In this chapter, Arendt explains the historical transformation in the hierarchy concerning the active life (vita activa)--which is exemplified in the ancient Greek tradition of the politically engaged citizen--and the theoretical/contemplative life--which is birthed in Socrates. Arendt argues that the medieval/world of late antiquity served to reverse the hierarchy, wherein the active life stood above the contemplative life. The active life (bios politikos), hinges on production, the making of something, which diverges from the contemplative life, which makes not attempt at the production of the material, which Arendt likens to a swipe at immortality. Since late antiquity, the contemplative life has overtaken the active life and become the motivator of action. Inherent in this chapter is the importance of the political human and the importance and possibility of action.
Chapter 2: The Public and the Private Realm
Arendt begins by tracing the evolution of public and private (idios) and (oikos) in Athenian and Socratic life. She contends that Athenian conceptions of public, private, and social have been misinscribed in Latin and Modernity. Society, as we understand it, is neither private nor public. Society is then a super-conglomerate family we call the nation.The household (oikos) is where man is mortal, beholden to the trappings of mortality.In the polis man becomes Man and can attain freedom. Conversely, modern politics is a superstructure of society. Whereas ancient Greek polis life created freedom and equality (not justice oriented equality) that presupposed an unequal household, modern political thought is built on the foundation of a society, a nation, as defined earlier. The purview of the Oikos has become a cause for common concern, which signals a shift from private life to public concern. Society has overtaken the political as the place of the public. Behavior, rather than action, is its operative output. Economics and statistics serve to measure society as a whole. Because statistics are aggregable, and since economics--in its classical form at least--requires the movement of a common "invisible hand," we can see that the social--through behavior and its predications--has become the mode of the public. Arendt argues that societies create societies of laborers, who replace the realm of the oikos in the public. Essentially, laboring becomes a public function for the good of society and the division of labor and automation are indicative of a once private function becoming public. Divisions of labor and specialization would have been impossible in the oikos. This is concerning because excellence requires a public display, not a social display. Excellence (arete or virtus) required the excellence of man, not mankind.
Public: (1) what can be seen in public and which creates the greatest amount of publicity, and (2) the common, man-made world we all share and doesn't include "our privately owned place in it." A public space depends on and must imagine a certain continuity; publics depend on the assumption that it will last into the future. The public, or the common space, is a place of plurality, not a place of commonly held beliefs or actions. The existence of privacy and the private world (in contrast to the public) depended on property. More than just the price of admission to the public life, where men became Man, private property gave one a place of one's own and, like its counterpart, increased humanity. This stands in contrast to wealth, which Arendt separates and delineates as different. Owning property was an assurance of meeting necessity. If someone could enter the public life, they could rest assured that their needs would be met. Wealth, then, was not the property, but the laborers who could meet the demands of necessity. To disregard the public life and to expand the way necessities were met, to expand wealth, was to make oneself a slave to necessity.
The public and private spheres, in modernity, have merged. The public serves the interests of the private, and the private interests are the only common concern. This erosion of the private and the outgrowth of the public into the social, forced a recoiling into the intimate (inner subjectivity of the individual), which was the original purview of the private.
Chapter 3: Labor
Labor is the pursuit of necessity. For the ancient Greeks, to labor was to be non-human. To be human was to be free of the necessities of existence, which are wrought through labor. Therefore, slaves weren't inhuman, they didn't lack the potentiality of humanness, but rather they were made nonhuman in their labor. It fettered them to a certain kind of existence. The modern conception of labor, under Marx, differs. Whereas labor secured life's necessities for the master of the oikos in ancient Greek life, the division of labor could produce surplus life. This diminishes the distinction between labor and work. The modern age has reversed the Greek relationship between the intellectual and manual worker. Now, when one must justify a life through its social function, the intellectual worker, whose product is far more suspect, becomes Adam Smith's menial servant, who sucks up productivity without providing any. Essentially, the contempt for labor in the ancient world has been overturned in modernity; labor stands above.
Work, as opposed to the natural metabolism of labor (i.e. the biological need to consumer and return materials to the cycle of life), seeks to "take matter out of nature's hands without giving it back to her in the swift course of the natural metabolism of the living body" (100).
In order to explain the new and expanding accumulation of wealth, Locke and Smith used natural metaphors that equate money=money. The only natural cycle that works this way, Arendt contends, is labor. It is a fertile life process.
