My copy of The Human Condition (THC) is back in service once again. During the past year, spurred on by a pandemic-created opportunity, I joined the Virtual Reading Group sponsored by Hannah Arendt Center of Bard College. After having read three of Arendt's books, Men in Dark Times (1968), Essays in Understanding 1930--1954: Formation, Exile, & Totalitarianism (2005) , and The Promise of Politics (2005), we're now turning to what I consider to be the centerpiece of Arendt's project, THC, which was published in 1958. I don't know how many times I've read it. When I purchased it, I was taking a year off from my undergraduate studies, and I assume that I read it during that period. Then, when I returned to complete my senior year, I took a course entitled "Contemporary Political Theory" that assigned THC as a required book. As I recall, before taking that class (also probably in my year away) I read Arendt's Between Past and Future: Eight Exercise in Political Thought (1961), a collection of essays about contemporary political thinking and related topics (history, education, culture). Thus, when I took the class on "Contemporary Political Thought" in the fall of 1975, I cam pre-loaded with Arendtian thoughts. The instructor, in his final evaluation, stated that he wished that my focus in the class had not centered so much on Arendt. Then, during law school, the same teacher (now on the tenure track) offered a class solely about Arendt, and he kindly allowed me to sit-in. Since then, I don't know how often I've gone back to THC and other of Arendt's works, but I did. I never lost touch with Arendt, so to speak. Then, in 2016, along with many others, I turned instinctively toward Arendt as the American republic entered a new, dangerous phase.
So, this isn't my first THC rodeo. Perhaps it's needless to say, but I'll do so anyway: I think that there's more I can get out of this book. And in an effort to do so, I intend to write a series of essays as we read through the book in our Virtual Reading Group, hoping to spur my efforts and to share what insights that I can glean. Now, to the Prologue.
Synopsis:
In 1957 "an earth-born object made by man was launched int the universe . . . ." (1). This event was more important than the splitting of the atom and should have "been treated with unmitigated joy" except for the fear of the military and political consequences surrounding the event. (1). [The Soviets gained an upper-hand in the "space race."] But the joy accompanying this event wasn't "triumphal" or a celebration of human achievement, but one of "relief" that humankind had taken "'the first step toward escape from men's [sic] imprisonment to the earth.'" (1). Humans have kept pace with scientific and technological development, often imagining such events before they occur. The "respectable press" (2), however, hasn't kept up, while the genre of science fiction writing, which serves as an unattended vehicle of "mass sentiments and mass desires." has. (2). Although Christians and philosophers have often sensed this world as a vale of tears and the body as a prison, before this new era no one had thought of going to the moon as an escape. "Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with the turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, and with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?" (2).
"The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition" (2) and is, so far as we know, unique in the universe. "Human artifact" separates us from "the mere animal environment" but life is based outside of the human artifact, although scientists have been striving to create artificial life to expand the powers and length of human life. Humans seem to be rebelling against the life given to them. There is no doubt that this course of action can be followed, 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." (3).
But already science itself is starting to suffer a crisis. "The trouble concerns the fact that the "truths" of the modern scientific worldview, thought that can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expressions in speech and thought." (3). We humans may be condemned to live in a universe that we can never fully comprehend. "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, no matter how murderous it is." (3).
The "situation created by sciences is of great political significance. Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, the matter becomes political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being." (3). We cannot "speak" with mathematical symbols, which are abstractions from reality. In science, mathematical symbols are a source of communication, but not so in the wider world. In a sense, science has lost speech and therefore its entryway into politics. To make sense of the world, to make it meaningful, it must be spoken about. "There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves." (4).
Perhaps of equal significance is the advance of automation, which could reduce the demand for labor, by which the modern age has come to see society as a "laboring society." (4). And while escape from labor by most people has been much sought-after for ages (limited as it was to the elite), freed from the fetters of labor, many wouldn't know what to do with themselves. People wouldn't know how to respond to higher callings. "
Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor's way of making men live together, where no class left, no artistocary of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary indviduals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left them. Surely, nothing could be worse. (5).
Arendt offers no solution to these concerns. There is no single "answer" by any single person to such concerns and they therefore a matter of practical politics. Arendt states the purpose of this work:
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. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thougtlessness--the heedless recklessness of hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of "truths" which have become trivial and empty--seeems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
"What we are doing" is indeed the central theme of this book. It deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with those activities that traditionally, as well as according to current opinion, are within the range of every human being. For this and other reasons, the hightest and perhaps purest activitiy of which men are capable, the activiting of thinking, is left out of these present considerations. (5).
