If you like the voiceovers, let me know. Adding them for read-along posts is feasible (takes about 30 minutes for 7 minutes of audio), but I'd only keep doing it if people found them helpful!
It's nice to hear your voice for sure, but I'm not sure it is worth that amount of labor. I use an AI text-to-speech to "read" articles online and maybe others do the same, so I can simult read and hear pieces - it helps me focus. So there is a working alternative for those of us who like to hear/read content.
“If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible.”
I sat for quite a while on this line, especially considering she likely couldn’t have imagined the type and level of technological development that would follow after. I wonder if we haven’t separated ‘knowledge’ from ‘thinking’ to a whole extra degree, especially with the development of search engines and now A.I. She hit something interesting, although it seemed almost in passing. Thanks for the introduction to Arendt; I hadn’t encountered her prior.
This passage also struck me. I’ve done a lot of tech support, and have seen the extent to which this is true of basic computer work. Many people who work with computers all day long, and are completely dependent upon them, have only the most rudimentary understanding of how they work. Even of the specific programs (virtual “gadgets”) with which they do the most work, there is often so little understanding. And it does impact the kind of thinking they are capable of doing. They know their work largely by rote—a calcified, fragile understanding of what they themselves are doing. And so their approach to the tool is tentative and even a bit fearful. People who have worked the longest with specific tools are often the most timid about how they are used! I think Arendt’s diagnosis is a solid one—the “know-how” of these tools has become separated from “thought,” and the supposed human agent has lost more and more agency over time.
At the moment, I actually find AI somewhat empowering, and I see others using it in empowering ways as well. But I think that’s a function of its technological infancy. Over time—and probably not much time, at that—it will almost certainly have the same effect, possibly in even more profound ways.
I feel that what she perhaps meant here is that we became dopamine junkies getting high on figuring out how things work. We keep scrolling from knowledge to knowledge without thinking what is all that for, ultimately, what is the purpose of it all? Why do we have this urge or need to figure things out? This is what THINKING is about. For Spinoza, rationally we need to try to learn as much about the world as possible and this will give us pleasure as we will find out more about God or Nature. For Spinoza, the ultimate goal of all knowledge would be intellectual love of God that hopefully eventually comes akin to an enlightenment when you just get it. If one were to take away religion from all this, what is left? Just mindless scrolling.
Arendt's distinctions of labor, work, action reminded me of the Creation mandate in Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 2:15.
LABOR: "God put Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (2:15) -- tending to biological needs;
WORK: God told Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth" (1:28) -- building and maintaining a world fit for human life, ie. culture building through family growth;
ACTION: God told them, "Fill the earth and SUBDUE IT. Rule over the fish and birds and creatures" (1:28) -- affirm the reality of the world and actualize capacity for freedom, enact agency by establishing order within realms of chaos
Why is this an important connection? Because Arendt's ideas are not that far out. They've essentially been with us since the beginning. I'm not suggesting that she intentionally echoes Torah in The Human Condition, but her ideas ring of ancient wisdom, which is, by her on admission, one of her goals.
Interesting. I think in my understanding of how Arendt defines the terms, “Be fruitful and multiply” would align more closely with ACTION. I took action to be about interpersonal connection, more than work. Subduing the earth, meanwhile, strikes me more as the way she describes WORK—it’s about productivity and material gain, really.
As I (re)read into her text, I agree with you, Spoko, and would revise my original notes. It is interesting that she looks back at the Genesis creation only so far as to establish plurality but not towards vita activa, which is strange simply because male and female were told to DO stuff in the Garden. I'm curious why Arendt's reference stopped merely at the "them" level.
As a recent college grad, I have to start by saying I'm SO excited to join these read-alongs; I was so nervous about losing a regular route for studying philosophy when I graduated, so this is such a nice way to hold myself accountable and get some intellectual stimulation/conversation outside of work (especially with Arendt, whose work I LOVE reading)!
Keeping with the undergrad theme, ChatGPT rose to infamy during my last couple years in college; I witnessed university policies about AI pop up overnight and was on the receiving end of professors struggling to find ways to root out and/or incorporate AI in the classroom. I bring this up because starting with the foreword and all the way through chapter 1, I saw connections to AI that made this first part of the text highly relevant for me (and clearly other people in these comments did too, it’s definitely on everyone’s minds I think). Arendt writes that “a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial’” (2) and that if we continue on a path that seeks to constantly do more that falls beyond our explanatory capacity, we will ultimately “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking” (3). What scares me is that our “work” (i.e. the “world of objects that human beings build upon the earth” (xxi), things like art, writing, music, clothing, etc.) is becoming increasingly made by AI rather than humans. Additionally, the threat that AI might grow to a point beyond our own understanding due to it’s ability to “do our thinking and speaking” about the things that we nonetheless do but can’t explain seems dystopian to me but not unrealistic. This level of “thoughtlessness” can be represented by the simple phrase “I don’t want to be along with my own thoughts,” which is used a concerning amount among people my age who are dependent on so many technological tools to drown out their own thoughts and intentionally avoid thinking about the world around them. This offloading of work and thought to “artificial” means is rapidly becoming more severe and is on my mind, so I look forward to following this thread through the text.
