Arendt Notes Copy

7/27/2019 Arendt Notes Copy

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Human Condition

Preface

3 The first instance of the word political, and in fact a political instance of the first order is aboutthe deployment of our technology what we wish to gain, to augment, to exchange.

She then makes the statement that the political has to do, by definition, with the relevance of speech.

The connection is to Aristotle, which is picked up in Heids 1922 (?) lecture, that logos is phusis for man.

5 What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without theonly activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.

The distinction between laboring for the sake of necessity, and work, is made with reference to howeven kings think of themselves as job-holders, while among the intellectuals only solitary individualsstill consider what they are doing to be work.

6 Why does the explosion of the atom bomb give birth to the modern world rather than the holocaust?These two events punctuate their respective ages.

Chapter 1

8 Labor assures the life of the species and the survival of the individual. Work bestows a measure of permanence and durability [this is the condition for linear time although the phrase measure of permanence may seem idiomatic, the products of work last and give a sense to what it would mean for permanence, which always exceeds the finitude of work-products. They are impermanent, but in beingso point to permanence.]

9 Metaphysical thought may take death as its central category, but political thought must take natalityto be its central category.

19 Regarding that measure of permanence mortality of individuals moves through rectilinear time,cutting across the cyclical immortal time of nature and the gods. Mortals do not only exist as membersof a species (species have no history ). Mortality has two aspects it is linear time, in a cyclicalenvironment. There is a recognizable life story, that is partly due to how individuals stand to lose

something in their world. The measure of their permanence is how much they can withstand expending, how much one can give .

Chapter 2

26 Only sheer violence is mute. What makes for violence to be sheer?

27 Speech is persuasive not just reckoning and answering.

29 The collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family is

what we call societyand its political form of organization is called nation.31 Violence is the pre-political act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world say the Greeks.

32 Freedom, for the Greeks, is neither to rule nor be ruled. If this is true then would Nietzcheanendeavors overcome the value of freedom itself?

33 That politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech, and thought are primarilysuperstructures upon social interest, is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among theaxiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economists of the modern age.


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The rise of society is the rise of the household, or economic activities, to the public realm so as to betaken up as a collective concern.

35 Characterization of society: where private interests assume public significance.

36 Courage . Inside the house, one is concerned with maintaining ones own life. It is a risk to exit thehouse and enter a merciless polis. The house attends to life courage is about risking life but only in

political experience does one reveal a self . Staying in the house risks the self.

38 The modern private sphere was developed out of the social, in opposition to it not out of the political. So, privacy is closely related to the social.

39 Rousseau rose to the cause of the private that was assailed by society. Intimacy was discovered, andit proliferated in forms of expression and importance. The intimately self-related individual can neither

be at home in society, nor be able to live outside of society.

40 Society excludes the possibility of action, just as a household would. Why? A member of societybehaves .

41 The equals within a conforming society do not resemble the equals of the ancient polis. The public realm [where everyone had to distinguish himself] was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were. It was for the sake of thischance, and out of love for a body politic that made it possible to them all, that each was more or lesswilling to share in the burden of jurisdiction, defense, and administration of public affairs.

42 Deeds are rare, events are illuminating of a whole age.

44 What Marx could not see was that the prevention of the communist ideal was not any class-interestas such, but only by the obsolete monarchical structure of the nation state.

45 The devouring of the private and newly discovered intimate by society is strengthened from the factthat through society it is the life process itself which in one form or another has been channeled into the

public realm.

46 Modern society is marked by its permission given to the activities necessary for mere survival sothat they may appear. Appearance is connected with linear development & progress. Once labor appears, it rises out of circular reiteration of the same.

47 The Human Condition does not offer a solution and so we are left to wonder what the answer is tothe problem posed by an unnatural superabundance of nature? Life is spreading faster in its affirmativeacquisitive mode, than in its decaying mode, and we must assume that an eventual equalization will be

paid dearly in time, as if all this life has taken a loan out from its future wealth.

49 Excellence, arete, by definition requires the presence of others. No activity can become excellent if the world does not provide a proper space for it.

50 The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the

world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never beenknown before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will alwaysgreatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, thisintensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world andmen.

