The inwardly turned, narcissistic ego with purely subjective access to the world is not the cause of social disintegration but the result of a fateful process at the objective level. Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people.

Byung-Chul Han 

 

“Domination today is...based on the one hand upon accomplished unity, and on the other hand upon the fact that opposition is generally characterized by a high degree of disunity.”

Edward L. Bernays

 

1. Language and Metaphysics

"As Agamben indicates in the 1989 preface to the English translation of Infancy and History, the key question that unites his disparate explorations is that of what it means for language to exist, what it means that “I speak.” In taking up this question throughout his work, and most explicitly in texts such as Infancy and History, Language and Death, and most recently, The Open, Agamben reinvigorates consideration of philosophical anthropology through a critical questioning of the metaphysical presuppositions that inform it, and in particular, the claim that the defining essence of man is that of having language. In taking up this question, Agamben proposes the necessity of an“experimentum linguae” in which what is experienced is language itself, and the limits of language become apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the experience of language as pure self-reference.

Published in Italian in 1978, Infancy and History constitutes one of Agamben’s earliest attempts to grasp and articulate the implications of such an as experience of language as such. Consisting of a series on interconnected essays on concepts such as history, temporality, play, and gesture, Infancy and History provides an importance entrance to Agamben’s later work on politics and ethics, particularly in the eponymous essay of the edition on the concept of infancy understood as an experiment of language as such. In this, Agamben argues that the contemporary age is marked by the destruction or loss of experience, in which the banality of everyday life cannot be experienced per se but only undergone, a condition which is in part brought about by the rise of modern science and the split between the subject of experience and of knowledge that it entails. Against this destruction of experience, which is also extended in modern philosophies of the subject such as Kant and Husserl, Agamben argues that the recuperation of experience entails a radical rethinking of experience as a question of language rather than of consciousness, since it is only in language that the subject has its site and origin. Infancy, then, conceptualizes an experience of being without language, not in a temporal or developmental sense of preceding the acquisition of language in childhood, but rather, as a condition of experience that precedes and continues to reside in any appropriation of language.

Agamben continues this reflection on the self-referentiality of language as a means of transforming the link between language and metaphysics that underpins Western philosophical anthropology in Language and Death, originally published in 1982. Beginning from Heidegger’s suggestion of an essential relation between language and death, Agamben argues that Western metaphysics have been fundamentally tied to a negativity that is increasingly evident at the heart of the ethos of humanity. While this collapse of metaphysics into ethics is increasingly evident as nihilism, contemporary thought has yet to escape from this condition. Agamben seeks to understand and ultimately escape this collapse through a rigorous philosophy of the experience of language suggested in Infancy and History. In his analysis of Heidegger and Hegel, Agamben isolates their reliance upon and indeed radicalization of negativity, by casting Da and Diese as grammatical shifters that refer to the pure taking place of language. Here, Agamben draws upon the linguistic notion of deixis to isolate the self-referentiality of language in pronouns or grammatical shifters, which he argues do not refer to anything beyond themselves but only to their own utterance (LD, 16-26). The problem for Agamben, though, is that both Hegel and Heidegger ultimately maintain a split within language – which he sees as a consistent element of Western thought from Aristotle to Wittgenstein – in their identification of an ineffability or unspeakability that cannot be brought into human discourse but which is nevertheless its condition. Agamben calls this mute condition of language “Voice,” and concludes that a philosophy that thinks only from the foundation of Voice cannot deliver the resolution of metaphysics that the nihilism toward which we are moving demands. Instead, he suggests, this is only possible in an experience of infancy that has never yet been: it is only in existing “in language without being called there by any Voice” and dying “without being called by death” (LD 96) that humanity can return to its proper dwelling place or ethos, to which it has never been and from which it has never left.

One further dimension of Agamben’s engagement with Western metaphysics and attempt to develop an alternative ontology is worth mentioning here, since it is one of the most consistent threads throughout his work. This is the problem of potentiality, the rethinking of which Agamben takes to be central to the task of overcoming contemporary nihilism. Citing Aristotle’s proposal in Book Theta of his Metaphysics, that “a thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing im-potential (“that is, there will be nothing able not to be,” (in HS, 45) Agamben argues that this ought not be taken to mean simply that “what is not impossible is possible” but rather, highlights the suspension or setting aside of im-potentiality in the passage to actuality. This suspension, though, does not amount to a destruction of im-potentiality, but rather to its fulfilment; that is, through the turning back of potentiality upon itself, which amounts to its “giving of itself to itself,” im-potentiality, or the potentiality to not be, is fully realized in its own suspension such that actuality appears as nothing other than the potentiality to not not-be. While this relation is central to the passage of voice to speech or signification and to attaining toward the experience of language as such, Agamben also claims that in this formulation Aristotle bequeaths to Western philosophy the paradigm of sovereignty, since it reveals the undetermined or sovereign founding of being. As Agamben concludes, ‘“an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself’” (HS 46). In this way then, the relation of potentiality to actuality described by Aristotle accords perfectly with the logic of the ban that Agamben argues is characteristic of sovereign power, thereby revealing the fundamental integration of metaphysics and politics.

These reflections on metaphysics and language thus yield two inter-related problems for Agamben, which he addresses in his subsequent work; the first of these lies in the broad domain of aesthetics, in which Agamben considers the stakes of the appropriation of language in prose and poetry in order to further critically interrogate the distinction between philosophy and poetry. The second lies in the domains of politics and ethics, for Agamben’s conception of the destruction of experience and of potentiality directly feed into an analysis of the political spectacle and of sovereignty. These also necessitate, according to Agamben, a reformulation of ethics as ethos, which in turn requires rethinking community".