One thing that I appreciate about Arendt’s perspective on action and politics is just how accessible these things become when we think about them as consistent parts of the human condition rather than specific jobs that specific people with specific traits can fulfill. If someone can think and communicate their thoughts, they can partake in Arendt’s proposal to “think what we are doing” (5). In contrast, our current dependence on science and mathematics for deciding what we do is inherently exclusionary; by relying on fields that “move in a world where speech has lost its power” (4), we have forced “a rupture in the shared linguistic fabric” (xii) that is required for action from a plurality of people. By shifting to a decision-making model that emphasizes interpersonal communication and experience-sharing amongst each other, we would theoretically be able to include people who have been historically excluded from politics, action, and efforts to define truths. Danielle Allen said all this in the foreword much better than I did, but I nonetheless wanted to draw attention to the increased accessibility/inclusivity of Arendt’s proposal.
There’s so much more I could comment on (still in the mode of writing discussion posts and preparing for 2.5-hour lectures clearly, oops) but overall I’m so happy to be reading Arendt again and can’t wait to discuss over Zoom in December!
I have always loved Arendt's Prologue, here an extended quote followed by some thoughts:
"The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environments, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life, man remains related to all other living organisms.
For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix "frozen germ plasm" from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope and thereby, so to speak, escape the human condition. I suspect this same desire underlies the hope to extend man's lifespan far beyond the hundred-year limit.
This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given—a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth.
The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians."
1. I can't help but think of Heidegger as an unnamed interlocutor here, with his obsession with beign towards death and temporality. The condition for the possibility of humankind heretofor has been natality/birth, earth, place, a condition against which man rebels and seeks escape as if in a prison. The misogynist desire for parthogenesis, reproduction outside of the womb, animate all these: AI, going to Mars to escape earth, eugenics, cryogenics, and the fantasy that you can survive with the doomsday bunker your billions can buy. Man will learn, one way or another, that the prison is inside him and he will carry it with him wherever he goes.
In any case, this "strange" opening is ivery important to understanding the motivation here. The condition for the possibility of human life are such, and if we succeed in outstripping earth, which it seems we might do at great cost to most, we will destroy humanity itself. Like ZIzek wrote in his last piece on substack, throwing in with the irrational and risky bet that AI will solve our climate crisis and make up for the fact that its development contributes to hastening our planetary demise.
I also hear Arendt saying, loud and clear, that this is not a scientific or technical problem, so that tech or high tech cannot provide us the solution. It is a human problem, political in the sense that being human is political (Aristotle's definition of the human as a political animal, in this sense), and not solvable by professional politicians. Here is it almost 100 years later, and boy did she clock it.
Her urging us to "think what we are doing" only becomes more essential and more urgent as our technology progresses. As we become increasingly more capable of changing the world, we need to be increasingly more careful in how we do. Sadly, I don't think we are.
Section 3 "Eternity Versus Immortality" was the passage in this chapter that evoked some deeper thinking . I tend to love the concept of understanding our relationship with time, seeing as it flows so differently for each one of us. I have been told my whole life that time moves too fast. My own experience tends to lead me toward time moving slowly, especially as I recall all the events that have happened in a single year, which helps re-affirm those feelings. The following quote from section three sent me down this rabbit hole of thinking about time.
["The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best (aristeuein, a verb for which there is no equivalent in any other language) and who “prefer immortal fame to mortal things,” are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals. This was still the opinion of Heraclitus"]
This passage led me to love the contrasts in eternality and immortality. I never thought of the "enteral" to be outside of the framework of time, which to me conjures up some intangible mysticism to "eternal beings". This might have come from an assumption that had when I was younger, which was, if a higher power created the world we experience, and we experience time, then that higher power would be affiliated with time. This has caused me to think on what being outside of time would be like, would it come with unbound-able powers or would it come with unknown restrictions.
Then to contrast this lack of timeliness with the concept of immortality was striking. Heraclitus's opinion on immortality viewed as a means to separate us from our subordinate animal counterparts was not what I considered immortality to be. I have always thought that there would be some advantage that a person would have if they were immortal which in some ways is true. I never thought of a lasting legacy, a book, a technology, or even a discovery of nature would be considered being immortal. I personally think leaving a positive immortal contribution to humanity is an amazing baseline for all to consider.
I am very excited to read the rest of this book with everyone here and I am curious on everyones opinion wether they experience time quickly or slowly.
To me, eternity is being outside of time. When we think about the Big Bang, spacetime started with that, supposedly. What happened "before" the Big Bang if there was not time before that? Can we even talk about something being "before" the Big Bang? Or, what happens to time inside a black hole? We don't know. The eternity and, hence, the God, whatever one means by God, would be standing outside of the concept of time in that sense perhaps. Also, when we die, if there is something left of us, a "soul" or the Spinozian concept of the eternal part of the human mind that intuitively knows God, or whatever your thoughts on that are, this should be also outside of spacetime and, hence, time. Therefore, if there is no time after death, there is no concept of memory after death either as memory presupposes the past and, hence, time.