The production of advanced tools, while they make life easier, can be dangerous because they cause humankind to lose sight of our slavishness to necessity. If we forget that life is bound in labor, we lose our drive that comes from a sense of futility. Tools are a product of work, and work ends with the production of a thing. Labor, however, is a never-ending process and condition of human life.
Arendt argues that we now treat the products of work as they are products of labor, things to be consumed and rapidly as food.
Our consumer society is really a society of laborers, Labor is defined as the opposite of play, so whatever isn't necessary for the life of the individual or society is termed playfulness. The exception might be the artist, whose WORK produces lasting artifacts that aren't disposable commodities like the labor of a consumer culture/society of laborers. However, since everything that isn't labor is play, the work of the artist is playfulness.
Automation, though it would appear to free man from labor, would only cause man to be an increased consumer, a subject that more rapidly carries out the consumption of labor's process. Therefore, we would be more slaved to labor than before. Marx thought that the power of labor could not be diminished so that if that power could be used on higher, more sophisticated, activities, time for man could be more beneficial. However, in a consumer society, the spare time that results from freeing of labor, causes an increase in consumption, and no matter how sophisticated that consumption becomes it is still the annihilation of a product.
Chapter Four: Work
The work of our hands produces durable objects that provide relief from nature, from whence they are derived and shall eventually return. Though impermanent, the objects provide a counter measure to man's subjectivity, that is they're objective midpoints between nature's indifferent interminable process and man's terminal futility.
It's not the consumability of the product that defines it as the end result of labor or work. Rather, it is the permanence of the product if it is not used/acted upon. Food vs. shoes. Labor products need to be replaced again and again if they are to remain in the world.
Work is the fabrication of material to meet the design of an immaterial model. The reification of an idea or an immaterial object does not destroy the immaterial object. The production of a table doesn't destroy the abstract tableness. Therefore, the production of something in the physical, in its impermanence, is the temporary manifestation of a permanent thing. (Plato's forms)
***Work has a predictable beginning and a predictable end. Labor, wrapped in the life-cycle, has neither a beginning nor an end. And action has a definite beginning, but no predictable end. This separates homo faber from the laboring animal and the man of action. The fabricator, the worker, can produce and destroy at will, subject only to himself. The laborer is tethered to life needs, and the man of action is tied to others.
Arendt spends some time pondering the relationship of tools, machines, and automation to the laboring human. Since man neither labors to live nor lives to labor, the purpose of the tool is subsumed by the labor process. The end purpose of labor is the same as the means.
A machine's telos is its proposed product, not its mitigation of the laboring life. The process of work is consequentialist, determined by the end product. The means come about in considering the end. However, as an object of use, the end must become the means to something else. The chair is an end product whose purpose serves, or is the means to, another end. Such utilitarianism erodes meaningfulness. If all things serve new and unending ends, then their meaningfulness can never be determined. Only meaning can be an end in itself, but in becoming and meeting its end, meaning becomes an object from which homo faber can utilize to plug back into the means-ends cycle. Only man as an end can end the cycle, but in becoming the end, man in his role of highest purpose and meaningfulness, degrades the value of the materials that were the means, thereby making the materials the means to man's end, whose value can only be measured as it meets the needs of man, not independent of themselves.
Things in utilitarianism only have value based on the purposes they serve. Plato saw utilitarianism as a dangerous philosophy> He rebukes Protagoras's belief that "man is the measure of all use things," because that elevates man the maker over man the speaker and doer or man the thinker.
Homo faber can produce and be involved in a public. The laborer is worldless, but the fabricator utilizes the market as a place to show the product of his private, isolated work. Homo faber must work independently. His is not one of teamwork or partnership, for this is political, working in concert and outside his realm of production. Homo faber meets to trade goods, but in an industrial manufacturing capital society, they no longer trade products, but human labor. Man then becomes a means and is alienated from his work. Man as a laborer (work) becomes valued as a producer, not a human. The focus is then on producing trade objects not use things. Only in a things potential to be traded does it have value. Value, then, is a public determination. Value has no objective reality, like things, deeds, or ideas; it is only determined relative to the members of society.
In contrast to the impermanence of work and labor products, whose value must be estimated in the marketplace on a contingent basis, art exists without utility, imperturbable to use. It's everlasting durability requires arbitrary valuations. Whereas homo faber and labor produce and fabricate from the natural, the artist creates from ideas and thought.