52 The greatness of the public realm may never be considered as charming, because the public realm isunable to harbor the irrelevant there is nothing irrelevant that is germane to public affairs.

54 Worldlessness as a political phenomenon is possible on the basis of the assumed finitude of the


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world.

55 Only the existence of a public realm and the worlds subsequent transformation into a communityof things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence(as opposed to an assumption that the world will not last). If the world is to contain a public space, itcannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men. Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly

speaking, no common world (ie common to all ) and no public realm, is possible.56 The Polis was the guarantee against the futility of individual life the space reserved for the relative

permanence and perhaps immortal deeds of mortals.

cf. Pain as the most private with the quote from totalitarianism about how the torture of the bodymanipulates so as to destroy the person as if the body were a disease a systematic destruction of ahuman body without killing it , and this systematic destruction is calculated to destroy human dignity .

57 Worldly reality truly and reliably appears where there is a maximum of difference aspects and perspectives converging on a single identity. Reality is not due to a common nature running through all

men, but the diversity that yet coheres.58 The end of the common world would arrive when there is only one perspective or one aspect of things appearing even if this perspective is multiplied or copied innumerable times.

63 The interior of a house is hidden, but the exterior appears in the realm of the city as a boundary(nomos). Between boundaries, which must be kept apart, was a no-mans land (as far Athens isconcerned).

64 In order for there to be a political community in Athens, there must be walls between properties else there would merely be an agglomeration of hovels.

65 The freedom that wealth makes possible is the freedom to transcend the necessity of ones life andrise into the artificial space of politics. To remain invested in the acquisition of unneccessary wealth isto become willingly what the slave was involuntarily, a servant of necessity. This is an answer to theriddle of why industry stopped at a plateau in the ancient world.

72 The governmental protection of wealth is achieved at the expense of tangible property.

74 Goodness is not done out of use or duty.

Chapter 3

94 The experience of use-objects provides for the thing-character of consumptible goods. Without thework of our hands, we may not even employ nouns in our speech. Nouns, things, are items of habit andhabitude the phases of existence that recur in form and we acclimatize ourselves to them in beingused to them.

95 Action and speech has its products , and these constitute the fabric of human relationships andaffairs. Left to themselves, they lack not only the tangibility of other things, but are even less durableand more futile than what we produce for consumption. The reality speech and deed depends upon theconstant presence of others who can bear testimony as witnesses. In order for thought, speech, anddeeds to become events of the world, they must first be seen, heard and remembered only then canthey be reified into records or testaments. After being remembered, memory can be fullfilled when itscontent is transformed (stepped over into form) into a tangible thing. Arendts language is very careful


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here the transformation is from intangible into the tangibility of things. In this description, anadjectival-noun is transformed into an a conceptual character of thinghood.

96 The deathless cycle Cyclical, too, is the movement of the living organism, the human body notexcluded, as long as it can withstand the process that permeates its being and makes it alive. Life is a

process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until eventually deadmatter, the result of small, single, cyclical, life processes, returns into the over-all gigantic circle of

nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless,deathless repetition. This characterization seems to capture part of the Pavlovian chain-reactionmechanism of totalitarian community.

Our understanding of birth and death is not known by nature.

97 The reason being that birth and death are not natural occurences when they are of single individualexistences unrepeatable and unexchangeable. A world is relatively permanent (points to a concept of

permanence that is ideally signified precisely in its not being possibly realized) it can designate timeintervals , lives between birth and death. There are limits in the world. When a limit is set, there is aworldly event and a lifetime is full of events that can be culled together into a story.

98 The three activities of the vita activa have each have one of three fundamentally different styles of temporality, each of which are irreducible but complementary to each other (indeed, cyclical timeconditions the unique unilinear time . The cyclical repetition of nature is marked by rhythm that

permutes its configurations in endless combinations of fashions (Messiaenic time in his Quator, esp theliturgie de cristal. As an aside, the name of this piece fits its expressed content marvelously. A crystalis perhaps the most obvious symbol for the manifest reality of formative laws, a self-schematizingdeathless organism that exists outward as a pure expression of its regularity. One can follow any pathof the a crystals facet and find an unending repitition of microcosms of the preceding. Natural life can

be poetically indicated by the phrase one grand circle, but a perhaps more concrete symbol would thecrystal. Schrdinger, whom Arendt quotes with approval from his popular writings, also speculatedthat the kernel of life resides in the form of an aperiodic crystal an idiom that is surely moremeaningless than a winged lion, but a pleasingly adequate conception of what we mean by DNA.)

