The Human Condition

Review

Quick disclaimer to say that I am woefully unqualified to review Arendt. I am not well read philosophically. I picked this up alongside Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling because 1) it kept showing up in other books I read, notably GHAM and The Long Form; and 2) I am interested in ideas around “goodness” – what it is, how to be it, what it means to be it. Arendt speaks relatively little about goodness.

I am not going to try and summarize her ideas as I might in another review, I just don’t have it in me and I don’t have a good enough grasp on them to do so competently. She lays the book out in sections, The Human Condition, The Public and the Private Realm, Labor, Work, Action, and The Vita Activa and the Modern Age. I imagine folks who are thoughtful about the specific differences between work and labor would find this a seminal text. I am not.

I was most interested in the sections on The Public and the Private Realm and Action.

One thing Arendt seems to insist on reliably about virtues in general is that they must be hidden and in some cases totally unknown to the author of them, to be valid and not cravenly political:

This, to be sure, does not mean that private concerns are generally irrelevant; on the contrary, we shall see that there are very relevant matters which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance, love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. ("Never seek to tell thy love / Love that never told can be.") Because of its inherent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world.

(page 51)

Arendt here quotes William Blake’s Love’s Secret, which I think deeply misunderstands what it means to confess love and misrepresents the benefits and costs of doing so. I will write more about this elsewhere. Suffice to say, I believe: love told may weep; love told may sing; love never told can never be.

Similarly, however, Arendt writes about goodness:

The one activity taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide from being seen or heard. Christian hostility toward the public realm, the tendency at least of early Christians to lead a life as far removed from the public realm as possible, can also be understood as a self-evident consequence of devotion to good works, independent of all beliefs and expectations. For it is manifest that the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness' sake.

(pg 74, but really throughout 73-77).

I fundamentally disagree with Arendt’s position here and have written about that in three articles in differing contexts: To Be Good, What’s in a Name and Shame—Pride.

It is possible that Arendt is speaking about virtue in specifically political maneuverings, after all she does cite Machiavelli here. I went and pulled my copy of The Prince from the shelf and re-read her cited chapter 15. I don’t see anything here that means virtue cannot be valid. I think intention matters. See my other writing for more, there’s no reason for me to re-write here.

Most of this has aged very well. Perhaps disturbingly well (we can use that dreaded word, prescient to discuss her recollections of tyranny and terror in the 40’s applied to today’s political environment). However, there is one section on love that I think falls in a specifically heteronormative world and thus misses a dynamic of existence totally:

For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives,(^81) indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. 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 insert a new world into the existing world. ... Love, by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.

Footnote:

81. The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

(page 242, emphasis mine)

For me, this might be the most interesting paragraph in the book. Parts, like love destroying the in-between, I agree with. I think love does eradicate all vision of shortcomings and faults in the object of love. We can come to love someone so deeply that even their faults are endearing to us, because they show the person’s specific character. Perfection is not interesting, unreal, and unlovable. Yet, I think this is a super heteronormative view of love. Because love can only be apolitical and even antipolitical when its existence and fulfillment is not the object of a political hatred and goal (i.e., the eradication or suppression of that love). We unfortunately do not have the option of letting our love be apolitical or antipolitical. In the home and with each other, it can be, but once it enters the public realm–which, contrary to what Arendt insists earlier, it does–it becomes a political act. Ultimately, I think that love is the most human of actions and I’m not sure it can ever really be apolitical, even in a heteronormative context.

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Anyway, I found this very thought provoking, though it took me forever to read. My eyes wanted to glaze over in the Labor and Work sections, though I suspect I may return to them in search of points someday. I did find this challenging to read in that it took effort but ultimately it was not exactly hard, just challenging.

I took a great many notes, here are a few that I think are worth including here that I haven’t already quoted above:

Notes

Prologue

• p4 - The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgement of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of “character”–that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons–or their naivete–that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use–but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lots its power. And whatever men do not know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about.
• p4 - 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.

