On the evening of October 25, a new round of the reading group on Arendt’s The Human Condition got underway. Hu Yilin led the reading, using Wang Yinli’s translation of the text (second edition). That night we began with Arendt’s own preface, reading the first nine of the twelve paragraphs: from the launch of the artificial satellite in 1957 all the way to the “society of laborers without labor.” The discussion revolved roughly around three questions: Why do human beings want to “escape the earth”? Technology can do more and more things, so why has it instead become a political problem? Once freed from labor, what else can human beings do?
What follows has been arranged by claude from the live recording and revised by me. Quotations are from Wang Yinli’s translation; the main speaker is Hu Yilin, and the other participants are unnamed.
Opening: Reading Slowly, Reading in the Room
My reading group has been running at Unfinished Bookstore in Singapore for almost two years now (and if you count from Beijing, it has been 12 years already). Before this we were reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, and we more or less got through it; for the second round we switched to The Human Condition. At first I wanted to use the newly published Zhong Shu translation, but then Zhong Shu was caught in a plagiarism scandal, and the shop owner, with a bit of what you might call “spiritual cleanliness,” decided we should still use Wang Yinli’s translation, specifically the second edition revised in 2021.
I had AI analyze these two translations: both are quite good, with no major problems, but there are also quite a few scattered errors. In fact, in the future we can simply use AI translations directly; by now AI translations are already better than most published translations. But some key concepts still need human oversight—for example, whether condition should be translated as “境况” or “条件.” I had already asked AI to prepare a reading handout and mark out the obvious mistakes in Wang’s translation.
We follow the old rule in reading: read aloud paragraph by paragraph, very slowly, and after each paragraph we pause, I gripe and explain, and everyone can jump in at any time without raising a hand. I’ve tried at home to discuss directly with AI, but it still doesn’t really work. The feeling and atmosphere of slow reading in a room, at least for now, cannot be replaced; the reading group also has livestreaming and recordings, but they still can’t match the sense of participation in the room.
My reading group welcomes readers to join at any time. I try to come every week, but it’s fine if you only show up occasionally. That’s because people are not reading as professional scholars; rather, they are connecting the reading with their own lives and feelings. What we read are sensations, associations, and inspirations, so even if you only come once in a while, you’ll still gain something.
As for why I chose this book: first, I’ve always liked Arendt; second, this book is highly relevant to the present day, with technological development and the AI boom.
A Philosophical Book that Is “Anti-Philosophy”
We didn’t read the preface or introduction, and went straight to Arendt’s own preface. But before starting, I briefly explained the background to the book’s writing. Arendt spent many years as a refugee, wandering through exile until she came to the United States, where she later took U.S. citizenship and wrote this book in English. The Zhong Shu translation is based on the German text she later wrote herself. Arendt thought the German text was better, because German was her native language, whereas English was only the third language she learned, after German and French. There is some truth to this, but the English text is the original version, and it matters more in academic terms.
There is something ironic about this book: it is treated as the representative work of Arendt, “the greatest woman philosopher,” but in her own view it is an “anti-philosophical” book. In her eyes, philosophy had gone down the wrong path, overemphasizing the contemplative life and forgetting human action in reality; this is in fact a political book, one that turns from contemplation back to political action. Of course, truly classic philosophical books are often anti-philosophical: Marx, Kant, and Heidegger all opposed earlier philosophy.
There are three layers to the sources of Arendt’s thought. First is Socratic civic politics. In Arendt’s eyes, Socrates was not a contemplative thinker but an actor, one who was ultimately persecuted to death over political matters; Socrates’ student Plato turned toward the path of contemplation, perhaps a kind of “traumatic stress response” brought on by Socrates’ death. Plato opposed civic politics and pursued the philosopher-king—in fact, a certain anti-political mode of governance; and after Plato, all of Western philosophy became footnotes to Plato, and so it just kept going down the wrong path. Second is Marx: Marx too was anti-philosophical, criticizing earlier philosophy for standing “on its head,” and stressing that what matters is changing the world; this is something Arendt inherits, though she criticizes Marx for confusing labor and work. Third is Heidegger: Arendt was his student and lover, inherited his genuine teachings, and also rebelled against him. Heidegger, though he claimed to bring metaphysics back from its wrong path toward actuality, still remained in tone oriented toward contemplation and failed to see that genuine actuality is political.
Of course, after talking at length about all this background, it’s actually not necessary to know it. Great philosophical works create their own world; one doesn’t need to read Heidegger or Marx first in order to read Arendt. What philosophers truly interrogate is their own age and their own condition. Arendt wrote in the 1950s, more than seventy years from today, and our condition still has points in common with hers, so we can read our way right into it.
One participant said that they were very concerned with how AI affects people’s work: some people change the way they work, some lose their jobs, and some are learning new things, so they felt this topic was very suited to modern society. I said that this was precisely why I chose this book. In fact, according to Arendt’s classifications, we don’t really have “work” at all now; what the job market is hiring are not workers, but laborers. Arendt distinguishes labor, work, and action, and in her view, modernity as a whole, including Marx, has mixed labor and work together. This is the theme of the whole book, and also a point of controversy.
Artificial Satellites: Human Artifacts Ascending to the “Position of the Gods”
Rather than saying this book is political philosophy, I would rather say that it is speaking about philosophy of technology. The preface begins with an event in the history of science and technology: in 1957, an artificial object was launched into the sky, orbiting the earth and following the same laws of gravity as the sun, moon, and stars. Arendt says that, of course, it is not the moon or a star, but for a period of time it dwelled and moved near the heavenly bodies,
This artificial satellite was neither the moon nor a star, nor a celestial body moving along a circular orbit, which for us mortals limited by earthly life is something that exists eternally. Yet for a time, this artificial satellite… seemed to have been temporarily granted permission to join their noble ranks.