We are so preoccupied with figuring out how nature works. One might wonder if this has done us any good in the metaphysical sense. Yes, we can better feed our bodies and inhabit these bodies longer by using modern medicine etc. If one truly believes that all there is to us are those physical bodies, then it makes sense to keep figuring out how everything works in order to inhabit those bodies for as long as possible. The issue is: are we asking the right question here? We keep trying to figure out how "things" work without asking what these "things" are fundamentally. Physicalists think that given enough time they will figure this out too. I think this is naive and the source of our predicament. The problem of consciousness is a big part of it.
Heidegger, Arendt's former teacher, claims that we have forgotten how to ask the question of what is the meaning of Being. He eventually wrote a book called "What is Called Thinking."
I don't think we will ever be able to answer a question like that but thinking about it is very important, probably the most important thing one could do to live a meaningful life in whatever sense one could find it meaningful
I liked your framing of the issue. We keep trying to advance technology because we feel we can, and in that rush of excitement when we're at the threshold of something new, we brush the questions under the rug. I find this to be true in my personal life too, spending a lot of time and energy focusing on how to fix things, rather than just sitting with it and trying to understand.
1) Her discussion of new technology impacting our world (sputnik and atom bomb) seems very applicable to today's issue with AI
2) Labor, Work, and Action. Where is the fun in that? Seriously, there is more to life than that. I wonder why she does not (yet?) make any mention of happiness. The point of labor is survival, but what is the point of work and action?
3) I find her use of the word "condition" confusing. She seems to use it in multiple ways - as a part of being human, as a prequel to being human, etc. She criticizes science for its use of mathematics as language (the entire point of which is clarity), but then is imprecise in her use of this word. I'm pretty sure she is doing this for rhetorical reasons, but it bugs me nonetheless.
I agree that her use of the word "human condition" is confusing. I suppose I had taken that term to mean something abstract about the condition we find ourselves in because of our human nature. It seems like Arendt is using it to describe the condition we find ourselves in because of our environment or outside forces more generally rather than our human nature. I think she is arguing that while human nature is fixed in some sense (and possibly unknowable), the conditions of life, some of which we contribute to, can change our environment and therefore the human condition itself. Her concern seems to be that as we change the conditions for our existence without thinking "What we are doing?" we don't take seriously enough the impact of these changes and the devastation they could create to what makes life good or meaningful. Of course, what makes life good and meaningful is up for grabs whether it is activity, contemplation, or something else.
I would counter your second point by leaning on Allen's foreword; work is defined as "that which we do out of creative effort, to build the things... that shape our world and establish our social connections with others" (xv). I think there's great happiness in these creative and social pursuits, especially when you consider the fact that Arendt views work as a measure of "permanence and durability" (8) in the face of our own mortality and therefore one of the only means to make a lasting impact on the natural world around us. I also think there's great happiness in action, i.e. "the effort we make together as political creatures" (xv), because if we can successfully find ways to work together and shape the world in a way that's acceptable to ourselves and others, we would likely be happier in that world than one in which we are all working in self-interested ways. In essence, much philosophical and psychological thought has pointed to our existence as social creatures, and because both work and action hinge on social bonds and community, I think enhancing those parts of our condition may naturally lead to enhanced happiness.
you may be right, we'll see how she develops her ideas. I have not read any secondary info on Arendt, other than the introduction, so I don't yet know quite where she is going.
I didn't get the impression that her 3 "fundamental" activities were intended as an exhaustive list. Also, in addition to action possibly including some meaningful activities as Jared notes in his response, I also think work is likely to include some as well.
2) my first thought was Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, although admittedly I haven’t read it yet and likely has minimal relevance here
3) not about her use of condition, but I found her comments on math and language really provocative, especially thinking about the place of AI (as noted above) and algorithmic language as a substitution for critical thinking and civic discourse
Christ Almighty I hit the screen with my little finger and it threw away my entire comment. This has a lot to do with how technology is simultaneously helping us and killing us. I am a penand paper guy.
Anyway.
What I originally said.... I do not understand why she says that Marx left the basic structure of action vs contemplation unchanged. Marx turned it upside down, putting action above thought, is this not revolutionary? I hope she expands on this later. It leads to my biggest concern, which is where contemplation fits into her scheme. It is different from thinking, in the view of the Greek philosophers and the Christians as well. Whereas thinking in the public sphere is after all a form of action. This seems to leave out any transcendent perspective -- and leaving that out is the major innovation of the so-called moderns. Does transcendence have any part to play in the human condition ? I know she would say yes, but where?
We’ll see. One thing I think Arendt is doing is shifting emphasis — she thinks contemplation has been discussed over and over, so she doesn’t have to devote much time to it.
