Hauser is examining the prisoner's behavior and transformation of the prison on Robben Island as an example of parrhesia. He contends that parrhesia constitutes a rhetorical act that can create change from those in power. Though, he admits, Foucault isn't concerned with the truth, only the truth teller, he acknowledges that the truth-teller must know what constitutes the thing he is telling.
Truth, then, is verifiable and once perceived can never be abandoned by the parrhesiastes. Political prisoners, who are jailed for their speech, embody the truth-teller. They're there not as petty criminals, but as someone who refused to capitulate, refused to compromise the truth. He uses the Czech dissident Havel as an example. Havel, who felt compelled in his celebrity to represent people and the truth, recognized the limits of his truth telling--it was his opinion--and used plain speech to tell it, hallmarks of a Foucauldian parrhesiastes. For Hauser, parrhesia is absolutely rhetorical.
Prisons, like other totalized institutions of dominance, sever agency through systematized means, resulting in a loss of identity.
The institutionalized racism of apartheid serves as a habituated vice. Here Hauser looks back to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and virtues and vices as habituated responses to daily life. Character is the behavior elicited in a problematic situation. Ethos in hexis. "Although we tend to talk of vice in terms of a specific behavior, we should not forget that vices are constituted by the cluster of behaviors that reinforce how we think, experience, talk, and behave in habituated ways that serve a disordered end" (72). Apartheid was institutionalized racism via habituated vice.
The prisoners of Robben Island "were conditioned by the use of power through inflicting humilation that was intended to deny prisoners' access to a rhetorical place, an inventional location from which to argue back for their human rights" (74).
The prisoners, especially the POCs, gave up hope for prison reform, and therefore "mounted vernacular performances of counterrhetoric reframing their warders' acts of depersonalization" (75).
The prisoners organized and refused to engage in actions that made them complicit in their own dehumanization. In this way they chose the battles that best allowed them to signify the truth to power. Essentially, anything that resulted in their bullying they refused on reasoned ground.
The prisoners also utilized euonia, or goodwill, and hospitality as a way to engage with the guards and gangs on a human level, both creating a rhetorical appeal to reason and change and reinforcing their own humanity.
Hospitality, as its Latin roots point out, signifies an outreach to a hostile or enemy. As such, it's a neutralizing choice that both allows the other to sit at the table while exposing oneself as something opposite and committed to the opposite of the "enemy."
As the prisoners became more organized, they formed committees that acted as universities of resistance/parrhesia. They functioned educationally, recreationally, communicatively, politically, disciplinarily, etc. They became an organization, a corporeal parrhesiastes?
"The committees were sights of embodied solidarity and felt phelia. They were arenas of discipline and pathos on which the prisoners' survival depended. The committees also were a technology of sorts, a techne or art of translating political theory into praxis. They were a rhetorical technology. They used processes of persuasion in contexts of deliberation and adjudication. They instilled the specific ethos of parrhesia as a core political value. They also inculcated the virtue of accountability" (90).
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Kelly E. Happe--"Parrhesia, Biopolitics, and Occupy"
Happe investigates the parallels between Foucault's militant lifestyle and free speech (parrhesia) and the occupy movement, which Happe argues is a representation of militant life, using precarity (Precarity is a precarious existence, lacking
in predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare. The
social class defined by this condition has been termed the precariat). It is a lifestyle as radical speech.
Happe focuses on the criticisms surrounding the "process is the message" formation of OWS. It represented no coherent unifying identity or policy statement; likewise its movement was amorphous and democratized, horizontally organized, which is in tune with its appeals to power restructuring.
Happe seeks to write about OWS in way that resists the usual frameworks surrounding political speech, activism, etc. OWS, then, represents an opportunity to explore the limits of political speech and language in an era of neoliberalism.
OWS was able to occupy the embodied space (Zoccotti Park) of Wall Street, giving the virtual and global nature of capitalism a place that could be populated with speech, discussion, care, etc.
Happe uses the OWS early days, which were concerned mostly with doing in service of the occupation, like cooking, as a way to connect to Foucault's Parrhesiastes/Cynic ideal, a lifestyle that connects body and soul in a symbiotic relationship. The truth teller lives a certain kind of recognizable life that "opens up the possibilities for thinking beyond, or outside of the constraints of the present" (216).
The Cynics' mode of existence made room for "ethical parrhesia," the "suspension of the properly political in order to make way for ethical transformation of the self...the Cynics were engaging in practices for which the particular content of speech could not be known or anticipated in advance" (216). Cynical existence utilizes codified behaviors without cultural markers to allow "frank speech not dependent on conventions of intelligibility" (216).
Essentially, Happe argues that the OWS could be read beyond its usual critiques: lack of success (or a redefining of success) and practical failure. Instead, she sees the OWS movement as emblematic of Cynical ethical parrhesia that focuses on acts that "confront what must be lost." As a movement, it makes no ideological, utopian claim in demands because it imagines something that is yet to exist. As such, its actions confront anxieties about what would be lost.
Happe focuses on the criticisms surrounding the "process is the message" formation of OWS. It represented no coherent unifying identity or policy statement; likewise its movement was amorphous and democratized, horizontally organized, which is in tune with its appeals to power restructuring.
Happe seeks to write about OWS in way that resists the usual frameworks surrounding political speech, activism, etc. OWS, then, represents an opportunity to explore the limits of political speech and language in an era of neoliberalism.
OWS was able to occupy the embodied space (Zoccotti Park) of Wall Street, giving the virtual and global nature of capitalism a place that could be populated with speech, discussion, care, etc.
Happe uses the OWS early days, which were concerned mostly with doing in service of the occupation, like cooking, as a way to connect to Foucault's Parrhesiastes/Cynic ideal, a lifestyle that connects body and soul in a symbiotic relationship. The truth teller lives a certain kind of recognizable life that "opens up the possibilities for thinking beyond, or outside of the constraints of the present" (216).
The Cynics' mode of existence made room for "ethical parrhesia," the "suspension of the properly political in order to make way for ethical transformation of the self...the Cynics were engaging in practices for which the particular content of speech could not be known or anticipated in advance" (216). Cynical existence utilizes codified behaviors without cultural markers to allow "frank speech not dependent on conventions of intelligibility" (216).
Essentially, Happe argues that the OWS could be read beyond its usual critiques: lack of success (or a redefining of success) and practical failure. Instead, she sees the OWS movement as emblematic of Cynical ethical parrhesia that focuses on acts that "confront what must be lost." As a movement, it makes no ideological, utopian claim in demands because it imagines something that is yet to exist. As such, its actions confront anxieties about what would be lost.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Michel Foucault--Fearles Speech
parrhesia: speaking what's on your mind. The speaker uses NO rhetorical flourish in conveying what he believes to be true. The truth is presented to the audience plainly and the speaker presents him/herself as the holder of the opinion/truth as well as the opinion/truth itself.