Wang Yinli’s rendering of “mortals limited by earthly life” is not quite accurate. AI suggested translating it as “bound by earthly time” (earthly time). Earthly does mean “pertaining to the earth,” but the reason earthly has the meaning of “worldly” is indeed, first of all, because it means “of the earth.” There is a background here in the history of Western thought: in antiquity, people divided the world into the sublunary heavens and the superlunary heavens; the sublunary world, or the world on earth, was the perishable realm, whereas the things above the moon were immortal. What Arendt is saying here is that by leaving the “earth,” the artificial satellite metaphorically transcends the “worldly” and acquires a certain immortality, or divinity. In the entire traditional way of thinking, the sky is the realm of the immortal and of the gods, while the earth is the realm of the mortal; the launching of the artificial satellite means that human beings, by their own authority, have sent their creation into the position of the gods.
Arendt then says that the significance of this event is no less than that of any event, not even nuclear fission; had it not been accompanied by unpleasant military and political circumstances, it would have deserved unreserved celebration.
But strangely enough, people’s cheers were neither the joy of victory, nor the pride and awe that fill the heart in the face of humanity’s great power to master nature (now, when they look up at the sky from the earth, they can watch something made by their own hands). At the very instant the event occurred, the immediate reaction was one of enormous relief: at last human beings had “taken the first step toward freeing man from the earth’s bondage.”
She points out that this sentence simply repeats what was inscribed on the tombstone of a great Russian scientist: “Human beings will not be bound to the earth forever.”
After speaking of awe, Arendt adds in parentheses “looking up at the starry sky,” which is really an evocation of Kant: Kant has a famous line saying that what makes us deeply reverent is, first, the starry sky above us, and second, the moral law within us. And now, in the starry sky above us, in addition to the stars, there is also an artificial satellite. This very thing even changes the emotion of “awe.”
Arendt is not opposing the launching of artificial satellites, nor does she think human beings should not rejoice over it. What she finds odd is the emotion behind the cheering: it is not joy, pride, and awe, but rather something like a successful escape from disaster: “freed from the earth’s bondage,” as if the earth were a prison, sounding a bit like leaving home to go out into the world in order to escape one’s family of origin.
Is the earth a prison?
Arendt then says that this emotion has become quite common for some time now; long ago it was already buried within science fiction novels, but in the history of human thought, this emotion is still relatively new. Before, Christianity also regarded the earthly world as the here-below that must eventually be cast off, and philosophers also regarded the body as the prison of the soul. “But no one in human history had yet regarded the earth itself as the prison of the human body, or displayed such an urgent desire to emigrate from the earth to the moon.” She asks: has modern liberation and secularization, which began by turning away from “our Father in heaven,” really come to an end in betraying the earth, that is, betraying the “mother of all living creatures under the sky”?
Plato believed the body was the prison of the soul, and that one had to break free of the body in order to see truth; Christianity believed that the earthly world was a bondage, and that the soul’s home lay on the other shore. Now this contempt for the body and abandonment of the earthly world has become, in science news, adulation for technological development; at root it is still a religious kind of belief, only magnified: in the past the earth was still Gaia, mother of life, but now even the earth itself has become a bond.
The modern movement for freedom and emancipation once struggled against divine rule, monarchical power, and hierarchy; after fighting heaven and earth, it ultimately discovered that what had to be opposed was actually the earth itself. The narrative of liberating all humankind has drifted toward a grotesque ending.
One participant raised a question: compared with localized struggles and emancipation in some particular region, Musk’s idea of making humanity a “multiplanetary species” feels like a greater liberation; the earth’s bondage seems greater than those local forms of bondage.
My response was: Arendt, or I, are not denying artificial satellites or a Mars plan. People can absolutely feel pride and awe at human mastery over nature, and regard the moon landing or colonizing Mars as the joy of opening up a new world; the problem lies in the logic of describing the earth as a prison—if you can’t even survive on earth, then what can you do on Mars? What exactly is being liberated? In the past, the logic of colonization still made sense: the earth is good, but resources are limited, the population keeps growing, the earth will eventually be full, so expansion outward is the only option. But now that logic no longer holds. Populations in developed countries are shrinking, nobody is having children anymore, we’re in a population crisis—so what’s the point of sending people out? The earth is so habitable, and you still call it bondage; then on Mars you’ll be free? On Mars you won’t even be free to breathe.
The participant pressed further: originally, humans could not go to Mars and could not breathe there, and that was bondage; if one day technology makes it possible, why can’t that count as liberation from, or a breakthrough against, bondage?
My response was: of course environmental limits can be called a kind of bondage; this is precisely what later on will be discussed as the “human condition.” But opening up a new environment is pioneering, advancing, not necessarily breaking out of prison. Pioneering is not a negation of the old home: the old home is precisely the condition of pioneering, the thing that lets you grow up, and only then do you have the chance to pioneer. To use an analogy: when a child grows up and wants to leave home to make their own way in the world, taking paths their parents never took, that’s a good thing; but if the child says, “I’m going to free myself from my parents’ bondage,” then you’d feel that this family of origin must have serious problems. Growing up and escaping are two different things. The subtlety lies in the phrase “freeing ourselves from the earth’s bondage.”