IEP

Pierson

Habermas and the Redemption of Modernity

In essence, modernity has rested upon the belief that the exercise of reason can inform progressive development towards individual and societal self-realization. It is an articulation of the confident claims of the Enlightenment; the replacement of myth and religion by science and reason; the replacement of tutelage to superstition and irrationality by self direction through the exercise of reason; the displacement of the cyclical fatalism of human existence by the promise of evolution and progress; the expectation that reason and philosophy could be married to (indeed, could only be realized in), the requirements of practical, sensuous life. For Habermas, the more optimistic Enlightenment thinkers »had the expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces, but would also further understanding of the world and of the self, would promote moral progress, the justice of institutions, and even the happiness of human beings«. This is an optimism which »the twentieth century has shattered«.2 Even the keenest advocates of the project of modernity (including Hegel and Marx) recognized that its realization might be difficult. But there also exists, alongside and almost as longstanding as the project of modernity itself, a more deep seated questioning of its most fundamental premises - that is a belief that the claims of reason to inform progressive development towards individual and societal self-realization were not just difficult to vindicate in practice but indeed profoundly mistaken in intent. The anti-modernists refute the claimed association between reason and emancipation that modernity shares with the Enlightenment. Their counter-argument is that the relationship between the practical application of (Western, instrumental) reason and emancipation is precisely the opposite of that indicated by the Enlightenment. The meta-narratives of Reason and of modernity do not foster self-realization; they do not disclose but rather mask the exercise of power - so that »Reason itself destroys the humanity it first made possible«.3 For Habermas, the coming of Nietzsche signifies a decisive formalization of this anti-modernist sentiment and the origins of something like a post-modernist position. Habermas’s ambition is to show that these criticisms of modernity (from Nietzsche to Foucault) are mistaken. He suggests that the development of modernity has been one-sided and does display many of the weaknesses which its critics very effectively isolate. He accepts that the project of modernity has in some sense been distorted. However, these weaknesses and distortions are seen not to be intrinsic to the project of modernity itself. The drastic conclusions of the opponents of modernity - that the project of modernity should be abandoned - are not justified by their critique. Broadly, Habermas’s claim is that, suitably reconstructed, the project of the Enlightenment/Modernity can still be progressive and realizable. Habermas sets out to defend this claim through a consideration of the historical development of the philosophical discourse of modernity and the parallel discourse of counter-modernity. He argues that the project of modernity had (and still has) an authentically emancipatory potential, but insists that this has been substantively suppressed by a number of »wrong turns« in its philosophical and historical development. Most fundamentally is this weakness to be retraced to the experience of Hegel and Marx. Habermas speculates that »the discourse of modernity took the wrong turn at the first crossroads before which the young Marx stood when he criticized Hegel«.4 Indeed, the parallels between Hegel and Marx are striking. In their youth, both thinkers hold open the idea of using the idea of uncoerced will formation in a communication community existing under constraints of cooperation as a model for the reconciliation of a divided bourgeois society. But later on, both forsake the use of this option.5 For Marx, the alternative was to embrace the paradigm of production, in which, echoing Habermas’s earlier work, it is suggested that the category of intersubjectivity is subordinated to the generalized category of labour. Habermas is centrally concerned »to trace how the transformation of the concept of reflection ends up in the concept of production, how the replacement of 'self-consciousness' by 'labor' ends up in an aporia within Western Marxism«, as, indeed, within the historical project of modernity more generally.*^ For Habermas, the key to this (and subsequent) 'wrong turns' lies in the unsatisfactory resolution of the philosophical problem of the 'paradigm of consciousness' or 'the philosophy of the subject'. Habermas insists that this problem of the self-constituting and self-contradictory subject had been recognised throughout the discourse of modernity, (and was not simply unearthed by its more recent critics). But he also maintains that the philosophers of modernity never satisfactorily resolved the challenge posed by 'the philosophy of the subject'. This is both the point of agreement between Habermas and the post-modernists, but also the perspective from which he criticizes them. Thus the one point in the critique of modernity that Habermas endorses is that »the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness is exhausted«.7 But he entirely rejects the conclusions to which this insight is said to give rise. For Habermas, the recognition of this difficulty is as old as the philosophical discourse of modernity itself and can be responded to in terms of a reconstruction of the philosophy of modernity, built upon a reversing of those 'wrong turns' taken at strategic points in its development. In essence, this means replacing the model of subject-centred reason with the model of unconstrained consensus formation in a communication community standing under cooperative constraints...[an orientation] to communicatively structured lifeworlds that reproduce themselves via the palpable medium of action oriented to mutual agreement.8 Here we return to Habermas’s familiar claims about universal pragmatics and the ideal speech situation. Communicative reason finds its criteria in the argumentative procedures for directly or indirectly redeeming claims to propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and aesthetic harmony...This communicative rationality recalls older ideas of logos, inasmuch as it brings along with it the connotations of a noncoercively unifying, consensus-building force of a discourse in which the participants overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement. Communicative reason is expressed in a decentred understanding of the world. For Habermas, the advocates of postmodernity have made the mistake of identifying the limitations of a particular form of (subject-centred) reason as a limitation of all forms of reason. Habermas’s claim is to have reconstituted the traditional but problematic claims of the supporters of modernity by purging this tradition of its association with an (exhausted) subject-centred reason and redeeming it through the appeal to the claims of intersubjective or communicative reason. The philosophical discourse of modernity is seen always to have been concerned with its relationship to political praxis. Habermas is insistent that his own recasting of modernity in terms of the suppressed element of communicative reason has just such practical implications in terms of our understanding of the contemporary problems of the »social-welfare-state-project«. Just like modernity, the welfare state is seen to have been a »disappointment« for these who were its keenest proponents. Habermas argues that the architects of the welfare state project, (primarily social democratic parties and trades unions), were principally motivated by the desire to enhance opportunities for the self-realization of workers by freeing them from the most oppressive aspects of commodification. The post-war welfare state was a part of »the Utopian project of labor«.10 But while their ambition lay in the emancipation of labour, the day-to-day practice of the welfare state has increased the colonization of the life-world and expanded the control of external forces over the individual and her/his free development. Thus Habermas sees the action of the founders of the welfare state being almost exclusively directed towards »the taming of capitalism, and this primarily through the use of state power which they (mistakenly) regarded as neutral or 'innocent'. In fact, in the promotion of 'welfare legislation programmes...an ever tighter net of legal norms, and of governmental and supporting bureaucracies has been drawn over the everyday existence of potential and actual clients'. The intention was to liberate the lifeworld from subjection to commodification, but the outcome has been the subordination of the lifeworld to both commodification and (state) bureaucratization. Habermas concludes: In short, inherent in the project of the social state is a contradiction between goal and method. Its goal is the establishment of forms of life which are structured according to egalitarian standards and which at the same time open up arenas for individual self-fulfillment and spontaneity. But apparently this goal cannot be achieved directly through a legal and administrative transformation of political programmes. 11 Consequently, the programme of the social welfare state...is losing its capacity to project future possibilities for a collectively better and less endangered way of life.«12 This may be related directly to the traditional constitution of modernity which has operated with the twin construct of economy/commodification and state/bureaucratization. If the emancipatory purpose of the welfare state project is to be realized, this requires the promotion of a third strand - a sphere oriented around the generation of solidarity and meaning, defence of the integrity of the lifeworld, and sustained through intersubjective, discursive will-formation. If the project of the social welfare state were not simply carried on or abandoned, but rather continued at a higher level of reflection, as Habermas recommends that it should be, it would need to become reflexive to a certain extent and aim at taming not just the capitalistic economy, but the state itself.13

