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