Arendt writes in the Prologue: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears” (emphasis mine). In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published just a few years prior to “The Human Condition,” she identified the destruction of the possibility for spontaneous, unique individual action to be one of the main conditions that allowed Totalitarianism, like the Holocaust, to arise. Keeping this in mind really helps me in understanding the driving force behind the book we’re reading: Arendt is trying to restore what she calls “plurality” as an antidote to the threat of Totalitarianism; and to achieve that, she must revitalize the concept of “labor” as a general and permanent human capacity.
But in focusing so heavily on this specific political problem, I worry that Arendt conceptualizes the human condition too narrowly. She admits that her book “deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with those activities that….are within the range of every human being.” This statement troubles me as it implies that this book only deals with the lowest common denominator, so to speak, of human activities. As a result, the complexity, richness, and full potentiality of the human condition may be ignored. I am particularly concerned with the following questions.
First, can thinking and acting, theory and practice, be put back together once they’ve been separated? Arendt writes in the Prologue that “the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking, is left out of these present considerations.” Can we paint a complete and adequate picture of the human condition if we leave out the “highest” and “purest” human activity? It wasn’t until the 70s, right before her death, that Arendt finally published “The Life of the Mind” to explore the nature of thinking.
Second, there seems to be no role for subjective matters such as emotions, personal identities, aspirations, etc., in Arendt’s account of the human condition. Can she explain how we all become unique individuals, as she claims, without resorting to such subjective elements? Is she able to fully explain plurality without incorporating psychology into her descriptions?
Last, I am a lover of the Romantic Poets. What attracts me most in their poetry is a sense of awe in the face of nature. William Wordsworth often writes about how nature has constantly shaped and transformed his whole being. I sometimes get the same feeling when I take walks along the shores of Lake Michigan. The best way for me to describe this feeling is Heidegger’s phrase “a sense of the presence of being.” Can Arendt’s analytical conceptual framework of labor, work, and action capture this sense of the presence of being, which I take to be an essential dimension of my human condition? To go one step further, is there a place for the spiritual, and thereby transcendent, dimension in Arendt's analysis of the human condition?
It is way too early to pass judgement on these questions, but I will keep them firmly in mind as I continue to read “The Human Condition.”
Agreed. Reading the chapter 2 now and it is quite dry without any discussion of affects and subjective experience. Perhaps, she will touch on some of these things later, although perhaps this is not the goal she intended for this book that would be unfortunate. The reason why I am a big fan of Spinoza is that exploration of human emotions makes such a big part of his Ethics
Arendt stresses the importance of reconnecting with the vita activa, emphasizing the role of labor, work, and action in shaping human identity. She critiques the modern impulse to transcend earthly existence, warning that this risks severing humanity from its roots and the shared world. The chapter introduces central philosophical questions that resonate throughout the book, especially the tension between progress and preservation of meaning.
I was not able to post a response to two earlier comments by Jeff Rensch, so I'll try to do it here.
Arendt agrees that Marx has reversed the hierarchy between action and thinking, but she argues that Marx has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of labor; instead of understanding it as containing the potential for unique individuals to act in freedom, he reduces it completely to efforts of necessity and survival. As a result, Arendt wants to split the concept of labor into three different components so that she can highlight the liberatory (or transcendent, using your term) potential of action.
I hope we are allowed a second comment. She has my mind and my heaart churning. Jared, you say she wants to give contemplation a rest. Sounds good. But I am wondering what this activa thing might be. I am intrigued by the 2nd chapter now where she contrasts action with behavior and clearly despises behavior. Action is perhaps one of those historical epochal events that are not possible when social conformity sets in. Or…?
I loved reading the comments but it seemed to me people went too heavily into technology, more heavily than she did. And still can’t understand how Marx left the hierarchy as is. Thanks.
I've had a little interaction with with Arendt's work, and I've generally not liked it. But that was also true for Heidegger, and I've found myself opening up to him. I suppose this read along will help me with a similar opening of the mind. Also the voiceover sounds great :)
Late to the party as always, thanks for posting these for free! First time getting involved in a read along and found your stuff though the Wisecrack interview you did with M.Burns which was fun to watch you guys vibe.
Reading the opening chapter and preface I had major flashback to Sartre's existentialism is humanism in regards to the human condition, although I like Ardent view of human nature being unknowable rather than Satre's of there being none.
The comments below have been very helpful so thanks to everyone who has dug in. I think it is very much in theme of plurality and using the idea's of others to create a rounded view of the world. So far my only idea of activa is one of making thought tangible and I'm looking forward to trying to understand her, and Y'all's idea's over the next reads.
I don't have anything all that cleaver to say so I'll just leave another thanks before I go!
If you like the voiceovers, let me know. Adding them for read-along posts is feasible (takes about 30 minutes for 7 minutes of audio), but I'd only keep doing it if people found them helpful!
It's nice to hear your voice for sure, but I'm not sure it is worth that amount of labor. I use an AI text-to-speech to "read" articles online and maybe others do the same, so I can simult read and hear pieces - it helps me focus. So there is a working alternative for those of us who like to hear/read content.
I love audio. I have Long Covid / ME and listening is a lot less demanding than reading.
I appreciated the voiceover.