Two meanings of parrhesia:
1. pejorative: meaningless talk or chatter, which could be found in mob-rule democracy. It's also listed in Christian literature as the kind of empty talk that keeps one from contemplating God.
2. postive: to say what one thinks. To simultaneously tell an opinion that is a truth. One knows it is the truth because one believes it. This epistemological model doesn't work with our Cartesian desire for evidence since we desire mental evidence beyond the feeling of something being true. Rather than doubting until evidence supports the feeling (Cartesian), parrhesia requires that the speaker have the moral qualities necessary to first know the truth and then tell the truth to an audience.
Since engaging in parrhesia requires an act of courage, a turning away from self-preservation in order to speak the truth because the truth the speaker utters is dangerous, the truth teller can be seen in his allegiance to the truth despite potential harm. The risk in telling the truth is not always a life-threatening risk. It could be telling the truth when it may hurt a friend's feelings.
Since parrhesia involves risk, a king or tyrant cannot use it because they risk nothing. A parrhesiastes prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than "a living being who is false to himself"
Parrhesia is a form of criticism, either toward another or oneself. It can, however, only come from below. Therefore when criticizing oneself, the parrhesiastes must be under the interlocutor. A teacher cannot use parrhesia with his students. Parrhesia flows uphill.
Parrhesiatic acts are performed out of a sense of duty. The parrhesiastes is free to remain silent but his duty to the truth compels him. "Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to the truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people" (19).
"the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy" (20).
--Foucault then begins to discuss the evolution of the parrhesiatic game over time and how the word shifted in meaning.
Rhetoric
"In the Socratic-Platonic tradition, parrhesia and rhetoric stand in strong opposition (Gorgias & Phaedrus)...This opposition between parrhesia and rhetoric, which is so clear-cut in the Fourth Century B.C. throughout Plato's writing, will last for centuries in the philosophical tradition" (20-21).
Quintillian, however, incorporates parrhesia into rhetoric as an artless exclamation: "it is without any figure since it is completely natural. Parrhesia is the zero degree of those rhetorical figures which intensify the emotions of the audience" (21).
Politics
Parrhesia is embedded in Athenian democracy and takes place in the agora. However, in the Hellenic monarchies advisors embody parrhesia. Kings cannot be parrhesiastes but they should be adept players of the parrhesiatic game, and he therefore accepts whatever his parrhesiastes says. The king's parrhesiastes represent the silent majority in their advice.
Philosophy
Socrates embodies, though he isn't termed one by Plato, the parrhesiastes, roaming the streets telling the truth and encouraging others to perfect their souls. "Philosophical parrhesia is thus associated with the theme of the care of oneself" (24).
When the age of Epicureans comes around, parrhesia has become a techne.
PART TWO PARRHESIA IN EURIPIDES
In this section, Foucault analyzes the use of parrhesia in Euripides' plays.
THE PHOENICIAN WOMEN
In the play, exile helps define parrhesia. In exile one loses their citizen right to free speech, the freedom to criticize, which results in unrestrained power, aka madness, for those who act without critique, operate without parrhesia.
HIPPOLYTUS
Parrhesia is linked to honor and free speech, without which one becomes a slave.
THE BACCHAE
In this play, parrhesia comes from a servant, who has the truth but no power, to a king, who has the power but not the truth. The servant enters into a parrhesiatic contract so that no harm may come to him when delivering bad news. The contract limits the risk of the speaker.
ELECTRA
This offers another example of the parrhesiatic contract, but in this example the contract is used as a subversive trap.
ION
Ion is a parrhesiatic play. This play signals a shift in truth-telling away from the oracle at Delphi to the Athenian principle of parrhesia. Truth switched from god to man to man to man. The play reverses Oedipus Rex's Apollo as revealer of the truth narrative. In Ion Apollo conceals the truth. The gods assume the role of silence and guilt in Ion instead of mortals.
"For despite the fact that it is in the nature of his character to be a parrhesiastes, he cannot legally or institutionally use this natural parrhesia with which he is endowed if his mother is not Athenian. Parrhesia is thus not a right given equally to all Athenian citizens, but only to those who are especially prestigious through their family and their birth. And Ion appears as a man who is, by nature, a parrhesiastic individual, yet who is, at the same time, deprived of the right of free speech" (51).
Ion is separated from his parrhesiastic nature through Apollo's inability to use parrhesia, so he will rely on the other parrhesiastes, his mother Creusa, to unite him with his nature. Creusa's parrhesia is directed at her more powerful rapist, Apollo, and herself.
ORESTES
In this play, parrhesia assumes the pejorative "babbler" denotation as embodied by a citizen who speaks at a trial but who cannot control what comes out of his mouth. He cannot distinguish "that which should be said from that which should be kept silent" (64). The speaker also displays a strength wrought in arrogance, not abilities of reason or eloquence. The man is a strong speaker only in that he has a loud voice. The speaker, though he has parrhesia as a citizen, cannot use it well because he lacks wisdom/learning. Therefore, a precursor for use of parrhesia is paideia or mathesis.
Diomedes, however, offers a counter-example for the proper uses of parrhesia. He is courageous. He is not a career politician; he only takes part in important political debates. He is a landowner who works with his hands (he has a vested interest in the preservation of Athenian land and property; this characteristic also means that he's good at making decisions because he has to do it in his business life). He's also a man of moral integrity.
PROBLEMATIZING PARRHESIA
Who then gets parrhesia? Unlike isonomia (equality under the law) and isogoria (equality in speaking opinion), parrhesia lacked institutional constraints and definitional restrictions.
What is the relationship between parrhesia and education? If parrhesia isn't simply frankness or courage, how then is it related to training?
The problem then is concerned with truth. Who can speak truth when everyone is given an equal voice?
Here Foucault describes his aim as inspecting the history of thought, how things that aren't problematic become problematic.
PART THREE: PARRHESIA in the CRISIS of DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
As a history of thought, the Greeks have discovered that equality in speech makes problematic the idea of parrhesia. If everyone has a right to speak, then those immoral speakers could help create tyranny. In this way, parrhesia could be bad for democracy.
The Oligarch asserts that Athenian democracy is an uneducated mob-rule that will never result in the perfection of the state.
Isocrates criticizes democracy because good orators are essentially demagogues who lack the courage to tell the truth and stand up to the demos.
