Do everyday labor, planning and manufacturing activities, science technology, and even partly artistic creativity an escape from political action, from the open public world? Hannah Arendt tends to answer this question in the affirmative. She is worried about the state of modern society, which is closed in the efficiency of production and consumption. The historical possibilities of free personal action remain unclaimed. The initial needs and conditions of human existence, the main types of human activity and, above all, the turn of human history associated with the transfer of the center of gravity to science and the invasion of mankind into space are subjected to a broad systematic analysis in the book. This book is the main work on political theory, which laid the foundation of this science in the 20th century.
One of the rare philosophical works of our time, capable of captivating any educated reader.
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Vita Activa Oder Vom Tätigen leben
W-Kohlhammer GmbH
The spelling and punctuation of the translator has been preserved in the publication.
Translation from German and English - V.V. Bibikhin
The Human Condition: Second Edition by Hannah Arendt
Licensed by The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
© 1958 by The University of Chicago
© V.V. Bibikhin, heirs, 2017
© Ad Marginem Press LLC, 2017
Introductory remarks
When Baal grew in the mother's womb,
The vault of heaven, already large and quiet and sluggish,
Yun and naked, blossomed in the beauty of the marvelous.
How Baal loved him when he came.
. . . . .
When Baal rotted in the dark earthly womb,
The vault of heaven, still quiet, great and sluggish,
Yun and naked, swam in marvelous beauty,
As when Baal loved him.Bertolt Brecht
People, the world, the earth and the universe - they are not specifically discussed in this book. There is also no talk about how the world arranged by people extends from the Earth far under the heavens, from the skies it swings at the universe, adjoining the Sun, the Moon and the stars. Who dares to start talking about what we have been constantly thinking about since the day the first man-made thing flew into space to wander there for some time along the same gravity-drawn orbits that mark the paths and sweeping run for centuries celestial bodies. Since then, one artificial satellite after another has risen into outer space, circled the Moon, and what ten years ago rose at an infinite distance, in the silent regions of impregnable mystery, will now, willy-nilly, share outer spaces outside the sky with human-terrestrial objects, hugging the earth.
The event of 1957 is second in importance to no other event, not even to the splitting of the atom, and one would expect that, despite all the preoccupation with the coming military and political circumstances, people should have received it with great joy. Strangely, there was no jubilation, there was almost no smell of triumph, but there was also no eerie feeling that from the starry sky above us our own apparatus and instruments now shine for us. Instead, the first reaction was a curious sense of relief at "having taken the first step toward escaping the earthly prison." And as fantastic as the notion that Earth-weary humans would go in search of new places to live in the universe may seem to us, it is by no means the random twist of an American journalist who wanted to come up with something sensational for a catchy headline; it only says, and obviously without knowing it, the very thing that more than twenty years ago appeared as an inscription on the tombstone of a great scientist in Russia: "Humanity will not forever remain chained to the Earth."
What is shocking about such statements is that they are not at all extravagant newfangled fantasies, as if latest achievements techniques hit someone in the head, and the common ideas of yesterday and the day before yesterday. In the face of these and similar coincidences, how can one think that human "thinking" lags behind scientific discoveries and the development of technology! It is decades ahead of them, and moreover, the thinking and imagination of a person from the street, and not just those who carry out these discoveries and accelerate their implementation. For science only brings people's dreams to life, and it only confirmed that dreams do not have to remain fantasy. A simple survey of science fiction literature, the strange madness of which, unfortunately, no one has yet been seriously disturbed by, could show how the latest novelties here meet precisely the desires and innermost anguish of the masses. And the vulgar kitsch language of journalists should not interfere with seeing that what they say is completely and completely exclusive, and not at all usual, if by ordinary we mean what we are used to. For although Christianity sometimes calls the earth a valley of sorrows, and philosophy sometimes saw in the body a prison for the spirit and soul, still, until the twentieth century, it never occurred to anyone to consider the earth a prison. human body or quite seriously bother about making a flight to the moon. Is it really that in which the Enlightenment saw the proclamation of a man of his maturity and what in fact meant a departure, if not from God in general, but from that God who was the Heavenly Father for people, should end in the end with the emancipation of the human race from the Earth, which, as far as we you know, the mother of all living things?
After all, no matter how things are with the "position of man in space", the Earth and terrestrial nature seem to be at least unique in the Universe in that they provide such beings as people with the conditions under which they are able to live and move and breathe here without much trouble. and without complete dependence on their own invented means. The world as a creation of human hands, unlike the surrounding world of animals, does not owe absolutely everything to nature, but our life itself is not entirely and completely included in this artificial world how it cannot completely and completely dissolve in it; as a living being, man remains attached to the kingdom of the living, although he gradually moves away from it towards the artificial, by himself organized world. For quite some time now, the natural sciences have been trying to artificially manufacture even life itself, and if they succeeded, they would really cut the umbilical cord between man and the mother of all life, the Earth. The desire to escape from "earthly captivity" and thus from the conditions in which people received life, manifests itself in attempts to give birth to life in a retort, through artificial insemination to grow a superman or cause mutations in which the human appearance and functions will be radically "improved", which, according to apparently also expressed in attempts to stretch the life span far beyond the limit of a century.
This future man, about which naturalists believe that he will inhabit the Earth in no more than a hundred years, if he ever arises in practice, he will owe his existence to the rebellion of man against his own being, namely against what was given to him at birth as a free a gift and what he now wants to exchange for the conditions he himself creates. That such an exchange lies in the realm of the possible, we have no reason to doubt it, just as, unfortunately, we have no reason to doubt that we are capable of destroying all organic life on the planet. The question can only be whether we want to use our new scientific knowledge and our monstrous technical abilities in this direction; and this question absolutely cannot be resolved within the framework of the sciences, and even within their framework it has not yet been reasonably and posed, because it is in the essence of science to go to the last end in each of the once outlined directions. In any case, this is a political question of the first order, and on this basis alone it cannot be left to the decision of specialists, whether they are professional scientists or professional politicians.
While all this is still a matter of the distant future, the first rebound of great scientific triumphs is in the so-called crisis of the foundations of the natural sciences. It turns out that the "truths" of modern scientific picture worlds, which are quite amenable to mathematical formalism and technical demonstration, can in no way be represented in speech or thought. As soon as one tries to grasp these "truths" in a concept and make them visible in the context of a linguistic statement, one gets an absurdity that "perhaps not quite as absurd as a 'triangular circle', but perceptibly more absurd than a 'winged lion'" (Erwin Schrödinger). We don't know if this is final yet. Still, it is possible that for earth-bound beings who behave as if the Universe is their home, it will forever remain inaccessible to the things they do in this way, and also to understand, that is, to speak meaningfully about them. If this were confirmed, one would inevitably have to assume that the very structure of our brain, i.e., the mental-material condition of human thought, prevents us from mentally reproducing the things that we do - from which, in essence, it would follow that we have nothing left to do but now to invent also machines that will undertake to think and speak for us. If it turns out that cognition and thinking no longer bear any relation to each other, that we are able to cognize and, consequently, produce much more than to understand by thought, then we will indeed fall, as it were, into our own trap, i.e., we will become slaves, although not of our machines, which is commonly feared, but of our own cognitive faculties, creatures that are forgotten by every spirit and all good spirits, and who see themselves helplessly dependent on any apparatus they can ever make, regardless of any savagery or ruinous consequences.