The participant then asked: If the original family can no longer meet a child’s needs for continued growth, can we call that kind of “failure to satisfy” a bondage? I said that this is precisely the issue of “conditions.” He connected it to the conclusion he had drawn earlier from reading Heidegger: “Freedom is not a right; freedom is a responsibility, a burden you carry, and what you carry is your finitude.” Human capability comes precisely from finitude; all conditions are finite. Only by acknowledging and bearing one’s own finitude can one move forward and broaden the boundaries. He emphasized once again that Arendt is not opposing Musk, but reminding us to scrutinize the civilizational narrative we ourselves are telling: why exactly do we want to go into the sky? Let me add, by the way: are current narratives such as the Mars plan really based on the claim that Earth can no longer meet humanity’s needs for continued development? What exactly is the need that cannot be satisfied on Earth? Is it that there isn’t enough water to drink, or not enough food to eat, or that all the oil has been dug up? But none of these things are on Mars either. Another participant cited one of Musk’s remarks: linking the level of civilization to how much energy it can use—the more energy it uses, the higher the civilization. He felt this was a very one-dimensional, even “downgraded,” understanding of civilization. I echoed that view: how to understand human life is precisely the theme of this book. If linear expansion is taken as progress, yet human life itself does not change—if originally you were slaving away on Earth, and now you go to Mars to slave away there, what has changed? The narrative of liberation originally meant that human beings could stop being beasts of burden, could break free from the control of authoritarian powers; but now it has become a matter of continually leaving one old environment and entering a new one, like if you can’t endure this factory, then just switch to another factory. Is that really liberation? If this factory can never be reformed, how can you be sure the next one will be better? True liberation means having a broader space, more room for choice, and more possibilities for survival. This involves one of Arendt’s key concepts: Wang Yinli translates it as “plurality,” while Zhong Shu translates it as “diversity”; the latter is intentionally interpretive, but it is also apt. Earth has Earth’s way of life, Mars has Mars’s way of life; this factory is organized by one system, that factory by another; then you can expand a new space of choice—that is progress. But if Earth is a factory of beasts of burden and Mars becomes a sweatshop, that is not progress. So why does humanity need to expand? Because we need to accommodate the plurality of more people, the diversity of human beings. If the only aim is to let one and the same way of life win more living space, then that is aligned with colonialism and even Hitler’s thought. ## “Conditions” or “Circumstances”? Next, Arendt wrote: The Earth is the very embodiment of human conditions…… Human-made objects in the world separate human existence from the whole animal environment, but life itself is outside this man-made world. Yet now a great deal of scientific investment is devoted to making life itself “artificial,” severing the last tie that allows human beings to belong to the embrace of Mother Nature. The examples she gives include creating life in test tubes and freezing the sperm of “exceptionally capable people” to produce supermen; she also speculates that behind the hope of pushing human life far beyond the age of one hundred lies the wish to escape the human condition. None of this is outdated today. At that time there was the background of eugenics, and countries all over the world engaged in it. Later, when people stopped doing it, it was not because they had truly realized it was wrong, but only because they thought there were problems with implementation. The pursuit of breaking free from constraints has always been there: life itself is seen as a bondage. “The Earth is the very embodiment of human conditions” — in Wang Yinli’s revised version, the main text basically changes “circumstances” back to “conditions”; the title, by convention, remains “circumstances.” Zhong Shu, meanwhile, thinks “circumstances” is better. I think both make sense. condition in English is often translated as “condition,” but what this book means is not logical sufficient conditions or necessary conditions. It has the sense of environment or situation, but it also carries the meaning of “the premise that makes you become what you are,” just as when we say someone has good family conditions or good physical conditions, especially when looking for a partner. “Circumstances,” by contrast, is closer to environment and situation. All of these layers of meaning are present, so translating it as “conditions” is fine, and translating it as “circumstances” is also acceptable. The participant who had just pressed the question about Mars asked again: family conditions and physical conditions can be good or bad and can be compared; but what are “human conditions”? Could it be that some human conditions are better than others? Or does it belong to all humankind and thus cannot be compared? I replied that human conditions can also be compared. The very fact that you think humanity’s conditions have improved after colonizing Mars is already a comparison; saying that we are better off than in the Middle Ages is also saying that our circumstances, our conditions, are better. Conditions can be large or small: for specific individuals, home, technology, and the community in which one lives are conditions; for humankind, the Earth is a condition in the concentrated sense. Conditions are historical; they are not fixed and unchanging. Humanity has always been striving to change its own conditions and break through finitude. **When technology can do too much, it becomes a political question** Arendt says, Scientists tell us that within less than a hundred years they may produce a future humanity that seems to possess a capacity to rebel against human beings’ given existence; if he wants, he can replace himself with anything he has made. There is no reason to doubt our ability to achieve such free exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is merely whether we really want to use our new scientific and technological knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is first and foremost a political question, and therefore cannot be left to specialist scientists or specialist politicians to answer. These remarks are extremely prescient: Arendt says “within less than a hundred years,” and she was writing in the 1950s—now we are almost there, and AI is accelerating things further. Cyborgs, brain-computer interfaces, gene editing: these technologies are indeed approaching maturity. You want what kind of body, and you can have what kind of body; you can attach wings or grow three eyes. You can also decide to wipe out certain animals—for example, exterminate mosquitoes. But then the question arises: does everyone need wings? Does everyone need a third eye? Who has the right to attach them, and who has the right not to? If mosquitoes can be exterminated, should they be? Should flies be wiped out as well while we’re at it? Once we are able to determine life and death like this, the next issue is no longer simply a technological one; it becomes a political one. Some people want to exterminate mosquitoes, others do not; you put on wings and I do not, and then there is the question of fairness. These conflicts cannot be left to scientists and experts to decide. The same is true of AI today: AI is omnipotent, capable of doing far too many things. Figures in the AI world like Dario and Altman are also turning the issue into one of governance: who has the right to restrict what AI can do and not do, even seeking endorsement from theologians and popes. Because technology can do too much, what is needed is restraint and negotiation: what should be done, what should not be done, who should restrict, who should punish…… After the Second World War, when Arendt saw the atomic bomb, satellites, and the arms