The Human Condition

• p7 - Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings.
• p10 - It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural esssences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves–this would be like jumping over our own shadows.
• p18 - Immortality means endurance in time, deathless life on this earth and in this world as it was given, according to Greek understanding, to nature and the Olympian gods.
• p26 - Only sheer violence is mute, and for this reason violence alone can never be great. Even when, relatively late in antiquity, the arts of war and speech (rhetoric) emerged as the two principal political subjects of education, the development was still inspired by this older pre-polis experience and tradition and remained subject to it.

The Public and the Private Realm

• p40 - As we know from the most social form of government, that is, from bureaucracy (the last stage of government in the nation-state just as one-man rule in benevolent despotism and absolutism was its first), the rule by nobody is not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its cruelest and most tyrannical versions.
• The laws of statistics are valid only where large numbers or long periods are involved, and acts or events can statistically appear only as deviations or fluctuations.
• p51 - This, to be sure, does not mean that private concerns are generally irrelevant; on the contrary, we shall see that there are very relevant matters which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance, love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. (“Never seek to tell thy love / Love that never told can be.”) Because of its inherent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world.
  • TB: I detest Arendt’s insistence that virtue must be hidden and in some cases not even known to its author to be valid. She says this also of goodness. Neither goodness nor love must be withheld in the dark hearts of man to be valid. Arendt here quotes William Blake’s Love’s Secret, which I think deeply misunderstands what it means to confess love and misrepresents the benefits and costs of doing so. I will write more about this elsewhere. Suffice to say: love told may weep; love told may sing; love never told can never be.
• p54 - Note re: charity as a political device, creating a counterworld with additional rules and regulations. Cites article 57 of the Benedictine rule in Levasseur. I don’t remember exactly why I highlighted this long section. In the citation, Arendt summarizes the Article as, “If one of the monks became proud of his work, he had to give it up,” which I find a bit disordered and is probably why I highlighted it.
• p55-56 - There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity. The latter being the concern of philosophers and the vita contemplativa, must remain outside our present considerations. But the former is testified to by the current classification of striving for immortality with the private vice of vanity. Under modern conditions, it is indeed so unlikely that anybody should earnestly aspire to an earthly immortality that we probably are justified in thinking it is nothing but vanity. (TB: emphasis mine.)
• p57-58 - Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, …, everybody is always concerned with the same object. If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of men, least of all the unnatural conformism of a mass society, can prevent the destruction of the common world, which is usually preceded by the destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself to human plurality. This can happen under conditions of radical isolation, where nobody can any longer agree with anybody else, as is usually the case in tyrannies. (TB: this goes on for several more lines and they’re all depressing but you get the point)
• p59 - Note re: “mass phenomenon of loneliness” which in 1950 seems quaint.
• p67 - …Proudhon hesitated to accept the doubtful remedy of general expropriation, because he knew quite well that the abolition of private property, while it might cure the evil of poverty, was only too likely to invite the greater evil of tyranny.
• p74 - The one activity taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide from being seen or heard. Christian hostility toward the public realm, the tendency at least of early Christians to lead a life as far removed from the public realm as possible, can also be understood as a self-evident consequence of devotion to good works, independent of all beliefs and expectations. For it is manifest that the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’ sake. … (TB: this goes on for quite a while all about goodness. I have notes from pages 74-78 and I’m not going to type them all out. I fundamentally disagree with Arendt’s position here and have written about that in To Be Good, What’s in a Name and Shame—Pride).
  • Trivia: On page 77, Arendt reference’s Machiavelli’s The Prince chapter 15 and I had to go get my copy, which I purchased in a Powell’s Bookstore in Chicago in 2013, to have a look. Arendt does not engage with the idea that Machiavelli’s text is somewhat satirical or written with personal political intention at the time, but that is basically fine in this context IMO.

Labor

• p79 - Arendt opens with the objectively hilarious, “In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized.” What a way to open the chapter, “Labor.”
• p120 - The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life.
• p121 - Men cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity….. For it is still probable that the enormous changes of the industrial revolution behind us and the even greater changes of the atomic revolution before us will remain changes of the world, and not changes in the basic condition of human life on earth.
• p129 - The modern age, much 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 instruments of violence in human affairs generally.
• p134 - The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.

