Arendt Reading Notes

Finally finished reading Arendt’s The Human Condition, and feel immensely relieved… Let me make some notes..

Wang Yinli’s Chinese translation of The Human Condition is basically pretty good. Though I didn’t compare it line by line with the English original, on the whole I could make sense of it, and there probably won’t be any major misunderstandings. The problem, however, is that her translation is still rather awkward. In the translator’s afterword, she also writes that she follows the principle of “literal translation,” saying that “literal translation has already become a consensus in the translation of academic works,” and so she tries not to change the original word order. I feel that this “consensus” is debatable. An important part of academic translation is getting the translated terms right and conveying the author’s intention accurately. But just how important is this “word order,” really? Is this practice of “following the original word order” truly so crucial to conveying the original meaning that it should become one of the major “principles” of academic translation? Or is it, to a greater extent, simply a sign that the translator is overly cautious, or even lazy? After dabbling in a bit of translation myself, I came to realize that a large part of the work of translation is actually spent adjusting “word order,” yet this seems to have turned into a thankless task. Not adjusting the word order and speaking in a stiff, forced way instead has become the academic standard, and I feel this is not a good thing. Of course, in order to save time, avoid risk, and play it safe, rendering the text into Chinese by forcing it to follow Western word order is not in itself a bad method. But the problem is that one should not elevate a practice that is plainly the result of the translator’s insufficient ability and nerve into the lofty status of an academic standard. You may translate in this conventional, stiff manner, but if someone else can convey the meaning in smoother Chinese, then that person should be regarded as more skilled, not scolded for failing to obey the rules.

Of course, in any case, after reading so many translations, I’ve basically gotten used to this style. The beginning of the book was not very smooth to read, but as I went on it became basically fluent.

Still, Arendt really is a thinker who is difficult to grasp, and it is no wonder that Teacher Shu misread her. In fact, Arendt seems never to have clearly and decisively supported any single definite position, even though she makes many layered distinctions: contemplative life versus active life; labor, work, and action; power, violence, physical force, and so on. But she is not trying to give us a complete set of clear-cut maps. For example, although she points out the distinction between contemplative life and active life, and notes that in modern times they underwent a reversal, the problem is that this reversal is not a simple either-or switch, not a matter of contemplation becoming superior to action or vice versa. The actual situation cannot be described as a linear increase or decrease among those distinctions, but rather as the breaking down of former boundaries, mutual penetration, alienation, distortion, and so on.

The reason Arendt makes so many distinctions is not that she wants to make certain assertions for us—for instance, that active life is better than contemplative life, or the reverse—but rather to reveal and narrate history and reality. Arendt is not preaching; she is more like she is chatting. Between her lines, sparks of inspiration flash everywhere, yet if one wanted to reduce her doctrine to a set of numbered dogmas, that would probably be quite difficult. Of course, Arendt admires the political life of ancient Greece, but is a way of life that must be built upon slavery really something to long for? Probably not at all. Arendt’s political philosophy does not offer an ideal blueprint for a political system; she is simply telling history and revealing our condition.

As for the title “The Human Condition,” the traditional translation is “人的条件” (“the human condition” in the sense of “condition”), whereas Wang Yinli argues for “人的境况” (“the human situation/condition”), and that does make some sense, because in this book condition does indeed, on the one hand, have the usage of “sufficient/necessary conditions” (in the plural), but on the other hand it more often does mean the human state, situation, or predicament (in the singular). The title itself also uses the singular, not the plural. The Chinese word 条件 (“condition”) does of course also have the meaning of background circumstances, as in “family conditions,” but basically this is extended from the meaning of “terms, clauses, documents,” and it tends more toward a sentential prerequisite than toward conveying the sense of “circumstance.” Of course, translating it as “conditions” is still workable; even if one adopts the “境况” translation, there are still many places where, according to context, condition has to be rendered as “conditions.” In any case, if we translate it as “conditions,” we should not understand it in the sense of “logical preconditions,” but rather in the sense of “his family conditions are pretty good, his physical conditions are terrible, his learning conditions are excellent.”