There is life-temporality . Then the temporality of single things taken singly objects and individuals who exhibit growth and decay. This is the temporality of work , which aims toward an end and achievessatisfaction along its way toward the end. There are markers and limits which give a sense to its linear direction. The easy life of the gods, where pain and pleasure are finally put out of play, would be alifeless life (put in that Hlderlin quip about the Gods envying mortals).

History is a story of events, which are unpredictable from the breaking point of their inception into plurality, and are uncalled for intercessions into the unfolding linearity of the world (252). Theworkmanship involved in making an object demands predictability and transparency of knowledge.The maker must see through to the end of a process.

The three modes of time have different conditions for their actuality. Nature requires mere existence it is the merest manner of pure existing. So called in-organic processes accomplish cyclical stasisspontaneously a tendency which has been expressed in many different endeavors of understandingthe physical scientifically, but perhaps no where so succinctly as the principle of least action.Physical processes spontaneously approach the simplest self identity, which appears to be an inactivestate of actualization. Mass society eats up and destroys culture (Between Past and Future 207), itdemands entertainment, whereas society as such demands culture. Arendt tellingly refers to nature as ahousehold (97), which goes to show that the home, the private, is an unending unbeginningindeterminate ground which serves as the background for the appearance of objects, the darknessaround the light.


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Nature has a way of overpowering the world, and with the world overpowered, plurality ceases.Arendts phenomenological analysis of humanity seems, despite her protestations of not promoting asolution, to locate the first falling domino at the moment when nature began to grow at an unnaturalrate. The condition for worldly time, linearity, is separation and isolation of contained intervals. Anobject has its integral development, only if it can be singly taken as an object. When the table at thesance disappears, so do the conditions of individuality (the weirdness of the situation that makes mass

society unbearable is that the world does no longer separate and relate people to each other).Obviously, without individuality there is not the necessary distinction for there occurring interactivity .Mass communication, where the transfer of information can be so ubiquitous and the environment of its

proliferation so saturated, such that the immediate presence of information can be said to be finallyimmediated , ie, robbed of its moment of mediation, will eventuate in the self-identical homogeneity of one language spoken to one listener, however many times over the exact utterance is reduplicated downa chain of mass mob bodies. A condition for the linearity of work-time is that products are made to beused and not simply used-up in a swift consumption.

Work-time has a beginning and an end.

Historical time can be represented accurately by neither a circle nor a line how are we to understandthis style of temporality? Is it what Husserl means by generative, as opposed to genetic and static?

100 Labor as eating , devouring. Arendt speaks of mass society in precisely the same terms in BetweenPast and Future. It devours its objects, incorporates them. At the last stage when work is abolished, sothat society will be wholly a consumer society, then the incorporation of devouring will have completeditself absolutely, where the form and content of consumption are no longer separable even in thought.Consumption will then consume consumption, just as animals feed on food. In order to makeconsumption consumable, it will have become highly developed in ironic forms of entertainment,where consumption itself is entertaining. We are already witnessing this transmutation in the ironic

pastiche that marks most of our hyper-aware cinema. What do I mean by absolute consuming?Where the subject of consumption and the object of consumption are no longer separated this is astate where pleasure from the release of pain no longer has reality it is partly what Arendt describes

as becoming unthinking slaves to our products. Consumption is an effort home economics is tiring initself, not replenishing.

Devouring, though, can only appear as it is from the perspective of the artificial world. When objectsof work give a measure of permanence, then the process of consumption appears as destruction or decay. However, from natures point of view, the craft of work seems vain and violent. Work removesfrom nature her wares and reconfigures them into an unnaturally enduring thing.

101 When the world is defended against encroaching nature for whos sake is this done? Is it for thesake of the world, or the sake of nature?