The book therefore will only address labor, work, and action. The final chapter deals with "the modern age," and throughout she deals with the "various constellations with the hierarchy of activities as we them from Western history." (6).
Arendt distinguishes"the modern age" from "the modern world." Arendt states that the modern age began in the seventeenth century and ended at the beginning of the twentieth century. "The modern world" began as a political matter with the first atomic explosion. Arendt does not discuss "the modern world" in this book. Arendt sticks to the three primary characteristics of the human condition: labor, work, and action. And she will trace the historical development of "modern world alienation" that comes to include the "flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self . . . .to arrive at an understanding of the nature of society as it had developed and presented itself at the very moment when it was overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age." (6).
Commentary:
If I was given only the Prologue to read without any background and without any background knowledge, how would I know that I was written in 1958 and not 2020? Perhaps the reference to the launch of a satellite into earth orbit (Sputnik) in 1957 without mention of the moon landings by astronauts, Mars landings, and reports from satellites at the furthest edges of the solar system gives it away. But still, the Prologue continues to have a very contemporary feel to it.
Is the exploration of outer space (I know, I date myself with this term) the most significant event of my life (b. 1953)? I don't feel that way. As a baby boomer, I grew up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. I'm old enough to have been (roughly) aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the implications of a nuclear war. (I grew up an hour's drive from Offut Air Force Base, SAC headquarters. One didn't have to be a junior Einstein to know that in the event of a war, that place was a prime target if the missiles and bombers actually went where intended, and I knew that fallout knew few bounds.) In short, that threat of nuclear annihilation by instant incineration or the slow burn of fallout weighed very heavy on my mind growing up and when my classmates and I were asked this question in class I took on Arendt. Now, I'm more worried about the slow boil of climate change. But alas, there seems to be no rule of having only one "existential risk" (a term I dislike) at a time.
The Prologue also includes her reference to the threat of "automation" to jobs. This seems to have been a concern, of greater or lesser degrees, my entire life. The topic is again hot, as the idea of "driverless" cars and other forms of automation, using high-powered computers and AI algorithms again seem to threaten the loss of many traditional forms of labor. (See Noah Yuval Harari, for instance, in his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, for a widely commented upon example.) If this proves true, Arendt's fear that people won't know what to do with themselves could prove prescient. As someone who worked in a profession and is now happy to read and then scribble, scribble, scribble, this strikes me as not such a bad thing, But a society that comes to depend on bread and circuses (or junk food & Super Bowls) to occupy the under-employed seems not to be a good bet--and this assumes that these displaced workers would have sufficient income to live upon without generating resentment, which is not a certainty not a given considering our current predominant economic and cultural ideologies.
This essay provides a useful introduction to the whole of the work. The trinity of what Arendt will later in the book dub "the vita activa," labor, work, and action, is here, along with her idea that speech is the heart of politics. Although she does not say it directly in this book as I recall; she considers many actions that we would consider "political," which involve the use of violence, threats, and other forms of coercion, as not "politics" at all, an issue that will continue to arise from reading this and other of her works.
In the early 1960s. in a televised interview (the transcript of which is included in Essays in Understanding), Arendt eschewed the label of "philosopher" and preferred to call herself a "political theorist." One can respect Arendt's desire here and one can see her point in these works, but in the prologue and later in THC, one can still see Arendt the philosopher shining through. (Not to mention her first major work, her dissertation (habilitation) on the concept of love in St. Augustine and her Gifford Lectures published as The Life of the Mind on the trinity of the vita contemplativa, thinking, willing, and judging, which was the final book that she wrote (and the final section, on judging, was incomplete at the time of her death). The idea of "world alienation" and the flight from the earth and from "the world into the self" reveal her deep philosophical grounding and concerns. These tells found throughout THC and confirm Arendt's underlying calling as a philosopher and not simply as a political theorist.
N.B. Arendt distinguishes "the human condition" from "human nature." She also distinguishes "thinking" (solitary, "useless") from "action" & "speech" (which are closely related.). Her ideas about "thought" & "thinking" are quite different from the use of "thought" in R.G. Collingwood, which entails all intentional human cognition (planning, strategy, theorizing, etc.) and all actions taken pursuant to such "thought."
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