Christopher Pierson

Developmental trauma is a more theoretically-driven construct, which refers to a potentially traumatic configuration of the relational field between the child and his or her caregivers, characterized by a lack of emotional reciprocity and a disavowal of the child’s affective needs (Bromberg, 2013). In developmental trauma, the child’s affective needs are disowned and entirely subdued by parental demands, desires, conflicts, fears and projections (Borgogno, 2007). Whether developmental trauma does or does not include overt material neglect and abuse of the child, it always embraces a series of negative child-caregiver interactions such as emotional neglect, intense role-reversal, or parental behaviors directed at the psychological domination of the child (Schimmenti, 2012). This definition of developmental trauma partially overlaps with other psychoanalytic constructs related to childhood trauma such as “cumulative trauma” (Khan, 1963) or “strain trauma” (Kris, 1955). These constructs highlight the accumulation of frustrating tendencies that derive from a longstanding external noxious force (especially a disturbance in the mother’s role as a protective shield), which constantly pressures the child to maintain defenses against overwhelming anxiety and that becomes in itself traumatic. However, our way of conceiving developmental trauma is more in line with Ferenczi’s (1929) understanding of the unwelcome child and Shengold’s (1989) concept of soul murder, where particular attention is given to the dysfunctional affective climate in which the child grows up and its polarization of the parent’s rather than the child’s needs. In fact, the focus here is on parental disavowal and denial of parts of the child’s existence, in particular those parts which go beyond the parental urges, wishes, and projections. In other words, it is as if the parents do not recognize a psychological existence of the child (Schimmenti, 2013), and thus they may be impersonal and affectionless in caregiving (Winnicott, 1971); or they may use the child as an “evacuatory object”, i.e. as a garbage can of their disturbed mental states (Shengold, 1989); or they may even violently introduce mental content into the child that can satisfy at a conscious or unconscious level their own needs, to the detriment of the child’s natural development...As Shengold (1989, p. 24) elegantly stated, “our identity depends initially on good parental care and good parental caring—on the transmitted feeling that it is good to be here”, while the intimate affective climate of developmental trauma may represent the exact opposite condition, such as “it is no good that you are here; you are only a problem” (Schimmenti, 2012, p. 198)

Adriano Schimmenti

Vincenzo Caretti

Notably, developmental trauma has important biological correlates. For instance, child abuse and neglect can slow down the myelination of the prefrontal medial cortex (PFMC), which is implicated in executive functioning and in regulating peripheral response to stress (De Bellis, 2005). Without the mitigating effects of the PFMC, the amygdala is left on its own to evaluate the potential threat and, if sensitised to negative emotional stimuli, it will most likely produce a signal activating the fear system (Panksepp, 1998). At that point, the child’s adrenal gland releases cortisol, a corticosteroid hormone, that stimulates gluconeogenesis-activating anti-stress pathways in the body. However, excessive exposure to cortisol can damage the cells in the hippocampus, which is responsible for converting short-term memories of emotional events into long-term memories, thus impairing the creation of new memories and inhibiting memory retrieval of already stored information (Joseph, 1999). This is consistent with psychobiological perspectives suggesting that dissociation may arise from a brain-based regulatory response to fear or other extreme emotion (e.g. Lanius et al., 2010), and it is possible that this biological process initiates one of the most important developmental pathways leading to the most severe forms of dissociation, particularly among those patients suffering from dissociative amnesia, depersonalization and even dissociative identity disorder: the implicit, emotional memories of relational threatening stimuli can be stored at a sensory level, but no episodic memory related to the traumatic event and its circumstances seem to be retrievable (Nadel & Jacobs, 1998). In this case, it is possible that the brain produces automatic, state-dependent responses reflecting what was once experienced—internally and/or externally— at a sensory and bodily level or, on the contrary, it replicates (i.e, it dissociatively reenacts) the same self-regulation strategy originally used to face the perceived threat. In fact, developmental research has shown that children can remember early events across short delays, but after long delays these memories may no longer be consciously accessible (Cordón et al., 2004; Terr, 1988). Research has also demonstrated that under certain

LINKING THE OVERWHELMING WITH THE UNBEARABLE

circumstances early memories of trauma can be retrieved (Cordón et al., 2004), and this may particularly apply to children (Gaensbauer, 1995, 2000); nonetheless, these memories may have a dream-like quality, since the effects of psychobiological dysregulation can prevent the rehearsal of such memories, leading to the decay of trauma-related details (Fivush & Schwarzmueller, 1995). This suggests that the mechanisms involved in the dialectic between compartmentalization and detachment are developmentally complex and are likely related to a difficulty in integrating the emotions into a cohesive structure of meaning when a child goes through self-experiences that rapidly shift from one side to another. The difficulty for severely abused and neglected children in selecting an integrated response system with consistent affect regulation strategies can also be inferred from the Strange Situation Procedure (Ainsworth et al., 1978). The Strange Situation is an experimental procedure for assessing attachment styles in children between the ages of 9 and 24 months. As the caregiver and a stranger enter and leave the room, the researchers observe the child’s reactions in terms of the amount of exploration the child engages in throughout the experiment: the interaction with the stranger, and the responses to the departure and return of the caregiver. Main and Salomon (1986) identified a group of children, highly represented among those who have suffered neglect and abuse, who exhibited a disoriented/disorganized attachment (the “type D” attachment style) and whose behaviors phenotypically resembled dissociative states (Main & Morgan, 1996). Some of these children showed extreme detachment symptoms, similar to animal responses of freezing (i.e. paralysis responses) when faced with an inescapable shock (Nijenhuis et al., 1998), perhaps because the parent represented for them a threat-associated stimulus, automatically eliciting the “feigned death” or other similar response. However, there are other disorganized children who show different patterns of behavior that rapidly shift from one to another. For example, a child can appear paralyzed looking at the wall, after which he turns his head back looking frightened at his caregiver, and immediately after he closes his eyes and starts violently moving his head back-and-forth. Another child can appear in a feigned death state in the arms of her caregiver, when she suddenly arches her back unnaturally and throws herself backward. Levine (1997) noted that animals emerging from freezing often manifest repetitive, almost seizure-like motor activity, postulating that these stereotyped motor responses serve to allow the completion of the motor sequences of successful escape or defense strategies. Consequently, Van der Hart and colleagues (2005) have postulated that the behaviors of disorganized children during the Strange Situation include concurrent or successive activation of the attachment action system and the defense action system.

