The Human Condition

Citation
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Prologue
"In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies - the sun, the moon, and the stars. [...] This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it. But, curiously enough, this joy was not triumphal [...] The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first 'step toward escape from man's imprisonment to the earth.'" (1)

Science catching up to what humans have aspired to for a long time; science fictional modes of representation and thought have forecasted present conditions. But what to do now is not a question for scientists, but rather a political question. (3)

Science as becoming untethered from expression, speech. "Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being." (3)

-Here be rhetoric!

Modern society as a laboring society, but one which is soon to be free from this condition of labor and we don't know what to do next or how to live otherwise. "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. [...] What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing." (5)

-Labor, work, and action as the most common denominator of human activity - not thought.

The Human Condition
"Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body [...] The human condition of labor is life itself.

"Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence [...] The human condition of work is worldliness.

"Action [...] corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. [...] This plurality is specifically the condition [...] of all political life." (7)

Vita activia designates labor, work, and action, fundamental human conditions that are concerned with human existence from birth to death, natality to mortality. (8) "Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers." (9)

-Vita activia concerned with futurity? Cf. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble?

The problem of human self-knowledge - the inability to be a rational self-knower because we lack a vantage point from which to see and know ourselves as a what, not a who. (10)

Vita activia and vita contemplativa - political life in relation to contemplative life; in ancient Greece, vita activia comes to be associated with the political, the unquiet, that which disturbs the quiet contemplation. "It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity, even the processes of mere thought, must culminate in the absolute quiet of contemplation." (15)

Arendt proposes vita activia as different from vita contemplativa, but does not perpetuate the implicit hierarchy between these modes of life. (17)

Difference between immortality and eternity - immortality in relation to the mortal, the human, while the eternal is transcendent and beyond the human. Mortals perform immortal deeds to leave non-perishable traces behind, attain an immortality of their own, proving man's divine nature: "Only the best, who constantly prove themselves to be the best and who 'prefer immortal fame to mortal things,' are really human" (19).

The eternal, on the other hand, is the inexpressible, unable to be thought or symbolized - though it is the realm of theoria, contemplation. But any attempt to symbolize (such as through writing or speech) interrupts contemplation - hence why Socrates did not write.

Man: A Social or a Political Animal
Arendt distinguishes between the political and the social - a distinction that is important for the Greeks, but that becomes conflated in Latin (Aristotle's zoon politikon becomes Seneca's animal socialis becomes Aquinas' homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis). "The word 'social' is Roman in origin and has no equivalent in Greek language or thought." (23)

For the Homeric Greeks, "Thought was secondary to speech, but speech and action were considered to be coeval and coequal, of the same rank and the same kind [...] finding the right words at the right moment, quite apart from the information or communication they may convey, is action." (25-26) Rhetoric is action! (And Arendt identifies rhetoric as "the arts of war and speech")

Later, emphasis shifts from action to speech-as-persuasion. Being political meant preferring speech to action, so that violent solutions to problems were considered un- or prepolitical - the domain of despotic rather than democratic life, such as barbarians or private families.

The Polis and the Household
Family as social life, so that "the collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family is what we call 'society,' and its political form of organization is called 'nation'" (29).

"What prevented the polis from violating the private lives of its citizens and made it hold sacred the boundaries surrounding each property was not respect for private property as we understand it, but the fact that without owning a house a man could not participate in the affairs of the world because he had no location in it which was properly his own." (29-30) Ownership of and access to the private is what constitutes the public, allows a person the buy-in to be invested in a public. (The importance of enfranchising citizens; what might this mean for projects like Deleuze and Guattari who seek to deterritorialize? Or more abstractly, for a discipline like rhetoric which has no home?)

The realm of the polis and public life is one of freedom from obligation or necessity - of biological life or power relations. "This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health." (31) Essentially, privilege. "To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled." (32)

Progressing to the medieval, public life became a source of caring for the common good, while private family life was a matter of caring for the individual.

The Rise of the Social
Link between privacy and (de)privation

Arendtian biopolitics? (40)

Division of labor between men and women - women cared for the family, men for the individual; similarly bifurcated into the domestic and public spheres - "The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were" (41).

The social replaces action with behavior - a norming of attitudes and actions. Excellence, the domain of the individual achievement, becomes flattened. The impact on history - making it less likely that excellent or noteworthy events will happen; as we trend towards a norm, "deeds will have less and less chance to stem the tide of behavior, and events will more and more lose their significance, that is, their capacity to illuminate historical time" (43).

"The initial science of economics, which substitutes patterns of behavior only in this rather limited field of human activity, was finally followed by the all-comprehensive pretension of the social sciences which, as 'behavioral sciences,' aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal. If economics is the science of society in its early stages [...] the rise of the 'behavioral sciences' indicates clearly the final stage of this development" (45). The social sciences and the flat/thin reading of human behavior in society.

On excellence (arete for the Greeks, virtus for the Romans) - "for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one's peers [...] While we have become excellent in the laboring we perform in public, our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality since the rise of the social realm banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private" (49).

-What does this mean for Quintilian's "good man speaking well"? Is this form of excellence no longer possible? What follows for rhetoric's civic role?

The Public Realm: The Common
Two meanings for "public"

1) "That everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity." (50)

2) "The term' public' signifies the world itself [...] This world, however, is not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men and the same time" (52).

"If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only' it must transcend the life-span of mortal men" (55)

-Rhetoric's civic function - not just focusing on ourselves in the present, but thinking in terms of relationships to come

"Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life."