But even apart from these still unknown consequences, the crisis of the foundations of sciences has serious political aspects. Wherever the issue of language relevance comes into play, politics must come into play; for people are political beings only because they are endowed with the ability of speech. Would we be mad enough to heed the advice coming from all over lately and adapt to current state sciences, we would have no choice but to abandon speech altogether. For the sciences today speak the language of mathematical symbols, which was originally conceived as an abbreviation for verbal expressions, but has long been emancipated from this and now consists of formulas that cannot be turned back into speech. Scientists therefore live in a languageless world from which they, as scientists, cannot escape. And this circumstance should arouse a certain suspicion about their ability to make political judgments. Relying on scientists in their capacity as scientists in matters that affect human affairs is opposed by their undisplayed willingness to create atomic bomb or their rather naive hope that someone will think about their advice and ask them whether and how it should be applied; much more significant is that they move at all in a world in which language has lost its power and which no longer owns language. For everything that people do, know, experience or know becomes meaningful only to the extent that it is possible to talk about it. Truths are possible that lie outside the speakers, and they can be very important for a person, insofar as he also exists in the singular, that is, outside the political field in the broadest sense. However, insofar as we exist in the plural, and, therefore, insofar as we live in this world, move and act in it, only that makes sense about what we can talk to each other or even to ourselves and what shows itself in the word having meaning.
Closer to us and, perhaps, no less important is another formidable event of recent decades, the spread of automation, which is still passing through its initial stages. We already know, although we are not yet able to imagine properly, that in a few years the factories will be empty and people will get rid of the ancient ties that chain them directly to nature, from the burden of labor and from the yoke of necessity. Here, too, we are dealing with a fundamental aspect of human existence, but the revolt against this condition of human existence, the gravitation toward an easy, God-like life liberated from effort and labor, is as old as history known to us. And a life freed from work is not new either; it once belonged to the most habitual and most firmly guaranteed advantages and privileges of the few who dominated the majority. So it may well seem that here, too, technological progress simply accomplishes what all generations of the human race only dreamed of, unable to achieve this.
However, this appearance is deceiving. The new time in the seventeenth century began with the theoretical exaltation of labor, and at the beginning of our century it ended with the transformation of the whole society into a working society. The fulfillment of an ancient dream comes up, as in a fairy tale, the fulfillment of desires, on circumstances in which the dreamed blessing turns into a curse.
For here it is, a working society, ready to free itself from the shackles of labor, but this society hardly knows just by hearsay those higher and meaningful activities for the sake of which it would be worth liberating itself. Within this society, which is egalitarian, for such is a form of life commensurate with work, there is not a single group, no aristocracy of a political or spiritual kind, capable of paving the way for the recreation of human abilities. The presidents of the republics, the kings and chancellors of powerful states consider what they do to be a necessary work in the life of society, their office is a service like any other; and what people who are engaged in intellectual activity think about their work is sufficiently expressed by the name "knowledge worker": where others work with their hands, these use another part of the body, namely the head. The only exceptions here really remain only "poets and thinkers" who, for this reason alone, stand outside society. We are faced with the prospect of a working society from which labor, that is, the only activity in which it still understands something, has escaped. What could be more sinister?
To all these questions, worries and problems, this book does not know the answers. All available answers are daily and everywhere given in practice by the people themselves, and as far as the solution of problems is concerned, they are a matter of practical politics, they depend and must depend on the interaction of the many. They are not and should not be the subject of solitary theoretical considerations, which never develop more than the intuition of one person, as if we were dealing here with things for which there is only one possible solution. What I therefore propose in all that follows is a kind of reflection on the conditions in which, as far as we know, people have lived hitherto, and this reflection is governed, even when it is not specifically said, by the experience and concerns of the present situation. Such reflection remains natural in the realm of thought and reflection, and, practically speaking, it is only capable of prompting further reflection - which, after all, may not be completely trifling in the face of rather ferocious optimism, lost hopelessness, or insensible chewing on the good old days, too often defining the spiritual atmosphere in which all these things are discussed. Be that as it may, I propose something very simple, the matter for me is not about anything other than thinking about what we actually do when we are active.
What do we do when we are busy vigorous activity' is the theme of this book. We are talking only about the simplest parts into which all activity in general falls apart, and therefore about those that traditionally and in our own opinion clearly should be located within the circle of experience of every person. For these reasons, and others to be explained below, the highest and perhaps the purest activity known to man, the activity of thought, is beyond the scope of these considerations. From this it turns out that the book is systematically centered around three chapters, including, respectively, the analysis of labor (work), creation (manufacturing) and action (deed). The concluding chapter examines historically how these activities were related to each other in modern times, however, in the systematic analysis of other chapters, the various structures within the vita activa itself are constantly taken into account, as well as the relationship of vita activa to vita contemplativa, as we know it from history.
Thus, the historical horizon of the book does not go beyond the end of modern times. new time and modern world, modern, not the same thing. As for scientific shifts, the New Age, which began in the seventeenth century, came to an end already at the turn of the last two centuries; in terms of politics, the world in which we now live was born perhaps with the first atomic explosions on the ground. But the world of modernity remains in the background of my considerations, still based on the assumption that the fundamental abilities of a person, corresponding to the fundamental conditions of human existence on earth, do not change; they may not remain irretrievably lost until these fundamental conditionings are replaced by radically different ones. The purpose of the historical analyzes included in the book is to trace back to the very origins the new European alienation of the world in its twofold aspect: flight from the earth into the Universe and flight from the world into self-consciousness; in this way it will be possible to achieve a better understanding of the phenomenon of the new European society, resp. the situation of European humanity at the moment when a new era has dawned for it, and thus for all the people of the earth.
First chapter
human conditioning
§ 1 Vita activa and condition humaine
The expression vita activa is intended to cover in the following three main types of human activity: labor (work), creation (production) and action (deeds). They are the main activities because each of them corresponds to one of the main conditions under which the human race is given life on earth.
The activity of labor corresponds to the biological process of the human body, which in its spontaneous growth, metabolism and decay feeds on natural things extracted and prepared by labor in order to provide them as the necessities of life to the living organism. The main condition to which the activity of labor is subject is life itself.
In creation, the anti-natural principle of a being dependent on nature makes itself felt, which is unable to integrate itself into the unchanging repetition of tribal life and does not find a kind of consolation for its individual mortality in the potential indestructibility. Creation produces an artificial world of things that are not just adjacent to natural things, but differ from them in that they oppose nature to a certain extent, and are not simply ground down by the processes of life. In the world of these things, human life is at home, the life of nature in nature is homeless; and the world turns out to be the home of people to the extent that it survives a person, opposes him, and objectively and objectively goes towards him. The main condition to which the activity of creation is subject is belonging to the world, namely, the dependence of human existence on objects and objects.
Action (deed) is the only activity in vita activa that unfolds without the mediation of matter, materials and things directly between people. The main condition corresponding to it is the fact of multiplicity, namely the fact that not one single person, but many people live on Earth and inhabit the world. It is true that in all its aspects human conditioning has a political side, but multiplicity conditioning has to do with the fact that among men there is such a thing as politics, again in some exclusive relation; it is not only conditio sine qua non, but also conditio per quam. For people, life - as Latin, perhaps the most deeply political language of all peoples known to us - says, is tantamount to "being among people" (inter homines esse). The Bible agrees with this in a certain sense, since according to one version of the creation story, God created not human, but people: “He created male and female their". This man, created in the plural, is fundamentally different from Adam, whom God made "from a piece of clay" in order to later attach to him a woman created "from a rib" this man, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Here multiplicity is not originally inherent in man, but is explained through multiplication. Any “idea of man in general” of any structure comprehends human multiplicity as the result of an infinitely varied reproduction of a certain primary model, and thereby refutes in advance and implicitly the possibility of an act. An act needs such a multiplicity that, although all are the same, namely, they remain human beings, but in that peculiar way and manner that none of these people is ever equal to another who has ever lived, lives or will live.