"Hence, real parrhesia, parrhesia in its positive, critical sense, does not exist where democracy exists" (83).
For Plato, parrhesia's danger lies in its creation of varying "manners of life" and "styles of living." They become autonomous cities in and of themselves. They are their own constitutions.
Problem #1: parrhesia as a use of speech becomes a personal choice in a way of life. It is non-institutional and contingent upon the individual.
Problem #2: parrhesia transitions into a check on a king's power, a personal choice or attitude.
Aristotle: parrhesia "is either a moral ethical quality, or pertains to free speech as addressed to a monarch" (87).
PART FOUR: PARRHESIA in the CARE of the SELF
Foucault uses Plato's dialogue Laches in examining how parrhesia absorbs the "care of the self."
When Socrates asks his interlocutors to give an account of their lives, he's not asking for a confession of sin or wrongdoing. He's asking for them to juxtapose their bios with their logos. Do they practice what they preach?
Socrates can act as a touchstone or measurer of others bios-logos relationship because his actions in public life denote that he is a man that acts according to his words. They are in harmony, a Dorian courageous harmony.
"Socrates is able to use rational, ethically valuable, fine, and beautiful discourse; but unlike the sophist, he can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords exactly with what he thinks, and what he thinks accords exactly with what he does. And so Socrates--who is truly free and courageous--can therefore function as parrhesiastic figure" (101).
For an overview of the word's evolution see p. 102.
The Greco-Roman parrhesia is (106)
1) Philosophical: epistemic; critical; and practices what it preaches
2) emphasizes conversion and changing one's life so that he takes care of himself and others
3) Knowing oneself creates a knowledge of truth
4) It's utility stretches beyond the political realm and can be employed in many places
THE PRACTICE of PARRHESIA
Its practice occurs in small groups, human relationships in public life, and individual personal relationships.
Cynical parrhesia emphasized "critical preaching, scandalous behavior, and...'provacative dialogue'" (119).
The cynical parrhesiastic game pushes to the edge of the parrhesiastic contract by provoking the interlocutor to injured pride. Whereas the Socratic parrhesiastic game focused on revealing one's ignorance of their own ignorance, the cynics used parrhesia to reveal false pride, you aren't what you claim to be instead of you don't know that you don't know what you proclaim to know.
Techniques of examination
-------Class Notes----------
Foucault has two periods:
1) Archaeology: He performs research and then forms a methodology out of it. Focused on periods and institutions, normalizations and how people become the same kinds of people through institutions, discourse, etc. How do people become certain kinds of subjects.
2) Genealogy: Not about how people become the same, but how does power work when people act the same. How does power work when people can choose their own subjectivities? (Post WWII). This is about the norm (a statistical norm). Difference can proliferate because we deal with percentages/probablility. Statistics that skew from the norm calls for state intervention. They intervene by incentivizing different kinds of practices. The health of a state exists in a normed statistic range. The practices don't try to eliminate aberration they try to keep it in a statistical range, a manageable range.
His main interests are power, subjectivity, and discourse and how they all work together.
"Wherever there is power there is resistance." Genealogy is about the invisibility of power, people's not knowing that they're being acted upon.
Three kinds of power:
Sovereign power: The right to kill
Disciplinary power: The power to make a human being a subject (psychology, prisons, education) Creating docile bodies.
Biopower: Power that acts on the population, the statistical norm. It allows for freedom but intervenes when the state of institution becomes vulnerable.
The three kinds of power emerge historically but they don't replace the other. They exist simultaneously but the emphasis emerges historically.
The Cynics are, to Foucault, a Golden Age for parrhesia.
A
Two meanings of parrhesia:
1. pejorative: meaningless talk or chatter, which could be found in mob-rule democracy. It's also listed in Christian literature as the kind of empty talk that keeps one from contemplating God.
2. postive: to say what one thinks. To simultaneously tell an opinion that is a truth. One knows it is the truth because one believes it. This epistemological model doesn't work with our Cartesian desire for evidence since we desire mental evidence beyond the feeling of something being true. Rather than doubting until evidence supports the feeling (Cartesian), parrhesia requires that the speaker have the moral qualities necessary to first know the truth and then tell the truth to an audience.
Since engaging in parrhesia requires an act of courage, a turning away from self-preservation in order to speak the truth because the truth the speaker utters is dangerous, the truth teller can be seen in his allegiance to the truth despite potential harm. The risk in telling the truth is not always a life-threatening risk. It could be telling the truth when it may hurt a friend's feelings.
Since parrhesia involves risk, a king or tyrant cannot use it because they risk nothing. A parrhesiastes prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than "a living being who is false to himself"
Parrhesia is a form of criticism, either toward another or oneself. It can, however, only come from below. Therefore when criticizing oneself, the parrhesiastes must be under the interlocutor. A teacher cannot use parrhesia with his students. Parrhesia flows uphill.
Parrhesiatic acts are performed out of a sense of duty. The parrhesiastes is free to remain silent but his duty to the truth compels him. "Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to the truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people" (19).
"the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy" (20).
--Foucault then begins to discuss the evolution of the parrhesiatic game over time and how the word shifted in meaning.
Rhetoric
"In the Socratic-Platonic tradition, parrhesia and rhetoric stand in strong opposition (Gorgias & Phaedrus)...This opposition between parrhesia and rhetoric, which is so clear-cut in the Fourth Century B.C. throughout Plato's writing, will last for centuries in the philosophical tradition" (20-21).
Quintillian, however, incorporates parrhesia into rhetoric as an artless exclamation: "it is without any figure since it is completely natural. Parrhesia is the zero degree of those rhetorical figures which intensify the emotions of the audience" (21).
Politics
Parrhesia is embedded in Athenian democracy and takes place in the agora. However, in the Hellenic monarchies advisors embody parrhesia. Kings cannot be parrhesiastes but they should be adept players of the parrhesiatic game, and he therefore accepts whatever his parrhesiastes says. The king's parrhesiastes represent the silent majority in their advice.
Philosophy
Socrates embodies, though he isn't termed one by Plato, the parrhesiastes, roaming the streets telling the truth and encouraging others to perfect their souls. "Philosophical parrhesia is thus associated with the theme of the care of oneself" (24).
When the age of Epicureans comes around, parrhesia has become a techne.
PART TWO PARRHESIA IN EURIPIDES
In this section, Foucault analyzes the use of parrhesia in Euripides' plays.
THE PHOENICIAN WOMEN
In the play, exile helps define parrhesia. In exile one loses their citizen right to free speech, the freedom to criticize, which results in unrestrained power, aka madness, for those who act without critique, operate without parrhesia.