race, what appeared on the surface to be a contest of technology had in fact become a political question—how to make an atomic bomb is a scientific and technological question; whether to make one, who can make one, and who will manage it afterward are all political questions. And this question is even more urgent today. What we need now may not merely be some technology experts who push for faster technological acceleration, but rather politics—political movements, political deliberation. ## The slave who “knows how” In the sixth section, Arendt writes about a crisis within natural science itself: the “truth” of modern science can be demonstrated with mathematical formulas and proved technically, yet can no longer be expressed in everyday speech and thought. Schrödinger uses “a triangle made of circles” and “a winged lion” as metaphors for such statements. She worries that we may never understand—that is, never be able to think and talk about—the things we are capable of doing: If it were indeed proved that knowledge—in the modern sense of “knowing-how”—and thought had permanently gone their separate ways, then we would indeed have become helpless slaves, not only slaves of our machines but also slaves of our “knowing-how,” turned into thoughtless creatures manipulated by whatever is technically possible, even if it would put human beings to death. Something that is both a wave and a particle sounds to ordinary people like “a triangle made of circles”; science has advanced to a point where ordinary people can no longer understand it. This problem is even more serious today. Back then, the knowledge produced by scientific experts was incomprehensible to ordinary people; now the knowledge produced by AI is incomprehensible even to scientific experts, and the structure of the problem is the same. Politics requires human judgment; when there are disagreements, there must be deliberation and compromise. But if ordinary people cannot understand what technology has done, what consequences and side effects it has, then how can there be deliberation? Arendt stands from the standpoint of ordinary people: a small number of scientific elites may understand, but they cannot replace ordinary people’s political participation. Now the problem is even worse, because even mathematicians can no longer get through mathematics papers. When people cannot understand something, they will give up and hand it over to technology, letting it keep running, even if it will put human beings to death. Behind this lies deepening specialization, and traditional political issues are no exception. In the past, monetary policy was nothing more than how many grams of gold could be exchanged for how many grams of silver, how much silver a coin contained; even if Newton were to formulate it, ordinary people could still understand it to some degree. Today’s monetary policy involves M0, M1, M2—ordinary people cannot understand it—but tariffs and monetary policy are, by nature, political issues that concern how people live. So politics becomes the business of experts too, and ordinary people can only hand it over to scientists, or so-called economists, and ultimately to professional politicians. Let me add a note: in Hayek’s acceptance speech after receiving the “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” he opposed the banking industry’s establishment of this prize, and one of his reasons was that it would authorize and scientize economics, packaging a field full of political controversy as objective and professional scientific research, making people believe that complex social governance could have a scientific conclusion. But this may be precisely the “open scheme” by which central banks co-opted Nobel’s name to create the award: after such packaging, it becomes reasonable, even righteous, for central banks to insist on a posture of political neutrality. Central banks, after all, like presidents and parliaments, formulate public policies closely tied to people’s lives and interests, yet central banks do not need to be elected; they stand outside partisan struggle, and many of their processes are no longer open and transparent, on the grounds that they require professionalism. The attitude of the “big-picture conspiracy” crowd is similar: ordinary people don’t understand that much; these people are playing a grand game, and all we can do is trust them. Hu Xijin has said things like this, saying that his habit of changing his stance according to the wind direction is reasonable, because he believes the wisdom at the top must see deeper than he does. Once the top speaks, one must believe them, because they are experts chosen from among thousands upon thousands, and they grasp the most comprehensive data. This is not only a Chinese problem. After the 2008 financial crisis, the West quickly saw the rise of the woke movement and Black Lives Matter, because issues like the gender struggle, minority groups, and Black rights are easy to understand, and ordinary people can speak up about them; but Wall Street and monetary policy shut ordinary people out, and politics became a very blunt, very monotonous quarrel, with Americans blaming China and Chinese people blaming America. Let me add that back then the slogan of Occupy Wall Street was “We are the 99%,” denouncing the 1% of powerful elites who controlled everything, caused the financial crisis, escaped punishment, and even continued to widen the gap between rich and poor. These slogans were actually easy to understand, so they did stir up waves for a time. But why did the movement eventually fade into silence? If you search for it, the first reason you’ll see is “a lack of clear political demands,” and then a lack of leadership, fragmentation of public opinion, and so on. In fact, it was simply this: they voiced their grievances, then public opinion said, “If you’re so capable, you do it—give us a concrete plan of action.” In the end, no one could really step up, and they all scattered like birds and beasts. Modern politics has become a series of complex scientific problems, technical problems, even engineering problems—everything except political problems—because these issues are difficult to bring into a public space of deliberation, unless they are simplified into the most straightforward, most elementary extremist versions. That is precisely the direction world politics has taken in recent years: people welcome all kinds of political propositions expressed at the level of primary-school knowledge, like Trump does, while the other side also polarizes into slogans like socialism or “overthrow the rich and equalize wealth.” The public space is full of clashes of positions, yet deliberation is still lacking. As AI develops, this trend will become even more pronounced: you ask AI, I ask AI, and in the end it becomes “AI governance.” But AI cannot replace people’s immediate judgment. What is good is itself a political question, a plural question; if even the dispute over good and bad is handed over to machines, what judgment and freedom do human beings still have?A participant asked: Arendt says that “knowledge (in the modern sense, ‘know-how’) and thought have diverged forever.” This seems to involve three things: knowledge in the ancient sense, knowledge in the modern sense, and thought. What are they respectively?
I explained that “know-how” is exactly “know how,” as opposed to “know why.” Ancient science asked why: the ground, causes, and essence of the world; what modern people want is “how,” “you tell me how to do it.” Take a microwave oven: press a button, and in two minutes it’s heated through, but I don’t know why it can do that. “Thought,” by contrast, is something broader: not only knowing how, but also knowing why, being able to understand causes and effects. What Arendt is talking about is the slave of “know-how.” A slave only needs to know what time the master wants him to do what; he doesn’t need to know why. An assembly line in a factory is the classic example: each person only turns his own screw, not knowing what the station upstream or downstream is doing, what the whole line is producing, or even what use this screw has. That is what it means to have no thought: I only know how I “do the work.”
