42 is not the answer
Work in progress – this was
written on 10th November 2015 as a memo to catch-up with some ideas
around my research. The Virtual Reading Group on Hannah Arendt led by Professor
Roger Berkowitz at Bard College (NY) defined the context of this writing.
As we are getting to the
end of reading The Human Condition,
timing is right for me to resume my thoughts. What you will find hereafter is a
memo introducing the questions I’m interested researching on Hannah Arendt and
the statement of my hypothesis, with a few words about myself.
I was born in 1958, son of
a Bulgarian political refugee and a Greek mother, the same year Arendt
published The Human Condition; and as
far as my childhood memories go, I remember a deep interest, or even passion I
had following the events of the Space Age, which culminated at the end of the
next decade with Apollo missions and Lunar landings. I remember also perplexing
questions I shared with boys of my age about the Cold War, and a somehow morbid
fascination for the atomic bomb. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey movie I saw at the turn of the seventies, made
a lasting impression to me, and possibly was the starting point for me turning
to metaphysical questions, in quite a natural way, feeling through this work of
art that Kubrick produced, the seeds of ταυμαζειν or philosophical interrogation, which I
started to follow more explicitly as a student when I entered at the University
of Brussels six years later. But life is unpredictable, and as it happened, I
dropped quickly from studies in philosophy, switched to psychology, got a
master degree with some specialization in neurosciences, and started a career
after a few years as a researcher in psychopharmacology, from which, again, I
switched after a while for more stable jobs on what was, and remains, an expanding
field: information technology. This is the domain I am still working on, more
specifically in the financial industry and banking for the last 16 years, and
where I suppose I will stay until I get retired. Then, philosophy came back to
the fore of my mind, somehow with life-turning events and a desire to think
more deeply, more seriously to the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life,
the Universe and Everything”, which is not “42” (as per Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy),
but “more philosophy”.
The first time I read
Hannah Arendt was during my final years at the University, with the translation
to French of the third part of The
Origins: The Totalitarian System -- then many years passed, and I started
reading The Human Condition when I
had decided to do “more philosophy”. The famous Prologue to that book fitted
almost perfectly with my mindset, I had found the set of questions I wanted to
think about: what happened to the world? What does the world of technology mean
to our condition? What is it telling about the way we organize our societies
and politics, leading perhaps to the manifestation of the “banality of evil”?
Somehow, I tried to put myself in the same footsteps as Arendt, and think to
the enigma of the “absence of thought”, the “banality of evil”, the roots of
the totalitarian system, all connected together in a puzzling way. I got the
feeling Arendt could not achieve addressing those questions. I had, and have
still the impression that she met a limit, an “aporia”, to use the
philosophical vocabulary, into her radical effort to think on the “origins of
Origins”, or that in a sense she failed to produce the convincing philosophical
evidence of “what turned wrong” with the human condition, going instead to the
end of her life to promote the tradition of the “Vita Contemplativa” as an
answer to the question of limits. Of course we do not know what she could have
achieved, had she lived a few years more; Judging,
the third part of the The Life of the
Mind would have probably lead to new avenues of thought linking the
esthetic and teleological judgments back with the concept of radical evil – we
will never know, we can only speculate, and this is maybe one of the reasons
why so many people get into arendtian studies. Maybe it is also one of my
reasons: try to understand better what she had in mind.
To be more specific, the
theme I am addressing in my starting research is “the question of technology”
in Arendt’s thought and work. I embarked this year onto a doctoral journey with
the support of my thesis promoter, Professor Antonino Mazzù at the University
of Brussels. To understand the context, Professor Mazzù leads the research
group on phenomenology and hermeneutics, at the department of Philosophy.