All three basic activities and the conditions corresponding to them are again rooted in the most general conditioning of human life, that it comes into the world through birth and disappears from it again through death. With regard to mortality, labor ensures the preservation of the life of the individual and the continuation of the life of the species; creation produces an artificial world, to a certain extent independent of the mortality of its inhabitants, and thereby affording their volatile existence something of permanence and stability; finally, the act, in so far as it serves to establish and maintain political coexistence, prepares the conditions for the continuity of generations, for memory, and thus for history. Every activity is equally oriented toward fertility, always having also the task of looking after the future, or that life and the world remain fit and ready for a constant influx of newcomers born here as strangers. At the same time, however, the act is associated with fertility as a fundamental condition more closely than labor and creation. The new beginning that comes into the world with each birth is only able to achieve significance in the world because the newcomer has the ability to introduce a new initiative himself, that is, to act. In the sense of initiative - the positing of initium - the element of action, deed is hidden in all human activity, and this means nothing more than precisely the fact that all this activity is carried out by beings who came into the world through birth and are subject to the condition of birth. And since the act is a political activity par excellence, it is very possible that birth is for political thought the same decisive, categorical fact as mortality has long been, and in the West, at least after Plato, was a circumstance incendiary for metaphysical-philosophical thought.
But condition humaine, human conditioning in general, covers more than just the conditions under which people are given life on earth. Human beings are conditioned beings because whatever they come in contact with directly becomes a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa moves consists essentially of things that are the creation of human hands; and these things, apart from man, would never have arisen, turn out in turn to be the condition of human existence. People live in this way not only under conditions set, as it were, in addition to the gift of earthly existence, but moreover under conditions of their own creation, which, despite their human origin, have the same conditioning power as the conditioning things of nature. Whatever human life touches, whatever enters into it, everything at once turns into a condition of human existence. Therefore, no matter what they do or what they miss, people always turn out to be conditioned beings. Everything that appears in their world immediately becomes integral part human conditioning. The reality of the world reaches significance within human existence as a force that conditions this existence and is felt by him as such. The objectivity of the world - its objective and material character - and human conditionality complement each other and are closely intertwined; since human existence is conditioned, it needs things, and things would be a heap of incoherent objects, a non-world, if each thing separately and all of them together did not determine human existence.
To avoid misunderstandings: talking about human conditioning and judging the "nature" of a person are not the same thing. Even the totality of human activities and abilities, insofar as they correspond to human conditioning, will not amount to something like a description of the nature of man. Even if we include in our analysis what we deliberately omit here, the activity of thinking and the rational faculty, even if someone succeeds in compiling a punctually accurate list of all the human possibilities that we have today, the essential features of human existence will by no means be exhausted by this, nor even in a negative sense, as if at least that which human existence cannot be deprived of without ceasing to be human has been finally found. The most radical change in human conditioning that we can imagine would be to move to another planet, and this is no idle fantasy now. This would mean that people completely and completely derive their life from the conditions dictated by the Earth and place it entirely in conditions created by themselves. The experiential horizon of such a life would probably change so radically that our concepts of work, creation, actions, thoughts would hardly have any meaning in it. Yet it can hardly be denied that even these hypothetical planetary migrants will still be human; only the only assertion we can make about their human nature is that they are still conditioned beings, even if in the new circumstances their conditioning becomes almost exclusively the product of the people themselves.
In contrast to this conditioning of man, about which we are able to make judgments, however imperfect, the problem of human being, the Augustinian quaestio mihi factus sum - "I have become a question to myself", seems insoluble, and it does not even make any difference whether this question is understood individually. psychological or general philosophical. It is extremely unlikely that we, who are able to cognize, understand and determine the essence of things that surround us and are not identical to us, that is, the essence of earthly things and possibly some other things in the universe surrounding the Earth, are able to achieve the same in relation to ourselves - as if jump over our own shadow. Moreover, nothing gives us the right to assert that man has an essence or nature in general in the same sense as other things. If there really must be something like the essence of man, obviously only God is able to know and determine it, for only God can surely judge about “ Who" in the same sense as about " What» . The forms of human knowledge are applicable to everything that has "natural" properties, and thus to ourselves, insofar as people are examples of a highly developed kind of organic life; but these same forms of knowledge fail when we ask no longer " What we are", and " Who we are like that". This refusal is the real reason why attempts to define the essence of man mostly end up in the construction of something divine, some kind of philosophical god, which, on closer examination, turns out to be a kind of first model or Platonic idea of man. Needless to say, the exposure of such philosophical concepts of the divine as the deification of human abilities and activities is not a proof, not even an argument in favor of the non-existence of God. But the fact that efforts to define the essence of man so easily lead to ideas that give the impression of "divine" only because they are superior to something human, should still make us hostile to the attempt to conceptually define the essence of man.
On the other hand, the conditions of human existence - life and earth itself, birth and death, belonging to the world and plurality - can never explain "man" or answer the question of what we are and who we are, namely for the simple reason that none of them are absolute. This has always been the view of philosophy, in contrast to the sciences, anthropology, psychology, biology, etc., which are also occupied by man. But today it seems to be considered scientifically proven that people, although they live in the conditions of the Earth and will probably always live in them, nevertheless remain creatures attached to the Earth in no way in the same sense as other living beings. After all, it must modern natural science with its exceptional triumph to that which has changed its point of view and looks at the earth-bound nature in such a way, interprets it as if it were no longer localized on the Earth, but in the Universe; as if he managed not only to find the Archimedean fulcrum, but to stand on it and operate from it.
In the analysis of postclassical political theory, it is often very instructive to find out which of the two biblical versions of the story of creation the author is relying on. Thus, it is very characteristic of the difference between Jesus and Paul that Jesus refers to the first book of Moses 1, 27 - “Have you not read that the Creator created them from the beginning as male and female?” (Mt 19:4, translation by Karl Weizsäcker) – while Paul insists that “not a husband from a wife, but a wife from a husband”, and therefore was created “for a man”, which Paul later softens somewhat in brackets: “ as there is no wife without a husband, so there is no husband without a wife” (I Cor 11:4-8). The difference says much more than different attitudes towards the role of women. It is connected with the fact that for Jesus faith led directly to action, and his preaching therefore inevitably left the plurality of people intact; while for Paul faith was only a moment of individual salvation of the soul. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is Augustine (De civitate Dei, book XII ch. 21), who not only completely ignores Genesis 1:27, but also sees his own difference between man and animal in that man was created unum as singulum, and the animal in many (plura simul iussit exsistere). Augustine uses the story of creation to emphasize the generic nature of animal life as opposed to the one-time nature of human existence.
Augustine, who is usually credited with introducing the philosophy of the so-called. anthropological question, was well aware of these differences and difficulties. He distinguishes between the questions: "Who am I?" and "What am I?"; the first person turns to himself - “And I turned to myself and said to myself: You, who are you? (tu? quis es?) And I answered: Man” (Confessiones, X, 6). The second question a person directs to God is: “What am I, my God? What kind of creature am I? (Quid ergo sum? Deus meus? Quae natura sum? ib. X, 17). For in that grande profundum that man is (IV, 14), there is “something human (aliquid hominis), of which the spirit of man that is in him knows nothing. Only You, O Lord, Who created him, know all about him (eius omnia)" (X, 5). Accordingly, the most famous of these expressions I quote in the text, quaestio mihi factus sum, is a question that sounds in the presence of God and is actually addressed to him (X, 33), to which only God is able to answer. As for the answer, we can briefly say that on "Who am I?" the answer is "Man, whatever it means," while the question "What am I?" in general, only God, who created man, answers. In other words, the question of the essence of man is just as much a theological question as the question of the essence of God; both can only be answered within the framework of divine Revelation.
The article was written in 2000 or early 2001, it was not published in Russian. It was intended for a Latvian publishing house, so it was also written in Latvian. Reproduced from archival materials.