105 Life, labor (not work or action) is inherently unending.

108 The local equilibrium of life-processes is not set, and the durable tools of the world can move the balance point up or down a scale of intensity. The current wealth of life, its global embarrasment of riches, has allowed an increase of life-production without yet catching up to its limit but we arecertain that it will come, and have no qualms about prophesying peak oil, climate change, foodshortage, et cetera. Almost ironically, our ability to foresee these limits to the potentially accelerating

proliferation results in our capacity to build new tools in order to accommodate the trajectory of our reproduction. Sustainability is approaching the level of mass sentiment, in direct proportion to howlittle it rings of decadent fear-mongering and how more it seems to be an inexorable truth of urgentutility.


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111 Natural processes are beyond willful control to check them would be to destroy nature.Economist of the modern age believed that checking the process of wealth (whether by protecting

property , or not) would be equivalent to an attempt to destroy the life of society.

We wonder now if property, as a private place, can withstand the process of growing wealth. Well, property becomes transformed into wealth property is the result of appropriation. I have appropriatedland, and a house, and I will sell them. My insurance on my property is for the sake of my increasing

wealth.115 The invasion of society into privacy is perhaps no better shown in recent times than by theeconomic collapse of 2008. The security of ones own place deteriorated without any spatial intrusion

by the outside the world property was shown to be already wrapped up and connected with the publicexchange of commerce that, as if by magic, ones own estate altered in appreciable value. Importantly,there was nothing an suffering property-owner could do to prevent it. Property had been subsumed in asocietal metabolism with such a magnitude of its distended sway made painfully clear by its staggeringindigestion. If privacy is meant to be protected from the public realm, there is none today outside thesafety net constituted by a bonded and insured government agency.

Property, if stable, can go some of the way toward bringing labor into relation with a world due to the

worldly-security that property provides. It is as if property emerges from the context of labor, and inturn provides of itself a sorely needed context for labors buzzing activity. Without property, labor hasonly sheer necessity to be worried about. I have lived with the constant threat of house payments.

116 Property, as a context and check to the life-process, limits the accumulation of wealth. If man istaken as a species, as socialized , then the acquisition of goods can go on indefinitely or infinitely.

119 It must be stressed that the animal laborans is worldless . This is expressed in the loneliness of mass society.

120 the perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor would not only rob biological life of its mostnatural pleasures but deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality . . . for mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.

121 Futility needs to appear in order for freedom to be a real struggle and thus real achievement. If theconsumptibles of labor are easily replaceable (eg, potted meat bought on the cheap), then futility will

be easier to bear and less repugnant. Freedom has an epistemic condition: man must know that he is bound to necessity, in order to willfully endeavor at extricating himself.

It seems that the improvement of the world (for the purposes of labor) makes the experience of theworld disappear. The homogeneity of shopping centers, where daily chores can be achieved in thesame manner no matter where one finds oneself, the standardization of the functional interface on amicrowave oven, ubiquitous free wi-fi these magnificent enlargements of the world are a condition of its disappearance, strictly speaking.

122 From the standpoint of labor (Arendt has frequently framed her appraisals in certain explicitways), tools strengthen strength .

(Making is connected with predictable and controllable ends, and is contrasted with living that isendless)

123 Division of labor is principally characterized as behaving together as though laborers are one . Thedivision of labor creates a quanitatively summed up aggregate of qualitatively equalized agents, so thatthe oneness of their joint effort can be synonymously expressed by the absolute exchangeability of eachfor each. A division of labor is the opposite of co-operation and it need not only be operative in afactory. If the great housekeeping of the nation is carried on so that each member of society behaves


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within statistical regularity, each member is therefore superfluous on its own.

What is the temporal meaning of the contemporary fact that tools are now consumable? If the currenttrend is to indicate the future, our technical apparatuses will forever suffer from obsolescence (n.b., onethat is not built-in as some may speculate paronoiacally). What is the difference here, between ahammer that may break, but will never become obsolete? Tools for our jobs become beyond usewithout being used-up.

125 The activity of workmanship is related to single objects, models, which are then reproduced on amass scale by labor. Mass production is only possible with the replacement of specialized workers bydivided labor.

A danger of tools is that they hide the necessity of labor from our senses . The pain no longer appears asit once did. If this disappearance reaches its conclusive extremity, society would then be thoroughlydirected by a necessity made all the more baleful by operating insensibly , thus, a fortiori , invisibly.