I appreciate you doing the voiceovers.
“If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible.”
I sat for quite a while on this line, especially considering she likely couldn’t have imagined the type and level of technological development that would follow after. I wonder if we haven’t separated ‘knowledge’ from ‘thinking’ to a whole extra degree, especially with the development of search engines and now A.I. She hit something interesting, although it seemed almost in passing. Thanks for the introduction to Arendt; I hadn’t encountered her prior.
This passage also struck me. I’ve done a lot of tech support, and have seen the extent to which this is true of basic computer work. Many people who work with computers all day long, and are completely dependent upon them, have only the most rudimentary understanding of how they work. Even of the specific programs (virtual “gadgets”) with which they do the most work, there is often so little understanding. And it does impact the kind of thinking they are capable of doing. They know their work largely by rote—a calcified, fragile understanding of what they themselves are doing. And so their approach to the tool is tentative and even a bit fearful. People who have worked the longest with specific tools are often the most timid about how they are used! I think Arendt’s diagnosis is a solid one—the “know-how” of these tools has become separated from “thought,” and the supposed human agent has lost more and more agency over time.
At the moment, I actually find AI somewhat empowering, and I see others using it in empowering ways as well. But I think that’s a function of its technological infancy. Over time—and probably not much time, at that—it will almost certainly have the same effect, possibly in even more profound ways.
I feel that what she perhaps meant here is that we became dopamine junkies getting high on figuring out how things work. We keep scrolling from knowledge to knowledge without thinking what is all that for, ultimately, what is the purpose of it all? Why do we have this urge or need to figure things out? This is what THINKING is about. For Spinoza, rationally we need to try to learn as much about the world as possible and this will give us pleasure as we will find out more about God or Nature. For Spinoza, the ultimate goal of all knowledge would be intellectual love of God that hopefully eventually comes akin to an enlightenment when you just get it. If one were to take away religion from all this, what is left? Just mindless scrolling.
Maybe cringe, but this made me think of: Prometheus showed us silicon, then we taught it to think.
Arendt's distinctions of labor, work, action reminded me of the Creation mandate in Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 2:15.
LABOR: "God put Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (2:15) -- tending to biological needs;
WORK: God told Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth" (1:28) -- building and maintaining a world fit for human life, ie. culture building through family growth;
ACTION: God told them, "Fill the earth and SUBDUE IT. Rule over the fish and birds and creatures" (1:28) -- affirm the reality of the world and actualize capacity for freedom, enact agency by establishing order within realms of chaos
Why is this an important connection? Because Arendt's ideas are not that far out. They've essentially been with us since the beginning. I'm not suggesting that she intentionally echoes Torah in The Human Condition, but her ideas ring of ancient wisdom, which is, by her on admission, one of her goals.
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of that connection. I’d need to think it over a bit more.
Interesting. I think in my understanding of how Arendt defines the terms, “Be fruitful and multiply” would align more closely with ACTION. I took action to be about interpersonal connection, more than work. Subduing the earth, meanwhile, strikes me more as the way she describes WORK—it’s about productivity and material gain, really.
As I (re)read into her text, I agree with you, Spoko, and would revise my original notes. It is interesting that she looks back at the Genesis creation only so far as to establish plurality but not towards vita activa, which is strange simply because male and female were told to DO stuff in the Garden. I'm curious why Arendt's reference stopped merely at the "them" level.
As a recent college grad, I have to start by saying I'm SO excited to join these read-alongs; I was so nervous about losing a regular route for studying philosophy when I graduated, so this is such a nice way to hold myself accountable and get some intellectual stimulation/conversation outside of work (especially with Arendt, whose work I LOVE reading)!
Keeping with the undergrad theme, ChatGPT rose to infamy during my last couple years in college; I witnessed university policies about AI pop up overnight and was on the receiving end of professors struggling to find ways to root out and/or incorporate AI in the classroom. I bring this up because starting with the foreword and all the way through chapter 1, I saw connections to AI that made this first part of the text highly relevant for me (and clearly other people in these comments did too, it’s definitely on everyone’s minds I think). Arendt writes that “a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial’” (2) and that if we continue on a path that seeks to constantly do more that falls beyond our explanatory capacity, we will ultimately “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking” (3). What scares me is that our “work” (i.e. the “world of objects that human beings build upon the earth” (xxi), things like art, writing, music, clothing, etc.) is becoming increasingly made by AI rather than humans. Additionally, the threat that AI might grow to a point beyond our own understanding due to it’s ability to “do our thinking and speaking” about the things that we nonetheless do but can’t explain seems dystopian to me but not unrealistic. This level of “thoughtlessness” can be represented by the simple phrase “I don’t want to be along with my own thoughts,” which is used a concerning amount among people my age who are dependent on so many technological tools to drown out their own thoughts and intentionally avoid thinking about the world around them. This offloading of work and thought to “artificial” means is rapidly becoming more severe and is on my mind, so I look forward to following this thread through the text.