Let's continue. The openness of the world, freedom of speech as an act presupposes such a structure of joint life when the leading place does not belong to specialists who perform their discrete functions. In our modern times, the last decision usually belongs to a professional, scientist or other specialist, including a professional politician or public relations specialist, public relations. By the way, all the powerful objections to democratic discussions and discussions, criticism of their infinity and futility comes from here. They say that sooner or later you will have to listen to a professional. A professional revolutionary knows how to organize the social system, a professional scientist - when he is involved in the examination - will know no less.
Professionals really know more than us, any specialist is much more competent than a person from the street. With sufficient discipline (modern society is a school of discipline equally in the West and throughout the world), a professional can organize a lot. This organization eventually leads the modern technical society to something like a termite state, a big anthill. Again, professionals know this. They have their own antidotes against such a threat, hoping to somehow overcome the ossification of society. But you understand that this path, this corridor - of professional control over society - in fact leads to a dead end, to an endless escalation of the means of control. Professional has the last word in all spheres of life, more and more. In the end, appropriate technologies are consolidated in politics.
The more difficult, but also the more important it is to understand what Hannah Arendt is trying to show. World in its sense, and this is important, implies unconditional respect for professionals, craftsmen, but it is guided not by the opinion of specialist experts, but by the decision of the people's assembly. Was there a Greek polis, an early example of human society as a world, built by professionals? In its pure form, it lasted very little, only one or two centuries. Perhaps the reason for its fragility was precisely the fact that the decisive word belonged to non-professionals. With all due respect to the technician, to the artisan, to the expert in his field, military, economic, the people's assembly, when making its decisions, relied not on scientific expertise, but on its own sense of justice and expediency. The craftsman, the professional was pointed to his official place. He could participate in the common cause, but not with his special knowledge.
I cannot but recall here the fate of our free city-republics, Tver, Novgorod, Pskov. Their system, where the supreme authority was the general popular assembly, the veche, was brutally destroyed and crushed by Moscow, by the way, at about the same time that Florence and the last free Italian cities were suppressed by the Catholic armies of Spain and France. The suppression of free cities by the forces of new nation-states was part of a pan-European movement towards specialization, the professionalization of the state. The so-called nation-state in Europe was a centralized politico-economic enterprise based on science and technology. In Russia, this corresponded to the rise of Moscow, as Berdyaev defined it, "the Christianized Tatar kingdom." In fact, it was no longer professionalization of crafts or occupations, but of the state and politics.
According to Hannah Arendt, I will tell you about a very important difference between a situation where professionals can and should be listened to, and another situation when this is by no means possible. Here is the difference. A professional, making efforts in his field, concentrating them, limiting himself in many ways, can achieve a lot, with sufficient energy, he can achieve everything that he sets himself as a goal. But in doing so, he loses the immediate wholeness of his human being, the natural dignity of man, the fullness of life, his very being. If you ask what makes up the fullness of being, then it will not be easy for me to answer. These things are difficult, elusive. But it is from them that the world is formed. History originates from free human action. If a person stops setting himself such goals as happiness, if he is satisfied with private material successes, society along the corridor of specialization and professionalization will come to a conditional, adapted, ultimately deficient existence.
The dilemma now confronts us all. Our society is staggering, leaning one way or the other, then towards total planning and continuous organization, reaching the point of embedding an individual into a computer, then towards an explosion, rebellion, towards dreams of replacing the entire current social system with an unknown other.
Hannah Arendt calls happiness, human dignity, fullness of life earthly immortality. It is convinced, knows and believes that it is already possible for a person to live now without waiting for the solution of the problems of nations, economic, political, - to live already now in the completeness of his existence. The desire for dignity, uprightness, free speech is the opposite of what we see around. There is a consolidation of business, a military-political state enterprise in the conditions of now unimaginable technization and professionalization. To raise one's head in the midst of the dominance of professionals, to bring to the stage of journalism such topics as happiness and the fullness of existence, this required courage. More than once in the life of Hannah Arendt there were periods when she had to speak alone in defense of unpopular theses.
Returning to the topic of the world, I will read one of the quotes that I have written out here in in large numbers. “In the World is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men". Death does not put an end to the world. This does not mean that people work for what they themselves will not see. They are being implemented in the world right now. Through the fullness of being, each individual existence emerges into a dimension that is eternal.
Important in Arendt's book is her understanding of pluralism. In Moscow, almost all former Marxists, having treated dialectical and historical materialism with dialectical flexibility, have now become pluralists. They understand pluralism as a philosophy of freedom, namely their private freedom, as allowing themselves to be individualists, constructing their own little world and conforming, adapting to the social structure. For Hannah Arendt, pluralism is a completely different, difficult thing that requires a lot of courage. A true pluralist is a person who fearlessly submits himself to the views of others and feels the image that others make of him. I become different, unfamiliar to myself under someone else's gaze. Before that, shutting myself up in my private individuality, I could imagine anything about myself and be content with my own thinking, I could imagine other people and build my own picture out of them. When it comes down to it, when I start to honestly hear what is being said about me, when I feel like they are looking at me, then at first I am lost, my head is spinning. I'm starting to realize that I still didn't really know myself. Pluralism is when I do not put my self above others, recognizing Yu their independence as my own, I appreciate in others the ability to remove me from my ideas about the world, to shake my convictions. Pluralism in this sense requires great courage to reconsider, perhaps, all my positions, but through humility and recognition of the dignity of others, it leads to an unlimited expansion of my world, without which the fullness of my life is also impossible. Pluralism is a step, at first sight sacrificial, but absolutely necessary for something like happiness to appear on my horizon.
When Arendt writes to Jaspers that her book will be called "Amor mundi," "Love of the World," she connects her new sense of a wide, friendly world with her American experience. She admits that she turned to people, left the office, woke up to respect all living things, everything moving; and if this happened to her so late, when she is already an adult, then, probably, this is available to everyone.
With such an exit of a person from the limitedness of private existence to people, under the views of others, Arendt connects his concept of history. History is not a process of developing consequences from social causes. concept historical development created by a kind of nihilistic despair - the illusion of regularity, to which nature and society are supposedly subject. The process is our imagination, that there is a law, or will (good or evil), or reason, which allegedly remains only to be understood in order to control society.
It is very doubtful that the solution to human history in the form of law, whether biological, moral or spiritual, really exists. The thesis of primitive existentialism is also doubtful, according to which, although there is no ruling history law, but we create it ourselves by our actions. Strictly speaking, we cannot know either the universal laws of history or the measure of our participation in it. Hannah Arendt believes, however, that we can and should know about human history, how it began.
History began once, and it began every time there was something new that made sense to talk about. From a continuous natural, physical, biological or psychological process, a unique, unprecedented, indeterminate one stood out. It was recognized as unusual, as a miracle, and it attracted the attention of everyone. Related to this is Hannah Arendt's disagreement with the dogma of Marx and Engels that labor created man. No amount of labour, no millennia of repetitive mechanical work, no matter how perfected the hand and tools would have been, would have created history. The labor process could never be the subject of general discussion. At best, people will be drawn into it and will improve their skills. In addition to everything repetitive, cyclical, there is such a thing as an absolute beginning that breaks the chain of causes and effects. Hannah Arendt proposes to understand a person precisely as such a possibility. Each person comes into the world - this is her recurring thought - as an opportunity for something unprecedented, absolutely new, and thus as a promise of universal renewal. Involuntarily, I again begin to think in this connection about our domestic circumstances and ask myself when Russian totalitarianism, Russian dictatorship, Russian sweeping will finally end. They will never end. The only way out, the only chance, the only hope is that they will be gradually forced out by new beginnings that are born with every person, with every child, with every idea. In the war between the habits of planning, rigid management and rebellion, the uprising of human freedom becomes new.
