Is there a type of 'action that cannot even be imagined outside the society of men?' No. We can imagine sociable actions of various types without any other men being involved. Li Po drinks with the moon and invites his shadow to dance with him. But we might also say that the moon might be otherwise engaged with a passing cloud.
Equally, highly complex social operations- e.g. one whereby a politician appears to support a colleague but damns him in a manner such that the rival who appears to benefit is actually the victim- may be described in purely mechanistic terms or animalistic terms.
Hannah Arendt's 'the human condition' was predicated on labour as being concerned with animalistic being, work as being related to inanimate objects, and action as corresponding to our plurality as distinct individuals. This gives rise to her notion of vita activa.
The vita activa, human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of manmade things which it never leaves or altogether transcends.
What about a human life which isn't actively engaged in doing anything? Would it no longer be rooted in the world of men and artefacts? Is it true that, in deep sleep, the soul leaves the body and merges with Brahman? If such is not the case and human life is rooted in the world of humans, just as the life of stars is rooted in the Galaxies, then what Arendt has written is a tautology of a foolish kind.
Things and men form the environment for each of man's activities,
No. Nature forms the environment which things and men also populate. It is not the case that gravity is man-made or that it ceases to exist if everybody goes away.
which would be pointless without such location; yet this environment, the world into which we are born, would not exist without the human activity which produced it,
Yes it would. The earth would exist even if we weren't born though no doubt some other species would be doing well in it.
as in the case of fabricated things; which takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic.
Arendt is speaking of the stock or flow of humanly produced goods and services as opposed to natural resources. Where there is scarcity- i.e. an opportunity cost- in the provision of such goods and services, economics has purchase. Political philosophy is useless except in so far as it is a stuttering attempt to articulate an economic theory.
No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
Nonsense! An astronaut might end up marooned on a distant planet where nothing save his own body testifies to human existence.
All human activities are conditioned by the fact that men live together,
No. Where men live together, and not otherwise, human activities have to take account, sooner or later and to a greater or lesser extent, of 'externalities'- benefits or costs gained outside the market, or other contexts of fair exchange.
but it is only action that cannot even be imagined outside the society of men.
This silly lady was writing this when many Americans were making good money writing comic books and adventure story and film scripts of a type which illustrated that the human imagination has no limits- at least none we can imagine.
The activity of labor does not need the presence of others,
yes it does. If the supervisor aint present, workers won't do shit. In any case, the division of labor in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage doesn't just depend on the presence of others, it also depends on conditions of secure and uncoerced exchange. Even that isn't always enough. You need a stable unit of account and medium of exchange and credit markets and futures markets and so forth. Political activities can promote or hinder the resulting 'correlated equilibria'.
though a being laboring in complete solitude would not be human but an animal laborans in the word's most literal significance.
No. It simply isn't true that Robinson Crusoe digging a ditch on his island is spoken off as a mole or some other sort of burrowing animal.
Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber:
Robinson Crusoe is homo faber. Man Friday might not be if he prefers to eat people rather than make tools so as to dig ditches and plough land and take fish out of the seas.
he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god, not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.
This is foolish. Aristotle merely said that a guy who can't live in society might be a bit of an animal in his uncouthness and lack of sociability while one who has no need for society might be a bit god like in his self-sufficiency.
Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man;
Only in the sense that prerogatives arise exclusively by the actions of men but if those men have no authority those prerogatives are useless.
neither a beast nor a god is capable of it,
Nope. Gods can do lots of cool stuff. But so could Capitoline geese or sacred crocodiles or the groundhog in Groundhog day.
and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.
This is not the case with political actions. A guy in solitary confinement could write a manifesto which changes the world.
This special relationship between action and being together seems fully to justify the early translation of Aristotle's zoonpolitikon by animal socialis, already found in Seneca, which then became the standard translation through Thomas Aquinas: homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis ("man is by nature political, that is, social").
Nice peeps- as opposed to barbarians- live in a nice Polis. They don't fart loudly when you try to lecture them. Also, they don't eat you.
More than any elaborate theory, this unconscious substitution of the social for the political betrays the extent to which the original Greek understanding of politics had been lost.