For the world, as a home for man, to be truly what it's meant to be, it must be a place for action, not just a utilitarian measurement of usefulness
Chapter 5: Action
Humans are both distinct and equal. We can understand each other (equal), but we need a system to convey ourselves to other humans (distinctness; if we didn't need this we would all be discernible to each other immediately, without the need for interpretation or inference). The paradox of plurality. Things exist in negation, but they are unique, containing qualities specific to themselves. Distinction and otherness are not synonymous. Humans are equal in their uniqueness.
Action and speech, therefore, are the defining characteristics of humanness. One can withhold producing things for consumption (labor) and refuse to add anything to the artifice, but one cannot be human without acting and speaking, which distinguish humanity.
Labor=necessity
Work=utility
Action and speech=to set something in motion, initiative.
Action and speech, though separate, act in conjunction to produce possibilities. The action could be recognizable on its own, but it needs words to qualify and explain its meaning and significance. Action discloses and reveals the agent. The production of possibility from speech and action require togetherness of humans, not a predisposed us-them dichotomy, where actions become predetermined means to ends. Action without a who, an agent, is meaningless.
Upon revealing the agent, we must scramble to identify the who and in doing so we attribute the who to the what, making comparisons about character and attributes that have as their referents other people with those qualities.
Action and speech are mostly concerned with the interests that exist between people. Those interests are diverse and subjective. The reality of such human relationships is a "Web." The subjectivities in this web, Arendt argues, do not emanate from a facade or a superstructure. Rather, men are unique, distinctive subjects.
It is through the web, which constitutes the reality of wherever men live together, that actions can be understood. Through subjectivities, the actions are at the disposal of the preexisting web, which means the actions must conform to the ruts and trenches in place. However, the web, as a medium, produces stories about the action, which can then take material shape. This is the reification of action.
Action, as opposed to fabrication, can never happen in isolation,
which deprives the ability to act.
There is no power in isolation.The actor acts into a web wherein actions become chain reactions and by which must also incur suffering, the other side of the action coin. Action is by nature boundless, and no framework can predict how each new generation will act within it. In their boundlessness, then, they are also unpredictable and can only be made sense of forensically. It's up to the storyteller to make sense of the action well after the fact.
The Greek polis was a place built to secure immortalization of action and speech. Arendt argues, however, that the public existed a priori and that action and speech create the theoretical polis, or public. The public, and the actions and speech that call it into being, form the basis of reality.
Power is vested in action and plurality. The only alternative to power is strength, violence against one another. Strength can destroy but never replace power. Power creates the conditions necessary for appearance, the criterion upon which a public exists. Power presumes the ability to act and speak and immortalize.
The exchange market can be likened to a public realm for homo faber, but it is not the same as a polis or true public realm because the people that attend it aren't interested in people, but products. The power that holds this place together is the power of exchange, a product of isolation.
The coming together of laborers, while it makes them act as one, doesn't create the same conditions for a public. Instead, the conglomeration of laborers creates sameness under a guise of equality.
Political action should not take on the utilitarian attributes of consequentialist reasoning. Like Plato's philosopher king, political philosophy concerns itself with making instead of acting, and the purview of making is teleologically oriented toward an end, which presupposes a justification of any means.
The freedom to act is paradoxical because once one acts he gives up the action to predetermined networks which ultimately disregard his free action and subdue it. Therefore, the only way to safeguard against such loss of freedom is to forego acting on the freedom.
Forgiveness breaks the cycle of action. In forgiveness we can move beyond the consequences of an action.
Chapter 6: The Vita Activa in the Modern Age
Arendt begins this chapter by explaining how Galileo's proof of previous theories was a watershed moment for science and philosophy. The result of such inventions, like the telescope, causes us to present reality as measurement derived by our tools. As such, our tools--created by man--supposedly present reality, but in fact they present only our subjectivities. Galileo showed that our senses can betray us and as a result we find triumph and despair in the same event. We now think of earth and reality from the perspective of a removed Archimedean point, but in reality we are still tethered to earth and the human condition. The supremacy of mathematics and its distance present reality as subdued to human mental forms.
The instruments of discovery caused great doubt in both science and philosophy. As such, certainty eroded and caused crises. If we could not trust our senses, then we could not be certain of a truth or reality. Since nothing was certain, then everything was doubtful. And though there might not be truth, men can be truthful. Though there might not be certainty, men could be reliable. So the measure of things is not man, but man's thought. In this way, doubt became the validation needed to prove existence. You cannot doubt that you doubt. Cogito ergo sum. In doubt, one is aware of their doubting, which proves that existence. My ability to be aware of my own uncertainty makes me.