Since I found a TXT version, extracting quotations became much easier, so I ended up pulling out quite a lot at once. As usual, I recorded them in the format of excerpt + commentary:

3[4] ……The situation created by science also has important political significance. Wherever the importance of speech is endangered, things in essence become political, because speech makes human beings into a political existence.…… Today science has been forced to adopt a mathematical-symbol “language,” although this symbolic language originally served merely as an abbreviated form for oral statements. But the statements it now contains can no longer be translated back into spoken discourse.…… Whatever people do, know, or experience has meaning only insofar as it can be talked about. Perhaps there are truths beyond speech; perhaps these truths are of great significance for the individual, in that he may be anyone at all so long as he is not a political being. But plural human beings (that is, people who live and act in this world) can experience meaning only because they can talk with one another,

// In the face of modernity, many romanticists take the stance of further resisting words and extolling pure, wordless experience of feeling. But in Arendt’s view, this resistance is nothing but another form of modernity; scientism and romanticism share the same point, namely, the evasion of public life, the evasion of conversation and intercourse. The wordless truths and affective experiences romanticists imagine, like modern science, ultimately leave human beings trapped in solitude and bereft of any place to lodge meaning.

1[7] I intend to use the term active life to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions of life on earth that have been given to human beings.
Labor is the activity corresponding to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay all depend on labor’s production and provision of the necessities required for the life process. The human condition of labor is life itself.
Work is the activity corresponding to the unnaturalness of human existence, namely the fact that human existence is not enclosed within the species’ cyclical life process, and its mortality cannot be compensated for by that life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things wholly different from the natural environment. Every person dwells within this world, yet this world itself is destined to outlast them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.
Action is the only activity that does not require things or affairs as intermediaries, but takes place directly between people; it corresponds to the human condition of plurality, that is, not the single individual, but people, living on the earth and dwelling in the world. Although all aspects of the human condition are to some extent related to politics, plurality is the condition specific to all political life—not only the necessary condition (conditio sine qua non), but also the sufficient condition (conditio per quam). Hence in the language of the Romans (perhaps the most political people we know of), “to live” and “to be among people” (inter homines esse) are synonyms,……

// The distinction among labor, work, and action corresponds to the threefold circumstances of nature, world, and the public realm. These three environments stand in a progressive relation—human beings first exist within “nature”; human beings are first animals, and the form of life called “labor” corresponds to the basic condition of human beings as animals. Human beings are first laboring animals, first dependent on labor to sustain their animal survival, but this does not mean that human beings are forever nothing but animals. Precisely this “first” of labor, or of animality, means that they ought not to be the ultimate meaning. In Arendt’s view, labor secures the bodily force of human animality, thereby making work possible; and work builds the environment of enduring artificial things—the world in which human beings live and interact—thereby making action possible, while action ultimately carries the meaning of life.

3[10] To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not identical with human nature, and the sum total of all human activities and abilities corresponding to the human condition does not constitute anything like a human nature. Neither the human activities and abilities discussed in this book, nor activities or abilities such as thinking and reason, which are left aside, nor even the most exhaustive enumeration of activities and abilities, constitutes what is called the essential attribute of human existence (meaning that without them existence would no longer be human existence). The most extreme change we can imagine within the human condition would be the migration of human beings from the earth to another planet. This not entirely impossible event would mean that human beings would have to live under artificial conditions, wholly different from those given by the earth. Indeed, at that point labor, work, and action, as well as thought as we know it, would no longer have any meaning. Yet even those hypothetical wanderers who leave the earth would still be human; the only statement we can make about their “nature” is that they remain beings of condition,

// This is not to say that the “human condition” Arendt enumerates is the logical premise of what it is to be human, as if one became human by satisfying these conditions and ceased to be human by failing to satisfy them. Rather, what Arendt is indeed talking about is the real condition of human beings, a condition that can change, but in any case human beings are conditional beings, or beings under conditions, or “finite” beings.

5[13] Aristotle distinguished three ways of life chosen by free men, free in the sense of being wholly freed from the necessities of survival and the relations arising from those necessities. The precondition of freedom already excludes all ways of life whose principal aim is mere livelihood—not only the life of labor (labor is the way of life of slaves, who endure the coercion of necessity and the rule of masters in order to stay alive), but also the life of the free craftsman’s making and the merchant’s profit-seeking life.…… What the three ways of life of free men have in common (the life of pleasure, the political life, and the contemplative life) is that they all concern themselves with “the beautiful,” that is, with things that are neither necessary nor merely useful: in the life of pleasure, beautiful things are consumed; in the life devoted to the affairs of the polis, excellence gives rise to beautiful deeds; in the philosopher’s life of inquiry and contemplation of eternal things, eternal beauty is neither generated by human intercourse nor altered by human consumption.