The difference between the relative durability of use objects and the swift coming and going of consumer goods dwindles to insignificance.

126 There, she finally came out and said it: It is as though we had forced open the distinguishing

boundaries which protected the world, the human artifice, from nature, the biological process whichgoes on in its very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which surround it, delivering andabandoning to them the always threatened stability of a human world. The succinct moral of the storyis cast in strong language: The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence,stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans.

Arendt speaks again of the check against nature as now an obstacle to the natural force of fertility.This unnatural obstacle is the singularly worldly stability of the human artifice. The division of labor isable to circumvent the limits set to life by specialized tool-use.

131 The ease by which the laboring process produces its goods may overwhelm the downbeat of consumption, so that the effort of labor-power will be spent in laborious consumption. I do, in fact,feel compelled to eat whats in front of me, as if it were a duty. The goods in my fridge spoil, and wemust plan our meals around them. What has led to the point of there being a Consumer Reportsresource home economics, a science of intelligent consumption.

132 Automation in production would overrun the human artifice, and wear down the durability of theworld. As the rain in Colorado washes away the roads, so will the massive life force of society regainthe upper hand, burst the limits, of its own world. If the world is to stay intact, it must foresee thethrong of life, and sacrifice its own values yet again to the accommaditing acquiescence. The work of a nation is devoted to enterprises such as the energy crisis, or sustainable agriculture. The worlditself would deteriorate if it did not essentially martyr itself for the good of its natural antagonist. Aonce complimentary relationship, secured by a measure of explicit violence, has been thrown out of

balance and now the gnawing tooth of cyclical time devours the world, all along under the guise of an

ostensible placidness and passivity.133 A thoroughly consumers society is a fools paradise. Animal laborans has an embarrassment of free time a phenomenon that only makes sense in terms of the missing segment in the cyclicalrepetition of natural processes. What is free time, precisely? What goes on in free time consumption& hobbies? The necessities of life become sophisticated; they are not merely necessary (from a lesssophisticated stage). Vitamins, regular exercise, seat-belts etc . . .

134 The problem is an issue of space, in a way. Animal laborans appears , it has been emancipated ,which is to say, it has permission to occupy the public realm. This mode is an untrue public realm


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because in it only private activities are displayed out in the open. Happiness is a matter of

Chapter 4

136 The very first remark has to do with the fabrication of a sheer variety of things.

(a way of understanding durability is in measuring how long a thing will withstand nature the linear time gets used up . This is precisely what is measured by the second law of thermodynamics a singleobject has so much composure, until it reaches the maximally probable configuration of tiny cyclicalmovements (96). Here, again, she speaks of how things return to nature.

137 Again with natures household . She makes nature out to be subjected realm of cyclicality, just asmuch as she connects the human household to natures endless repetition.

Objectivity depends upon a separation from nature. Nature becomes invisible when there is noartificial vantage. But what, accurately put, is natural? Why is the architecture of a beaver naturalwhile we may hesitate to say the same for our own? I contend that our technology, insofar as it is takenfor consumer goods, is a natural occurrence, and as non-objective as the trash heaps we keep fromsight. The cleanliness of our modern cities serves to hide them from an objectifying intuition.Without a world between men and nature, there is eternal movement, but no objectivity.140 Strength appears here as a vocab word. It is allied in the constellation of work it is theopposite of the painful exhausting effort experienced in sheer labor. It is the most elementaryexperience of acting violently upon nature so as to master it. Strength gives confidence and self-assurrance; repeatedly, Arendt has associated bliss with labor.

141 The model for fabrication lies outside the fabricator. The idea of the object can be reified. Pain, pleasure these are not reified. They are called out of someone by a catalyzing agent pornography or the cinema are obvious examples but are not, strictly speaking, objects that are there. An orgasmdoes not exist in the way that a bed exists.

Chapter 6

256 Arendt again uses the language of sacrifice to characterize the relation between the ideals of homofaber and the pressing demands of the animal laborans. What is sacrificed is the worldliness of man.Bataille, as a theorist of sacrifice, instead exhorts us to take an attitude of sacrifice toward our life.Consumer goods and vital energy are to be sacrificed for no particular use he recommends profligateexpenditure of vitality. Expropriation is the cancelling of the private protection dependent upon a

bounded share in the world.