Adriano Schimmenti  Vincenzo Caretti

Soul, or psychic, murder involves trauma imposed from the world outside the mind that is so overwhelming that the mental apparatus is flooded with feeling. The same overstimulated state can result as a reaction to great deprivation. The terrifying too-muchness requires massive and mind-distorting defensive operations for the child to continue to think and feel and live. The child’s sense of identity (that is, the emotional maintenance of the mental images of his or her self) is threatened.

SHENGOLD

 "Truth" is created when knowledge is elevated by power and reproduced through discourse. Knowledge can exist with a minimum of power (for example only in my head) but "truth" experienced as some kind of transcendental knowledge can not be established without vast amounts of power'.

Unlike the natural scientist, who deals with matters that, whatever their origin, are not man-made or man-enacted, and that therefore can be observed, understood, and eventually even changed only through the most meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality, the historian, as well as the politician, deals with human affairs that owe their existence to man’s capacity for action, and that means to man’s relative freedom from things as they are. Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist’s patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency.

          Hanna Arendt

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice."

ROBERT F. KENNEDY

Marx

"If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposes that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day; but this equalizing of labor is not by any means the work of M. Proudhon’s eternal justice; it is purely and simply a fact of modern industry.

In the automatic workshop, one worker’s labor is scarely distinguishable in any way from another worker’s labor: workers can only be distinguished one from another by the length of time they take for their work. Nevertheless, this quantitative difference becomes, from a certain point of view, qualitative, in that the time they take for their work depends partly on purely material causes, such as physical constitution, age and sex; partly on purely negative moral causes, such as patience, imperturbability, diligence. In short, if there is a difference of quality in the labor of different workers, it is at most a quality of the last kind, which is far from being a distinctive speciality. This is what the state of affairs in modern industry amounts to in the last analysis. It is upon this equality, already realized in automatic labor, that M. Proudhon wields his smoothing-plane of “equalization,” which he means to establish universally in “time to come!”

All the “equalitarian” consequences which M. Proudhon deduces from Ricardo's doctrine are based on a fundamental error. He confounds the value of commodities measured by the quantity of labor embodied in them with the value of commodities measured by “the value of labor.” If these two ways of measuring the value of commodities were equivalent, it could be said indifferently that the relative value of any commodity is measured by the quantity of labor embodied in it; or that it is measured by the quantity of labor it can buy; or again that it is measured by the quantity of labor which can acquire it. But this is far from being so. The value of labor can no more serve as a measure of value than the value of any other commodity". 

Karl Marx

 https://epochemagazine.org/60/hannah-arendt-culture-as-care-and-resistance/

West

"And by funk, what I mean is, wrestling with the wounds, the scars, the bruises, as well as the creative responses to wounds, scars, and bruises—some of them inflicted because of structures and institutions, some of them...tied to our existential condition".

Cornel West

Anderson: Hannah Arendt on Political Life (Transcript)

0:00
In today's lecture, I want to talk about some
0:02themes both from The Human Condition and from The Origins
0:05of Totalitarianism. I'll start with some ideas
0:07from The Human Condition.
0:09For Arendt, it's important to talk about the human
0:11condition rather than human nature, because humans don't
0:15have an essential nature that is unchanging over time.
0:19Rather, we condition our environment and are
0:23conditioned by it in a reciprocal fashion.
0:27There is no fundamental essence to human nature
0:31because we are always both shaping and being shaped
0:35by what surrounds us.
0:38We all partake in a shared human condition, but
0:42there's no kind of bird's eye view of an unchanging
0:45nature outside of history.
0:47This is probably a familiar concept to us by now
0:50because it picks up on some of the themes from Hegel
0:53and Marx about the way that humans are shaped in
0:56relation to our environment.
0:58For Arendt as well.
1:00Humans are a who rather than a what.
1:03We help define ourselves and we help define each other.
1:08The human condition is characterized by what
1:10Arendt calls, using a Latin term, the Vita
Vita Activa
1:13Activa, or the active life.
1:16Now the Vita Activa has three primary levels,
1:20we might say, to it.
1:21The first is labor.
1:22And labor refers to our activity in terms of
1:25biological processes, creating and sustaining life, taking
1:29care of our physical needs.
1:32Now the second level is work, which is activity in
1:35terms of the life of humans, the things that we create,
1:39the sort of environments or worldliness that we establish.
1:44So this vase is the product of work, not of
1:47labor in Arendt's sense.
1:49So she's using labor and work in pretty specific ways.
1:53Art is also an expression of work for Arendt.
1:57The third level of the Vita Activa is action.
2:01And this refers to activity in the sense of the
2:05social life of humans.
2:08The life of action is undertaken by humans as a
2:12collective or as a plurality.
2:15The life of thinking the life of politics are part
2:19of this domain of action.
2:21So thinking is action for Arendt and action
2:25is the political activity par excellence.
2:28What characterizes humans is that we have this capacity
2:31to be what Aristotle calls political animals.
Isolation
2:35Let's connect this idea of the Vita Activa to the
2:38Origins of Totalitarianism because in this text, Arendt
2:42seems extremely concerned that we have given up
2:47taking on the challenges of the life of action, of
2:53real political activity and engagement with one another,
2:58and just sort of lapsed into this laziness of
3:02accepting the status quo and allowing our sort of
3:06baser impulses to take over.
3:09Arendt talks about how one of the origins of totalitarianism
3:13is isolation, when the political sphere of life,
3:17which for her means acting together in pursuit of a
3:20common goal, is destroyed,
3:24and we start to pit ourselves against each other, we feel
3:28lonely in a political sense.
3:31We don't want to talk politics with each other.
3:33We don't feel like it's important for
3:35us to be political.
3:37We feel a sense of powerlessness to
3:39change the status quo.
3:41And this isolation in a political sense can breed
3:46loneliness about human life as a whole, which she discusses
3:50on pages four 74 and four 75.
3:53We have this experience of not belonging to the world
3:56at all, which she says is a common ground for terror.
4:00This experience of loneliness and isolation,
4:03perhaps paradoxically, is actually a shared experience
4:08of the ever-growing masses, she says on 478.
The Mass
4:13So what is the mass and how is it that we live in an era
4:18of the masses, even as we live in an era of extreme
4:22loneliness and isolation?
4:25Arendt describes the mass as not being held
4:27together by any sense of common interest or goals.
4:31They might actually have common interests and goals,
4:33but they don't recognize themselves as such.
4:37And she describes how both the Nazi and communist
4:40movements recruited members from the mass of people who
4:44are apparently indifferent.
4:46These people that the mainstream parties had given
4:49up on because they saw them as indifferent, maybe even as
4:53lazy as lacking motivation.
4:55And I want say that you probably
4:58have already picked up on some disturbing parallels
5:01to the present time, and there are more to come.
5:05Arendt is trying to figure out here how Germany
5:09in the 1930s became a bastion of the Nazi party,
5:13when previously there had been a republic.
5:15And here are a few of the many, many elements
5:18that she draws on.
5:19So she says that totalitarian movements end the illusions