The participant who had earlier brought up Mars said why she had come to read Arendt: she had first encountered Arendt’s “the banality of evil” through the history of World War II, that is, through not thinking, or outsourcing thought. What had struck her most just now was that people in the past could still choose to think or not think, whereas now it seems as if we are increasingly trapped in a state where we simply cannot think. “Is there a solution to this problem?”
I said: perhaps there is no solution. What Arendt calls for is some kind of revival of civic politics, but in fact it is not a ready-made solution telling you what to do. Still, at least we can know why, can know why our situation is the inevitable outcome of certain conditions; that itself is very important. Being obsessed with finding a solution is itself the logic of know-how—equivalent to saying, “You’re asking me to know how to get out of know-how,” which is ironic. We have to admit that there is no unified, scientific, objective solution. What Arendt emphasizes is diversity: it is not about pursuing one single solution, but about everyone striving to be themselves; only then can this society become a little better. There is no once-and-for-all remedy.
During the break, the discussion remained on the “banality of evil.” Some participants felt that in today’s division of labor, their own work is more or less implicated in it as well. I said that in modern society, this is more or less unavoidable. In Heidegger’s terms, you have to plead guilty before you can be free: first acknowledge your situation, and then within that situation do something that is your own, your own creation, leaving behind something in the world that you consider positive, rather than denying this world and escaping from it altogether. This is really what Arendt means by work and action: work is leaving your things in the world, action is leaving your influence in others. Another participant sighed that it still felt like “an ant trying to stop a chariot.”
By the way, “the banality of evil” was something Arendt proposed only after finishing this book and after participating in the Eichmann trial; before that, her famous work was The Origins of Totalitarianism. “The banality of evil” has always been controversial; some say she is excusing evil-doers. I think she is not denying the existence of the chief culprit, but rather saying that the machine can get moving not because of one person’s achievement, but because the whole machine cooperates. The Origins of Totalitarianism also says that totalitarianism is hollow, that the whole mechanism revolves around a center, and that center does not even need to be any specific person.
Where Speech Loses Its Power
Arendt continues to emphasize the significance of politics:
Wherever speech encounters danger, things have in essence become political, because speech makes human beings into a political existence. If we were to follow the advice so often pressed upon us, namely, that our cultural attitude too should conform to the status of current scientific achievements, we would, heedless of everything, adopt a way of life in which speech no longer has any meaning. For today’s science has been forced to adopt a mathematical-symbolic “language,” which, though originally nothing more than an abbreviated form of oral statements, now contains statements that can no longer be translated back into spoken discourse. Why is it said to be wise not to trust scientists, as scientists, in their political judgment… precisely because of the fact that they live in a world in which speech has already lost its power, a world in which whatever people do, know, or experience has meaning only within the range of what can be talked about. Perhaps there are truths beyond speech, and perhaps these truths are very meaningful for the individual, namely, that he can be anyone, so long as he is not a political being. But the plural human beings (insofar as they are the people who live and act in this world) can experience meaning only because they can talk to one another, can understand one another and make themselves understood.
Talking with one another is the essence of political activity, on the condition that we can understand one another; yet scientists have now moved far away from politics. Oppenheimer and Einstein actively pushed the United States to develop the atomic bomb, and after the bomb exploded they felt something was wrong; in their later years both threw themselves into political activity, and Oppenheimer was even politically persecuted. But once the atomic bomb had been built, politicians no longer listened to them. Of course, in those days they still had political influence, but as time went on each generation was worse than the last. By the time of cases like mad cow disease, scientists, in the capacity of scientists, were backing the claim that it “wouldn’t spread from person to person”; such political performance can only be called ugly. Arendt points out that this trend is not merely a matter of the moral character of a few scientists or occasional naïveté. Its root is that in this era the language of science and the language of politics have already diverged; they are experts in the language of mathematical symbols, but in political language they are childish.
It was not like this in antiquity. Even Plato, who prized contemplation, got entangled in politics; he had to go to Syracuse to seek out his philosopher-king. Chinese philosophers in antiquity traveled among the various states, peddling their political ideas. Mozi studied the imaging of a small hole, like a scientist, and at the same time preached universal love and opposition to offensive war. In those days, the language of knowledge and the language of politics were mutually intelligible. Today, although the languages no longer communicate, the relationship between modern technology and politics is in fact even closer. Algorithms, Douyin, cloud computing, surveillance, and GFW are all key political factors that affect our lives, yet the developers and programmers behind them have no standing in the political realm, and no one seriously listens to what they say.
A participant said that there is a structural problem here: even if you don’t develop GFW, someone else will. I said that this is of course a problem of “the banality of evil,” but programmers are not without “credit” either. Without Fang Binxing, there would still have been GFW, but it would not have come so quickly or worked so effectively; without Einstein and Oppenheimer, even if the atomic bomb could have been built, perhaps Japan would already have surrendered. A few years earlier or later, or being realized in a different direction, would make a huge difference. The internet itself also contains political tensions; it could just as easily have grown into a “Big Brother” model of strengthened central surveillance like the Soviet model. That the American model prevailed is also thanks to those programmers and developers. Whether positively or negatively, they are in fact participants in politics—only they have no discursive power, and their speech can no longer enter into political activity.
Another participant raised a possibility: perhaps Mozi could do science on the one hand and politics on the other because science and politics were not so complex then; later, the division of labor became finer and the disciplines more complex, and one person simply could not do both.
I said that this is professionalization. In antiquity, a craftsperson could handle an entire set of tasks alone; today there are only workers, each responsible for the one station right in front of them. Overall efficiency has increased, at the cost of there being no common language among people: I can only say how many screws I turned, while the station next to me may be doing sheet-metal work, and that has no common language with me. This is the modern human condition. We do not need to say right away whether it is wrong or right; it simply is so.