The inability to know for sure created an underlying reliance on knowing for sure that what one produces exists, which heightened discovery and development. Inductive reasoning supplanted common sense and deductive logic as the way to know. To know anything then requires the objective language of science, itself a human construct. Truth is now the logical relationships evidenced by man-made symbols.
The work of man's hands, its development of tools, switched the hierarchical order in a search for truth. Truth was now the purview of action, not contemplation. Contemplation is separate from thinking, as thinking as the precursor to doing. Philosophy in the modern era turned away from the universal and instead focused itself inward and investigated the subjective experience of man. Science, meanwhile, build evermore elaborate tools for their investigation of captured nature. Philosophy turned to explain the spirit of the times or pursued epistemology.
Whereas pre-modern sciences experimented from nature as a product of a Being, modern science replaced the static nature with a state of becoming. Process and the "how" replaced why and what as the purview of science. However, the process is the end in and of itself. Homo faber is concerned with the product, but science is concerned with revealing the process. This represents a reversal of the means-end equation and the products of science are merely byproducts of the pursuit of knowledge.
Philosophy in the era of homo faber began fabricating political machines (e.g. Hobbes' Leviathan). In Plato's philosophy, contemplation and fabrication are closely aligned. The form of something produced, its shape in the mind's eye, represents an excellence that can't be reproduced. To contemplate then, the behold truth in the mind, could be achieved by homo faber. However, modern homo faber isn't interested in the product. Rather, science and homo faber focus on the process. Therefore, the imagined product or essence of a form (e.g. a table's tableness) no longer represented truth.
Philosophy resulting from modern science, via homo faber, fails. The moral calculus of utilitarianism, the great good for the greatest number, does not arrive at any tenable truth, but is rather a fabrication process with the end result, happiness, as its telos.
The success of Christianity in the ancient world hinged on immortality, a hope for man. However, this was originally the domain of political action. The Christian immortality elevated the mortal body (animal laborans) to the most heralded position. Though Christianity is in decline, its elevation of the laboring animal through immortality remains.
The Greek polis was a place built to secure immortalization of action and speech. Arendt argues, however, that the public existed a priori and that action and speech create the theoretical polis, or public. The public, and the actions and speech that call it into being, form the basis of reality.
Power is vested in action and plurality. The only alternative to power is strength, violence against one another. Strength can destroy but never replace power. Power creates the conditions necessary for appearance, the criterion upon which a public exists. Power presumes the ability to act and speak and immortalize.
The exchange market can be likened to a public realm for homo faber, but it is not the same as a polis or true public realm because the people that attend it aren't interested in people, but products. The power that holds this place together is the power of exchange, a product of isolation.
The coming together of laborers, while it makes them act as one, doesn't create the same conditions for a public. Instead, the conglomeration of laborers creates sameness under a guise of equality.
Political action should not take on the utilitarian attributes of consequentialist reasoning. Like Plato's philosopher king, political philosophy concerns itself with making instead of acting, and the purview of making is teleologically oriented toward an end, which presupposes a justification of any means.
The freedom to act is paradoxical because once one acts he gives up the action to predetermined networks which ultimately disregard his free action and subdue it. Therefore, the only way to safeguard against such loss of freedom is to forego acting on the freedom.
Forgiveness breaks the cycle of action. In forgiveness we can move beyond the consequences of an action.
Chapter 6: The Vita Activa in the Modern Age
Arendt begins this chapter by explaining how Galileo's proof of previous theories was a watershed moment for science and philosophy. The result of such inventions, like the telescope, causes us to present reality as measurement derived by our tools. As such, our tools--created by man--supposedly present reality, but in fact they present only our subjectivities. Galileo showed that our senses can betray us and as a result we find triumph and despair in the same event. We now think of earth and reality from the perspective of a removed Archimedean point, but in reality we are still tethered to earth and the human condition. The supremacy of mathematics and its distance present reality as subdued to human mental forms.