259 Events are unprecedented. Ideas are not unprecendented.

260 The difference between ideas and the telescope is one of space . There was bodily contact between

the stars and man. A demonstrable fact was established.261 Arendt makes a refreshing gloss of Heisenbergs principle, that man only encounters himself inhis observations.

265 The experiment is a deliberate taking of nature according to the forms of mans inquisitive mind.He places nature in a cosmic enframing.

266 Mathematics saves appearances at the expense of genuine revelation of being. Mathematicalconformity is not the same as objectivity the sensual givens are reduced.

279 The conjoint triumph and despair of man is found in his turning away from truth to truthfulness,


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and from reality to reliability.

284 The conviction that all observable reality is doubtable as it would be in itself results in locating theArchimedean point within man.

290 The practical involvement of man with nature is not the engine for the accelerating advance of scientific knoweledge. Useless knowledge was in the beginning of scientific achievements. But, truthand knowledge could be won only by action, by the work of mans experimenting hands.

291 Thought is contrasted to the complete stillness of contemplation. Thinking is a highly active statewithout an outward manifestation, and, traditionally, it leads to contemplation.

292 Doing came to be of primary importance, to which thinking is subservient. Contemplation, then, becomes meaningless in the modern age.

293 This reversal, of doing over thinking, is unprecedented and eventful, because it was instigated by ademonstrable discovery .

307 What changed the mentatlity of the once dominant homo faber was the notion of process. For modern man, the sense of a definite telos or end began to make less sense, until he experienced himself to be part of two superhuman processes nature and history which are intrinsically endless. Thefaculties that aim at building a world stood to lose much from world-alienation. A process, to homofaber, is a means to an end but not the ends themselves are processual.

309 Utility is no longer about the employment of a stable and permanent world, but in a shifting fieldof goals, utility would only make sense in connection with the pain/pleasure in the production processitself.

321 Mans fully valued metabolism with nature makes for many aspects to life to appear assuperfluities. But, what are the needs of the life process itself? Absence of pain & thus pleasure.The necessities can become sophisticated, for sure.

324 In her concluding remarks, Arendt speaks of the separation of the dividing line between natureand the human world

{{ World-time is a linear time of endings . Completion is the most significant meaning of this style of time the making of an object is either completed or in a present state of incompletion. The begininng,the arche or principle of making, in an important sense always pre-dates the reifying activity. Theworker is the efficient cause of the object, but not of the beginning of the object he builds a fire as hedoes a bed with the utmost inner vision of predictability for the course of the construction. The worker

sees things through to their end. The laboring animal does not know the determinate limits or ends of the task at hand (theres a footnote about how factory workers dont know the names of the machinesthey operate). Laboring time is without beginning or end. The time of action, speech and deeds, is oneof beginning . At 257, the talk of Jesus as an event, directly contrasts his birth to endings as, instead, a

beginning of some unpredictable historical event. Event

Origins of Totalitarianism

438 Total domination organizes all of humanity as if it were one individual. The reduction is to anever-changing identity where A = A without a difference between the 2 As. The measure of this:any thing can be exchanged for another at random without a change to the system at large (think thermal equilibrium and the loss of all identifying information). This is the goal, and totalitariandomination strives after it in a specific way this same goal may be accomplished in other ways, and in


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differently observable modes.

Totalization is the end of every natural process, which aims at eternity. Preservation of the species isthe Spinozistic insight into all conatus. This striving after equality (and therefore superfluity [btw,superfluity cannot mean the same thing as unnecessary there still must be matter upon which theforms of totalitarianism can come to work upon, but this matter must be, in a way, used up , fully actual,so that the material aspect of it, viz potentiality, is made impossible by making possible everything.

Eternal self-identity, thought thinking itself, strives to exist here on earth, but it is an unearthly andinhuman aspiration which generates monstrous attempts at its realization in spite of an inertialrecalcitrance to all that is mundane. There is a flip-flop in Arendt from earlier thinking: evil is theuniversal, good is the particular. Matter is the principle of goodness , idealized universality is the aridlandscape in which evil thrives. Radical evil is still impossible for it can only appear when it iscommitted by no man .

