Questions:
1. General question on homo faber and animal laborans: are these positions, identities, standpoints, perspectives, values, etc.?
2. Can we get clear on some distinctions Arendt makes in the chapter on “work”, especially §20: automation and natural process; operation vs. product; tool vs. machine? I am particularly interested in figuring out how this turn towards automation and the machine has led to the “loss of faculty to distinguish clearly between means and ends in terms of human behavior” (145) and why this faculty is so important for Arendt.
3. Want to clear up what’s wrong with means-end reasoning vis-a-vis action (i.e. Politics) (p.156-157)
4. Clear up instrumentality of tools vis-a-vis homo faber and animal laborans (p. 144; 156).
5. Does Marcuse’s one-dimensional man map on to Arendt’s critique of means-end reasoning?
6. Clear up her usage of “use objects” and commodities; how does she map these distinctions (consumption/piece of work/commodities)?
7. Durability as use objects vs commodity? (P. 163)
Discussion:
1. Help clarify other questions by starting here. At one point she’s uses standpoint; Kantian background. In a Kantian critique, developing different standpoints of reasoner/knower. What is interesting is she is also phenomenological that, even though there are standpoints, they are contrary to a Kantian standpoint which would assume neutrality. All of these standpoints hold weight (influence from Heidegger). You buy into standpoint and it is weighty. Social positions would be interesting because in a way she is addressing class, although she doesn’t want to address this in a Marxist sense. These standpoints als o reflect social class positionalities. Who gets to be a homo faber? Who is traditionally an animal laborans? There is a language of ‘mastery’ that feels like a classical imperialist form of writing. What are the patterns underlying these standpoints—who gets to be what—that Arendt is not addressing? She is very aware of freedom but the problem of distribution is not addressed. There is a sense of transcendental analysis but it is interesting to see how there is sociopolitical issues (e.g. class, identities) happening in the story as well.
Animal laborans are people who labor and homo faber are people who work; but these are not fixed or essential identities. Important to think about the structures of society (e.g. racial or gendered structure) that are not being told here.
The logic of the homo faber, the moment of instrumentalization; this becomes the dominating view. Arendt critiques this, you need meaning which is a different kind of play; if you only have homo faber, then utility saturates the entirety of society.
(P. 154) “This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence…” Could we read this as Arendt turning this distinction on its head?
(P. 155-156) Utility cannot be the only standard. Once the world is built, you can not let utility or homo faber logic to be the dominating one.
(P. 159) Reference to Marx
Animal laborans operates on necessity and homo faber operates on meaning to means and ends, creativity in a social sense, etc.
Need to break down the ideas happening in the concepts. What is the argument she is making here?
(P. 144) “The same instruments, which only lighten the burden…” Homo faber makes the tools that animal laborans uses to work. That act of invention, making tools and instruments, relies on means-end reasoning.
(P. 145) “The frequent complaints…factual situation of laboring.” If you are laboring, you’re going to use the tools at your disposal to make things easier and tools are constituting human life from the bottom up. This section feels important; next page talks of losing this faculty. The inability to distinguish between means and ends stems from labor. When you make something, like food, you’re going to consume it; the very means is the ends. Labor is circular and necessary; where exactly are the means and where exactly are the ends? Homo faber has this distinction because they’re not predicated on this necessity.
(P. 146) Repetitiveness and monotony of labor such that the laborer is able to zone out while laboring. There is this idea that laboring is related to the machine and automation. It seems at moments she is raising homo faber and at other times she is saying there is a means-end distinction between homo faber and animal laborans.
We’ve always had automated, repetitive work; tools are extensions but machines automate body. Distinction between animal laborans that can only look at material produced by work, not as the end of some practice, but only as the thing that can satisfy their needs. On the other point, the homo faber can only see the product as satisfying the end of the practice but they can’t find the inherent meaning in it.
Action creates ends but doesn’t have an end. The problem with our society is an ability to critique the ends in our society. This is not homo faber (action?)
(P. 151) There’s a sense in which homo faber is in control, makes the world. Animal laborans is an earth in a Heideggerian sense, with earth as natural, cyclical, things like soil; world is artificial, we make it. The work of art creates the world; but would the work of art be an action? From the standpoint of work, the homo faber will look at Van Gogh from perspective of exchange value.
(P. 152; 154) Basic functions and machines replace utility of the world. Homo faber as unable to distinguish between meaning and utility and utility replaces meaning. The problem with homo faber, and instrumental reason, colonizes, it becomes the logic of a society. The problem is not having different spheres, we need them all, but the problem is when one dominates the others. It is a labor society that is mechanic; machines come out of homo faber but do the work of animal laborans.
Homo faber seems like reference to Aristotelian and essential functions; how does this relate to two distinctions mentioned earlier?
(P. 153) Fabrication process and homo faber; “The trouble with the utility standard…” She says earlier this is something that comes from a notion of animal laborans. Perhaps one; this process collapses into necessity and on the other hand it collapses in utility and we lose the ability to distinguish between means and ends. Meaning is what stops the chain; meaning can never be an end. You need a meaning but it doesn’t respond to the logic of means and ends.
When she says utilitarian, she is not referring to Mill’s utilitarianism, she includes Kant in this; it is related to the notion of utility.
Arendt’s discussion of transcendentals and who fulfills these categories; in her examples of Ancient Greece, women and slaves are animal laborans. Homo faber as identified with early capitalism/modernity. This reasoning grew as capitalism grew is the historical punch she’s making.
(P. 162) On the last public realm; relation to Hegel’s explanation of the market as a place of recognition where we, in some sense, become equal to each other. There is a dark side; the problem is not the issue it was colonized by the logic of value. This is an index of labor taking over work. Production to productive goods to conspicuous consumption.
(P. 163) “Commercial society, or capitalism in its earlier stages…” The loss of distinction between means and ends. There’s a sense in a which you consume so you produce and produce so you consume. Transition from use things to exchange objects. Attempts for homo faber and animal laborans to locate value in something objective outside of itself.
(P. 164) This is what action will give us. But is this positive? (P. 166) and “loss of intrinsic worth…inherent in the very concept of value itself.”
Value is not something that exists in isolation; but there is something other than value that is generated that we haven’t quite addressed yet. Is it that people no longer value the polis but something else? Does she want something private or something not dependent on this public realm? Is that what art is?
(P. 165) “Confusion in classical economics” related to value/worth. She is problematizing the exchange market. Anything can be exchanged for anything and so everything becomes fungible.