The instruments of discovery caused great doubt in both science and philosophy. As such, certainty eroded and caused crises. If we could not trust our senses, then we could not be certain of a truth or reality. Since nothing was certain, then everything was doubtful. And though there might not be truth, men can be truthful. Though there might not be certainty, men could be reliable. So the measure of things is not man, but man's thought. In this way, doubt became the validation needed to prove existence. You cannot doubt that you doubt. Cogito ergo sum. In doubt, one is aware of their doubting, which proves that existence. My ability to be aware of my own uncertainty makes me.
The inability to know for sure created an underlying reliance on knowing for sure that what one produces exists, which heightened discovery and development. Inductive reasoning supplanted common sense and deductive logic as the way to know. To know anything then requires the objective language of science, itself a human construct. Truth is now the logical relationships evidenced by man-made symbols.
The work of man's hands, its development of tools, switched the hierarchical order in a search for truth. Truth was now the purview of action, not contemplation. Contemplation is separate from thinking, as thinking as the precursor to doing. Philosophy in the modern era turned away from the universal and instead focused itself inward and investigated the subjective experience of man. Science, meanwhile, build evermore elaborate tools for their investigation of captured nature. Philosophy turned to explain the spirit of the times or pursued epistemology.
Whereas pre-modern sciences experimented from nature as a product of a Being, modern science replaced the static nature with a state of becoming. Process and the "how" replaced why and what as the purview of science. However, the process is the end in and of itself. Homo faber is concerned with the product, but science is concerned with revealing the process. This represents a reversal of the means-end equation and the products of science are merely byproducts of the pursuit of knowledge.
Philosophy in the era of homo faber began fabricating political machines (e.g. Hobbes' Leviathan). In Plato's philosophy, contemplation and fabrication are closely aligned. The form of something produced, its shape in the mind's eye, represents an excellence that can't be reproduced. To contemplate then, the behold truth in the mind, could be achieved by homo faber. However, modern homo faber isn't interested in the product. Rather, science and homo faber focus on the process. Therefore, the imagined product or essence of a form (e.g. a table's tableness) no longer represented truth.
Philosophy resulting from modern science, via homo faber, fails. The moral calculus of utilitarianism, the great good for the greatest number, does not arrive at any tenable truth, but is rather a fabrication process with the end result, happiness, as its telos.
The success of Christianity in the ancient world hinged on immortality, a hope for man. However, this was originally the domain of political action. The Christian immortality elevated the mortal body (animal laborans) to the most heralded position. Though Christianity is in decline, its elevation of the laboring animal through immortality remains.
The laboring animal now stands atop the triad of the human condition since the preservation of mankind as a species process must continue. As a result, the laboring society is now the job holder society. Each individual member should renounce his individuality for the benefit of the social species. The active life is now the purview of scientists who can act in concert. However, scientists are interested, not in the web of human relationships, but in universal, observable laws, cannot merge their action with meaningfulness, which requires narrative, historical formation.
***Class Notes***
Arendt:
- German philosopher trained under Heidegger, a phenomenologist (interest in Being)--What is a thing in its being, objectivity.
- What is in the object itself?
- What is essential to that person or thing?
- Heidegger, critic of tech and humanism
- He wanted to understand things on their own terms.
- He was associated with the Nazi party.
- Arendt was Heidegger's lover.
- Her relationship with Heidegger reflects the fact that she's a deep thinker who is able to hold oppositional ideas (dialectics) together at once.
- Arendt is interested in political theory (materialism).
- Her husband was a Marxist.
- She approaches public, politics, from a unique perspective, both Marxist and non-Marxist
- Her most permanent position is at The New School, a Dewey founded school for public intellectualism, known for bringing in German Jews during Nazism.
- 2-3 Questions that guide her career
- Why do people give up their ability to be autonomous critical thinker? Why do they acquiesce to group think?
- What does is mean to live an engaged political life? How does one use critical thinking and language to be a political citizen?
- She's very interested in direct democracy: individual human beings engaging with the world around them.
- At Eichmann trial she coins the term "banality of evil," which defines evil as not thinking, as towing the line, as being passive rather than active.
- Arendt's question: How can we merge the vita activa and vita contempletiva?
- After gaining American citizenship, she never wrote another word in German.
- Her popularity has waxed and waned. Now, she's in.
- Agency is central to Arendt's work.
- Burkean motion between motion and action
- motion: doing something but not being active, an outside acting force
- action: doing something under one's own volition
- Who is responsible for the action?
- labor is wage labor in the public sphere that produces surplus value
- Productive labor can be exploited and then made into profit
A
No comments:
Post a Comment