HIPPOLYTUS
Parrhesia is linked to honor and free speech, without which one becomes a slave.
THE BACCHAE
In this play, parrhesia comes from a servant, who has the truth but no power, to a king, who has the power but not the truth. The servant enters into a parrhesiatic contract so that no harm may come to him when delivering bad news. The contract limits the risk of the speaker.
ELECTRA
This offers another example of the parrhesiatic contract, but in this example the contract is used as a subversive trap.
ION
Ion is a parrhesiatic play. This play signals a shift in truth-telling away from the oracle at Delphi to the Athenian principle of parrhesia. Truth switched from god to man to man to man. The play reverses Oedipus Rex's Apollo as revealer of the truth narrative. In Ion Apollo conceals the truth. The gods assume the role of silence and guilt in Ion instead of mortals.
"For despite the fact that it is in the nature of his character to be a parrhesiastes, he cannot legally or institutionally use this natural parrhesia with which he is endowed if his mother is not Athenian. Parrhesia is thus not a right given equally to all Athenian citizens, but only to those who are especially prestigious through their family and their birth. And Ion appears as a man who is, by nature, a parrhesiastic individual, yet who is, at the same time, deprived of the right of free speech" (51).
Ion is separated from his parrhesiastic nature through Apollo's inability to use parrhesia, so he will rely on the other parrhesiastes, his mother Creusa, to unite him with his nature. Creusa's parrhesia is directed at her more powerful rapist, Apollo, and herself.
ORESTES
In this play, parrhesia assumes the pejorative "babbler" denotation as embodied by a citizen who speaks at a trial but who cannot control what comes out of his mouth. He cannot distinguish "that which should be said from that which should be kept silent" (64). The speaker also displays a strength wrought in arrogance, not abilities of reason or eloquence. The man is a strong speaker only in that he has a loud voice. The speaker, though he has parrhesia as a citizen, cannot use it well because he lacks wisdom/learning. Therefore, a precursor for use of parrhesia is paideia or mathesis.
Diomedes, however, offers a counter-example for the proper uses of parrhesia. He is courageous. He is not a career politician; he only takes part in important political debates. He is a landowner who works with his hands (he has a vested interest in the preservation of Athenian land and property; this characteristic also means that he's good at making decisions because he has to do it in his business life). He's also a man of moral integrity.
PROBLEMATIZING PARRHESIA
Who then gets parrhesia? Unlike isonomia (equality under the law) and isogoria (equality in speaking opinion), parrhesia lacked institutional constraints and definitional restrictions.
What is the relationship between parrhesia and education? If parrhesia isn't simply frankness or courage, how then is it related to training?
The problem then is concerned with truth. Who can speak truth when everyone is given an equal voice?
Here Foucault describes his aim as inspecting the history of thought, how things that aren't problematic become problematic.
PART THREE: PARRHESIA in the CRISIS of DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
As a history of thought, the Greeks have discovered that equality in speech makes problematic the idea of parrhesia. If everyone has a right to speak, then those immoral speakers could help create tyranny. In this way, parrhesia could be bad for democracy.
The Oligarch asserts that Athenian democracy is an uneducated mob-rule that will never result in the perfection of the state.
Isocrates criticizes democracy because good orators are essentially demagogues who lack the courage to tell the truth and stand up to the demos.
"Hence, real parrhesia, parrhesia in its positive, critical sense, does not exist where democracy exists" (83).
For Plato, parrhesia's danger lies in its creation of varying "manners of life" and "styles of living." They become autonomous cities in and of themselves. They are their own constitutions.
Problem #1: parrhesia as a use of speech becomes a personal choice in a way of life. It is non-institutional and contingent upon the individual.
Problem #2: parrhesia transitions into a check on a king's power, a personal choice or attitude.
Aristotle: parrhesia "is either a moral ethical quality, or pertains to free speech as addressed to a monarch" (87).
PART FOUR: PARRHESIA in the CARE of the SELF
Foucault uses Plato's dialogue Laches in examining how parrhesia absorbs the "care of the self."
When Socrates asks his interlocutors to give an account of their lives, he's not asking for a confession of sin or wrongdoing. He's asking for them to juxtapose their bios with their logos. Do they practice what they preach?
Socrates can act as a touchstone or measurer of others bios-logos relationship because his actions in public life denote that he is a man that acts according to his words. They are in harmony, a Dorian courageous harmony.
"Socrates is able to use rational, ethically valuable, fine, and beautiful discourse; but unlike the sophist, he can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords exactly with what he thinks, and what he thinks accords exactly with what he does. And so Socrates--who is truly free and courageous--can therefore function as parrhesiastic figure" (101).
For an overview of the word's evolution see p. 102.
The Greco-Roman parrhesia is (106)
1) Philosophical: epistemic; critical; and practices what it preaches
2) emphasizes conversion and changing one's life so that he takes care of himself and others
3) Knowing oneself creates a knowledge of truth
4) It's utility stretches beyond the political realm and can be employed in many places
THE PRACTICE of PARRHESIA
Its practice occurs in small groups, human relationships in public life, and individual personal relationships.
Cynical parrhesia emphasized "critical preaching, scandalous behavior, and...'provacative dialogue'" (119).
The cynical parrhesiastic game pushes to the edge of the parrhesiastic contract by provoking the interlocutor to injured pride. Whereas the Socratic parrhesiastic game focused on revealing one's ignorance of their own ignorance, the cynics used parrhesia to reveal false pride, you aren't what you claim to be instead of you don't know that you don't know what you proclaim to know.
Techniques of examination
-------Class Notes----------
Foucault has two periods:
1) Archaeology: He performs research and then forms a methodology out of it. Focused on periods and institutions, normalizations and how people become the same kinds of people through institutions, discourse, etc. How do people become certain kinds of subjects.
2) Genealogy: Not about how people become the same, but how does power work when people act the same. How does power work when people can choose their own subjectivities? (Post WWII). This is about the norm (a statistical norm). Difference can proliferate because we deal with percentages/probablility. Statistics that skew from the norm calls for state intervention. They intervene by incentivizing different kinds of practices. The health of a state exists in a normed statistic range. The practices don't try to eliminate aberration they try to keep it in a statistical range, a manageable range.
His main interests are power, subjectivity, and discourse and how they all work together.
"Wherever there is power there is resistance." Genealogy is about the invisibility of power, people's not knowing that they're being acted upon.
Three kinds of power:
Sovereign power: The right to kill
Disciplinary power: The power to make a human being a subject (psychology, prisons, education) Creating docile bodies.