totalitarianism

5:24of a democratic society.
5:26And there are two in particular that she
5:27focuses on on page 313.
5:30The first is the illusion that the people as a
5:32majority had taken an active part in government.
5:37The reality was, she says, that a democracy functions
5:41according to rules that are actively recognized
5:44only by a minority.
5:45So majority rule is often not the actual case in
5:49a democratic society, but democratic society
5:51pretends that it is.
5:53And the second illusion is that the indifferent masses,
5:56people who were politically apathetic, didn't matter.
6:00Right?
6:00It's like, Oh, you know, there are plenty of folks
6:03who don't really have strong political affiliation.
6:05They're just sort of apolitical, they don't do
6:07politics, and they don't want to discuss them.
6:10Democratic society functioned under the illusion that
6:13those people didn't matter.
6:15But what actual totalitarian movements such as that
6:19of national socialism recognized was that these
6:23people could be enlisted for totalitarian projects
6:26because of their feelings of isolation and loneliness.
6:29One of the first signs of the breakdown of the party
6:31system in a democracy is the failure to recruit members
6:36from the younger generations.
6:38Younger generations come of age and they're like, what
6:41do I care about politics?
6:43That's just not my deal!
6:45Another is the lack of silent support of unorganized masses.
6:50A mass of furious individuals who seemingly have nothing
6:54in common start to develop.
6:56What they have in common is precisely their sense that
7:02party members are doomed and that the powers that be
7:06are stupid and fraudulent, she discusses on page 315.
7:11The self-centered bitterness of the masses develops
7:15hand in hand with their increasing lack of care for
7:19their own self preservation.
7:21The masses sort of start to go haywire and self-destruct,
7:25and they're okay with destroying themselves
7:27and others around them.
7:29These are extremely dangerous conditions
7:31for totalitarianism.
7:32Arendt gives a very useful summary of totalitarian
7:36government on page 460.
7:39Totalitarian government transforms
7:41classes into masses.
7:43It also supplants the party system by a mass movement.
7:49Importantly, Arendt says the origins of totalitarianism
7:52aren't so much in a one party dictatorship as they
7:55are in a mass movement that's not really driven
7:59by any particular goal.
8:01Totalitarian government also shifts the center of power
8:05from the army to the police.
8:07And in addition, it establishes a foreign policy
8:10that is openly directed towards world domination.
8:14She says on page 462, that totalitarianism is
8:18lawfulness without legality.
8:23One thing that totalitarian governments tend to do is
8:26supplant legality with laws of history and or laws of nature.
8:33For instance, the idea that our particular people
8:36is destined to dominate the world, right?
8:39In the case of national socialism.
8:41In this sense, humans are taken to be swept along by
8:44a force outside of them.
8:47And Arendt mentions actually Darwin and Marx
8:50here, as examples of this very troublesome idea.
8:53Actual laws that are context specific begin to
8:57be replaced by total terror, which she says translates
9:01into reality, the law of nature and or of history.
9:05This idea that you are being swept along by forces, and you
9:08can either be at the bottom or you can be at the top.
9:11Terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.
9:16She says on page 464, Terror makes us think
9:21that we are nothing but the pawns of nature or
9:24the pawns of history.
9:27We are not free.
9:29Terror eliminates freedom and the source of freedom.
9:33One of the many ways it does this is through
9:36undermining our capacity for action, which is the
9:40third level and the highest level of the Vita Activa.
9:43Recall that thinking is one of the components of action.
9:47For Arendt, totalitarianism undermines our capacity
9:50for free thinking in part because it causes us to
9:55question the distinction between reality and fiction.
10:00And to conclude that there is no valid
10:02distinction to be made.
10:03So on page 474, she says that the ideal subject of
10:06totalitarian the rule is not the convinced dogmatist,
10:11it's not the person who says "national socialism
10:14is the best political philosophy out there.
10:16I'm going to hang my hat on it."
10:17And that's that.
10:19No.
10:20The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is
10:23the person for whom fact and fiction, true and
10:27false, no longer have any relevant meaning.
10:30They don't have any relevant distinction such
10:32that somebody can say, this is the right view,
10:35or this is the wrong view.
ideologies
10:37I want to close by saying something briefly
10:39about ideologies, which Arendt addresses here.
10:42She says that ideologies are not inherently
10:44totalitarian, but they do have totalitarian elements.
10:48And an ideology is an -ism that can explain
10:52everything by deducing it from a single premise.
10:56Ideologies draw from the scientific approach
10:59and they pretend to be a scientific philosophy, right?
11:03Everything is organized around a particular principle,
11:06say spirit in Hegel.
11:08Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the
11:11entire historical process.
11:14And for ,Arendt they're extremely troublesome because
11:17they reduce our freedom
11:19by replacing it with a straitjacket of logic.
11:23Everything can be explained-- and not just explained,
11:26but explained away.
11:28The claim to total explanation that we find in ideologies
11:32intersects with ideologies' independence from experience.
11:38An ideology doesn't think it needs to draw on the
11:41evidence of experience,
11:43because all it does is explain phenomena by deducing them
11:47from overarching abstract a priori principles.
11:51So for instance, something like that, alternative facts,
11:54I think Arendt hints at on page 471, where she says that
11:59in ideology, different facts can change their reality in
12:03accordance with their claim.
12:05You might think about the way that a supporter of Q Anon
12:08is always going to be able to fit in a particular belief
12:11that seems to contradict their belief system with
12:14another belief that makes sense of the apparent
12:16contradiction and says, no, actually this can fit back
12:19in to the Q Anon narrative.
12:22In the end, ideologies have an unreal consistency
12:26as Arendt describes them.
12:28Reality, she notes, is not itself consistent.
12:32And so anytime we're able to find a perfectly consistent
12:35picture, whether of history or of nature, we are
12:39finding ourselves in a very troubling situation where
12:43we're not letting ourselves be taught by reality.
12:46We're trying to slot everything in to a
12:49predetermined set of principles deduced from one
12:52overarching principle, but that doesn't do justice to the
12:56messy nature of reality of the world as it is, including the
13:01inconsistent and unpredictable character of human freedom.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"The two central features of action are freedom and plurality. By freedom Arendt does not mean the ability to choose among a set of possible alternatives (the freedom of choice so dear to the liberal tradition) or the faculty of liberum arbitrium which, according to Christian doctrine, was given to us by God. Rather, by freedom Arendt means the capacity to begin, to start something new, to do the unexpected, with which all human beings are endowed by virtue of being born. Action as the realization of freedom is therefore rooted in natality, in the fact that each birth represents a new beginning and the introduction of novelty in the world.

