Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (#3)

I find it easy to write about books I love. Writing about The Red and the Black and The Myth of Sisyphus was easy for me, because I had such an intense response to them.

Writing about Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition is quite a deal harder because it is sometimes very stupid, and sometimes illuminating. I've already read the book, I have a middling response to it, and I want to move on. Yet, I promised myself that I would write a review of it, so I must carry on. But it may not be as detailed as my previous entries. And I may lose motivation partway through, hit "publish" and stop wasting my breath on this book.

Arendt's object is to characterize the viva activa, the active life (as opposed to the viva contemplativa of philosphers) as it has been practiced throughout Western history. She contrasts the life of the Ancient Greek polis to our contemporary society. To her, the viva activa is broken up into three activities: i) Labor, the activity devoted to maintaining our physical bodies, ii) Work, the activities used to construct an "unnatural" world of things, and iii) Action, activity between humans without material intermediaries.

Arendt connects these three activities to the broader human conditions of birth and death, symbolized by a series of contrasts. Consider natality, or the new beginning inherent in the miracle of birth, because of the capacity that a newcomer has to begin something new, to mortality, or the metaphysical condition that each individual person will perish from the earth. Our individual mortality stands in stark contrast to nature: each individual man has a personality and a life story, whereas all of the other creatures of the earth are not differentiated from each other and exist in a life cycle that is in harmony with nature. But then Arendt gestures toward immortality, not in the Tuck Everlasting sense of the inability to die, but the ability to do great and glorious deeds that bards will sing about for all eternity.

To create the conditions for immortality, humans must construct a setting in which great deeds will be performed. This setting must be durable enough to ensure that their descendants will remember them -- in other words, the inhabitants of the state must be able to create a history of their people. The example par excellence is the Ancient Greek polis. Arendt conceives of the polis as the blueprint for the public realm, or the political arena. The public realm is contrasted to the private realm, or the household. In the Greek city-state, according to Arendt, the goings-on of the household were entirely a private affair, hidden from the view of all outside. The administration of the household was essentially an economic affair: the labor needed to upkeep life was managed by the household. To enter the public realm of politics required the fulfillment of the economic necessities of household life. Political economy, in those days, was an oxymoron.

Which means, of course, that householders would only be allowed to enter society if they had sufficient labor to power their households. In the Greek city-states, this was done with slave labor. To the Greeks, slaves were slaves to their human nature first - they lacked the refinement of character to satisfy anything but their basest human instincts. To enter the public realm was to transcend slavishness to the biological life process and construct something that would transcend the individual's lifespan.

This is the first — and most substantial — objection I have to The Human Condition: Arendt's admiration of the Ancient Greek public/private divide amounts to an apologia for slavery. I understand that she had been disenchanted by industrial society with the rise of totalitarianism (Arendt published The Human Condition in 1958), but endorsing slavery is too far. To those of you who think Arendt isn't endorsing slavery, she is practically doing so by omission; she has plenty of critiques for every other system of organization, but does not stop to think how we would reclaim the public realm in our liberal society without introducing slavery, or some other form of labor exploitation to screen for "the best people", as Donald Trump would say. This is a classic reactionary move: to claim that we have to burn down society in order to save it. Think I'm exaggerating?

"The worldlessness of the animal laborans, to be sure, is entirely different from the active flight from the publicity of the world which we found inherent in the activity of "good works". The animal laborans does not flee the world but is ejected from it in so far as he is imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfillment of needs in which nobody can share and which nobody can fully communicate. The fact that slavery and banishment into the household was, by and large, the social condition of all laborers prior to the modern age is primarily due to the human condition itself; life, which for all other animal species is the very essence of their being, becomes a burden to man because of his innate "repugnance to futility". Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt it was the natural condition of life itself. ... The price for the elimination of life's burden from the shoulders of all citizens was enormous and by no means consisted only in the violent injustice of forcing one part of humanity into the darkness of pain and necessity. Since this darkness is natural, inherent in the human condition --only the act of violence, when one group of men tries to rid itself of the shackles binding all of us to pain and necessity, is man-made--the price for absolute freedom from necessity is, in a sense, life itself, or rather the substitution of vicarious life for real life."

Arendt cleverly sets up slavery as a "natural" condition, which give her an excuse to avoid asking hard questions about how political power was seized in the polis to begin with. One recollection I have from studying Ancient Greek history is that the Greeks regarded anyone who didn't speak Greek as barbarians. Those who were captured in war were condemned to slavery. One wonders how much the members of the polis would be incentivized to win wars of conquest to build up their stores of slave labor. The polis is meant to be a setting to trumpet one's great deeds, after all -- what could be a greater deed than victory over the enemy from across the sea?

The next problem I have with The Human Condition is Arendt's characterization of modernity as the victory of the animal laborans (her moniker for the slavish component of man, as referred to in the quote above). Her reasoning is that industrialization has provided humanity with repetitive means to be productive via capital. The production function of the animal laborans now matches the rhythm of the machines they operate. The endless character of the assembly line mimics the endless character of labor done for survival, as the products of industry are shipped off to distant lands and the operator merely has to pull the same lever again and again and again. The abundance created by the interaction of animal laborans and capital is a consumer society, where goods are made to be consumed, not used, so they can be replaced by new copies made on the assembly line. In this way, a mass culture develops.