438 Almost immediately she draws the connection between persistent self-identity and the eliminationof spontaneity la Pavlov. For this reason, the totalitarian principle, everything is possible, seems alittle misleading, because under totalitarianism, no individual does anything.

458 Totalitarianism maintains a strangely pure logicality that hold reality and factuality in contempt.What is reality? For one, the possible stuff of change (Aristotle / natality). The contempt for realityinvolves a maniacal estimation of consistency nothing matters but consistency.

The duality that Arendt sets up is between creative incalculability and routinized predictability.

459 Arendt must make the strong claim: There is only one thing that seems to be discernible: we maysay that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equallysuperfluous. She has repeated time and again the importance of all and equal. Not equally different,

but equally superfluous. Superfluous to what? Coherence. The existence, the substance, of each person is left out of account in the accounting books. In this way, radical evil is the opposite of whatKant intended for there is no subject at the terminus of the radix to wield evil. There merely is evil with no perpetrator.

How does this compare to our world today? We live without isms, because for the most part we liveunthinkingly would an determinate ism, something on which to hang your hat, be better than thetransparent coherency which, in its totality, makes even the claim to being an ism superfluous?Ideologies, she sez, are only dangerous if they are taken seriously what if no one takes anythingseriously, so that unserious and inconsistent ideologies are able, by some final synthesis, to hang

together in an incommunicative environment where everyone is fillibustering at the same time, whichmakes for each speech to be superfluous? For she sez: The manipulators of this system believe intheir own superfluousness as much as in that of all others.

The tendency toward superfluity follows upon thinking of the world on utilitarian terms. Why?Something to do with the reduction to reflex reactions, to a pure Pavlovian abstraction where thespontanaeity of even hunger is taken away. Utility for the sake of utility that for which an act bearsutility for the sake of is conditioned just as much as the utility of the act. Totalitarianism is not useful in the normal sense of the world but it is useful in the supersense it is useful for itself, it maintainsitself.


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Take thermodynamics as an example, again. When there is not total dominance in a physical system,when there are appreciable distinctions to be made among its elements, there is use to be extracted yet.Only when the identity of each part is obliterated, does the use get used up. A physical system can onlygive energy in the form of extracted work, can only be useful for something external , when it is notabsolutely self-consistent. Arendt will call the camp a society of the dying because it is a persistentinertness a flatlined thing the only serves its own etrnal flatlining. Thermal equilibrium is the most

stable configuration, which none the less contains the most chaotic relations among its parts.

Reflection on Little Rock

Isnt she absolutely wrong in her distinction between the social and political? And whats wrong withit? And why does she group the private and political together in Little Rock, while she keeps theintimate and the social apart in Human Condition? Are the distinctions between private, social, and

political formed by a European experience and just dont apply to the race-question with Little Rock?

Cambridge Companion

2 Political evil = evil as policy.The camps are central institutions of totalitarian regimes.3 The totalitarian logic is a superhuman one, that unfolds by a necessity which transcends normal moralnecessities of human ilk.Arendt, in OoT, contrasts the bourgeois with the citoyen (the former lusts after wealth and power, thelatter is concerned with the public realm and preservation of freedom). The conquering bourgeoisoverstepped the structurally stabilizing limits of the public realm.4 Citizenship is a legal category race is a different sort of category.

The bourgeoisie exploited the public realm for private (or class) interest.

6 In HC, Arendt explains how the political becomes merely protective (a necessary evil) of theeconomic realm the political lost its claim to instrinsic dignity. The political was not maintainedagainst the sea of natural processes, but made to serve nature.

8 The thing is, people find political engagement to be a burden. Americans want freedom from politics Welfare States see politics as the centralized administration of the needs of life.

11 There is tangible identity in politics (HC 193)

12 The trouble of the switch from acting to making, or substituting making for acting, leaves political

action to be, at best, a means for an extra-political end (personal salvation, preservation of life, theVolk). Almost all Western political philosophers have missed the existential significance of politicalaction itself.

121 Thinking is governed by the law of non-contradiction. To be in agreement with oneself is acondition of thinking and this is a limit on the freedom of political opinion . Doing politics is put outof play so that making politics can be accomplished in ideal identity.

124 Free action keeps open and clears a political space.

Arendt Notes Copy

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