
Arendt disagreed with the forced
desegregation of schools (Little Rock case). She agreed to remove a political
injustice, but in order to let the society choose itself the way to implement,
taking certainly more time to adjust; otherwise, good intentions become similar
to tyranny.
Q. Calculus?
There are advantages to live under the rule
of a benevolent tyrant; but it’s a dangerous road.
We must resist the drive to making, to
craftsmanship, and fabricating, instead of acting in the name of Justice or
other good ends.
Ch. 32, it’s a difficult chapter
Moving from politics to natural science
Act into nature by engineering it
Stoicism
Epicureanism
Ch. 33, the power the forgive and to make
promises
Vengeance is one response to violence, when
harm is made upon us, but it keeps running into a cycle of violence.
Page 239, Luke gospel: we don’t know the
consequences of our acts, good or bad. H.A. does not say to forgive to
criminals; she speaks about reconciliation and forgiveness, by releasing
something.
Q. Natural versus Political world
Metaphor of the sea and forgetfulness
Session 12, 11th
September 2015. Chapters 35-37
Is there a danger to the human condition?
As something which is given that could be lost in our time?
Arendt is convinced we are subject to a
transformation of the human condition. How do we understand it?
The relationship between Vita Activa and
Vita Contemplativa has changed over the centuries. Now there is an inversion in
the Vita Activa between the bios
politikos, the homo faber, and
the animal laborans. The modern world
is more about labor and life than work or action.
We live in the “modern world”, not the same
thing as the “modern age” (p.6, in the Prologue).
Ch. 35 is about World Alienation, how does
it lead to it from the modern age, while ch. 36-40 can be regrouped under
“Earth Alienation”.
Three great events changed the world.
Space is conquered and the world becomes
smaller. There is a paradox with exploration, discovery and mapping of the
world, which enlarges it and makes it smaller at the same time (p. 251). We
live in a kind of abstract, alienating world.
Reformation, the expropriation of peasants
from their land and the rise of capitalism is the second of these events.
The age of world exploration on the one
hand, and the Reformation/rise of capitalism on the other hand, drive the same
end result: the flight from world into
the Self. This is what Arendt calls “world alienation”.
Question (Christo): HA seems to be inspired
by Hegel and an interpretation of the philosophy of history in this chapter,
can you comment?
(Additional question sent with the messaging tool: Roger, about the orientation of Arendt's thought in relation
to Heidegger's “Frage
nach dem Technik“. Would you say that Arendt elaborates the question of Action being subsumed by Labor (the victory of the animal
laborans) is reminiscent of Heidegger's framework, where history of the
metaphysics is interpreted as a retreat or fall from Being? Christo)
Roger: Hegel’s purpose is understanding and
reconciliation with the world as it is, while for Arendt it is merely
understanding and resistance to the world, which comes as the main reading of
history. She uses Heidegger’s deconstruction of the Being (Sein) in the
philosophical tradition, to give rise to her concept of freedom as nativity.
Q2 (Maurizio): decline of the European
nation-state system; p. 254 citing Marx thought.
Politics for Arendt is about setting limits, boundaries, which comes as a
contrast to boundless, limitless expansions of imperialism, giving rise to OT
In short, world alienation is the flight to
the Self, and the creation of “refugees” as a new kind of a-political men
(without rights).
Ch. 36 – this is the most important chapter
of the whole book. The second flight: from Earth to the Universe, starting with
Galileo and the invention of the telescope (p. 265); the scientific revolution
against which both the discovery of the globe and the expropriation of wealth
are of minor significance.
The way we see the world with our eyes and
through scientific instruments, becomes doubtful – c/o Descartes, who comes
after Galileo.
The move from a geometric to an algebraic
view of mathematics (Leibniz, nothing is without reason; reality depends upon
rationality. Reality exists as long as it can be proven (cfr Roger Berkowitz’
own book “The Gift of Science”, on rational ideas of justice). Natural science
transforms into Universal science.
Q3 (John): Popper’s falsifiability
principle
Science is driven by a desire of certainty
in knowledge, to reduce terrestrial data to hypothesis that can be refutable;
computer models using data replace scientific understanding to the point from
which we can lever the Earth.
Earth alienation, is looking at it as an
object, the idea that people can eventually create a new world (cfr, the
epigraph of Kafka).
Ch 37 Universal vs nature science
We devalue ourselves, and by analogy we
devalue the Earth (p. 268: destroying Nature, not only by dropping an A-Bomb,
but also by creating a purely artificial environment -- cfr., “Conquest of
Space” essay). “Natural” is what is outside of humanly designed processes.
All sciences, physical and social, pursue
the same objective of fabricating a purely man-made world, by imitation of
“God’s processes”.
Q4 (Harold) it is the same thing as
per Mars exploration movement (Elon Musk) or the Singularity (Ray Kurzweil),
ideas of terraforming.
Universal science is about transcending the
limits of natural science.
(to be continued....)
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