One thing that I appreciate about Arendt’s perspective on action and politics is just how accessible these things become when we think about them as consistent parts of the human condition rather than specific jobs that specific people with specific traits can fulfill. If someone can think and communicate their thoughts, they can partake in Arendt’s proposal to “think what we are doing” (5). In contrast, our current dependence on science and mathematics for deciding what we do is inherently exclusionary; by relying on fields that “move in a world where speech has lost its power” (4), we have forced “a rupture in the shared linguistic fabric” (xii) that is required for action from a plurality of people. By shifting to a decision-making model that emphasizes interpersonal communication and experience-sharing amongst each other, we would theoretically be able to include people who have been historically excluded from politics, action, and efforts to define truths. Danielle Allen said all this in the foreword much better than I did, but I nonetheless wanted to draw attention to the increased accessibility/inclusivity of Arendt’s proposal.
There’s so much more I could comment on (still in the mode of writing discussion posts and preparing for 2.5-hour lectures clearly, oops) but overall I’m so happy to be reading Arendt again and can’t wait to discuss over Zoom in December!
I have always loved Arendt's Prologue, here an extended quote followed by some thoughts:
"The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environments, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life, man remains related to all other living organisms.
For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix "frozen germ plasm" from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope and thereby, so to speak, escape the human condition. I suspect this same desire underlies the hope to extend man's lifespan far beyond the hundred-year limit.
This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given—a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth.
The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians."
1. I can't help but think of Heidegger as an unnamed interlocutor here, with his obsession with beign towards death and temporality. The condition for the possibility of humankind heretofor has been natality/birth, earth, place, a condition against which man rebels and seeks escape as if in a prison. The misogynist desire for parthogenesis, reproduction outside of the womb, animate all these: AI, going to Mars to escape earth, eugenics, cryogenics, and the fantasy that you can survive with the doomsday bunker your billions can buy. Man will learn, one way or another, that the prison is inside him and he will carry it with him wherever he goes.
In any case, this "strange" opening is ivery important to understanding the motivation here. The condition for the possibility of human life are such, and if we succeed in outstripping earth, which it seems we might do at great cost to most, we will destroy humanity itself. Like ZIzek wrote in his last piece on substack, throwing in with the irrational and risky bet that AI will solve our climate crisis and make up for the fact that its development contributes to hastening our planetary demise.
I also hear Arendt saying, loud and clear, that this is not a scientific or technical problem, so that tech or high tech cannot provide us the solution. It is a human problem, political in the sense that being human is political (Aristotle's definition of the human as a political animal, in this sense), and not solvable by professional politicians. Here is it almost 100 years later, and boy did she clock it.
Her urging us to "think what we are doing" only becomes more essential and more urgent as our technology progresses. As we become increasingly more capable of changing the world, we need to be increasingly more careful in how we do. Sadly, I don't think we are.
Section 3 "Eternity Versus Immortality" was the passage in this chapter that evoked some deeper thinking . I tend to love the concept of understanding our relationship with time, seeing as it flows so differently for each one of us. I have been told my whole life that time moves too fast. My own experience tends to lead me toward time moving slowly, especially as I recall all the events that have happened in a single year, which helps re-affirm those feelings. The following quote from section three sent me down this rabbit hole of thinking about time.
["The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best (aristeuein, a verb for which there is no equivalent in any other language) and who “prefer immortal fame to mortal things,” are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals. This was still the opinion of Heraclitus"]
This passage led me to love the contrasts in eternality and immortality. I never thought of the "enteral" to be outside of the framework of time, which to me conjures up some intangible mysticism to "eternal beings". This might have come from an assumption that had when I was younger, which was, if a higher power created the world we experience, and we experience time, then that higher power would be affiliated with time. This has caused me to think on what being outside of time would be like, would it come with unbound-able powers or would it come with unknown restrictions.
Then to contrast this lack of timeliness with the concept of immortality was striking. Heraclitus's opinion on immortality viewed as a means to separate us from our subordinate animal counterparts was not what I considered immortality to be. I have always thought that there would be some advantage that a person would have if they were immortal which in some ways is true. I never thought of a lasting legacy, a book, a technology, or even a discovery of nature would be considered being immortal. I personally think leaving a positive immortal contribution to humanity is an amazing baseline for all to consider.
I am very excited to read the rest of this book with everyone here and I am curious on everyones opinion wether they experience time quickly or slowly.
To me, eternity is being outside of time. When we think about the Big Bang, spacetime started with that, supposedly. What happened "before" the Big Bang if there was not time before that? Can we even talk about something being "before" the Big Bang? Or, what happens to time inside a black hole? We don't know. The eternity and, hence, the God, whatever one means by God, would be standing outside of the concept of time in that sense perhaps. Also, when we die, if there is something left of us, a "soul" or the Spinozian concept of the eternal part of the human mind that intuitively knows God, or whatever your thoughts on that are, this should be also outside of spacetime and, hence, time. Therefore, if there is no time after death, there is no concept of memory after death either as memory presupposes the past and, hence, time.