Back to the subject of a professional, professional knowledge. Of course, you can rely on it. But there is something in a person that should not submit to a professional, a specialist, that should rebel against any dictate of scientific knowledge. Power likes to rely on knowledge, it repels everything that has no scientific basis. Power is always scientific. But we must defend our right to a direct, primary perception of the world, no matter how naive it may seem. And Europe stands on the fact that it still succeeds with each new generation. Hannah Arendt says a little ironically - has it all started now? Were not the Greek tyrants irritated by the habit of their peoples of agora, in the marketplace, and engage in politics, reasoning about war, peace and social order, instead of going to work, trade and give birth to children. Tyrants would always very much like to end the endless and hopeless democratic discussion. Europe still exists, continues, seeks and finds its way through a very difficult return to the beginnings.
Of the useful distinctions offered by Hannah Arendt, I will name the difference between consumption (consuming) food or, say, gasoline and using (using), take a simple case, such as roads. We do not consume the road as we consume gasoline, we use it. It is more difficult to see what is in the state and in human society things like laws or ethical rules are also not consumed - that is, in the bad case they are consumed, serve someone for his convenience or his demagogy - but in the normal case they are used.
How does it stand in this regard with philosophy, with literature, with poetry and with works of art? At first glance, of course, we do not consume art, except for the bad cases of art consumers, and do not use it. In some more important sense, however, we very much use works of art, maybe like nothing else. They serve us as landmarks, as a marking of space, maybe unconscious, but one without which we are lost. Each of us in the music that he hears, his own or someone else's, in poetry, his own or someone else's, in thought has strong spiritual foundations. In this sense, we use philosophy, poetry, art constantly, at every step, although for the most part unconsciously, in view of vague ideals. If there is anything more necessary than roads and laws, then these are just things of high art. They are not subject to consumption like bread or gasoline, but they themselves demand a lot from us, involve us, use us so that we belong not to ourselves, but to the space that they open up, the space of the world. They also create continuity, the duration of historical existence. There is nothing stronger and more durable than the creation of art. This is one of the main beliefs of Hannah Arendt.
But here is a problem that we immediately stumble over. Is it enough, Arendt asks, to be an art connoisseur, an aesthete, a deep understanding of philosophy, the ability to listen to music in order to live a full life? No, it won't work. Our I is still fully expressed in the two things mentioned above - word and deed, speech and action, speech and deed. No matter how sophisticated we are aesthetically, no matter how we have been taught to appreciate art, we still have little part in the fullness of human existence. It is often achieved by much more naive and simple things than the contemplation of high truths. What is man after all, was he really born only to function? B O Most of us belong to functions for a long time, we are able to function 100%. But we really exist and our true history continues only to the extent that we are still capable of free initiatives.
Among the unexpected initiatives of Hannah Arendt herself, at the level of initiating a new approach to politics by her, one can name her understanding of political power, strength. Again, language helps her, a Greek word that means "power", arche- Start, archia- beginning. Power originally in its purest form belonged to the one who knew how to start, who knew how to move the community from the circles of eternal repetitions to the new, was able to carry it along with him. Of course, power is connected with strength, with a single power, not divided into legislative and executive instances. Power as an undertaking naturally draws people along with it. Initially, the power of power is directly opposite to violence. It was only because of the confusion of concepts that power began to be identified with violence. Violence often pretends to be the last, decisive authority, which has some kind of special, special knowledge and, relying on it, knows where to move. We must strictly distinguish between violence and real power. Tyranny relies on violence because it has nothing to offer, it cannot start anything, it can only repeat. Tyranny is based on the impotence of citizens when they lose their human dignity and their human ability to act and speak freely.
Hannah Arendt finds only one single instance in which power can become harmful. Power corrupts when the weak, the mediocre, the victims of an inferiority complex, as in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, herd in order to force out people who would really be able to lead everyone along. The power of the initiators of the new, the power in the sense of Hannah Arendt, is the power of the individual. With its success, with the achievement of its fullness, the personality at the same time opens up prospects not only for itself, in essence, not for itself at all. If such a thing as the joy of life, its fullness in speeches and deeds, was revealed, then it was revealed to everyone at once.
In today's society, where mechanism dominates more and more, there is very little opportunity for such an absolute beginning. The end of Arendt's book, with whom we are talking, is, if you like, tragic. She sees only one force that is still able to withstand danger - this is thought. The exit to the space of the world becomes more and more problematic. The world sometimes arises spontaneously, does not have time to gain a foothold and is thwarted by strategists, professionals from politics.
Among the spontaneous breakthroughs that could lead to the return of peace, Hannah Arendt refers to the Californian student movement in 1966, the Parisian and Czech spring of 1968, and even earlier, in 1956, the Hungarian revolution. She does not name the first post-war years in Germany, but I would attribute the opportunity that opened up then in Germany common cause to the same row. In all these cases, the movement towards peace coming from below turned out to be very soon perverted, sometimes literally within a few days everything returned to the previous circle, but with regard to the first impulse towards self-government, towards freedom, towards open discussion, Hannah Arendt was hardly mistaken. I can imagine with what understanding she would have followed our events for five or six mysterious years, starting from 1986, when it seemed to us that we had the most interesting events going on.
Of Hannah Arendt's distinctions, which I think are important and worth remembering, I will name the distinction between society and the world. Society, socium, obeys the laws of social development, has this or that arrangement, rarely being able to change it, and is controlled by people who take this arrangement into account and generally support its functioning. Society has its own inertia of development, a tendency to consolidate, it can count on longevity, but this stability of society is a phenomenon of a completely different order than the earthly immortality that a person achieves in the open space of the world.
I was fascinated by this book when I translated it. Now I have tried only to list for you some of her bright theses. Instead of a conclusion, I will now add to them only one more, which is of particular relevance to us. This is again the distinction, made with rigid certainty by Hannah Arendt, between wealth and possessions. Capital is one thing. His accumulation, by definition, has no limit, since the accumulation of capital serves to be able to accumulate even more later, and so on. This is done by firms, companies, corporations. Ultimately, the state, which in modern times became an economic-geographical, social-military enterprise, and all modern humanity are occupied with the same thing. It is a completely different matter - property, which first connects me with my body (it is my own), with my loved ones, with my land where I was born, to which I am attached, with my language, with the earth in the very specific sense of a piece or piece of land. , which belonged to my father, grandfather and now belongs to me.
In antiquity, man was understood through property. In Europe, the end of the Middle Ages was marked by a period when, at the same time (it is described in detail by Hannah Arendt), the accumulation of capital began and first the monasteries, then the peasantry, then the nobility were deprived of their attachment to the land. Inherited property was supplanted, replaced by the accumulation of wealth. A man could now say that although he does not have a piece of land, he has a stable income and a position assigned to him. A position, however, is a place within a system of functioning. It is infinitely far from this system of functioning to the openness of the world, while from property, such as a body, a piece of land inherited from parents, a house, a family grave, there is less than one step to the world.
In this sense, as I said, the end of the book is rather tragic. Even then, in the 1950s, Hannah Arendt was talking about automation, about automation. In America, she saw advanced research in this direction - and did not find anything radically different in automation from the general new European trend towards mechanization. Automation deprives the masses of the last ties to the earth that still existed through bodily labor. With the liberation of modern humanity from work, there is an infinite freedom to manage their time. We are no longer burdened by everyday work, we are not slaves of labor, we are not slaves of anyone or anything, but for what purposes, how to use this unoccupied time of ours, this freedom of movement, we no longer know.
Automation immerses us irrevocably in the processes of provision, primarily of itself. It is no coincidence that we continue to understand history as a process. The processes are clearly underway, we know what they are - financial, economic, social - but what they really are, we no longer know. Everything has acquired a gigantic, planetary scale, when no one is able to survey and understand what is happening to us.