Life got safer. Wealthy people weren't confined to the City State of which they were citizens. They had suburban estates and liked to go shopping in Emporia towns.
For this, it is significant but not decisive that the word "social" is Roman in origin and has no equivalent in Greek language or thought.
The Greek word is koinonia. Aristotle's koinōnía politikē was translated as societas civilis- i.e. civil society.
Yet the Latin usage of the word societas also originally had a clear, though limited, political meaning; it indicated an alliance between people for a specific purpose, as when men organize in order to rule others or to commit a crime.
The etymology is from 'socius'- partner/ally. There really isn't anything very novel or surprising here.
It is only with the later concept of a societas generis humani, a "society of man-kind,"
which was associated with big Empires and a great expansion in citizenship of the Imperial Polis.
that the term "social" begins to acquire the general meaning of a fundamental human condition.
No. It sharply distinguishes between sweet smelling and sociable dudes and uncouth barbarians who might eat you.
It is not that Plato or Aristotle was ignorant of, or unconcerned with, the fact that man cannot live outside the company of men,
This simply is not a fact. Plato and Aristotle weren't stupid. They have been laughed at if they suggested that a marooned sailor would turn into a goat or a god if he had no human society.
but they did not count this condition among the specifically human characteristics; on the contrary, it was something human life had in common with animal life, and for this reason alone it could not be fundamentally human.
This isn't true. No Greek was that stupid. Men share something fundamental with animals though they are not fundamentally beasts. But this is also true of dogs. Fundamentally, they are doggy not bestial at all.
Arendt doesn't seem to understand that her readers knew that Aristotle was on the wrong side of history. City States had ceased to count. The future lay with Divine Emperors like his pupil Alexander. This meant that Imperial 'positive law', aiming at homonoia or harmony of intention, replaced the more arbitrary ecclesia of the City State where citizens could vote on who to exile or exalt. This meant that economic- or rather 'chrematistic' financial- development could take off almost exponentially.
Big Empires have a proportionately smaller political class (i.e. people who can affect Policy by their actions) than City States or Tribal Republics. However, there is a much bigger, geographically dispersed, increasingly deracinated, 'Civil Society'. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Mandarin, Arabic- there are many languages in which the transition from 'political society' to 'civil society' can be traced through sacred and then epic and then polite literature.
Greek and Latin authors were perfectly aware of their own economic and political history. Arendt, bizarrely, thinks there was some 'misunderstanding' or confusion.
Although misunderstanding and equating the political and social realms is as old as the translation of Greek terms into Latin
which was done by Greeks who remembered the Divine Alexander and who could predict the emergence of a Divine Augustus.
and their adaption to Roman-Christian thought,
Jews had adopted Greek. Second Maccabees is written in Greek. St. Paul's epistles are in Greek. There were plenty of Latin translations accompanying the Bible- the Vetus Latina- before the Vulgate was commissioned.
it has become even more confusing in modern usage and modem understanding of society.
Nonsense! We understand that a socially active person may be apolitical and vice versa.
The distinction between a private and a public sphere of life corresponds to the household and the political realms,
Only if you are a politician. A guy who hangs out with celebrities may be said to have a great social life. But he may have no political life whatsoever. The opposite is equally true. A guy with no social life might be the leading light in a political party.
which have existed as distinct, separate entities at least since the rise of the ancient city-state; but the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, is a relatively new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state.
Sheer nonsense! Your private life had to do with what went on in the inner portions of your house. Your social life might encompass your outer chamber and the street and the temple and the courts and the market-place. You might also hold a political office which would involve subordination to a hierarchy wholly alien to that of your own society.
What concerns us in this context is the extraordinary difficulty with which we, because of this development, understand the decisive division between the public and private realms,
Arendt had observed that many married couple would get confused and have sex in the street rather than their bedroom.
between the sphere of the polls and the sphere of household and family,
Many Mums try to stuff their little babies through the ballot box because of this confusion.
and, finally, between activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life,
you don't get to exist in 'a common world' if you aint maintaining your life.
a division upon which all ancient political thought rested as self-evident and axiomatic.
