Arendt: Philosophy, Politics and Plurality

ARENDT: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS AND PLURALITY John Goff 2019 https://capcog.com https://independentscholar.academia.edu/JohnGoff Slides handout from a seminar at City Lit, London on 7th October 2019 Hannah Arendt’s examination of the existential and political conditions under which human beings create the world and her examination of thinking as an antidote to totalitarianism, make her thought ever more relevant as the 21st century unfolds. In this seminar we consider Arendt’s ‘The Human Condition’ (1958), in the main, with reference also to ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (1951) and ‘The Life of The Mind’ (1978) Slides online: https://capcog.com/?page_id=693 Hannah Arendt: Philosophy, Politics and Plurality Hannah Arendt (1906–75) On being a philosopher … clip ends at 5:22 Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) ... There being masses of 'superfluous' people is precondition for radical evil of totalitarianism ... Terror and Dynamic movement for its own sake – the point is to remove the free movement of human beings and replace it with the impersonal movement of forces of nature ... Three steps to totalitarian destruction of human beings ... 1. Destroying the juridical person – sense of arbitrariness of punishment must be in place rather than any sense of their being a system of justice (even the most cruel) in action ... 2. Destroying the moral person through, for example, making all complicit in punishment and betrayal of others ... 3. Destroying the individuality of the person – this is the most difficult to do ... “Thus totalitarianism destroys even the DESERT of tyranny, for the latter void at least leaves SPACE for deracinated men to move in – totalitarianism presses people together with no space to move and furnishes only the capacity for the impersonal movements of natural scientific processes. Thus the Desert of Tyranny becomes the SANDSTORM of movement, random particles, of nature.” Shivdeep Singh Grewal, personal notes on 'OoT' On intellectuals … clip ends at 35:31 The Human Condition (1958) … In 'The Human Condition' (THC), Hannah Arendt introduces her central ideas of plurality and natality as the conditions for freedom … Her distinctions between ‘labour’, ‘work’, and ‘action’ ground her account of freedom ... “... the human condition [is one] of plurality … men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. … this plurality is specifically the condition … of all political life. ” THC p.7 Labour (‘animal laborans’) ... “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.” THC p.7 Work (‘homo faber’) ... “Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.” THC p.7 Action (‘vita activa’) ... “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality ... this plurality is specifically the condition ... of all political life.” THC p.7 Labour ... “Unlike the productivity of work, which adds new objects to the human artifice, the productivity of labor power … never “produces” anything but life.” THC, p.88 “The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal. We live in a laborers’ society because only laboring, with its inherent fertility, is likely to bring about abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans ... ” THC p126 “...we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of “making a living” ...” THC, p.126 “The danger of future automation is less the much deplored mechanization and artificialization of natural life than that … The rhythm of machines would magnify and intensify the natural rhythm of life enormously, but it would not change, only make more deadly, life’s chief character with respect to the world, which is to wear down durability.” THC, p.132 “... the spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites. That these appetites become more sophisticated … harbors the grave danger that no object of this world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.” THC, p.133 Work ... “The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human less painful. ... But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer “human value” is restricted to the use the animal laborans makes of them. ... the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, least, not primarily-to help the human life process. The question ... is not ... whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if … they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.” THC, p.151 Action ... On being in public ... “Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If men were not distinct ... they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood. Signs and sounds to communicate immediate, identical needs and wants would be enough.” THC, p.175 “This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins. ... the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him ... … so with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before. If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.” THC, p.178 “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique identities and thus make appearance in the human world ... This disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is - his qualities, talents, and short-comings ... is implicit in everything somebody says and does.” THC, p.179 “This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure … Because of its inherent tendency to disclose the agent together with the act, action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm.” THC, p.180 “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government ... ...it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men … but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves. Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.” THC, p.199 The Modern Age ... “… among the outstanding characteristics of the modern age from its beginning to our own time we find the typical attitudes of homo faber: his instrumentalization of the world, his confidence in tools and in productivity of the maker of artificial objects; his trust in the all-comprehensive range of the means-end category, his conviction that every issue can be solved and every motivation reduced to the principle of utility; his sovereignty, which regards everything given as material and thinks of the whole of nature as of “an immense fabric from which we can cut out whatever we want to resew it however we like”; his equation of intelligence with ingenuity, that is, his contempt for all thought which cannot be consider to be “the first step ... for the fabrication of artificial objects, particularly of tools to tools, and to vary their fabrication indefinitely”; finally, matter-of-course identification of fabrication with action.” THC, p.305 The Life of The Mind (1978) ... “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer … was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological conviction or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect … it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.” LoTM, p.4 (on Eichmann) “Where are we when we think?” “Our question: What makes us think?, does not ask for either causes or purposes. Taking for granted man’s need to think, it proceeds from the assumption that the thinking activity belongs among those energeiai which, like flute-playing, have their ends within themselves and leave no tangible outside end product in the world we inhabit.”