To be sure, Arendt recognizes that all activities are in some way related to the phenomenon of natality, since both labor and work are necessary to create and preserve a world into which new human beings are constantly born. However, of the three activities, action is the one most closely connected with natality, because by acting individuals re-enact the miracle of beginning inherent in their birth. For Arendt, the beginning that each of us represents by virtue of being born is actualized every time we act, that is, every time we begin something new. As she puts it: “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting ” (HC, 9).

Arendt also stresses the fact that since action as beginning is rooted in natality, since it is the actualization of freedom, it carries with it the capacity to perform miracles, that is, to introduce what is totally unexpected. “It is in the nature of beginning” — she claims — “that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings … The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world ” (HC, 177–8).

The birth of every individual is thus the promise of a new beginning: to act means to be able to disclose one’s self and to do the unanticipated; and it is entirely in keeping with this conception that most of the concrete examples of action in the modern age that Arendt discusses are cases of revolutions and popular uprisings. Her claim is that “revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning,” (OR, 21) since they represent the attempt to found a new political space, a space where freedom can appear as a worldly reality. The favorite example for Arendt is the American Revolution, because there the act of foundation took the form of a constitution of liberty. Her other examples are the revolutionary clubs of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, the creation of Soviets during the Russian Revolution, the French Resistance to Hitler in the Second World War, and the Hungarian revolt of 1956. In all these cases individual men and women had the courage to interrupt their routine activities, to step forward from their private lives in order to create a public space where freedom could appear, and to act in such a way that the memory of their deeds could become a source of inspiration for the future. In doing so, according to Arendt, they rediscovered the truth known to the ancient Greeks that action is the supreme blessing of human life, that which bestows significance to the lives of individuals.

In the book On Revolution Arendt devotes much attention to the rediscovery of this truth by those who participated in the American Revolution. In her view the Founding Fathers, although they might have pretended that they longed for private life and engaged in politics only out of a sense of duty, made clear in their letters and recollections that they had discovered unexpected delights in action and had acquired a taste for public freedom and for earning distinction among their peers".

Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst [288] possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology. According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum. The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology. Who would ever deny that it is correct? It is in obvious conformity with what we are envisaging when we talk about technology. The instrumental definition of technology is indeed so uncannily correct that it even holds for modern technology, of which, in other respects, we maintain with some justification that it is, in contrast to the older handicraft technology, something completely different and therefore new. Even the power plant with its turbines and generators is a man-made means to an end established by man. Even the jet aircraft and the high-frequency apparatus are means to ends. A radar station is of course less simple than a weather vane. To be sure, the construction of a high-frequency apparatus requires the interlocking of various processes of technical-industrial production. And certainly a sawmill in a secluded valley of the Black Forest is a primitive means compared with the hydroelectric plant on the Rhine River. But this much remains correct: modern technology too is a [289] means to an end. This is why the instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, "get" technology "spiritually in hand." We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control. But suppose now that technology were no mere means: how would it stand with the will to master it? Yet we said, did we not, that the instrumental definition of technology is correct? To be sure. The correct always fixes upon something pertinent in whatever is under consideration. However, in order to be correct, this fixing by no means needs to uncover the thing in question in its essence. Only at the point where such an uncovering happens does the true come to pass. For that reason the merely correct is not yet the true. Only the true brings us into a free relationship with that which concerns us from its essence. Accordingly, the correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology's essence. In order that we may arrive at this, or at least come close to it, we must seek the true by way of the correct. We must ask: What is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong? A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But not only that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality. For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formulis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and matter; (4) [290] the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith. What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality. But suppose that causality, for its part, is veiled in darkness with respect to what it is? Certainly for centuries we have acted as though the doctrine of the four causes had fallen from heaven as a truth as clear as daylight. But it might be that the time has come to ask: Why are there only four causes? In relation to the aforementioned four, what does "cause" really mean? From whence does it come that the causal character of the four causes is so unifiedly determined that they belong together? So long as we do not allow ourselves to go into these questions, causality, and with it instrumentality, and with this the accepted definition of technology, remain obscure and groundless. For a long time we have been accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. In this connection, to bring about means to obtain results, effects. The causa efficiens, but one among the four causes, sets the standard for all causality. This goes so far that we no longer even count the causa finalis, telic finality, as causality. Causa, casus, belongs to the verb cadere, to fall, and means that which brings it about that something falls out as a result in such and such a way. The doctrine of the four causes goes back to Aristotle. But everything that later ages seek in Greek thought under the conception and rubric "causality" in the realm of Greek thought and for Greek thought per se has simply nothing at all to do with bringing about and effecting. What we call cause [Ursache] and the Romans call causa is called aition by the Greeks, that to which something else is indebted [das, was ein anderes verschuldet]. The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else. An example can clarify this. Silver is that out of which the silver chalice is made. As this matter (hyle), it is co-responsible for the chalice. The chalice is [291] indebted to, i.e., owes thanks to, the silver for that of which it consists. But the sacrificial vessel is indebted not only to the silver. As a chalice, that which is indebted to the silver