You're drawing on Arendt’s distinctions—homo faber, homo laborans, homo politicus, bios theoretikos—not to sharpen their borders but to show how they’ve collapsed into a singular mode under economic domination. And not simply through neglect, but by a kind of hostile takeover: homo laborans and its modern extension, homo economicus, doesn’t merely crowd out the others—it absorbs and redefines them on its own terms. Participation becomes productivity; judgment becomes optimization; contemplation becomes downtime.
Your note about eudaimonia is particularly insightful. Arendt is often seen as recovering a form of political life that is not merely instrumental—where action is its own reward, where the public realm is not a means to flourishing but the very site of it. Yet even this can be misread in liberal terms, as if flourishing were a private good secured through public means. Your refusal of traditional eudaimonism points toward something more collective, less psychologized.
And your closing line strikes a sharp chord: the problem isn’t the lack of a sharp enough distinction between domains. It’s not confusion but colonization. A single domain, that of necessity and survival, now masquerades as the whole of life. Even homo faber, once a proud figure of creative making, is reduced to a producer of scalable goods or frictionless tools. Even bios theoretikos, once the life of thought, becomes data science, or cognitive labor, or "mindfulness" as an HR perk.
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