We are so preoccupied with figuring out how nature works. One might wonder if this has done us any good in the metaphysical sense. Yes, we can better feed our bodies and inhabit these bodies longer by using modern medicine etc. If one truly believes that all there is to us are those physical bodies, then it makes sense to keep figuring out how everything works in order to inhabit those bodies for as long as possible. The issue is: are we asking the right question here? We keep trying to figure out how "things" work without asking what these "things" are fundamentally. Physicalists think that given enough time they will figure this out too. I think this is naive and the source of our predicament. The problem of consciousness is a big part of it.
Heidegger, Arendt's former teacher, claims that we have forgotten how to ask the question of what is the meaning of Being. He eventually wrote a book called "What is Called Thinking."
I don't think we will ever be able to answer a question like that but thinking about it is very important, probably the most important thing one could do to live a meaningful life in whatever sense one could find it meaningful
I liked your framing of the issue. We keep trying to advance technology because we feel we can, and in that rush of excitement when we're at the threshold of something new, we brush the questions under the rug. I find this to be true in my personal life too, spending a lot of time and energy focusing on how to fix things, rather than just sitting with it and trying to understand.
Some thoughts:
1) Her discussion of new technology impacting our world (sputnik and atom bomb) seems very applicable to today's issue with AI
2) Labor, Work, and Action. Where is the fun in that? Seriously, there is more to life than that. I wonder why she does not (yet?) make any mention of happiness. The point of labor is survival, but what is the point of work and action?
3) I find her use of the word "condition" confusing. She seems to use it in multiple ways - as a part of being human, as a prequel to being human, etc. She criticizes science for its use of mathematics as language (the entire point of which is clarity), but then is imprecise in her use of this word. I'm pretty sure she is doing this for rhetorical reasons, but it bugs me nonetheless.
Action is very broad for Arendt. I think it deals with a lot of what we’d think are meaningful activities.
I agree that her use of the word "human condition" is confusing. I suppose I had taken that term to mean something abstract about the condition we find ourselves in because of our human nature. It seems like Arendt is using it to describe the condition we find ourselves in because of our environment or outside forces more generally rather than our human nature. I think she is arguing that while human nature is fixed in some sense (and possibly unknowable), the conditions of life, some of which we contribute to, can change our environment and therefore the human condition itself. Her concern seems to be that as we change the conditions for our existence without thinking "What we are doing?" we don't take seriously enough the impact of these changes and the devastation they could create to what makes life good or meaningful. Of course, what makes life good and meaningful is up for grabs whether it is activity, contemplation, or something else.
I would counter your second point by leaning on Allen's foreword; work is defined as "that which we do out of creative effort, to build the things... that shape our world and establish our social connections with others" (xv). I think there's great happiness in these creative and social pursuits, especially when you consider the fact that Arendt views work as a measure of "permanence and durability" (8) in the face of our own mortality and therefore one of the only means to make a lasting impact on the natural world around us. I also think there's great happiness in action, i.e. "the effort we make together as political creatures" (xv), because if we can successfully find ways to work together and shape the world in a way that's acceptable to ourselves and others, we would likely be happier in that world than one in which we are all working in self-interested ways. In essence, much philosophical and psychological thought has pointed to our existence as social creatures, and because both work and action hinge on social bonds and community, I think enhancing those parts of our condition may naturally lead to enhanced happiness.
Does labor require social bonds?
you may be right, we'll see how she develops her ideas. I have not read any secondary info on Arendt, other than the introduction, so I don't yet know quite where she is going.
I didn't get the impression that her 3 "fundamental" activities were intended as an exhaustive list. Also, in addition to action possibly including some meaningful activities as Jared notes in his response, I also think work is likely to include some as well.
I couldn’t help but consider AI as well, and even just the now-simple technologies like search engines.
I’m not sure, but maybe her ideas on happiness are tied to the broader topic of action.
1) yes I was making these connections as well
2) my first thought was Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, although admittedly I haven’t read it yet and likely has minimal relevance here
3) not about her use of condition, but I found her comments on math and language really provocative, especially thinking about the place of AI (as noted above) and algorithmic language as a substitution for critical thinking and civic discourse
Well, if she is going to say that having beer with friends is "action", I'll be onboard!
Unless you only do it for the calorie intake (in which case it’s labor), I would consider it to be action.
I wish it were not calorie intake!
Christ Almighty I hit the screen with my little finger and it threw away my entire comment. This has a lot to do with how technology is simultaneously helping us and killing us. I am a penand paper guy.
Anyway.
What I originally said.... I do not understand why she says that Marx left the basic structure of action vs contemplation unchanged. Marx turned it upside down, putting action above thought, is this not revolutionary? I hope she expands on this later. It leads to my biggest concern, which is where contemplation fits into her scheme. It is different from thinking, in the view of the Greek philosophers and the Christians as well. Whereas thinking in the public sphere is after all a form of action. This seems to leave out any transcendent perspective -- and leaving that out is the major innovation of the so-called moderns. Does transcendence have any part to play in the human condition ? I know she would say yes, but where?