The last stage of a working society, which now works only through automata, leads to the fact that individuals are the holders of certain places in the technical system and their dignity is determined by the importance of these places they occupy. Planetary Technical Society - I will give the last quote - "demands of its member a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the overall life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, to extinguish individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and to calm down in a duped and doped, “tranquillized” functional type of behavior”. The last free decision that is still open to us within the all-consuming technical system is to reconcile, to agree with it, to become, like everyone else, a functionary inside the huge mechanism that provides me.
This is stated at the very end of the book. Should we quell our anxiety, forget the moments of inexplicable horror and settle down in the slightly drugged existence of more or less well-to-do functionaries? Hannah Arendt is referring here not so much to known drugs as to various types agreements with the life stream. Rebellion against everything modern society in the spirit of Guy, Deborah may seem like the only way out, but he hardly has a chance of success.
The diagnoses and dilemmas of Hannah Arendt continue to hurt us even now. To the questions posed by her, I can imagine no other solution than the one she herself gave - to endure the intolerability of contradictions, not to rush to take measures, to value honest meaning above all in any activity.
The first edition of Hannah Arendt's Vita activa, or On the Active Life was published in 1957 on English language under the title "The Human Condition", and the fourth - in German - in 1960, with the title "Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben". At the same time, the biography of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) really dictates a wide range of interpretations, allowing, if desired, to present this particular scientist as a "star" of world philosophy: a student of Heidegger (1889-1976) and Jaspers (1883-1969), Hanna Arendt connected scientific discourse with personal life, thereby realizing the definition of the category of labor she studied as identical to life processes. The hidden biologism of philosophical thought unfolding in the head of a thinker of the weaker sex is not a reason for characterizing a "weak thinker". Hannah Arendt's workforce depended on teachers and God, speaking through the mouth of a medium-philosopher like an evil spirit that uses women suffering from hiccups (for example, in the 30s, Heidegger, having taken the post of rector of a university in Nazi Germany, did not stand up for his Jewish protégé , thereby dooming it to eternal opposition).
The annotation to the book says that we have before us one of the rare philosophical works of our time, capable of captivating any educated reader. This is indeed true, however, in order to really get carried away by the book, the “educated reader” needs to be patient and overcome its first hundred pages. In these pages, Arendt only prepares the reader for future surprises, so much of what is said here cannot yet be fully understood. Arendt's reasoning is full of thoughtful remarks about eternity and immortality, the policy and the household, property and possession, but the meaning of these remarks, their "why", remains hidden for the time being.
The heaviness of the language, the abundance of lengthy notes (comparable in volume to the main text), the love of philological subtleties (do not forget that Arendt is a phenomenologist and Martin Heidegger is among her teachers) also hinder the enthusiasm for the book. However, let the reader not be afraid - the efforts spent on overcoming the first two chapters of the book will certainly pay off. Yes, and in themselves, these chapters contain a lot of interesting things. For example, the surprising announcement that Ancient Greece“In no case could politics be understood as something necessary for the well-being of society” (how could it be otherwise? - the “educated reader” will ask), or an insightful analysis of society with the involvement of Heidegger’s “das Man” (derived by Arendt under the name “ nobody").
The core of the book is the third chapter on labor. She is also the strongest - both intellectually and emotionally. It can even be said that the book as a whole was conceived for the sake of this chapter, and all other chapters were introduced to frame it. In the chapter on labor, Arendt takes upon herself the seemingly unbearable: she rebels against the new European exaltation of labor and takes up its depreciation. Labor is the lowest value, and not at all the most valuable type of human activity, which, moreover, deprives a person of humanity and turns him into animal laborans - “working animal”. Strongly said, but needs some explanation.
First of all, labor as interpreted by Arendt is not exactly labor in the usual sense. It is not at all the creation of material goods, regardless of what needs they serve. Arendt sharply contrasts labor and creation (work and production), and although, in the end, labor also creates something, what is created by labor differs from what is created by creation itself. Labor creates consumer products that serve exclusively the vital needs of man and are therefore immediately consumed, leaving nothing lasting behind. Labor is the continuation of life, metabolism, absorption for the sake of existence and existence for the sake of absorption. Labor does not at all make a man a man, but, on the contrary, returns him to an animal. “In contrast to the creation, completed when the object has received its proper shape ..., labor is never “finished”, but rotates in endless repetition in an invariably returning circle, which is prescribed for it by the biological life process and whose “hardships and disasters” find their end only with the death of the organism that drags them.” In a country where for a long time it was “labor that created man”, such words sound especially defiant.
However, the main thing is not even that. The main thing is that the modern, labor-oriented and worker-oriented economy turns people into a “consumer society”, requires constant and accelerating consumption, moves towards the so-called waste economy, where what is produced is immediately spent and thrown away, otherwise disaster will follow. One can understand Marx and other leaders of the labor movement, who were inspired by the hope that free time would relieve people of want and labor power, not wasted on the hardships of life, would be freed up for higher use. However, the futility of this hope is now evident: “animal laborans never spend their surplus time on anything other than consumption, and the more time is left to it, the more insatiable and dangerous will become its desires and appetite.” And worst of all, the victorious march of animal laborans threatens culture in that it promises to fall victim to devouring consumption.
If progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the emancipation of labor and the working class is undoubtedly progressive. But that it is just as progressive, if progress is measured by increasing freedom, there is less certainty. For, with the possible exception of torture, no power of man over man can be compared with that “monstrous natural force of necessity” that dominates people in a society of consumers. Less violence, but more need. And this has already happened in history - in the last centuries of the dying Roman Empire, when labor began to become the occupation of the free - but only for their enslavement.
Arendt's interpretation of work may differ, but one cannot but agree that her picture of consumer society captures one of the most painful places of our time - the deplorable fate of high culture. True, Arendt is not the first to sound the alarm about this, but on the other hand, she succeeds in the seemingly impossible: to connect the decline of culture with the new European exaltation of labor. The idea is almost seditious, but not unfounded: the higher we value the “man of labor”, the more defenseless the “man of culture”; the more the economy, politics and culture itself are oriented towards labor and the working person, the less attention and support goes to high creativity and the creator. And how to be?
However, I would like to argue with Arendt in another respect. Even if the consumer society is more like a monkey, I have good reason to doubt that there is less freedom in it. Arendt, like many others, is captivated by the classical opposition between freedom and necessity and, as a result, draws the wrong conclusion that since there is more need, there is less freedom. Yes, we can agree that a society of consumers (ideally) is a society of all working people, where work is not only a natural, but a social necessity - a duty. But freedom cannot be measured by the absence of necessity. The measure of freedom (if it has any measure at all) is the quantity and quality of possibilities, and it is hard not to admit that the possibilities of animal laborans are wider and richer than those of their predecessors.
According to Arendt, it turns out that in labor a person cannot be free, since labor is a continuation of vital necessity. That this is not the case, if we take labor in the usual sense, is more or less obvious. But this is not so, even if we take the work in the interpretation of Arendt herself. Even if by labor we must understand the activity that creates exclusively vital goods, does it follow from this that a person cannot be free in the creation of such goods? Well, what if a person wants to create such benefits and their creation has become a matter of his life, the meaning of his being? And if we now assume that his creative possibilities have expanded and enriched, then will this not mean that such a person has become freer than his predecessors? What other freedom do we want to make him happy, if he simply does not need any other freedom?
Another thing is also objectionable - the very expression "consumer society", since we are called upon to put a condemning meaning into it. What's wrong with people consuming what they produce? Should what is produced not be consumed? Should what is produced be produced for purposes other than consumption? Arendt draws a subtle distinction between consumption and use: in consumption, the product is consumed immediately and in its entirety, in use, not immediately and in parts. Or: what is consumed is transient, used is durable. Therefore, a consumer society is a society where there is no place for use, where even what is produced for use is not used, but consumed.