Biopower: Power that acts on the population, the statistical norm. It allows for freedom but intervenes when the state of institution becomes vulnerable.
The three kinds of power emerge historically but they don't replace the other. They exist simultaneously but the emphasis emerges historically.
The Cynics are, to Foucault, a Golden Age for parrhesia.
A
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Edward W. Said--Representations of the Intellectual
Chapter 1: Representations of the Intellectual
Said begins by differentiating between two competing definitions of the intellectual:
"There is no such thing as a private intellectual" (12). This connects to Arendt: action must be public by nature.
Intellectuals have a vocation for representing publicly. (13)
"intellectuals are representative, not just of some subterranean or larger social movement, but of a quite peculiar, even abrasive style of life and social performance that is uniquely theirs" (14).
(I wonder about the intellectual as vocation, as someone produced but yet apart, actively criticizing and provoking the thing they're no longer a part of.)
Said, in defining the intellectual as one who advances human freedom and knowledge, rebuffs Lyotard's position that the Grand Narratives of the modern era are dead. For Said, such a position is a mark of laziness/indifference that ignores continuing oppressive regimes.
The actions of the intellectual cannot be leaned in a how-to guide. They must be learned "as a concrete experience constantly threatened by modern life itself" (20). Intellectuals definitions are in the ACTIVITY (Arendt) "dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgment; and this puts the individual on record and on the line. Knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual action" (20).
Said calls for intellectuals to engage in politics, which is inescapable. The intellectual is a product of his time and must react to the representations of politics and media. Intellectuals should unmask official narratives and provide alternate iterations
Chapter 2: Holding Nations and Traditions at Bay
Though intellectuals differ from region to region, language to language, country to country, there are some general notions of what an intellectual does.
Intellectuals are beholden to a language that they try to make their own. However, that language carries with it the status quo. If the intellectual is to represent the editorial "we" and "us," if they are to put forth the best ideas of the collective conscious--perhaps even as a way to mitigate the mob rule of democracy--there's a danger in becoming co-opted mouthpieces for the state, the nation, and nationalism. (30). Intellectuals should transcend such national mentalities, but in doing so, the intellectual is bound to a shared or common language that intimates national identity.
"Never solidarity before action." The intellectual will always have to choose between the stronger or the weaker (32-33). The intellectual should reveal the construct that is a national identity.
The intellectual will always face a problem of loyalty since they cannot disenfranchise themselves with their origins and membership in some group. The task then is not to criticize or simply add a voice to a revolutionary cause, but to create something new (Arendt). Their role is "to go beyond survival to questions of political liberation, to critiques of the leadership, to presenting alternatives that are too often marginalized or pushed aside as irrelevant to the main battle at hand" (41).
"For the intellectual the task...is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others...This does not at all mean a loss in historical specificity, but rather it guards against the possibility that a lesson learned about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another place or time...you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims" (44).
Chapter 3: Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals
Said begins this chapter talking about exiles and how they occupy an in-between space. They are not completely severed from their old place because they're constantly reminded that they're in exile. The old place exists, and the new place serves as a contrasting point for that fact.
This chapter focuses on the intellectual who will not acculturate. Intellectual exile is a metaphor, as well as a literal reference, for Said. Exiled intellectuals are outsiders. Exiled intellectuals are happy in their unhappiness, taking pleasure from their disdain.
"there is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position, a sort of dwelling whose falseness is covered over in time, and to which one can all too easily become accustomed" (58).
The exile never sees things in isolation. They don't see things as they are, but how they have come to be. The exile can look upon entrenched institutions with respect void of reverence. For the exile, such establishments reveal themselves more easily as products of history, in flux and changing. Therefore, the intellectual exile is ironic, skeptical, and playful, but not cynical. (61).
Exile can therefore be a model of thinking for the intellectual, a person who occupies the margins and is home-less. Such a position allows the intellectual to proceed in his affairs without caution or restraint for those in the corporate body.
Chapter 4: Professionals and Amateurs
Individuals associated with institutions rise and fall along with the institution. Said asks whether or not there can be a free-range intellectual, an intellectual apart from a university, a party, a union, etc.
The 20th century has seen a rise in the intelligentsia, which makes Said wonder whether or not an independent intellectual is even possible at all or if these intellectuals are in fact Gramscian organic intellectuals created by the class/interest they represent.
Said focuses his response to Joacoby's Reagan era publication about the demise of the non-institutional intellectual and its replacement with inarticulate, discipline-centered
erudite professors.
Said proclaims that institutional affiliation does not keep one from being an intellectual. The threat to intellectualism today, for Said, is not institutionally related. Rather, it is PROFESSIONALISM.
Professionalism: "thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior--not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and 'objective'" (74).
Reading Sartre, Said says the modern criticism of the intellectual fails to consider how the intellectual is created in response to a society and the pressures that come along with society trying to cajole, hem in, and hector the intellectual.
There are four pressures that challenge the intellectual's ingenuity and will, which can only be overcome by "amateurism," being moved by passion and interest and refusing to be tied down to specialty (76).
Pressure #1: Specialization
The role of the intellectual is not to placate or appease his audience.
Chapter 5: Speaking Truth to Power
This chapter focuses on how the intellectual confronts power and authority.
"the intellectual, properly speaking, is not a functionary or an employee completely given up to the policy goals of a government or a large corporation, or even guild of like-minded professionals" (86).
Said claims that the intellectual shouldn't be bound by his professional training. But in engaging in areas outside expertise in the public sphere, the intellectual must ask: how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?
Said cautions and admonishes intellectuals whose objectivity doesn't bend to encompass the "them"/other. "the meaning of an effective intervention in that realm has to rest on the intellectual's unbudgeable conviction in a concept of justice and fairness that allows for differences between nations and individuals, without at the same time assigning them to hidden hierarchies, preferences, evaluations" (94).
"whereas we are right to bewail the disappearance of consensus on what constitutes objectivity, we are not by the same token completely adrift in self-indulgent subjectivity. Taking refuge inside a profession or nationality...is only taking refuge; it is not answer to the goads all of us receive just by reading the morning's news" (98).
"The intellectual does not climb a mountain or pulpit and declaim from the heights...the intellectual's voice is lonely, but it has resonance only because it associates itself freely with the reality of a movement, the aspirations of a people, the common pursuit of a shared ideal" (101-102).
"Speaking truth to power...is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change" (102).
Chapter 6: Gods That Always Fail
How far should an intellectual go in getting involved?
***Class Notes***
A
Said begins by differentiating between two competing definitions of the intellectual:
- Gramsci: organic intellectual vs. traditional intellectual. The organic rise in relation to classes and unlike traditional intellectuals, act in movement instead of upholding entrenched systems.