We’ll see. One thing I think Arendt is doing is shifting emphasis — she thinks contemplation has been discussed over and over, so she doesn’t have to devote much time to it.
Apparently she changed her mind; she published "The Life of the Mind" later on.
Arendt writes in the Prologue: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears” (emphasis mine). In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published just a few years prior to “The Human Condition,” she identified the destruction of the possibility for spontaneous, unique individual action to be one of the main conditions that allowed Totalitarianism, like the Holocaust, to arise. Keeping this in mind really helps me in understanding the driving force behind the book we’re reading: Arendt is trying to restore what she calls “plurality” as an antidote to the threat of Totalitarianism; and to achieve that, she must revitalize the concept of “labor” as a general and permanent human capacity.
But in focusing so heavily on this specific political problem, I worry that Arendt conceptualizes the human condition too narrowly. She admits that her book “deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with those activities that….are within the range of every human being.” This statement troubles me as it implies that this book only deals with the lowest common denominator, so to speak, of human activities. As a result, the complexity, richness, and full potentiality of the human condition may be ignored. I am particularly concerned with the following questions.
First, can thinking and acting, theory and practice, be put back together once they’ve been separated? Arendt writes in the Prologue that “the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking, is left out of these present considerations.” Can we paint a complete and adequate picture of the human condition if we leave out the “highest” and “purest” human activity? It wasn’t until the 70s, right before her death, that Arendt finally published “The Life of the Mind” to explore the nature of thinking.
Second, there seems to be no role for subjective matters such as emotions, personal identities, aspirations, etc., in Arendt’s account of the human condition. Can she explain how we all become unique individuals, as she claims, without resorting to such subjective elements? Is she able to fully explain plurality without incorporating psychology into her descriptions?
Last, I am a lover of the Romantic Poets. What attracts me most in their poetry is a sense of awe in the face of nature. William Wordsworth often writes about how nature has constantly shaped and transformed his whole being. I sometimes get the same feeling when I take walks along the shores of Lake Michigan. The best way for me to describe this feeling is Heidegger’s phrase “a sense of the presence of being.” Can Arendt’s analytical conceptual framework of labor, work, and action capture this sense of the presence of being, which I take to be an essential dimension of my human condition? To go one step further, is there a place for the spiritual, and thereby transcendent, dimension in Arendt's analysis of the human condition?
It is way too early to pass judgement on these questions, but I will keep them firmly in mind as I continue to read “The Human Condition.”
Agreed. Reading the chapter 2 now and it is quite dry without any discussion of affects and subjective experience. Perhaps, she will touch on some of these things later, although perhaps this is not the goal she intended for this book that would be unfortunate. The reason why I am a big fan of Spinoza is that exploration of human emotions makes such a big part of his Ethics
Arendt stresses the importance of reconnecting with the vita activa, emphasizing the role of labor, work, and action in shaping human identity. She critiques the modern impulse to transcend earthly existence, warning that this risks severing humanity from its roots and the shared world. The chapter introduces central philosophical questions that resonate throughout the book, especially the tension between progress and preservation of meaning.
I was not able to post a response to two earlier comments by Jeff Rensch, so I'll try to do it here.
Arendt agrees that Marx has reversed the hierarchy between action and thinking, but she argues that Marx has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of labor; instead of understanding it as containing the potential for unique individuals to act in freedom, he reduces it completely to efforts of necessity and survival. As a result, Arendt wants to split the concept of labor into three different components so that she can highlight the liberatory (or transcendent, using your term) potential of action.
I hope this explanation helps a little bit.
I hope we are allowed a second comment. She has my mind and my heaart churning. Jared, you say she wants to give contemplation a rest. Sounds good. But I am wondering what this activa thing might be. I am intrigued by the 2nd chapter now where she contrasts action with behavior and clearly despises behavior. Action is perhaps one of those historical epochal events that are not possible when social conformity sets in. Or…?
I loved reading the comments but it seemed to me people went too heavily into technology, more heavily than she did. And still can’t understand how Marx left the hierarchy as is. Thanks.
I've had a little interaction with with Arendt's work, and I've generally not liked it. But that was also true for Heidegger, and I've found myself opening up to him. I suppose this read along will help me with a similar opening of the mind. Also the voiceover sounds great :)
Late to the party as always, thanks for posting these for free! First time getting involved in a read along and found your stuff though the Wisecrack interview you did with M.Burns which was fun to watch you guys vibe.
Reading the opening chapter and preface I had major flashback to Sartre's existentialism is humanism in regards to the human condition, although I like Ardent view of human nature being unknowable rather than Satre's of there being none.
The comments below have been very helpful so thanks to everyone who has dug in. I think it is very much in theme of plurality and using the idea's of others to create a rounded view of the world. So far my only idea of activa is one of making thought tangible and I'm looking forward to trying to understand her, and Y'all's idea's over the next reads.
I don't have anything all that cleaver to say so I'll just leave another thanks before I go!
Hello Jared,
Thank you for your article! It has been very helpful in my reading. I never imagined Hannah Arendt would still be this impactful today.