Arendt is one of the thinkers being studied within this research group,
alongside prominent figures of the phenomenological current: Husserl of course,
the most important one, Fink, Heidegger, Binswanger, Merleau-Ponty, and other
French philosophers like Michel Henry, Henry Maldiney or Marc Richir, who just
passed away recently – he had teach at the University of Brussels and inspired
many people, among them Mazzù. There is a strong tradition of phenomenology in
Belgium, starting with the Husserl archives being deposited at the University
of Leuven, and with people like Alphonse de Waelhens who was the first
translator in French of Heidegger’s Sein
und Zeit. Where does Arendt fit in this context? Obviously: almost
everywhere in her work, and probably the most profoundly in The Human Condition, where she is
developing her “existential analytics” of the “Dasein”, as we might say, with
the concept of the “Vita Activa”. And as we are now nearly achieving to study
this book through the lessons of the Virtual Reading Group, I can more
precisely frame my working hypothesis: that Arendt understood technology into
the framework that Heidegger, with Die
Frage nach der Teknik had defined, as the “power of will”, and that her
interpretation of the reversals between ‘Vita Contemplativa’ and ‘Vita Activa’
on the one hand, and within the ‘Vita Activa’ between action, the homo faber and the animal laborans, on the other hand, rely on the (almost) same
metaphysical ground as Heidegger pessimistic view, that the Question of Being
has been lost and replaced by the worldly domination of technology. For Arendt,
the sense of loss comes from the demise of action and politics per se, seen from the Greek perspective
of early philosophers. She sees the turning point being the Modern Age and the invention
of the telescope, followed by the rise of scientific thought everywhere
(statistics, calculation, processes…)
To wrap up, I have defined
my subject of research being “Vita Activa and Technology”, and what I am
looking for is of course to come to terms with in-depth understanding of the
“modern age” of Science, starting from Galileo and Descartes, until Marx,
through Arendt’s concepts. As a thinker profoundly influenced by German
phenomenology and the work of Heidegger in particular, I will obviously need to
clarify the influences coming from such texts at the Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl) and the Question of Technology (Heidegger) to shaping Arendt’s framework. A
philosopher I am also very much interested is Leibniz (Professor Berkowitz has
shown the relation between Leibniz’s concept of Law and Justice and its
applications as calculated outcomes of rules and ‘standards’
– algorithmic governance is a topic drawing much attention nowadays). I would
like maybe to dedicate some part of my research on Arendt reading Leibniz, or Arendt reading Marx,
in her own conceptualization of the Vita Activa, and the critique of the age of
science and technology. I don’t believe Arendt was pessimistic on science
although it seems she has a bias against it; neither she was optimistic; she
tried to think science and technology and their impacts. But as I said in the
beginning, I am not sure she succeeded producing an original or innovative
model where modern age would fit both with the outcomes of totalitarianism, and
with the world of liberal democracies or economies, as we know them. The
problem is that I cannot formulate what she possibly missed, because it is no
more than an intuition at the moment.
 |
| This year marks the 300th anniversary of Leibniz death |
To switch to more practical
queries, and assuming the subject is relevant and makes sense, my most urgent
need is to find out whether or not Arendt wrote down something not published
yet in relation to science and technology, or the philosophers of the modern
age. It is well-known she worked a lot on Marx, and the New School has
published some material in 2002 and 2007, as well as Jerome Kohn did in Promises of Politics (2005), but there
are maybe additional sources that can be exploited. I browsed from the Internet
the list of topics archived at the Library of Congress, but at this point I’m
stuck because I don’t know what could be uncovered doing the research onsite,
at the New School or at the Library of Congress itself, versus working from the
Internet exclusively. I am just throwing hereafter some items identified from
the Catalog, but again, I have no experience working with Arendt’s archives. I
contacted also Professor Jerome Kohn about this query and he advised me to go
directly to the Library of Congress at Washington D.C. to search through Arendt’s
papers.
Subject File 1949-1975
Box 55
University of Columbia
Conference on Private
Rights and the Public Good
Conference on Technology
and the Ideal of Human Progress
Box 57
Courses
Cornell University
Machiavelli
to Marx, 1965
Box 58
University of California
History of Political
Theory, lectures 1955
Box 59
University of Chicago, Ill
Marx, Karl, seminar, 1966
Box 72
Cybernetics, lecture 1964
Box 74
The impact of Marx, lecture
notes, Rand School, 1952
Box 75
Karl Marx and the Tradition
of Western Political Thought, Christian Gauss Seminar, Princeton, 1953 (this
has been published in Social Research Journal 2002)
Box 82
Marx and Hegel (2 folders)