- Benda: intellectuals are rare geniuses who upend the status quo by "upholding eternal standards of truth and justice" (5).
"There is no such thing as a private intellectual" (12). This connects to Arendt: action must be public by nature.
Intellectuals have a vocation for representing publicly. (13)
"intellectuals are representative, not just of some subterranean or larger social movement, but of a quite peculiar, even abrasive style of life and social performance that is uniquely theirs" (14).
(I wonder about the intellectual as vocation, as someone produced but yet apart, actively criticizing and provoking the thing they're no longer a part of.)
Said, in defining the intellectual as one who advances human freedom and knowledge, rebuffs Lyotard's position that the Grand Narratives of the modern era are dead. For Said, such a position is a mark of laziness/indifference that ignores continuing oppressive regimes.
The actions of the intellectual cannot be leaned in a how-to guide. They must be learned "as a concrete experience constantly threatened by modern life itself" (20). Intellectuals definitions are in the ACTIVITY (Arendt) "dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgment; and this puts the individual on record and on the line. Knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual action" (20).
Said calls for intellectuals to engage in politics, which is inescapable. The intellectual is a product of his time and must react to the representations of politics and media. Intellectuals should unmask official narratives and provide alternate iterations
Chapter 2: Holding Nations and Traditions at Bay
Though intellectuals differ from region to region, language to language, country to country, there are some general notions of what an intellectual does.
Intellectuals are beholden to a language that they try to make their own. However, that language carries with it the status quo. If the intellectual is to represent the editorial "we" and "us," if they are to put forth the best ideas of the collective conscious--perhaps even as a way to mitigate the mob rule of democracy--there's a danger in becoming co-opted mouthpieces for the state, the nation, and nationalism. (30). Intellectuals should transcend such national mentalities, but in doing so, the intellectual is bound to a shared or common language that intimates national identity.
"Never solidarity before action." The intellectual will always have to choose between the stronger or the weaker (32-33). The intellectual should reveal the construct that is a national identity.
The intellectual will always face a problem of loyalty since they cannot disenfranchise themselves with their origins and membership in some group. The task then is not to criticize or simply add a voice to a revolutionary cause, but to create something new (Arendt). Their role is "to go beyond survival to questions of political liberation, to critiques of the leadership, to presenting alternatives that are too often marginalized or pushed aside as irrelevant to the main battle at hand" (41).
"For the intellectual the task...is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others...This does not at all mean a loss in historical specificity, but rather it guards against the possibility that a lesson learned about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another place or time...you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims" (44).
Chapter 3: Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals
Said begins this chapter talking about exiles and how they occupy an in-between space. They are not completely severed from their old place because they're constantly reminded that they're in exile. The old place exists, and the new place serves as a contrasting point for that fact.
This chapter focuses on the intellectual who will not acculturate. Intellectual exile is a metaphor, as well as a literal reference, for Said. Exiled intellectuals are outsiders. Exiled intellectuals are happy in their unhappiness, taking pleasure from their disdain.
"there is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position, a sort of dwelling whose falseness is covered over in time, and to which one can all too easily become accustomed" (58).
The exile never sees things in isolation. They don't see things as they are, but how they have come to be. The exile can look upon entrenched institutions with respect void of reverence. For the exile, such establishments reveal themselves more easily as products of history, in flux and changing. Therefore, the intellectual exile is ironic, skeptical, and playful, but not cynical. (61).
Exile can therefore be a model of thinking for the intellectual, a person who occupies the margins and is home-less. Such a position allows the intellectual to proceed in his affairs without caution or restraint for those in the corporate body.
Chapter 4: Professionals and Amateurs
Individuals associated with institutions rise and fall along with the institution. Said asks whether or not there can be a free-range intellectual, an intellectual apart from a university, a party, a union, etc.
The 20th century has seen a rise in the intelligentsia, which makes Said wonder whether or not an independent intellectual is even possible at all or if these intellectuals are in fact Gramscian organic intellectuals created by the class/interest they represent.
Said focuses his response to Joacoby's Reagan era publication about the demise of the non-institutional intellectual and its replacement with inarticulate, discipline-centered
erudite professors.
Said proclaims that institutional affiliation does not keep one from being an intellectual. The threat to intellectualism today, for Said, is not institutionally related. Rather, it is PROFESSIONALISM.
Professionalism: "thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior--not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and 'objective'" (74).
Reading Sartre, Said says the modern criticism of the intellectual fails to consider how the intellectual is created in response to a society and the pressures that come along with society trying to cajole, hem in, and hector the intellectual.
There are four pressures that challenge the intellectual's ingenuity and will, which can only be overcome by "amateurism," being moved by passion and interest and refusing to be tied down to specialty (76).
Pressure #1: Specialization
- Usually accompanying high levels of education, specialization makes the intellectual lose sight of anything outside their field.
- Specialization causes the intellectual to tame their pursuits to fit what others will allow.
- It kills excitement and creates laziness
- comes from proper certification by an authority
- authorities instruct what type of language is to be used
- has little to do with knowledge
- Professionalism breeds the coopting of intellectuals by powerful entities (e.g. STEM fields and the humanities in fighting communism during the Cold War)
- large institutions "employ academic experts to carry out research and study programs that further commercial as well as political agendas. This of course is part of what is considered normal behavior in a free market system...Everything about the system is acceptable according to the standards of competition and market response that govern behavior under advanced capitalism in a liberal and democratic society...we have not been as fastidious in considering the threats to the individual intellectual of a system that rewards intellectual conformity...accordingly, research and accreditation are controlled in order to get and keep a larger share of the market" (81-82).
The role of the intellectual is not to placate or appease his audience.
Chapter 5: Speaking Truth to Power
This chapter focuses on how the intellectual confronts power and authority.
"the intellectual, properly speaking, is not a functionary or an employee completely given up to the policy goals of a government or a large corporation, or even guild of like-minded professionals" (86).
Said claims that the intellectual shouldn't be bound by his professional training. But in engaging in areas outside expertise in the public sphere, the intellectual must ask: how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?
Said cautions and admonishes intellectuals whose objectivity doesn't bend to encompass the "them"/other. "the meaning of an effective intervention in that realm has to rest on the intellectual's unbudgeable conviction in a concept of justice and fairness that allows for differences between nations and individuals, without at the same time assigning them to hidden hierarchies, preferences, evaluations" (94).
"whereas we are right to bewail the disappearance of consensus on what constitutes objectivity, we are not by the same token completely adrift in self-indulgent subjectivity. Taking refuge inside a profession or nationality...is only taking refuge; it is not answer to the goads all of us receive just by reading the morning's news" (98).
