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