Another participant asked: many people now believe that as long as technology is developed well, the world can be changed and all the problems of social governance can be solved. Where does this idea come from?
I said that this is the mentality of “the slave of the machine.” Historically, the main force pushing for the liberation of slaves was not actually the slaves themselves, but intellectuals, the middle class, and people shaped by the Enlightenment; slaves might feel that having food and drink every day was enough. Once one gets used to being a slave, one comes to feel that there is nothing wrong with handing over the direction of humanity to machines. So this is a question of re-enlightenment: Arendt wants us to realize that there are some things that cannot be left unchecked, and that is where human preciousness lies. But he also says that we do not need to judge right or wrong in advance, nor do we need to criticize the “accelerationists” who advocate letting technology accelerate freely. Let us first make clear the condition of modern people, and then see whether Arendt can persuade us.
Some participants said that accelerationists believe technological development will inevitably bring changes in everyone’s lives, but they skip over too many steps in between; they are either unwilling to think through the logic or are avoiding the issue.
I said that accelerationists would say history has always been like this, but they overlook the fact that in history there has also been struggle, political movements, and human deliberation in addition to technological development. But the predicament accelerationism faces is real: our deliberation can no longer keep up. The division of labor had already begun during the Enlightenment, but people’s language was still mutually intelligible; the ideal of compiling encyclopedias was precisely to allow everyone access to all knowledge. Once the modern education system and factory system arrived, it became different. Technological iteration became faster and faster, while public speech became slower and slower, because one still has to break through each specialized field before it can become public deliberation. When a scholar publishes a paper on politics or ethics in a specialized journal, the review cycle alone takes one or two years, let alone when it might be transformed into a public issue. So accelerationists say: if you can’t keep up, then don’t keep up; blindly following along only drags things down. There is some truth in that.
When we read philosophy, we need not rush to pass judgment. Earlier we read Heidegger, and Heidegger would also admit that what he criticized had its own correctness. Arendt identifies the condition of specialization and the disjunction of language; this is not a denunciation that says it is wrong, nor is specialization something that can simply be reversed. The key is to recognize what it means for human political activity and way of life, and then to imagine new political forms. The preface is only an opening statement, describing what kind of era we inhabit and what kind of problems we face, and Arendt enters from the fissure between technology and politics.
A Society of Workers Without Work
In the eighth section, Arendt writes about another, more imminent event: automation. Automation will, within a few decades, leave factories empty, liberating human beings from the oldest and most natural burden, namely labor and the shackles of necessity. The desire to be freed from labor is as old as recorded human history; freedom from labor is nothing new either, and in the past it was the most secure privilege of the few. Now technology seems merely to be realizing what all previous eras dreamed of but no one could achieve.
Note that in Wang Yinli’s translation there is an error here: it renders this as “will make factories empty in a few decades,” putting it in the past tense, whereas it should actually be future tense. This is one of Arendt’s predictions, and automation only rose in the 1940s and 1950s. But seen from today, her future tense is already our past tense: over these decades, automation really does seem to have been liberating people from labor. In antiquity, nobles and freemen did not work; slaves and servants did. Automation, especially AI, may make everyone into nobles, into free people—this is the fulfillment of a distant dream.
But Arendt then says that “all this is only superficial”:
Modernity has already completed, in theory, the glorification of labor, and has led the entire society to become in fact a society of workers. Thus this wish, like the wish in a fairy tale, defeats itself at the very moment it is fulfilled. This society is a society of workers about to be liberated from the chains of labor, and it does not know of any higher or more meaningful activity that would deserve the freedom from labor for its sake. … In this society, no political or spiritual aristocracy is left to preserve and renew the other capacities of human beings; even presidents, kings, and prime ministers regard their offices as a necessary task of social life, and among intellectuals only isolated individuals still regard what they do as creation rather than a means of livelihood. The prospect before us is a society of workers without work, and the only activity left to them—labor—is gone as well; there is indeed nothing worse than this.
As a workers’ society, we are to be liberated from labor—how can that be possible? The last sentence in Wang Yinli’s translation is also somewhat inaccurate. What is worst is not that “only labor is left to people,” but that labor, as the only activity left to them, is gone as well, replaced by automation. What is so terrible about it is precisely that we are finally liberated from labor, yet do not know what else human beings can do besides labor. In antiquity, nobles, after eating their fill, engaged in politics, and also in science and creation; some craftsmen made a sculpture not because they had taken on a project and wanted to make money, but because they simply wanted to do it. These higher pursuits, in the modern workers’ society, have been dismissed as remnants of aristocracy and hierarchy and wiped away all at once. Labor has become the most glorious, and also the only, way of existing; human value lies in being a worker—either a mental worker or a manual worker. If we really are freed from labor, and I am not working in order to make money, then do I still work? The entire system of social operation, values, and cultural customs takes labor as the standard of value. To say to such a society, “We have finally been liberated from labor,” is not good news.