But is that the point? Is this the essence of the wasteful economy towards which, as Arendt assures us, consumer society is moving irresistibly? That's just the point, that's not it! The fact of the matter is that the essence of a wasteful economy is precisely the rejection of consumption - that the product is not consumed, but (using the terminology of Arendt herself) is only consumed and then immediately thrown away, as another product takes its place. Figuratively speaking, instead of eating the whole product (immediately or gradually), it is only bitten, thrown away, and immediately after that another product is purchased that satisfies the same need. Moreover, the new product often differs from the old one only in the name and packaging. But even if it differs qualitatively, the essence of the matter does not change from this - the old product is consumed only partially, thrown away not because of refusal to serve the needs, but because of “moral obsolescence”, i.e. simply because it has become kind of “indecent” to continue consuming this product. Non-consumptive acquisition - that is the essence of a wasteful economy, and therefore not animal laborans, but homo mercans, "the person who acquires" - this is the true hero of our time. Moreover, it is homo, because among animals the thirst for non-consuming acquisition is not observed. Chapters four and five are devoted to two other types of vita activa - creation and action (making and doing). I will not dwell on their characterization, noting only that they, too, are interpreted by Arendt in a way that is not entirely customary, especially action, since it is opposed to labor and creation. At the same time, the value of creation is higher than the value of labor (which is why Arend already calls the creator homo faber), and the value of action is higher than the value of creation and is inferior in value only to vita contemplativa - “contemplative life”.
Having ordered the types of human activity, Arendt concludes by expounding his own philosophy of history. This philosophy is not as ambitious as, say, Hegel or Marx, but it is just as pessimistic as Hesiod. It confines itself to the philosophy of modern European history alone, but sees in it not an ascent, but a descent, not progress, but regression. The role of the “silver” (or, if you like, “bronze”) generation is assigned to homo faber, the role of the “iron” is assigned to animal laborans. True, Arendt does not say anything about those who could be attributed to the “golden” generation, however, in the book there are enough hints for the educated reader to guess for himself: only the ancient Greeks can claim this role (of course, at the best time of their history.) For who else can compete with the Greeks in what Arendt placed on the highest step of the podium, I would define Arendt's historiosophical position as follows: ancient revanchism combined with a special form of early Christian eschatologism (what does the “end of the world” have to do with it, an educated reader will guess after reading the book).
That is the intention and general structure Hannah Arendt's book Vita activa. The book is in many ways controversial, but bold, exciting and captivating. And let the reader not wish to agree with the author in any of her “provocative” conclusions, in order to refute these conclusions, he will have to spend a lot of effort. For I repeat, the book is written masterfully and does not throw words into the wind. Each conclusion is carefully crafted, and when spoken, takes the reader by surprise. The strength of the book's impact is also multiplied by the emotional coloring of the text, which allows the reader to some extent experience the feeling that in many ways forced Arendt to write this book - pain.
It seems that Arendt was aware of the negative spiritual biology of her work and, perhaps, that is why she felt the horror of work, instead of viewing work as overcoming the horror of death. Labor for Arendt in the book “Vita activa”, inspired by man's flight into space, is not a postponement of death, but a rebellion against the divine gift of earthly existence. In any work, according to Arendt, madness shines through, because “the mental-material condition of human thought prevents us from mentally reproducing the things that we do” (p. 10). The intellectual workers are no exception here, since where others work with their hands, they use another part of the body, namely the head. The historical horizon of the book does not go beyond the end of the New Age and includes an analysis of three types of activity identified by Hannah Arendt: labor (work), creation (production) and action (act) (Labor - Work - Action; Arbeit - Herstellen - Han- deln). If the activity of labor is defined by Arendt as corresponding to the biological process of the human body, then creation is postulated as the production of an artificial world of things, while action turns out to be the only activity in the vita activa, unfolding without the mediation of matter, materials and things directly between people. Each of these activities is covered in a separate chapter. A separate chapter explores the dichotomy of the private and the public, its evolution and the transformation of three types of activities, depending on whether they belong to the public space or the private sphere.
The dichotomy of public and private is compared by Arendt with the oppositions freedom/necessity, as well as action/work. If for antiquity, living in the private, a person lives in a state of deprivation, then in the future there is a gigantic growth of the private sphere. The symptoms of this emancipation of the private sphere are the discovery of the sphere of the intimate by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - the development of the novel to an independent art form, the content of which forms social reality and, at the same time, the decline of public art forms, especially architecture. At the same time, Hannah Arendt notes the relationship between the right and left members of the opposition: “chiaroscuro itself, poorly illuminating our intimate private life, owes its luminous power to the dazzlingly sharp light emitted by publicity” (p. 68). This “light-bearing” slang is not an accident, and literally on the next page the reader observes how the public space ceases to “gather people” and “the situation ... approaches in its creepiness a seance in which a group of people gathered around the table suddenly sees that the table by force some kind of magic has disappeared from their midst, so that now the two faces sitting opposite each other are no longer separated by anything, but are no longer connected by anything tangible. Arendt connects the "miracle" of the capitalist economy with the disappearance of the private sphere, when private property becomes a public interest, and labor is included in the social space.
Hannah Arendt connects the history of labor with the etymology of the word "labor" itself in European languages. Finding that all the words for "labor" mean primordially "torment" in the sense of painful bodily effort and also have the meaning of birth pangs, the researcher deduces from this the reason for the long-term existence of labor only in a private sphere, hidden from the eyes of society. Hence, any social status of labor could arise only with the emancipation of the private and the privatization of the public space. The dark, impure, inhuman side of labor alone existed in a slave-owning society, when slaves were considered to have an inhuman nature.
Arendt does not say this explicitly, but in the alternation of the word forms used by her, the contemplation of a negative otherworldly essence is guessed, whose solemn appearance occurs precisely in the era of the heyday of labor, which becomes an expression of human humanity: “the introduction of the concept of“ labor force ”is the most significant contribution of Marx to the theory of labor. All objectivity produced by the labor force is, as it were, a by-product of activity, which basically remains aimed at providing the means of its own reproduction ... Therefore, violence in a slave-owning society and exploitation in a capitalist society can be used in such a way that part of the concretely available labor force is sufficient to reproduce the life of all "( p. 114).
The production of art objects belongs to Hannah Arendt in the field of creation - that is, the second activity in her classification. Works of art she considers the most stable, and therefore the most belonging to the world of all things: "the power that realizes thought and creates the creation of the mind is ... the activity of the master, which, with the help of the primary tool, which is the human hand, creates and manufactures all other durable things of the world." The expediency, the functionality of an object of art, according to Arendt, is characteristic kitsch, while constancy and stability are the highest value of art.
The third type of activity - action - is concluded for Arendt primarily in the spoken word and is feasible primarily in the public sphere. Drama that brings out actors” to the judgment of the public, is a reflection of this kind of activity in art. Action, according to Arendt, is comparable to power, manipulation of other people: “Power is what calls to existence and generally keeps the public sphere in being, the potential space of manifestation among those who act and speak ... Power is always the potential of power ... Power ... no one has, it arises among people when they act together, and disappears as soon as they disperse again” (p. 266).
A brief history of labor in such a setting is as follows: new European discoveries contributed to the overturning of theory into practice, that is, the change of vita contemplativa to vita activa; later on, a reversal takes place already within the vita activa, when the acting person turns into homo faber. The leapfrog ends in the conditions of the New Age with the fall of homo faber and the reign of animal laborans. Arendt interprets such a process as the degradation of a person and quotes Cato in the last lines of his work: “You are never as active as when, in the view from the outside, you are sitting idle, you are never less alone than in solitude with yourself alone.”