"The destruction of the common world [...] can happen under conditions of radical isolation, where nobody can any longer agree with anybody else [...] But it may also happen under conditions of mass society or mass hysteria, where we see all people suddenly behave as though they were members of one family [...] In both instances, men have become entirely private, that is, they have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and being heard by them" (58).

-This, I think, is W131's link to the civic - the emphasis on representation and how we see; in what ways does W131 turn the issue on the students, to think about how we represent ourselves or are seen by others? What is the role of critical distance in this model of public engagement?

The Location of Human Activities
Goodness and wisdom as that which is hidden from the world, unattainable and imperceptible; "When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness, though it may still be useful as organized charity or an act of solidarity" (74).

The Disclosure of the Agent in Speech and Action
Human distinctness, not otherness - "Otherness in its most abstract form is found only in the sheer multiplication of inorganic objects, whereas all organic life already shows variations and distinctions. [...] In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, become uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings. Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness." (176)

-Speech and action constitute the human, place in relation to other humans and insert the person into the world.

Greek and Latin verbs - to act and to begin.

"If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals." (178) Here is rhetoric again! Through speech and action, we appear to others and show ourselves for who we are, distinct from others.

The Web of Relationships and the Enacted Stories
"The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is [...] we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us." (181)

-Compare with Nietzsche's "Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense" (language as convention, eliding uniqueness of experience), Burke's "Terministic Screens" (symbolic action's ability to select, reflect, deflect)

"Action and speech go on between men [...] and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively 'objective,' [...] interests constitute, in the word's most literal significance, something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between [...] We call this reality the 'web' of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality" (182-183).

The web of human affairs binds us together, produces stories - but nobody is the author of their own story; stories reveal an agent, but the agent is not the author or producer of speech and action.

The Frailty of Human Affairs
Greek verbs - archein (to begin, to lead, to rule) and prattein (to pass through, to achieve, to finish) - that correspond to Latin verbs - agere (to set into motion, to lead) and gerere (to bear). Action divided into two parts, beginning (initiated by a single person) and achievement. "In both cases the word that originally designated only the second part of action, its achievement became the accepted word for action in general, whereas the words designating the beginning of action became specialized in meaning, at least in political language" (189), coming to mean simply "to lead."

Action as boundless, unpredictable, only revealing itself fully to the storyteller, "that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants" (192). The role of the critic? Critique as backwards-looking, founded on another text, action, etc.

The Greek Solution
RE: The impossibility of knowing self to be good - for the Greeks, nobody can be called eudaimon before they have died; for Catholics, saints are only posthumously recognized. "For eudaimonia means neither happiness nor beatitude; it cannot be translated and perhaps cannot even be explained. It has the connotation of blessedness, but without any religious overtones, and it means literally something like the well-being of the daimon who accompanies each man throughout life, who is his distinct identity, but appears and is visible only to others. Unlike happiness, therefore, which is a passing mood, and unlike good fortune, which one may have at certain periods of life and lack in others, eudaimonia, like life itself, is a lasting state of being which is neither subject to change nor capable of effecting change." (193)

-The question of whether rhetoric can teach virtue, then, isn't such a great one. Thus perhaps also rhetoric and composition's recourse to teaching habits over prescriptive actions?

"The original, prephilosophic Greek remedy for this frailty had been the foundation of the polis. [...] First, it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under certain restrictions, what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinar and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their households. The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win 'immortal fame,' that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness. [...] The second function of the polis, again closely connected with the hazards of action as experienced before its coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech [...] In other words, men's life together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made 'products,' the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable. The organization of the polis [...] is a kind of organized remembrance" (196-198).

Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive
"The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility [...] is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictabliity, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises (237).

-Forgiveness undoes the past, promises bind the future

"Without being forgiven [...] our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover [...] Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities [...] Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself" (237).

Jesus's teachings on forgiveness, which have been overlooked by political philosophy since it is originated in a religious context. According to Jesus, "first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God [...] but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also" (239).

-Forgiveness is necessary because "they know not what they do," trespass and error as everyday occurrences that are more common exigences for forgiveness than crime, willed evil, or sin.

"Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action's constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly" (240).

-Does forgiveness require forgetting? Compare with Burke on the study of past error.

"In contrast to revenge [...] the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven" (241).

-Compare with Burke on action vs motion?

Punishment as the alternative to forgiveness; we cannot forgive that which we cannot punish, cannot punish what is unforgiveable.

"Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. [...] and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive [...] Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world." (242)

-Fascinating! Cf. Theology of the Body, obviously, but what about Lee Edelman's antisocial thesis?

"Yet what love is in its own, narrowly circumscribed sphere. respect is in the larger domain of human affairs. Respect [...] is a kind of 'friendship' without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem. [...] Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person." (243)

-Regard as a thing, but isn't it also a verb (to regard someone)? What is the substance of this regard - what are its limits (when is it permissible to withdraw our respect and regard, and in turn the possibility of forgiveness?)

Unpredictability and the Power of Promise
"The danger and the advantage in all bodies politic that rely on contracts and treaties is that they, unlike those that rely on rule and sovereignty, leave the unpredictability of human affairs and the unreliability of men as they are, using them merely as the medium [...] into which certain islands of predictability are thrown and in which certain guideposts of reliability are erected. The moment promises lose their character as isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty, that is, when this faculty is misused to cover the whole ground of the future and to map out a path secured in all directions, they lose their binding power and the whole enterprise becomes self-defeating" (244).

-Sedgwick and Silvan Tompkins' language of strong vs. weak theory? Against strong promises, insistence on weak, contingent promises?

For Nietzsche, promises as the distinction between humans and animals.

"The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin. [...] It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born" (246-247).