He linked this to today: after AI has replaced these jobs, what are people supposed to do? What is human value? Our value as a resource has already fallen below computing power; human labor is no longer a resource, so what should it become? People may just turn into couch potatoes, lying there scrolling Douyin. Arendt will later say that the laboring society has turned into a consumer society, and everyone is a consumer. In his view, such consumers have no higher aspirations; they are nothing more than “eating and waiting to die.” Automation seems to be liberating us, but we have not truly been liberated, because what binds us is not actual labor, but labor as an idea, as a yardstick. There are three paragraphs left in the preface. I decided to leave a tail for next time, and turn to discussion. ## Discussion: Will a society of creators arrive automatically? One participant asked: after Arendt wrote this book, did the human condition get better? I said: first of all, the human condition is not a question of good or bad, because the value yardstick of good and bad is itself part of the human condition; Arendt is not preaching morality or sighing that the world has grown worse, but speaking of a kind of fate, a continuing trend. By my own yardstick of value, overall it has not become better. But in some respects it has indeed improved: modernity has been continuously freeing people from animal labor, from the “fate of cattle and horses”; famines are fewer, wars have relatively speaking seemed somewhat better too, and severe events like Nazi concentration camps have at least not happened again in these past decades. Arendt herself was a refugee, nearly sent to a concentration camp, and lived a life of upheaval. And we, living in a relatively stable environment, if we insist on saying our situation has gotten worse, that too would be a bit of the sanctimoniousness of standing safely and talking. Still, “getting worse” is in fact Arendt’s own prophecy as well. What Arendt emphasized was precisely not matters like food, clothing, and safety. She also expected automation to liberate people from labor, which by either ancient or modern standards is good news; but what she wanted to stress is that behind this good thing, the key problem has never been solved. Today our society, politics, way of life, modes of communication, and organizational forms still have not broken free of the paradigm of the laboring society; the crises of the industrial age that Arendt criticized still seem to exist, while AI has brought new predicaments. There is a wolf in front and a tiger behind; the situation may be more severe and more dangerous, so that is what “getting worse” means. Of course, “where there is danger, there is also salvation”; danger is also an opportunity to build new forms of human organization. Solving the problem of food and clothing, solving necessity, is of course a good thing. But what Arendt wants to discuss is: after that, where is human society to go? This participant disagreed, believing this was Arendt’s “limitation”: she could not see the conditions needed for a transformation from a laboring society into a “society of creators,” and so she worried about the future. Once AI releases our productive capacity, our time, and our thought, per capita output will rise, and each person will naturally begin to create more—this kind of small discussion group today might also produce something rather good. Was she worried because she simply failed to see it? I said, it is not that she failed to see it, but that her judgment was different. Arendt believed such a world would not come about automatically; even if it did arrive, it would have to rely on political action. The directions of many contemporary enlightened people and political movements were themselves influenced by the thinkers of Arendt’s generation. The phrase “from a laboring society to a society of creators” can also be traced back to Arendt: she distinguishes labor from work, and what she calls work is similar to creation. And to actually say this aloud—for instance, “We need to move into a society of creators”—is itself a political act, and a powerful one: once it is heard, people will begin moving in that direction, supporting and respecting creators. This is not just Arendt; anyone who says such a thing is contributing to that turning point. If no one clearly explains the difference between creation and labor, society will not change on its own. But that participant objected to the idea that “we think about it, and only then will we come to respect it.” She invoked Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: as more and more people solve the problem of food and clothing, they will pursue higher-level needs and naturally respect creators. Facts have already proven that this is not the case: when the laboring society reaches its so-called higher stage, what it becomes is a consumer society, not a society of creators. People’s needs become lying on the sofa scrolling Douyin and watching television. And those things may all be automatically generated by AI in the future. Even Maslow never said that once lower-level needs are satisfied, people will automatically pursue higher-level ones; higher needs also have different modes of satisfaction and social structures. So-called self-realization is itself a political activity: polis politics is precisely about allowing the self to manifest in the world, to realize its own value and brilliance. How to make society better suited to everyone’s self-realization is a matter of social organization, social structure, communication, and politics. Another participant gave an example: before AI appeared, there were already many content creators on Instagram. Do they count as a society of creators, or are they just entertainment? The participant who had asked earlier then picked up the thread and said that we still have not entered a society of creators; many people become internet celebrities on Douyin simply to make a living. And as Hu Yilin said, after the level of social production rises, society may also move toward a consumer society rather than a society of creators. So there are multiple choices before us; the question is whether, at this fork in the road, we can enter a more meaningful society. I said that Arendt is calling for action, opposing merely sitting in a study imagining and meditating. “Saying it out loud” is itself an action. Even advocacy of accelerationism, or the claim that society will automatically become a society of creators, is a political stance: some people think it must be encouraged and pushed forward, others think it is enough to let things be. Even if you think letting things be is enough, that we should just sit at home and wait, waiting for the development of productivity, that too is a political stance. No political stance comes about automatically, just as North Korea will not automatically become a capitalist society. What Arendt wants to revive is not some specific political program, but political life as such: what should be advocated first and foremost is precisely that “it is meaningful to discuss these questions themselves.” Another participant pressed further: “Is talking really useful?” If saying something cannot affect anything in the end, would it not become “I’ll make enough money and use that money to influence others,” that is, the whole effective altruism line? In this participant’s view, that line also has many problems. I said that Arendt’s key point is to return to Greek polis life: politics is not done because it is useful, but because it is needed for self-realization. The self has never been a soul floating in cosmic emptiness, unrelated to others; it is a social, historical, living existence. To realize oneself is to act, to speak, to express oneself. Expression itself is meaning; whether it succeeds, whether it changes policy, that is an external yardstick. What changes first is other people: you speak, others hear it, and your words remain in the world, causing ripples in others, even if they oppose you. When all of us believe that speech has power, then speech really will have power. That participant asked again: isn’t this like a kind of retreat—if you cannot obtain results, then you define the process itself as meaningful? I said: you can put it that way too, depending on your mindset. But that is how the Greeks were: when city-states went to war, it was for honor, not plunder; once they won, they