Because the goods made by the animal laborans on the assembly line are meant to be consumed by the animal laborans within the home, the private realm becomes the driving force of the world. By doing so, Arendt claims the private realm is warped into the social realm, which is a unique occurrence in human history: to Arendt, the citizen has been robbed of their arena to act. All activities outside of participating in the new economy is rendered a "hobby", an epithet Arendt hisses with venom, just as she does with the idea of "making a living".

And that is not the only thing that occasions the victory of the animal laborans. She claims that her ideal of work -- embodied by the homo faber (Man the maker) -- has been destroyed by the ascension of mechanized labor:

"We live in a laborers' society because only laboring, with its inherent fertility, is likely to bring about abundance; and we have changed work into laboring, broken it up into its minute particles until it has lent itself to division where the common denominator of the simplest performance is reached in order to eliminate from the path of human labor power -- which is part of nature and perhaps even the most powerful of all natural forces -- the obstacle of the "unnatural" and purely worldly stability of the human artifice."

With the liberation that the modern economy has given them from a life lived in toil and trouble, what could the laborer do that would satisfy Arendt? Surely it would not be acting (in the sense that Arendt defines it), because the laborer's "slave mentality" renders them ineligible for political discourse. But all other activities are closed off to them as being either acts of consumption or mere hobbies.

Some parts of The Human Condition descend into self-parody. For example, Arendt glorifies the application of violence because she connects violence to the need of homo faber to apply "violence" to Nature to fashion tools. Homo faber must destroy nature in order to build a more durable world; he is a Promethean figure. Arendt suggests that this violence is the application of human strength, which renders it a higher virtue than mere labor, which only involves effort, the sweat of one's brow. Violence is good, remember?

"The emancipation of labor and the concomitant emancipation of the laboring classes from oppression and exploitation certainly meant progress in the direction of non-violence. It is much less certain that it was also progress in the direction of freedom. No man-exerted violence, except the violence used in torture, can match the natural force with which necessity itself compels... It was the arts of violence, the arts of war, piracy, and ultimately absolute rule, which brought the defeated into the services of the victors and thereby held necessity in abeyance for much of recorded history. The modern age, must more markedly than Christianity, has brought about -- together with its glorification of labor -- a tremendous degradation in the estimation of these arts and a less great but not less important actual decrease in the use of the instruments of violence in human affairs generally. The elevation of labor and the necessity inherent in the laboring metabolism with nature appear to be intimately connected with the downgrading of all activities which either spring directly from violence, as the use of force in human relations, or harbor an element of violence within themselves, which, as we shall see, is the case for all workmanship. It is as though the growing elimination of violence throughout the modern age almost automatically opened the doors for the re-entry of necessity on its most elementary level." [emphasis mine]

Next is Arendt's lack of precision in distinguishing between the homo faber living in a world of use and durability on one hand, and the animal laborans living in a world of consumption on the other. Here's a paragraph where she attempts to describe the difference:

"Use, indeed, does contain an element of consumption, in so far as the wearing-out process comes about through the contact of the use object with the living consuming organism, and the closer the contact between the body and the used thing, the more plausible will an equation between the two appear... Against this stands what we mentioned before, that destruction, though unavoidable, is incidental to use but inherent in consumption. What distinguishes the most flimsy pair of shoes from mere consumer goods is that they do not spoil if I do not wear them, that they have an independence of their own, however modest, which enables them to survive even for a considerable time the changing moods of their owner."

What Arendt seems to be decrying here are changing fashions and planned obsolescence. But the shocking fact that, in the paragraph above, the most flimsy pair of shoes is used as an example of something made by homo faber and not a mere consumer object, shows the flimsiness of her logic.

At this point, I feel like I've spilled too much ink on this book. I have become so disenchanted with Arendt's critique that I do not think she needs me to give her credit for points that I agree with. Maybe this makes me a bad critic. I don't care. With the passage of time, I may return to the book to praise her reflections on political action. But that time is not now.

There is a term that the Very Online use to describe their ideological radicalization - getting "blackpilled". Reading The Human Condition was almost the opposite — in my repulsion from it, I recognize how strongly I embrace a more normal set of political ideas. Call it globalist liberalism if you must, but unlike Arendt, I acknowledge that we live in a time of relative peace and prosperity and that is something to celebrate. Her "blackpilled" compatriots long for the return for a Golden Age of the Greek city state or feudalism or whatever other retro aesthetic they gravitate towards because they think it will be them who are the lords of the revanchist society they fashion -- not the animal laborans forced to suffer in silence, deprived of the knowledge and tools needed to lift them out of a life of endless toil because their betters think they are capable of nothing more. The past 150 years of human history has defeated that idea resoundingly.