{"id":2479,"date":"2017-11-07T12:30:01","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T09:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=2479"},"modified":"2017-11-07T12:30:01","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T09:30:01","slug":"hannah-arendt-an-extraordinary-loss-of-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/2479\/hannah-arendt-an-extraordinary-loss-of-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Arendt, An extraordinary loss of humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpts from H. Arendt, “The Human Condition”<\/a>, p. 320 ff.
\n__________<\/p>\n

The victory of the animal laborans would never have been complete had not the process of secularization, the modern loss of faith inevitably arising from Cartesian doubt, deprived individual life of its immortality, or at least of the certainty of immortality. <\/p>\n

Individual life again became mortal, as mortal as it had been in antiquity, and the world was even less stable, less permanent, and hence less to be relied upon than it had been during the Christian era. <\/p>\n

Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real. <\/p>\n

And in so far as he was to assume that it was real in the uncritical and apparently unbothered optimism of a steadily progressing science, he had removed himself from the earth to a much more distant point than any Christian otherworldliness had ever removed him. <\/p>\n

Whatever the word “secular” is meant to signify in current usage, historically it cannot possibly be equated with worldliness; modern man at any rate did not gain this world when he lost the other world, and he did not gain life, strictly speaking, either; he was thrust back upon it, thrown into the closed inwardness of introspection, where the highest he could experience were the empty processes of reckoning of the mind, its play with itself. <\/p>\n

The only contents left were appetites and desires, the senseless urges of his body which he mistook for passion and which he deemed to be “unreasonable” because he found he could not “reason,” that is, not reckon with them. <\/p>\n

The only thing that could now be potentially immortal, as immortal as the body politic in antiquity and as individual life during the Middle Ages, was life itself, that is, the possibly everlasting life process of the species mankind…<\/p>\n

Individual life became part of the life process, and to labor, to assure the continuity of one’s own life and the life of his family, was all that was needed. <\/p>\n

What was not needed, not necessitated by life’s metabolism with nature, was either superfluous or could be justified only in terms of a peculiarity of human as distinguished from other animal life\u2014so that Milton was considered to have written his Paradise Lost for the same reasons and out of similar urges that compel the silkworm to produce silk.<\/p>\n

If we compare the modern world with that of the past, the loss of human experience involved in this development is extraordinarily striking. <\/p>\n

It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfill these functions much better than we ever could. <\/p>\n

Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms of making and fabricating, only that making, because of its worldliness and inherent indifference to life, was now regarded as but another form of laboring, a more complicated but not a more mysterious function of the life process…<\/p>\n

The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquilized,” functional type of behavior. <\/p>\n

The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society. <\/p>\n

It is quite conceivable that the modern age\u2014which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity\u2014may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.<\/p>\n

But there are other more serious danger signs that man may be willing and, indeed, is on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come. <\/p>\n

If, in concluding, we return once more to the discovery of the Archimedean point and apply it, as Kafka warned us not to do, to man himself and to what he is doing on this earth, it at once becomes manifest that all his activities, watched from a sufficiently removed vantage point in the universe, would appear not as activities of any kind but as processes, so that, as a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel…<\/p>\n

Thought, finally\u2014which we, following the premodern as well as the modern tradition, omitted from our reconsideration of the vita activa\u2014is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

As a living experience, thought has always been assumed, perhaps wrongly, to be known only to the few. It may not be presumptuous to believe that these few have not become fewer in our time. This may be irrelevant, or of restricted relevance, for the future of the world; it is not irrelevant for the future of man. <\/p>\n

For if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity were to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa., it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all. <\/p>\n

Whoever has any experience in this matter will know how right Cato was when he said: Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum agent, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset\u2014”Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.”<\/p>\n

______<\/p>\n

Excerpts from H. Arendt, “The Human Condition”<\/a>, p. 320 ff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpts from H. Arendt, “The Human Condition”, p. 320 ff. __________ The victory of the animal laborans would never have been complete had not the process of secularization, the modern loss of faith inevitably arising from Cartesian doubt, deprived individual life of its immortality, or at least of the certainty of immortality. Individual life again […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,9,46],"tags":[5738,5739,504,2024,5737,43],"class_list":["post-2479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-europe","category-philosophy","tag-hannah-arendt","tag-labor","tag-modernity","tag-reason","tag-the-human-condition","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}