would go back home and not annex the other side. In the Homeric epics, the highest honor is to surpass others with one’s own hands and feet. What they pursued was not efficiency, not the possession of resources, but self-realization, honor. Of course you can also say this is “being unable to reach the grapes and calling them sour,” an Ah Q mentality; I can’t really refute that, because today pragmatic and utilitarian thinking is very strong and very domineering. This can also be seen as an evasion of the utilitarian narrative. ## Discussion: From the bread factory to “poverty of diversity” We may imagine that once productivity has become immensely abundant, society will naturally turn toward a society of creators. But what does “enough abundance” even mean? In developed countries, food and clothing have long ceased to be a problem; famine is a problem of distribution, not production. In a certain sense, food and clothing were basically achieved in the fifties and sixties already, and today’s food industrial system is even more oversupplied; famines in a few regions are all problems of distribution rather than production. Not only Arendt, but Stiegler also said that the laboring society is organized according to the logic of productivity, not according to the logic of satisfying necessary needs. Human basic needs are limited: one loaf of bread a day is better than half a loaf, two are better than one, but if you are given twenty loaves a day, that may not be better than two—you cannot eat them all. But the producer’s desire is infinite: a bread factory producing two hundred loaves is certainly better than producing twenty. Once the market is saturated, people go on producing more advanced bread and creating demand: fashion makes you change clothes ten or twenty times a year, not because your need for warmth has not been met, but because if you do not change, you become “old-fashioned” and “out of date”; one phone can easily last ten years, but once a new version comes out, you have to change. All creativity is used to create new needs. Of course this is also a kind of work, a kind of creation, a kind of self-realization, but it is a “self-realization gone astray”: is this the creation we really want, or an endless cycle aimed at capital appreciation? One participant added: the producer can serve more and more consumers; by the internet age, a team of a few people making videos can already face a huge audience. Even if production is counted as creation, creation is concentrated in the hands of very few people, while most people are just consuming. I agreed—that is exactly right. Even those who create new needs are only a tiny minority; most people are still on the assembly line. Creating new needs is in fact creating new assembly lines, so that unemployed laborers have work to do, so that they can move on to the next factory, rather than being told, “You don’t need to labor anymore, go create.” So creation will always be a game for the few, and even that is gradually being replaced by AI, while labor remains humanity’s fate. Productivity for money, money for productivity—this inertia is endless, so society does not automatically become better. The participant then asked: so, creation that does not require consumers—isn’t that still worth pursuing in itself? I said: everyone should be able to create; creation ought to have independent meaning. Right now, creation is measured by productivity and wealth effects; innovation and entrepreneurship have become the creation of market capitalization. This one-way creation never ends, and instead keeps reinforcing the laboring society, because entrepreneurs who are bosses are after all a minority, and what they provide are ever more labor posts. Another participant raised a question: creation is always social, and someone has to receive it—maybe another person’s time, attention, or money. If everyone goes off to create, who receives it? That may not necessarily be a good society. I replied: of course people can receive one another’s creations; this is precisely why Arendt insisted on plurality and multiplicity: what you create I cannot create, what I create you cannot create; each person is unique. Because we are different, we can exchange, appreciate one another, respect one another. If all we do is compete over market capitalization, then everyone becomes homogeneous and monotonous; if what we seek is to make the world richer, then the more different people there are, each creating according to their own characteristics and styles, the better. People can receive things that are different from themselves. A participant followed up by saying that this means no longer pursuing some single unified standard, such as being more popular, bigger, stronger, but instead pursuing one’s own uniqueness. Then someone asked: but the reason Arendt is important is precisely that the concepts she created have been “consumed” by so many people, and we are also here “consuming” Arendt today; without the consumer, how can we judge that her creation was important? I said that here “consume” is already a figurative extension. We are reading and discussing here, and yet we use the word “consume” to name these activities; that itself is a result of the consumer society’s tyranny. We accept Arendt’s ideas not for traffic, but for each person’s self-realization and self-growth; each person has their own reading, and there are a thousand Hamlets for a thousand readers—do we call that consuming Hamlet? This is actually communication, a political activity, human speech. One participant asked: in recent years, with the rise of AI and layoffs at big tech companies, people seem to have reflected more on life and on technology. From his observation over these years, is that the case? Will the development of AI make people reflect more on technology? I said this is certainly an opportunity. Philosophers of technology have long been discussing these issues; they have just remained very niche and very marginal. Now even major AI companies are hiring philosophers and talking with theologians; even if that has a bit of the sensational about it, it does reflect that this era is indeed concerned with these issues, because the impact of technology on us is too great. Another participant said that some people also say, “I’ve now entered a pure keep-on-living-each-day era; I no longer care about the meaning of life.” I said, most people have always been like that; there were not so many philosophers in ancient times either. Now there are certainly more people concerned with philosophy than in the past. Besides, a “keep-on-living-each-day era” is itself a philosophical insight, an expression of helplessness toward the age, toward one’s situation. Lying flat is a philosophy, and lying flat is also a political movement—otherwise why would it be banned?A participant then said: if we really can manage to live well, aren’t we also creating our own meaning—that too wouldn’t be a kind of creator society, would it? Hu Yilin said the key lies in articulating it: a person lying there in silence is not a political activity; when “we’re just lying flat” or “all we can do is go on living” is voiced aloud, it is that expression itself that is political.
Finally, one participant returned to a topic raised earlier: today’s political movements tend toward simplification—like “Black Lives Matter.” How would Arendt view this kind of simplified political movement? Is this a kind of consumerism?
Hu Yilin said that, in a certain sense, politics has been turned into consumerism and flattened out. Arendt would not address this issue directly, but the underlying logic is similar: the core of politics is human plurality. Black Lives Matter and DEI are also talking about plurality; first of all, this is a positive affirmation: even in this age, people still care about politics, still care about plurality. The negative side is that this plurality is relatively impoverished. What Arendt is concerned with is humanity’s fate in the face of technology; true plurality lies in diverse ways of life, diverse viewpoints and ideas, diverse forms of creation and aesthetics when using technology. But the plurality emphasized today falls instead on distinctions such as skin color—distinctions that can also be made among animals, a kind of “impoverished plurality.”
By the time the discussion reached this point, it was already ten o’clock in the evening. The first Arendt reading group session came to an end.