But it is equally evident to us. We are supposed to fuck at home, not in the marketplace. Also, if you want to get elected you can't say 'I hate my wife. Kindly elect me so I can pass a law which gets her sent to jail for being a nagging bitch.' You have to pretend to care about the inequities of current fiscal policies or something of that sort.
In our understanding, the dividing line is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.
Arendt was living in the America of the Fifties when she wrote this. There were plenty of movies which featured hubby returning home from work only to be greeted by a Doris Day type wifey who has his dry Martini ready- if not his slippers and his pipe. Women did the housekeeping J.Edgar Hoover didn't put on a calico dress and come do the hoovering for them. Well, okay, sometimes he did but that was supposed to be a secret.
The scientific thought that corresponds to this development is no longer political science but "national economy" or "social economy" or Volkswirtschaft, all of which indicate a kind of "collective house keeping'
This is Fiscal and Monetary policy- i.e. the ways and means by which Public and Merit and Club goods and services are provided
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."
Only if we are as stupid as shit and didn't study Econ at Uni.
We therefore find it difficult to realize that according to ancient thought on these matters, the very term "political economy" would have been a contradiction in terms:
Nope. The Polis had to mobilize resources for collective security etc. Arendt had studied stupid shit at Uni and thus didn't know about externalities and Public Finance and so forth. More importantly, she had zero common sense.
whatever was "economic," related to the life of the individual and the survival of the species, was a non-political, household affair by definition.
Unless there were externalities, non-convexities or peeps just enjoyed collective labor of a meritorious type.
Historically, it is very likely that the rise of the city-state and the public realm occurred at the expense of the private realm of family and household.
The reverse is the case. City-states attracted immigrants precisely because private property was more secure. This included your slaves and women-folk and those of your sons who didn't keep knifing you.
Yet the old sanctity of the hearth, though much less pronounced in classical Greece than in ancient Rome, was never entirely lost. 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.
If you don't own property, you can't pay property tax and thus you may have no vote or other voice in how municipal revenue is spent. On the other hand, property might be granted to those willing and able to perform military service as required.
Even Plato, whose political plans foresaw the abolition of private property and an extension of the public sphere to the point of annihilating private life altogether, still speaks with great reverence of Zeus Herkeios, the protector of border lines, and calls the horoi, the boundaries between one estate and another, divine, without seeing any contradiction.
There is none. Plato owned property. It was in his interest to show respect for boundaries.
The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs.
But that's also why we might join a bunch of robbers or soldiers or savants or sex workers. We might also establish households when communal living palls.
The driving force was life itself,
only in the sense that the driving force behind your being a chauffeur is the fact that you need to drive people around to earn money.
the penates, the household gods, were, according to Plutarch, "the gods who make us live and nourish our body" which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others.
Did these guy work the fields or did they just pray to the Penates to feed them? Arendt doesn't seem to understand that a prudent and pious man would perform his household rituals as well as discharge liturgical duties entrusted to him. There was a reputational benefit from this. No doubt, the rich or the powerful could be guilty of 'asebia' without incurring any penalty. The establishment of an impersonal law code spanning a great territory and the emergence of a professional administrative class meant that householders no longer needed to keep up a reputation for piety. They had rights with incentive compatible remedies under a vinculum juris- or bond of law.
Arendt seems incapable of understanding the nature of the Anglo Saxon polity to which she had emigrated.
In the modern world, the social and the political realms are much less distinct.
There is no connection between them whatsoever. People of all walks of society may vote for the same candidate. A businessman or a judge or a policeman would be considered to be acting improperly if they enquired about the political allegiance of a person to whom they are contractually or professionally obligated to provide a particular service.
That politics is nothing but a function of society,
No. It is a function of a particular organ of the State which decides matters of policy. That organ may or may not be linked to a particular society.
that action, speech, and thought are primarily superstructures upon social interest,
is demonstrably false. I can talk and act like a Princess- indeed, I often do when asked to do the washing up.
is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economists of the modern age.
Marx had shit for brains. But so does everybody with a PhD in stupid shite.
This functionalization makes it impossible to perceive any serious gulf between the two realms; and this is not a matter of a theory or an ideology, since with the rise of society, that is, the rise of the "household" (oikia) or of economic activities to the public realm, housekeeping and all matters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have become a "collective" concern.
