5 March 2026
Questions:
- Life/happiness—is Arendt ambivalent about these? What’s the positive account of each?
- Is Arendt theorizing biopower? [Biopolitics (labor?) vs. anatomopolitics (work?)] If so, how might we mark/note the difference from other views of biopolitical resistance?
- Homo faber vis-a-vis Bergson?
- How do we respond? Art (pg. 323)? Science (pg. 324)?
- Relations between thought vs. contemplation vs. ideas?
- Questions of method—what’s Arendt’s methodology? How do we characterize this as history? “Not a history of ideas” (313). How does it contrast with genealogy?
- Life vs. action: increasing concern with life as constitutive of the social corresponds to decreasing possibilities for action for Arendt.
Discussion:
- General conclusions about how Arendt ends things
- Ought we interpret Arendt in line with a quasi-Heideggerian soft determinism? Or is she more Hegelian (i.e., determinations only clear and appear necessary in retrospect)? Vita activa as Heideggerian calculative thinking vs. vita contemplativa as Heideggerian meditative thinking. Is Arendt giving an account of the emergence of these Heideggerian categories?
- The methodological question: why did upsweep in labor have to correspond to decrease in work and action? What needs to be the case in Arendt’s account, in her methodology, for these conclusions to follow?
- Who is able to choose to perform labor/work/action vs. who is consigned to them?
- What’s the motor driving the historical processes she’s tracing? Not contradiction (as in Hegel), but what is it?
- What’s the relationship between the behavior of the strands (labor, work, action)? What holds them in balance? When their balance is interrupted, in what way is this interruption a result of facts about how the behavior of each relates to that of the others?
- If this isn’t a history of ideas (pg. 313), then what is it? A history of concepts? [Concepts as indexes of forms of life, not a thin sense of “concept” here.]
- Challenge for pragmatism—how to respond? Pragmatist instrumental reasoning emerging as a result of the historical processes inhering between labor/work/action.
- We can imagine Arendt asking: can pragmatism think a conception of action that's irreducible to work?
- How central is instrumental reasoning to the critique Arendt is making? Is her primary concern the subsumption of reason into instrumental reasoning at the expense of other non-means-ends forms of rationality?
- How might constructing phenomenological examples of each (labor, work, action) help clarify in what ways they can be analytically separated?
- Action as parasitic on work and labor
- Are labor, work, and action points of view? Orientations one can or may take up? Or are some deeds just action, some deeds just work, etc.?
- What would it look like to practice action in a way that’s irreducible to an instrumentalized, "work" sense of action?