"The intellectual does not climb a mountain or pulpit and declaim from the heights...the intellectual's voice is lonely, but it has resonance only because it associates itself freely with the reality of a movement, the aspirations of a people, the common pursuit of a shared ideal" (101-102).
"Speaking truth to power...is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change" (102).
Chapter 6: Gods That Always Fail
How far should an intellectual go in getting involved?
***Class Notes***
- 1800-1900 Britain colonized 84% of the world.
- They imposed political apparatuses when they colonized, and they also instilled cultural values: language, education, festivals, religion, etc.
- The cultural work did ask much if not more than the political work of colonizing
- Said is interested in the cultural colonizing. Language and education have as much colonizing force as political colonization
- Anti-colonist thinkers had a double-consciousness. They received its power but were also critical of it. They identified with it and felt subjugated by it.
- 1950s+ many former colonies emerge as nation states, but the problems don't go away. Therefore, people like Said examine the lasting intellectual/cultural colonization that lingers.
- e.g. Said and Spivak
- Said was particularly interested in how psychology worked on the colonized and the colonizer
- Our subjectivities are fraught between dialectic between imposing power and not imposing power
- Said is most famous for his book Orientalism: an examination of how oriental people were represented to non-orientals often by people who never went there in the first place. It comes to stand in for the real, or as Foucault would say, it has become the real. Dual ontology: invented and real.
- One of the first to talk about travel theory: how ideas move between different communities and different people and what changes in that movement.
- Very active in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
- Primary critique: he gives the European vision of the dominated group from the view of the dominator. It lacks a first person account. The repressed don't represent themselves; they need representation.
A
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Hannah Arendt--The Human Condition
Chapter 1
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.
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:
A
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
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Karl Marx--"On the Jewish Question"
Marx is responding to Bauer's belief that there can't be political emancipation in a religious state (Germany was officially Christian)
Bauer believes emancipation comes from abolishing religion.
Marx, however, takes issues with Bauer's premise. Political emancipation doesn't come through a secular state. Disaffiliating the state with an official religion won't result in emancipation. Marx then begins interrogating what is at the heart of political emancipation. Bauer's questioning only attends to the religious state and emancipation, not the political state and emancipation. The state could be secular, Marx contends, and the people still religious. So, it isn't the state-emancipation from religion that will set the people free.
If man frees himself through the state, he must free himself through a medium, an intermediary, that provides the system from which one may become free. If freedom comes through the state, the man exists in partiality to the state itself.
Marx points out that edicts from the state (no private property ownership necessary to vote, free primary education, etc.) doesn't erode the natural boundaries of those systems. I think he's trying to show that freedom can't come from the political state. He's showing that the power of the state the change norms (de jure) didn't really change anything (de facto). The state can never abolish these conditions; "the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence."
Marx likens civic bodies, governments, to heavens (all powerful universalities of a species' perfection) and civil life (private, self-interested, imperfect species) to seculary (earthly) belonging. Only in civic, political life does the man become universal, "the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty...deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality." The "differences" of men in civil society are mere "sophistry," to Marx, wordplay that establishes false contradictions.
"The division of the human being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so."
The state exists in presupposition to private property, law, religion, etc. Any revolution that seeks abolition of such things requires a forever revolution. Its only counterpart results in the reestablishment of the presuppositions it requires to exist.
"The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance."
Having established the possibility of political emancipation without religious emancipation (both of which aren't synonymous with human emancipation), Marx turns to the Enlightenment notion of universal "rights of man."
The rights of man exist in community; "Their content is participation in the community, and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state."
The rights of man denote that rights are individually, and privately held. Therefore, civic law provides the conditions for civil universality.
The rights of man include "liberty," whose purview includes that which does not harm others, and harm is defined through law. The universal right of man is thus wrapped completely in the political state's definition of harm, liberty, etc.
Man's right to liberty is based on the disassociation of man. It's mans' right to be withdrawn into himself. Marx argues this is enmeshed with the right to private property; the right to property exists "without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest." As such, fellow men become barriers to liberty, not the conduit for it. If liberty comes from self-interest, then the citizenry are obstacles to liberty. Equality then is based on the liberty defined above. We are equal, then, in our liberty to pursue self-interest. Security is, then, the security of liberty.
The rights of man, then, are universal egoism. The irony is that the political body serves the interest of the withdrawn, separated man. In Marx's view, the state is a supreme species to the individual. It doesn't follow that the "communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being." Such a system sees the partial man as the "essential and true man." Marx's idea of human perfection rests within the state. The communal man stands above the isolated man.
The rights of man are paradoxical, however, as they cease to exist when they come "into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with its aim, with these rights of man." Here, Marz argues that the rights of the individual cannot supersede the collective rights of the individual. Freedom of the press ceases to exist when they threaten the system that secures the freedom of the individual. The practice of the rights of man stand in contrast to its theory. The political body provides the security of the rights of man, which means that liberty ceases to exist once those rights of man threaten the political body.
Man's political emancipation from feudalism was not human emancipation. "man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business."
Marx argues that the "political revolution" termed "natural" as rights the preconditions necessary for the basis of its existence. The political emancipation fragmented from into the real--fallen man--and the true--political idea man. The real man--egoist. The true man--citizen.
Only when man recognizes and reorganizes his "own powers as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power form himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished."
SECTION II
Bauer believes emancipation comes from abolishing religion.
Marx, however, takes issues with Bauer's premise. Political emancipation doesn't come through a secular state. Disaffiliating the state with an official religion won't result in emancipation. Marx then begins interrogating what is at the heart of political emancipation. Bauer's questioning only attends to the religious state and emancipation, not the political state and emancipation. The state could be secular, Marx contends, and the people still religious. So, it isn't the state-emancipation from religion that will set the people free.
If man frees himself through the state, he must free himself through a medium, an intermediary, that provides the system from which one may become free. If freedom comes through the state, the man exists in partiality to the state itself.
Marx points out that edicts from the state (no private property ownership necessary to vote, free primary education, etc.) doesn't erode the natural boundaries of those systems. I think he's trying to show that freedom can't come from the political state. He's showing that the power of the state the change norms (de jure) didn't really change anything (de facto). The state can never abolish these conditions; "the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence."
Marx likens civic bodies, governments, to heavens (all powerful universalities of a species' perfection) and civil life (private, self-interested, imperfect species) to seculary (earthly) belonging. Only in civic, political life does the man become universal, "the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty...deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality." The "differences" of men in civil society are mere "sophistry," to Marx, wordplay that establishes false contradictions.