appears in the aspect of a chalice and not in that of a brooch or a ring. Thus the sacred vessel is at the same time indebted to the aspect (eidos) of chaliceness. Both the silver into which the form is admitted as chalice and the aspect in which the silver appears are in their respective ways co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel. But there remains yet a third something that is above all responsible for the sacrificial vessel. It is that which in advance confines the chalice within the realm of consecration and bestowal. Through this the chalice is circumscribed as sacrificial vessel. Circumscribing gives bounds to the thing. With the bounds the thing does not stop; rather, from within them it begins to be what after production it will be. That which gives bounds, that which completes, in this sense is called in Greek telos, which is all too often translated as "aim" and "purpose," and so misinterpreted. The telos is responsible for what as matter and what as aspect are together co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel. Finally there is a fourth participant in the responsibility for the finished sacrificial vessel's lying before us ready for use, i.e., the silversmith—but not at all because he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial chalice as if it were the effect of a making; the silversmith is not a causa efficiens. The Aristotelian doctrine neither knows the cause that is named by this term, nor uses a Greek word that would correspond to it. The silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted. To consider carefully [überlegen] is in Greek legein, logos. Legein is rooted in apophainesthai, to bring forward into appearance. The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacred vessel's bringing-forth and subsistence take and retain their first departure. The three previously mentioned ways of being responsible owe thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the "that" and [292] the "how" of their coming into appearance and into play for the production of the sacrificial vessel. Thus four ways of owing hold sway in the sacrificial vessel that lies ready before us. They differ from one another, yet they belong together. What unites them from the beginning? In what does this playing in unison of the four ways of being responsible play? What is the source of the unity of the four causes? What, after all, does this owing and being responsible mean, thought as the Greeks thought it? Today we are too easily inclined either to understand being responsible and being indebted moralistically as a lapse, or else to construe them in terms of effecting. In either case we bar to ourselves the way to the primal meaning of that which is later called causality. So long as this way is not opened up to us we shall also fail to see what instrumentality, which is based on causality, actually is. In order to guard against such misinterpretations of being responsible and being indebted, let us clarify the four ways of being responsible in terms of that for which they are responsible. According to our example, they are responsible for the silver chalice's lying ready before us as a sacrificial vessel. Lying before and lying ready (hypokeisthai) characterize the presenting of something that is present. The four ways of being responsible bring something into appearance. They let it come forth into presencing [Anwesen]. They set it free to that place and so start it on its way, namely, into its complete arrival. The principal characteristic of being responsible is this starting something on its way into arrival. It is in the sense of such a starting something on its way into arrival that being responsible is an occasioning or an inducing to go forward [Ver-an-lassen]. On the basis of a look at what the Greeks experienced in being responsible, in aitia, we now give this verb "to occasion" a more inclusive meaning, so that it now is the name for the essence of causality thought as the Greeks thought it. The common and narrower meaning of "occasion," in contrast, is [293] nothing more than a colliding and releasing, and means a kind of secondary cause within the whole of causality. But in what, then, does the playing in unison of the four ways of occasioning play? These let what is not yet present arrive into presencing. Accordingly, they are unifiedly governed by a bringing that brings what presences into appearance. Plato tells us what this bringing is in a sentence from the Symposium (205b): he gar toi ek tou me ontos eis to on ionti hotoioun aitia pasa esti poiesis. "Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing-forth [Her-vorbringen]." It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handicraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis, also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself (en heautoi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another (en alloi) in the craftsman or artist. The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing-forth. Through bringing-forth the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance. But how does bringing-forth happen, be it in nature or in handicraft and art? What is the bringing-forth in which the fourfold way of occasioning plays? Occasioning has to do with the presencing The Question Concerning Technology 4 [Anwesen] of that which at any given time comes to appearance in bringing-forth. Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment. Bringing-forth comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment. This coming rests [294] and moves freely within what we call revealing [das Entbergen]. The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say "truth" and usually understand it as correctness of representation . But where have we strayed to? We are questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning— causality—and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means as well as instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. If we inquire step by step into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing. Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth. This prospect strikes us as strange. Indeed, it should do so, as persistently as possible and with so much urgency that we will finally take seriously the simple question of what the name "technology" means. The word stems from the Greek. Technikon means that which belongs to techne. We must observe two things with respect to the meaning of this word. One is that techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic. The other thing that we should observe with regard to techne is even more important. From earliest times until Plato the word techne is linked with the word episteme. Both words are terms for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides [295] an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing. Aristotle, in a discussion of special importance (Nicomacheun Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4), distinguishes between episteme and techne and indeed with respect to what and how they reveal. Techne is a mode of aletheuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the terms of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisaged as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive in techne does not at all lie in making and manipulating, nor in the using of means, but rather in the revealing mentioned before. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth. Thus the clue to what the word techne means and to how the Greeks defined it leads us into the same context that opened itself to us when we pursued the question of what instrumentality as such in truth might be. Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.

