Questions
1. What is the role/understanding of faith under Arendt? (pp. 270-271).
2. Arendt and the telescope – relationship to homo faber / making of knowledge + what this says about work/labor more broadly?
3. What is the significance of the telescope's "changing the world view;" what is the distinction between ideas/events and the introduction of the telescope as a transformative vector of modernity (p. 274).
4. What is the relationship between modern conception of reason and the detachment from the senses, and how are we to make sense of this in relationship to the telescope?
5. Notes reversal between the order of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa (p.289), but what exactly is involved in this reversal?
6. Tracking what she is doing with the Cartesian doubt (p. 282-283)... If Cartesianism is an introspection into the (structures of the) mind and its reification as process, what is the role of doubt in relation to modernity as fabrication.
7. How is the loss of contemplation, revelation of truth and—especially—wonder related to the loss of politics that is at the core of the book?
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Discussion
The loss of wonder and the loss of politics is connected to the loss of commons sense (that is world-directed) in favor of introspection and the primacy of the structures of the mind.
Rationalism and empiricism as doing the same thing in relation to the Archimedean point of view.
What do we think of her reading of the hypothesis–experiment as a circle related to the subjectivism diagnosed as the core of the modern age?
Close to Foucault: tracking a change of perception and episteme? A different subjectivity emerging here especially when she notes that modern science "puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind" (288). Her focus is on natural science while Foucault is on social/human sciences...
Irony: it is the instruments that makes this worldview and it is not reason who produces it (even if it reaches the conclusions earlier).
The telescope is a creation of "non-practical search for useless knowledge" (289), so it is not a creation of contemplation but is its destruction. The doing of the telescope is not practical, so here action gets detached from practice (vs a pragmatist view). Here there might be a connection with Hans Blumenberg's reading of curiosity as a driving force of modernity in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
The problem seems ot be the hierarchy of vita contemplativa and vita activa and therefore the reversal but not the distinction because she does not think there should be a vindication of one over the other.
The Life of the Mind could be useful here as a place with Arendt thinks of thinking as a legitimate and separate sphere but without domination and recognizing the loss of the world. This is taken up by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography Hannah Arendt, For the Love of the World.
Preservation and the autonomy of the spheres and not only about relation between them. Very worried about the merging of spheres.
Connection here with her debate with Carl Schmitt: there is a validity to the desire of recovering the autonomy and legitimacy of the political but without such operation leading to domination, dictatorship, sovereign decision but to a plurality, common world and sense.
Descartes: detachment of practical concern and the world and into introspection. He erases the possibility (and experience) of the eternal as it was for the vita contemplativa and turns to immortality. Interesting here to refer how she reads Kierkegaard as bringing the Cartesian doubt into the heart of religion and therefore debasing religion by modernizing it from within.
Collapse into narcissism and solipsism but in this case Narcissus does not recognize that the image is himself. Science does not know that it only discovers itself, but has lost the world.
Resonance to what Foucault does: when 2+2=4 becomes the paradigm of knowledge, then our common sense is deeply impoverished, thinned-out, suffocated. We, again, have lost the world by absorbing it into consciousness—we loss the uniqueness of the object, its sensible specificity (similar to Adorno)—and as the Archimedean point moves into the subject itself (p. 284).
When this happens and labor is elevated over work and everything has its expiration date (nothing lasts) there is no disorientation, no fixity of things.. This has been seen as the conservative element in her thought: tradition as providing the stability, a reference point, something that allows us to be part of the common human world.
Wonder also connection to an individual, to the brand-new, and unique and that cannot be repeated: that which is born.
Interesting that when introspection is talked about without the senses, this sounds like a really good model to understand AI. Of course it "thinks" but that is a thought devoid from the world and the human condition.
She describes Descartes as the natural consequence of the telescope. How are we to understand this? Is there a Heideggerean technological determinism here?
Another shift: speculum. It also helps us see what we could not before and that is, in some sense, perception. And there is an activation of perception; as she says, it is also the intervention into appearance. It is a way to de-alienate this distance...
Telescope seems to give us a great power but it also makes you so very small – inside to the cosmos – so its a reaction formation to then say: what matters is the mind of man (Descartes). It also opens up all the doubts of our senses that leads the to the radicality of never-ending doubt...