"The division of the human being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so."
The state exists in presupposition to private property, law, religion, etc. Any revolution that seeks abolition of such things requires a forever revolution. Its only counterpart results in the reestablishment of the presuppositions it requires to exist.
"The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance."
Having established the possibility of political emancipation without religious emancipation (both of which aren't synonymous with human emancipation), Marx turns to the Enlightenment notion of universal "rights of man."
The rights of man exist in community; "Their content is participation in the community, and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state."
The rights of man denote that rights are individually, and privately held. Therefore, civic law provides the conditions for civil universality.
The rights of man include "liberty," whose purview includes that which does not harm others, and harm is defined through law. The universal right of man is thus wrapped completely in the political state's definition of harm, liberty, etc.
Man's right to liberty is based on the disassociation of man. It's mans' right to be withdrawn into himself. Marx argues this is enmeshed with the right to private property; the right to property exists "without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest." As such, fellow men become barriers to liberty, not the conduit for it. If liberty comes from self-interest, then the citizenry are obstacles to liberty. Equality then is based on the liberty defined above. We are equal, then, in our liberty to pursue self-interest. Security is, then, the security of liberty.
The rights of man, then, are universal egoism. The irony is that the political body serves the interest of the withdrawn, separated man. In Marx's view, the state is a supreme species to the individual. It doesn't follow that the "communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being." Such a system sees the partial man as the "essential and true man." Marx's idea of human perfection rests within the state. The communal man stands above the isolated man.
The rights of man are paradoxical, however, as they cease to exist when they come "into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with its aim, with these rights of man." Here, Marz argues that the rights of the individual cannot supersede the collective rights of the individual. Freedom of the press ceases to exist when they threaten the system that secures the freedom of the individual. The practice of the rights of man stand in contrast to its theory. The political body provides the security of the rights of man, which means that liberty ceases to exist once those rights of man threaten the political body.
Man's political emancipation from feudalism was not human emancipation. "man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business."
Marx argues that the "political revolution" termed "natural" as rights the preconditions necessary for the basis of its existence. The political emancipation fragmented from into the real--fallen man--and the true--political idea man. The real man--egoist. The true man--citizen.
Only when man recognizes and reorganizes his "own powers as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power form himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished."
SECTION II
Friday, February 26, 2016
Immanuel Kant--"What is Enlightenment?"
Enlightenment: "man's emergence from self-incurred immaturity"
If you're immature you depend on the guidance of others. Kant implies here that we're naturally mature and capable of rational, independent thought.
People aren't freed from immaturity because they're lazy or scared. Others gladly assume the mantle for the unthinking people.
Ignorance is blissful and profitable. People use fear to keep people from enlightenment, for they're more easy to control in this state.
Inflexible "dogmas and formulas," which are in and of themselves implements for rationality can also become the chains of ones own self-incurred immaturity.
Enlightenment can happen on a large, public scale, but never through revolution. Enlightenment is a SLOW process. In revolution, prejudice in one shape or form overtakes the masses. Though they might overthrow tyranny, they only replace one form of prejudice with another.
Enlightenment comes through freedom, which is the ability "to make public use of one's reason in all matters." This is not to say, however, that civility and rule of law impose on freedom. Kant believes the ability to disagree within the bounds of obedience is foundational for enlightenment's success.
Public use: a man addressing a reading public (Habermas)
Private: civil post or government office
Those holding office can argue as a citizen without "harming the affairs in which he is employed." Kant uses a tax paying analogy. While it's wrong for someone to withhold taxes, it's permissible for that person to pay taxes and argue vehemently against paying. It's right for a clergyman to lead his congregation in the doctrines and publish scholarship about his questioning those doctrines. Uphold the position and express freedom in thought.
Kant believes it is wrong and impossible to have a human commit to the veracity of one document, doctrine, belief, etc. throughout time. "A contract of this kind, concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind for ever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or to make progress whatsoever in enlightenment."
Laws, then, have legitimacy as long as the people will them.
"it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no-one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in man's upward progress, thus making it fruitless and even detrimental to subsequent generations."
"there is no danger even to his legislation if he allows his subjects to make public use of their own reason and to put before the public their thoughts on better ways of drawing up laws, even if this entails forthright criticism of the current legislation"
At the end, Kant recognizes a paradox in freedom as an intellectual right and freedom as denoting unfettered ability to do whatever. He writes: "A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent." In essence, There must exist mandated civility (rule of law) for intellectual freedom to occur and expand.
If you're immature you depend on the guidance of others. Kant implies here that we're naturally mature and capable of rational, independent thought.
People aren't freed from immaturity because they're lazy or scared. Others gladly assume the mantle for the unthinking people.
Ignorance is blissful and profitable. People use fear to keep people from enlightenment, for they're more easy to control in this state.
Inflexible "dogmas and formulas," which are in and of themselves implements for rationality can also become the chains of ones own self-incurred immaturity.
Enlightenment can happen on a large, public scale, but never through revolution. Enlightenment is a SLOW process. In revolution, prejudice in one shape or form overtakes the masses. Though they might overthrow tyranny, they only replace one form of prejudice with another.
Enlightenment comes through freedom, which is the ability "to make public use of one's reason in all matters." This is not to say, however, that civility and rule of law impose on freedom. Kant believes the ability to disagree within the bounds of obedience is foundational for enlightenment's success.
Public use: a man addressing a reading public (Habermas)
Private: civil post or government office
Those holding office can argue as a citizen without "harming the affairs in which he is employed." Kant uses a tax paying analogy. While it's wrong for someone to withhold taxes, it's permissible for that person to pay taxes and argue vehemently against paying. It's right for a clergyman to lead his congregation in the doctrines and publish scholarship about his questioning those doctrines. Uphold the position and express freedom in thought.
Kant believes it is wrong and impossible to have a human commit to the veracity of one document, doctrine, belief, etc. throughout time. "A contract of this kind, concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind for ever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or to make progress whatsoever in enlightenment."
Laws, then, have legitimacy as long as the people will them.
"it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no-one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in man's upward progress, thus making it fruitless and even detrimental to subsequent generations."
"there is no danger even to his legislation if he allows his subjects to make public use of their own reason and to put before the public their thoughts on better ways of drawing up laws, even if this entails forthright criticism of the current legislation"
At the end, Kant recognizes a paradox in freedom as an intellectual right and freedom as denoting unfettered ability to do whatever. He writes: "A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent." In essence, There must exist mandated civility (rule of law) for intellectual freedom to occur and expand.
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