Work

• p172 - …the sense in which the modern age understood the term, namely, an animal species which differs from other animals in that it is endowed brain power, then the newly invented electronic machines, which, sometimes to the dismay and sometimes to the confusion of their inventors, are so spectacularly more “intelligent” than human beings, would indeed be homonculi. As it is, they are, like all machines, mere substitutes and artificial improvers of human labor power…
• TB: I basically was not super interested in the chapters on Labor and Work. Oops.

Action

• 178 - Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?”
• p181 - The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is. … his specific uniqueness escapes us.
• p186 - The hero the story discloses needs no heroid qualities; … The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a williness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own. And this courage is not necessarily or even primariy related to a willingness to suffer the consequences; courage and even boldness are alreayd present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one’s self. The extent of this original courage … may even be greater if the “hero” happens to be a coward.
• p192 - Yet more of Arendt saying participants and selves cannot really allow themselves to experience or tell things. I have a lot of underlines between this and page 194.
• p202 - Under the conditions of human life, the only alternative to power is not strength–which is helpless against power–but force, which indeed one man alone can exert against his fellow men and of which one or a few can possess a monopoly by acquiring the means of violence. But while violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind neither monuments nor stories, hardly enough memory to enter into history at all.
• p206 - Greatness … can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement.
• p222 - It is the obvious short-range advantages of tyranny, the advantages of stability, security, and productivity, that one should beware, if only because they pave the way to an inevitable loss of power, even though the actual disaster may occur in a relatively distant future.
• p225-226 - Only in the Republic were the ideas transformed into standards, measurements, and rules of behavior, all of which are variations or derivations of the idea of the “good” in the Greek sense of the word, that is, of the “good for” or of fitness. This transformation was necessary to apply the doctrine of ideas to politics …But this idea of the good is not the highest idea of the philosopher, … even in the Republic, the philosopher is still defined as a lover of beauty, not of goodness. The good is the highest idea of the philosopher-king, who wishes to be the ruler of human affairs because he must spend his life among men and cannot dwell forever under the sky of ideas.
• p233 - The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself has come to an end.
• p237 - Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confied to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever…"
• p242 - For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives,(^81) indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. 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 insert a new world into the existing world. … Love, by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.
  • 81. The common prejudice that love is as common as “romance” may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
  • TB: This might be the most interesting paragraph in the book. Parts, like love destroying the in-between, I agree with. I think love does eradicate all vision of shortcomings and faults in the object of love. We can come to love someone so deeply that even their faults are endearing to us, because they show the person’s specific character. Perfection is not interesting, unreal, and unlovable. Yet, I think this is a super heteronormative view of love. Because love can only be apolitical and even antipolitical when its existence and fulfillment is not the object of a political hatred and goal (i.e., the eradication or suppression of that love). We unfortunately do not have the option of letting our love be apolitical or antipolitical. In the home and with each other, it can be, but once it enters the public realm – which, contrary to what Arendt insists earlier, it does – it becomes a political act. Ultimately, I think that love is the most human of actions and I’m not sure it can ever really be apolitical, even in a heteronormative context.
• p243 - Respect, not unlike Aristotelian philia politike, 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…
• p243 - Thus, the modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear sympom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.

The Vita Activa and the Modern Age

• p273 - notes on Doubt.
• p311 - If modern egoism were the ruthless search for pleasure (called happiness) it pretends to be, it would not lack what in all truly hedonistic systems is an indispensable element of argumentation–a radical justification of suicide. This lack alone indicates that in fact we deal here with life philosophy in its most vulgar and lease critical form. In the last resort, it is always life itself with is the supreme standard to which everything else is referred, and the interests of the individual as well as the interests of mankind are always equated with individual life or the life of the species as though it were a matter of course that life is the highest good.
• p324 - Unfortunately, and contrary to what is currently assumed about the proverbial ivory-tower independence of thinkers, no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.