// So-called “freedom” is first of all a kind of release: not a release from other people, or from relations of intercourse, in order to stand apart and go one’s own way, but a release from “necessity.” What the ancient Greeks called “necessity” is what we moderns often call “reality”; for example, when one says, “Be realistic, philosophy can’t put food on the table,” what is meant is that before engaging in activities such as philosophy, one must overcome “necessity,” namely the problem of eating. To toil for one’s livelihood, to support one’s family, to ensure the continuation of life—this is the “necessity” nature grants to humankind. And the meaning of “labor” lies in overcoming, or rather coping with, these “necessities.” Only under the condition of being freed from necessity, even if only temporarily and in a limited way, that is, only by rising above human animality, is it possible to begin a “free” way of life. The standard of free life is “beauty,” no longer “life”; the meaning of free life is measured by “beauty,” not by “life”—even though the maintenance of life is the precondition that makes such a life possible, precisely because it is a “precondition,” it cannot be a higher pursuit. Later we shall see that one of Arendt’s major diagnoses of modernity is that it elevates life to the highest and sovereign position, thereby abolishing altogether the meaning of free life.

6[14] With the disappearance of the ancient city-state…… the term “active life” lost its specifically political significance and began to denote all activities devoted to worldly things. Strictly speaking, the disappearance of the ancient city-state did not bring about the rise of work and labor in the hierarchy of human activities, such that they would attain the same dignity as political life. What actually emerged was rather another situation: action too was viewed from the level of the necessities of earthly life, so that contemplation [“theoretical life” is here translated as “contemplative life”] became the only truly free way of life.

// Because the other world became the destination of meaning, this world lost its independence; the “necessity” to be overcome was no longer confined to the maintenance of animal life, but the whole of the “earthly” was understood as a necessity to be undergone and ultimately cast off. To free oneself from necessity and move toward free life no longer meant freeing oneself from animality and moving toward city-state life (human life), but meant freeing oneself from the whole earthly realm and moving toward a spiritual, otherworldly life. Thus only contemplation, this state of distancing oneself from the mundane and closing one’s eyes to the world, could be called “freedom.”

7[14] However, the superiority of contemplation over any other activity, including action, is not Christian in origin. We find this superiority already in Plato’s political philosophy…… Beyond the freedom of the ancients from the necessities of life and from coercion by others, philosophers added freedom from political activity, so that the freedom later proclaimed by Christianity—from all worldly turmoil and liberation from all earthly affairs—had as its origin and precursor precisely the depoliticized thought of philosophy in the classical age. Only the thing once demanded of a few is now seen as the right of all.

// Plato, or Platonism, is often regarded as the culprit behind modernity’s various predicaments, and Arendt has a similar tendency. But common criticism of Plato tends to focus more on his metaphysics, his world of Ideas, his worship of mathematics, and so on; Arendt, from another angle, traces Plato’s fault to the other side—reverence for the world of Ideas is, on the other hand, evasion of the real world. Plato’s political philosophy is the shadow cast by his metaphysics, or conversely, Plato’s metaphysics may well be the reflection of his political philosophy. In a certain sense, Plato perhaps cannot represent the Greek spirit; rather, he represents the end of the Greek spirit.

7[15] Traditionally, and up to the beginning of modern times, the term “active life” never lost its negative connotation of “restlessness.” This connotation itself is closely linked to what is perhaps the Greeks’ even more fundamental distinction: the distinction between things that are as they are in themselves and things that exist because of human beings, the distinction between natural things and man-made things. The priority of contemplation over action rests on the belief that no man-made work can compare with the natural cosmos in beauty and truth, for the latter revolves eternally within itself, unaffected by any external intervention or assistance from human beings or gods. Only when all human motion and activity completely cease does this eternity disclose itself to mortal eyes. Compared with this state of stillness, all distinctions and utterances within active life vanish. From the standpoint of contemplation, it is not important what exactly disturbs its necessary calm; what matters is only that it is disturbed.