Some recent shift in attention from consumption processes to production processes forces us to critically rethink the concept of Marx with his labor as productive consumption and the utopia of humanity, which supposedly will someday begin to live an unworking life. In essence, modern philosophy, sociology and cultural studies continue to be influenced by Marx, speaking about the consumer society and mass culture. In rejecting Marxism, Hannah Arendt does not provide a concept capable of truly subverting it. There are significant gaps in her philosophical analysis: speaking of Marx's "labor", she does not refer to Hegel's "labor", meanwhile, it is by turning to Hegel that one can get a weapon against Marx in one's hands. Another drawback of the concept is a distraction from the fact of combining all three types of activity in one act, the division of which into three components, if not problematic, then debatable and should be considered in a single context. At the same time, the value of the book "Vita activa" lies not only in the acquaintance of the Russian reader with a well-known philosopher in the West, but also in the painstaking historical and philosophical analysis of concepts for the actual one.
Balayan Alexander political scientist of the Center for Political Analysis and Forecasting "Centurion"
Vita Activa Oder Vom Tätigen leben
W-Kohlhammer GmbH
The spelling and punctuation of the translator has been preserved in the publication.
Translation from German and English - V.V. Bibikhin
The Human Condition: Second Edition by Hannah Arendt
Licensed by The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
© 1958 by The University of Chicago
© V.V. Bibikhin, heirs, 2017
© Ad Marginem Press LLC, 2017
Introductory remarks
When Baal grew in the mother's womb,
The vault of heaven, already large and quiet and sluggish,
Yun and naked, blossomed in the beauty of the marvelous.
How Baal loved him when he came.
When Baal rotted in the dark earthly womb,
The vault of heaven, still quiet, great and sluggish,
Yun and naked, swam in marvelous beauty,
As when Baal loved him.
Bertolt Brecht
People, the world, the earth and the universe - they are not specifically discussed in this book. There is also no talk about how the world arranged by people extends from the Earth far under the heavens, from the skies it swings at the universe, adjoining the Sun, the Moon and the stars. Who dares to start talking about what we have been constantly thinking about since the day the first man-made thing flew into space to wander there for some time along the same gravity-drawn orbits that mark the paths and sweeping run of celestial bodies from time immemorial. Since then, one artificial satellite after another has risen into outer space, circled the Moon, and what ten years ago rose at an infinite distance, in the silent regions of impregnable mystery, will now, willy-nilly, share outer spaces outside the sky with human-terrestrial objects, hugging the earth.
The event of 1957 is second in importance to no other event, not even to the splitting of the atom, and one would expect that, despite all the preoccupation with the coming military and political circumstances, people should have received it with great joy. Strangely, there was no jubilation, there was almost no smell of triumph, but there was also no eerie feeling that from the starry sky above us our own apparatus and instruments now shine for us. Instead, the first reaction was a curious sense of relief at "having taken the first step toward escaping the earthly prison." And as fantastic as the notion that Earth-weary humans would go in search of new places to live in the universe may seem to us, it is by no means the random twist of an American journalist who wanted to come up with something sensational for a catchy headline; it only says, and obviously without knowing it, the very thing that more than twenty years ago appeared as an inscription on the tombstone of a great scientist in Russia: "Humanity will not forever remain chained to the Earth."
What is shocking about such statements is that they are not at all extravagant new-fangled fantasies, as if the latest achievements of technology hit someone in the head, but the generally accepted ideas of yesterday and the day before yesterday. In the face of these and similar coincidences, how can one think that human "thinking" lags behind scientific discoveries and the development of technology! It is decades ahead of them, and moreover, the thinking and imagination of a person from the street, and not just those who carry out these discoveries and accelerate their implementation. For science only brings people's dreams to life, and it only confirmed that dreams do not have to remain fantasy. A simple survey of science fiction literature, the strange madness of which, unfortunately, no one has yet been seriously disturbed by, could show how the latest novelties here meet precisely the desires and innermost anguish of the masses. And the vulgar kitsch language of journalists should not interfere with seeing that what they say is completely and completely exclusive, and not at all usual, if by ordinary we mean what we are used to. For although Christianity sometimes calls the earth a valley of sorrows, and philosophy sometimes sees the body as a prison for the spirit and soul, still, until the twentieth century, it never occurred to anyone to consider the earth a prison of the human body, or seriously bother about flying to the moon. Is it really that in which the Enlightenment saw the proclamation of a man of his maturity and what in fact meant a departure, if not from God in general, but from that God who was the Heavenly Father for people, should end in the end with the emancipation of the human race from the Earth, which, as far as we you know, the mother of all living things?
After all, no matter how things are with the "position of man in space", the Earth and terrestrial nature seem to be at least unique in the Universe in that they provide such beings as people with the conditions under which they are able to live and move and breathe here without much trouble. and without complete dependence on their own invented means. The world as a creation of human hands, unlike the surrounding world of animals, does not owe absolutely everything to nature, but our life itself does not completely and completely enter this artificial world, just as it cannot completely and completely dissolve in it; as a living being, man remains attached to the realm of the living, although he gradually moves away from it towards an artificial world arranged by himself. For quite some time now, the natural sciences have been trying to artificially manufacture even life itself, and if they succeeded, they would really cut the umbilical cord between man and the mother of all life, the Earth. The desire to escape from "earthly captivity" and thus from the conditions in which people received life, manifests itself in attempts to give birth to life in a retort, through artificial insemination to grow a superman or cause mutations in which the human appearance and functions will be radically "improved", which, according to apparently also expressed in attempts to stretch the life span far beyond the limit of a century.
This future man, about whom naturalists believe that he will inhabit the Earth no more than in a hundred years, if he ever actually arises, he will owe his existence to the rebellion of man against his own being, namely against what he was at birth. presented as a free gift and that he now wants to exchange for conditions created by himself. That such an exchange lies in the realm of the possible, we have no reason to doubt it, just as, unfortunately, we have no reason to doubt that we are capable of destroying all organic life on the planet. The question can only be whether we want to use our new scientific knowledge and our monstrous technical abilities in this direction; and this question absolutely cannot be resolved within the framework of the sciences, and even within their framework it has not yet been reasonably and posed, because it is in the essence of science to go to the last end in each of the once outlined directions. In any case, this is a political question of the first order, and on this basis alone it cannot be left to the decision of specialists, whether they are professional scientists or professional politicians.
While all this is still a matter of the distant future, the first rebound of great scientific triumphs is in the so-called crisis of the foundations of the natural sciences. It turns out that the "truths" of the modern scientific picture of the world, which are quite amenable to mathematical formalism and technical demonstration, can no longer be represented in speech or thought in any way. As soon as one tries to grasp these "truths" in a concept and make them visible in the context of a linguistic statement, one gets an absurdity that "perhaps not quite as absurd as a 'triangular circle', but perceptibly more absurd than a 'winged lion'" (Erwin Schrödinger). We don't know if this is final yet. Still, it is possible that for earth-bound beings who behave as if the Universe is their home, it will forever remain inaccessible to the things they do in this way, and also to understand, that is, to speak meaningfully about them. If this were confirmed, one would inevitably have to assume that the very structure of our brain, i.e., the mental-material condition of human thought, prevents us from mentally reproducing the things that we do - from which, in essence, it would follow that we have nothing left to do but now to invent also machines that will undertake to think and speak for us. If it turns out that cognition and thinking no longer bear any relation to each other, that we are able to cognize and, consequently, produce much more than to understand by thought, then we will indeed fall, as it were, into our own trap, i.e., we will become slaves, although not of our machines, which is commonly feared, but of our own cognitive faculties, creatures that are forgotten by every spirit and all good spirits, and who see themselves helplessly dependent on any apparatus they can ever make, regardless of any savagery or ruinous consequences.