Arendt – The Human Conditions – sec. 37-41

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 active and the vita contemplative (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?

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

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... 

Arendt, The Human Condition, Sections 31, 31, (33 and 34), 35 and 36

 Arendt, The Human Condition, Sections 31, 31, (33 and 34), 35 and 36

Questions:

1. How or why are faculties of forgiving and promising contingent upon or tied to plurality? Why is forgiving (or promising?) unpredictable? (p.g 237)

2. Sect. 31→ Ruling others and ruling oneself, how or in what ways can the care of the self, governmentality, and pastoral power in Foucault be connected to Arendt’s discussion of ruling or action as “rule”? Especially in her reading of “ruling” as making in Plato?

3. Relation of ruling to fabrication (of city-state)?

4. Critique of idea theory in politics, what is the relation to the critique of the mathematization of science?

5. What is the relationship between mathematization critique and Arendt's concern with worldlessness, or alienation? Are these two separate points? Concern with modern science and earth alienation? 

6. Section 31→ The substitution of acting for making: How should we understand Arendt’s critique of Aristotle and her celebration of the polis as the exemplary of the realm of action? Contradiction or no?

7. Tracking the decoupling of ruling and beginning in “archein,” what is this?

8. (256): Is there something we can say in regard to a transition from sovereign to biopower in Arendt’s account of the stages of alienation (family/ home to society and state)

• Do we want to invite the pragmatist discussion?

• Nope

• Status of forgiveness as disclosive and possible for Arendt: interesting that Arendt says that no one can forgive himself, and the dependency of others as ontological (plurality) for the possibility of action

• Comparing to Nietzsche and promising

• Moving to a discussion of freedom: (237), Arendt sees forgiveness as essential for freedom, how?

• Domination and freedom, domination becomes ubiquitous in the modern age, wherein the wanting to overcome plurality and action result in arbitrary domination of all others.

• (259): Return of the notion of the idea, Arendt seems to have an issue with “idea” as distinct from event, which are never unprecedented. Why is that?

• Having an idea is never unprecedented? 

• Very hard to get a grasp on this, especially because what Arendt means by “idea” may or may not be what she is attributing to Plato’s sense of “idea,” but again, how would we agree to this premise that ideas are never unprecedented?

• Maybe it’s not that deep… Maybe idea means something that “comes and goes” but isn’t acted upon, doesn’t enter the realm of objectivity until it is instantiated in an event or deed.

• Comparing and contrasting Arendt and Foucault. Arendt seems so interested in redemption given the mourning or nostalgia for a political action that has been foreclosed, so this book could not be written today.

• How did this become our present?

• Both Foucault and Arendt as tracking how deep and layered our present has become. 

• If Arendt is trying to uncover the piles of sediment to see what has been lost, then Foucault is looking is looking at the cloth that was doing the covering.

• Wondering if we can still have principles and rules, and still have indeterminacy for Arendt, or unpredictability (essential for action, or tantamount to it).

Arendt - The Human Condition §§ 24, 25, 29, 30

 Questions: 

1) Connection between meaning and commonsense / common world? 

2) Consequences of making speech the paradigm of humanity? Relationship to disability and assumption of abled speaking human subject.

3) Arendt's views of the labor movement and what this examples does for her broader argument? (216)

4) Distinctions between force, power, strength, and their relationship to tyranny (202)

5) What is speech in relation to action or deed? (178)

Discussion: 

• Recap - how do the pragmatists feel about Arendt's critique of instrumental rationality? 
• Are pragmatists really utilitarians? 
• Anthropocentric utilitarianism is its greatest in Kant (155)
• The Problem is the inability to distinguish between means and ends
• Pragmatists have a more pluralistic notion of use - not just desire-satisfaction
• She is right to recognize that modern philosophers have an issue with instrumentalism 
• Speech versus sign-language - "action seems a not very efficient substitute for violence, just as speech, from the viewpoint of sheer utility, seems an awkward substitute for sign language" (179)
• At the very least, non-verbal conceptual acts need to be disclosure
• "A life without speech and without action [...] it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men" (176).
• Why are labor and work not a part of the public realm, while speech and action are? 
• Does this show the problems inherent in speech/action?
• For the labor movement, she criticizes the conflation as well 
• But this might be important - they didn't have the capacity to act in this deeper sens
•  Action and speech are not just necessary for politics, but also for existential life - for getting to the who/subject not the what/object - dependent upon a conception of disclosure
• Lots of uses of words which are not speech 
• "mere talk" 
• See "mere appearance" (219) of the slaves in public compared to her earlier notion of slaves as instrumentum vocale (121) - so mere appearance and mere words are not speech/action
• Non-verbal conceptual disclosures are action - can one act and not speak? 
• Power - as opposed to force/violence - relates to speech/action 
• "Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds have not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities ..." (200)
• Power as more than "potentiality in being together" (201) - disperses when no longer together
• Violence is not action
• Power is persuasive - it gives reasons (?)
• Violence cannot reproduce power  (202) 
• Once can exert it against power but it collapses the being together of speech/action
• Relation to Arendt's criticism of the French Revolution
• Isolation - cannot act and speak together
• Should we view speech/action as justification? 
• Probably not (the pragmatists are reading too much Sellars into this). 
• But speech/action as a rupture; intangible; novelty 
• Uncontrollability and boundlessness of action (191) 
• Strength is indivisible; located in individual (201)
• Power is NOT Foucauldian - it is an emergent property that can disperse and vanish
• Strength connects to individuals - copes with violence but not power
• "Power corrupts when weak band together in order to ruin the strong" (201)
• Courage - risk, rupture, novelty, mimesis 
• Significance of action is retrospective - only when we generate myths and lore
• Poetry is a move from remembrance to memory 
• New happens against certainty - appears in the guise of a miracle
• Do we ignore the underlying labor when you look to great moments of history?
• Need to recover the polis without going back

Arendt The Human Condition Chapter IV Work

 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.