Only if externalities, non-convexities, repugnancy markets etc, etc. arise.
In the modern world, the two realms indeed constantly flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life process itself.
No they don't. Don't be silly. The good thing about representative Democracy is that we don't have to waste a lot of time thinking about politics. Some people may like attending political rallies but they tend to be boring losers.
The disappearance of the gulf that the ancients had to cross daily to transcend the narrow realm of the household and "rise" into the realm of politics is an essentially modern phenomenon.
there was no gulf. You went from the agora to vote in the ecclessia where you might get a small payment for attendance. We don't need to bother with any such shite. Communism turned out not to be modern at all. It represented, by another name, the despotic rule of Emperors who had a strong tendency to megalomania. However, this could be ameliorated by the establishment of SEZs- which correspond to Medieval 'Liberties' or 'Sanctuaries' which, in England, got inscribed into the Common Law.
What Arendt is working up to is the notion that there's something very wonderful about sitting in the ecclessia and hearing or making speeches and exiling or exalting some fellow citizen. But the Athenians soon found out that blathershites are bad at battle. Guys who studied or taught Aristotelian shite were enslaved and shipped off to Rome. Prating about Freedom, might get you promotion, as a slave, to the status of tutor to your owner's son.
At the root of Greek political consciousness we find an unequaled clarity and articulateness in drawing this distinction. (between making useful decisions and talking stupid shite) No activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufacture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens indeed became the "pensionopolis" with a "proletariat of consumers" which Max Weber so vividly described.
Weber was wrong. Athens paid its way by exporting high value added goods and services. Still, if it picked the wrong side in a Civil War, its peeps got fucked over. Politics did matter but only in the sense of picking the right side in a conflict and sucking up to powerful satraps or proconsuls.
The true character of this polls is still quite manifest in Plato's and Aristotle's political philosophies,
Aristotle was out of date. Alexander had begun his rise.
even if the borderline between household and polls is occasionally blurred, especially in Plato who, probably following Socrates, began to draw his examples and illustrations for the polls from everyday experiences in private life, but also in Aristotle when he, following Plato, tentatively assumed that at least the historical origin of the polls must be connected with the necessities of life and that only its content or inherent aim (telos) transcends life in the "good life."
Which, conveniently, involved paying for Paideia from chaps like Aristotle. But then the Lyceum had to compete with the Brothel and the Gymnasium and the Riding Stables.
These aspects of the teachings of the Socratic school, which soon were to become axiomatic to the point of banality, were then the newest and most revolutionary of all and sprang not from actual experience in political life but from the desire to be freed from its burden, a desire which in their own understanding the philosophers could justify only by demonstrating that even this freest of all ways of life was still connected with and subject to necessity. But the background of actual political experience, at least in Plato and Aristotle, remained so strong that the distinction between the spheres of household and political life was never doubted. Without mastering the necessities of life in the household, neither life nor the "good life" is possible, but politics is never for the sake of life. As far as the members of the polls are concerned, household life exists for the sake of the "good life" in the polls.Arendt won't accept that Plato and Aristotle were running educational establishments. If wealthy young men stopped paying for instruction, they would have to up-sticks and move elsewhere.
In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy,
there is no such thing. What was private was what was owned by the person. If he was deprived of it he naturally experienced deprivation or just privation.
indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man's capacities.
Only if somebody actually deprived you of your personal property. If you don't have a pot to piss in, you have to piss in the street and the other kids say mean things about the puniness of your genitals.
A man who lived only a private life,
by choice, might be greatly respected more especially if he was as rich as fuck
who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm,
because the slave had a master who told him to get on with his work
or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human.
But the barbarian who conquered and enslaved you was referred to as 'Lord' or 'Master'.
We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.
No. We understand that 'privation' is a contraction of 'deprivation'. Also a guy who don't got no pot to piss in gets little privacy when he relieves himself.
Is there anything at all in Arendt's book which isn't stupid shit? No. There is no 'Human Condition'. There is only a species which must adapt to an uncertain fitness landscape.
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