Martin Heidegger

Knowledge is always mediated. Immediate, direct experience tells us some things, but cannot access other knowledge, and sometimes obscures the bigger picture. For example, direct historical evidence from a soldier during a war is powerful, but tells us nothing of the wider war – the reasons, the politics, the campaign. It is impossible to understand any concept without going outside of it to the whole – every human action is social.

Now and Then

Heidegger

We are questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer : everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning-causality-and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means, belongs instrumentality.l1 Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. If we inquire, step by step, into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing. Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth. (12)

[…] what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth. (13)

Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence...in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens. (13)

What kind of unconcealment is it, then, that is peculiar to that which comes to stand forth through this setting-upon that challenges? Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. The word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere “stock.” The name “standingreserve” assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object. (17)

MH

Han

"The term vita contemplativa is not meant to invoke, nostalgically, a world where existence originally felt at home. Rather, it connects to the experience of being [Seinserfahrung] in which what is beautiful and perfect does not change or pass—a state that eludes all human intervention. The basic mood that distinguishes it is marveling at the way things are [So-Sein], which has nothing to do with practicality or processuality. Modern, Cartesian doubt has taken the place of wonder. Yet the capacity for contemplation need not be bound to imperishable Being. Especially whatever is floating, inconspicuous, or fleeting reveals itself only to deep, contemplative attention.3 Likewise, it is only contemplative lingering that has access to phenomena that are long and slow. Paul Cézanne, a master of deep, contemplative attention, once remarked that he could see the fragrance of things. This visualization of fragrances requires profound attention. In the contemplative state, one steps outside oneself, so to speak, and immerses oneself in the surroundings. Merleau-Ponty describes Cézanne’s mode of contemplatively observing a landscape as a kind of externalization or de-interiorization [Entinnerlichung]: He would start by discovering the geological structure of the landscape; then, according to Mme Cézanne, he would halt and gaze, eyes dilated. . . . “The landscape thinks itself in me,” he said, “and I am its consciousness.” Only profound attention prevents “unsteadiness of the eyes” and yields the composure capable of “join[ing] the wandering hands of nature.” Without such contemplative composure, the gaze errs restlessly and finds expression for nothing. That said, art is “expressive action.” Even Nietzsche, who replaced Being with Will, knew that human life ends in deadly hyperactivity when every contemplative [beschaulich] element is driven out: From lack of repose our civilization is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active, that is to say the restless, counted for more. That is why one of the most necessary corrections to the character of mankind that have to be taken in hand is a considerable strengthening of the contemplative element in it.5 16 In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt seeks to rehabilitate the vita activa against the primacy a long tradition has granted the vita contemplativa, and to articulate its inner richness in a new way. In her estimation, the traditional view has wrongly reduced vita activa to mere restlessness: nec-otium or a-scholia. 1 Arendt connects her revaluation of vita activa to the priority of action [Handeln]. This makes her commit to heroic actionism, like her teacher Heidegger. That said, for the early Heidegger death provides the point of orientation: the possibility of dying imposes limits on action and makes freedom finite. In contrast, Arendt orients possible action on birth, which lends it more heroic emphasis. The miracle, she argues, lies in human natality itself: the new beginning that human beings are to realize on the basis of being born. Wonder-working belief is replaced by heroic action, the native obligation of mankind. This amounts to conferring a quasireligious dimension on action: The miracle . . . is the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. . . . It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born to us.” According to Arendt, modern society—as a society of “laboring” [Arbeitsgesellschaft]—nullifies any possibility for action when it degrades the human being into an animal laborans, a beast of burden. Action, she maintains, occasions new possibilities, yet modern humanity passively stands at the mercy of the anonymous process of living. Thereby, thinking degrades into calculation, mere cerebral functioning (“reckoning with consequences”3). All forms of vita activa, both the matter of producing and that of acting, sink to the level of simple laboring. As Arendt sees it, modernity began with an unprecedented, heroic activation of human capacity, yet it ends in mortal passivity. Arendt’s explanation for the ubiquity of animal laborans does not hold up to recent social developments. She maintains that the life of the modern individual is “submerged in the over-all life process of the species”; under these circumstances, “the only active decision” would be “to let go, so to speak, to abandon . . . individuality” and “acquiesce” to a “functional type of behavior.”4 The absolutization of laboring follows from the fact that, “in the rise of society[,] it was ultimately the rise of the species which asserted itself.”5 Arendt even believed that she had identified danger signals “that man may be . . . on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come.”6 She assumes that all human activities, if viewed from a sufficiently remote point in the universe, would no longer appear as deeds but as biological processes. Accordingly, for an observer in outer space, motorization would resemble a biological mutation: the human body surrounds itself with a metal housing in the manner of a snail—like bacteria reacting to antibiotics by mutating into resistant strains.7 Arendt’s descriptions of the modern animal laborans do not correspond to what we can observe in today’s achievement society. The late-modern animal laborans does not give up its individuality or ego in order to merge, through the work it performs, with the anonymous life process of the species. Rather, contemporary labor society, as a society of achievement and business, fosters individuality. 18 The late-modern animal laborans is equipped with an ego just short of bursting. And it is anything but passive. If one abandoned one’s individuality and dissolved into the life process of the species entirely, one would at least have the serenity [Gelassenheit] of an animal. But the late-modern animal laborans is anything but animalian. It is hyperactive and hyperneurotic. There must be another answer to why all human activities in late modernity are sinking to the level of mere laboring—and, more still, why such hectic nervousness prevails. The modern loss of faith does not concern just God or the hereafter. It involves reality itself and makes human life radically fleeting. Life has never been as fleeting as it is today. Not just human life, but the world in general is becoming radically fleeting. Nothing promises duration or substance [Bestand]. Given this lack of Being, nervousness and unease arise. Belonging to a species might benefit an animal that works for the sake of its kind to achieve brute Gelassenheit. However, the late-modern ego [Ich] stands utterly alone. Even religions, as thanatotechnics that would remove the fear of death and produce a feeling of duration, have run their course. The general denarrativization of the world is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare. Work itself is a bare activity. The activity of bare laboring corresponds entirely to bare life. Merely working and merely living define and condition each other. Because a narrative thanatotechnics proves lacking, the unconditional compulsion arises to keep bare life healthy. Nietzsche already observed that, after the death of God, health rose to divine status. If a horizon of meaning extended beyond bare life, the cult of health would not be able to achieve this degree of absoluteness. Life today is even barer than the life of homo sacer. Originally, homo sacer refers to someone excluded from society because of a trespass: one may kill him without incurring punishment. According to Giorgio Agamben, homo sacer stands for absolutely expendable life. Examples he provides include Jews in concentration camps, prisoners at Guantanamo, people without papers or asylum-seekers awaiting deportation in a lawless space, and patients attached to tubes and rotting away in intensive care. If late-modern achievement society has reduced us all to bare life, then it is not just people at the margins or in a state of exception—that is, the excluded—but all of us, without exception, who are homines sacri. That said, this bare life has the particularity of not being absolutely expendable [tötbar]; rather, it cannot be killed absolutely [absolut untötbar (ist)]. It is undead, so to speak. Here the word sacer does not mean “accursed” but “holy.” Now bare, sheer life itself is holy, and so it must be preserved at any cost. The reaction to a life that has become bare and radically fleeting occurs as hyperactivity, hysterical work, and production. The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. People who suffer from depression...or burnout syndrome develop the symptoms displayed by the Muselmänner in concentration camps. Muselmänner are emaciated prisoners lacking all vigor who, like people with acute depression, have become entirely apathetic and can no longer even recognize physical cold or the orders given by guards. One cannot help but suspect that the late-modern animal laborans with neuronal disturbances would have been a Muselmann, too—albeit well fed and probably obese. The last chapter of Arendt’s Human Condition addresses the triumph of animal laborans. The author offers no viable alternative to this social development. With resignation, she concludes that the ability to act is restricted to only a few. Then, on the final pages of the book, she invokes thinking directly [beschwört . . . unmittelbar das Denken]. Thinking, she contends, has suffered the least from the negative development in question. Although Arendt concedes that the world’s future depends on the power of human beings to act, and not on their power to think, thinking still bears on the future of humanity because it surpasses all other activities [Tätigkeiten] of the vita activa in its sheer capacity for action [Tätigsein]. Accordingly, the book closes with the following words: Whoever has any experience in this matter will know how right Cato was when he said: . . . “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.” These final lines seem like a stopgap. What could thinking accomplish, such that this “experience of being active . . . would surpass [all other activities]”?8 After all, the emphasis on being active has a great deal in common with the hyperactivity and hysteria displayed by the late-modern achievement-subject. Cato’s dictum also seems a little out of place in light of the fact that Cicero originally included it in his treatise De re publica. Quoting the same passage as Arendt, Cicero exhorts his readers to withdraw from the “forum” and the “rush of the crowd” in order to find the isolation of the contemplative life. That is, immediately after quoting Cato, Cicero goes on to praise the vita contemplativa. Not the active life but the contemplative life makes man into what he should be. Arendt changes the same words into praise for the vita activa. What is more, the solitary contemplation Cato speaks of proves incompatible with the “power of acting human beings,” which Arendt invokes time and again. Toward the end of her discussion of vita activa, then, Arendt inadvertently endorses vita contemplativa. It escapes her notice that the loss of the ability to contemplate—which, among other things, leads to the absolutization of vita activa—is also responsible for the hysteria and nervousness of modern society".

Byung-Chul Han