// Of course, Arendt does not deny the beauty of nature; contemplative activity itself, which gazes upon the beauty of nature, is not something to be negated. The issue is that “active life” should not possess this negative significance merely in the sense of obstructing contemplation. Human-made things may not be as perfect as nature, but they are still human creations, and the activity of creating also has an irreplaceable significance.

8[17] The assumption shared by modern overthrow and traditional hierarchies is that one and the same primary human concern governs all human activities, because without a principle that embraces everything, order cannot be established. This assumption is of course not a fact, and my use of the term “active life” presupposes that the concerns behind various activities are different, and that other concerns are neither higher nor lower than the chief concern of the “contemplative life.”

// Likewise, we could say: the artisan’s concern (immortal works), or the actor’s concern (immortal achievements), is neither higher nor lower than the laborer’s concern (the continuation of life). Arendt is not trying to oppose people’s concern for life; the problem is that in a “society of laborers,” life becomes the sole concern.

9[17] On the one hand, various modes of activity actively devoted to worldly affairs; on the other, pure thought reaching its climax in contemplation—these correspond respectively to two wholly different primary human concerns,…… The briefest way—though a somewhat superficial one—to evoke these two different, and to some extent even conflicting, principles is to recall the distinction between immortality and eternity.

// This distinction is also upheld by Christian theology. It is said that Adam and Eve’s life in Eden was only immortal, not eternal, because that life was still conditional and needed maintenance. Christianity shifts people’s concern from immortality to eternity, but in the end loses both…… In a sense, only “eternity” is absolutely free; eternal things are released from the bonds of time and space, no longer dependent on the transmission of human history, and can only be experienced in the mysterious instant of present intuition. The pursuit of immortality, by contrast, requires one to cast oneself into time and space, into history, into the midst of people, before it can be achieved. Seeking eternity and pursuing immortality are equally attempts to transcend the finitude of one’s own life. I also mentioned this distinction in an article some years ago: Immortality in a Historicist Perspective

10[19] The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their capacity to create—works, deeds, and words—products that belong at least to some extent to the realm of enduring things; it is through these that mortals can find their place in this universe in which everything is immortal except themselves. Human beings, though mortal as individuals, have acquired an immortality of their own through their capacity to perform immortal deeds, through their capacity to leave indelible traces behind them, thereby proving that they possess something divine. The difference between human beings and animals does not lie precisely in a human species attribute: only the best (aristoi) human beings, who always prove themselves the best, “love immortal fame more than mortal things,” are truly human; the rest, who are satisfied with the pleasures nature provides, live and die like animals. Such a view still survives in Heraclitus, but no philosopher after Socrates can be found holding a similar opinion.…… It was only in Plato that concern for eternity and the philosopher’s life, and pursuit of immortality and the citizen’s life, the “political life,” were seen as intrinsically contradictory and mutually opposed.

// “Best” would perhaps be better translated as “excellent.” In a sense, the Greek spirit is better summed up by the four words “the pursuit of excellence.” Arendt praises this spirit, but that does not mean she opposes concern for “eternity,” for immortality and eternity need not necessarily be seen as mutually conflicting. In fact, among artists and scientists, these two concerns can still be said to be unified even today: on the one hand, they gaze fervently at the eternal beauty of nature; on the other, they devote themselves to establishing immortal works or achievements.

15[24] The unconscious replacement of the word “politics” by the word “society” has already revealed the extent to which people have lost the Greek original understanding of politics.…… The word “society” is of Roman origin, and there is no corresponding term in Greek language or thought.…… It is not that Plato or Aristotle ignored the fact that human beings cannot live outside people; rather, they did not regard this condition as a characteristic peculiar to human beings; on the contrary, it is an aspect shared by human life and animal life, and precisely for that reason it is not essentially a human trait. The purely natural social union of the human species was seen as a limitation imposed on us by the life needs of the organism, a limitation that is the same for human animals and for other forms of animal life alike.

// The word “society,” if translated in Yan Fu’s manner, is “group.” And living in groups is not a specifically human trait; even if this “group” is not a mere aggregation but possesses some organizational structure, it is no different in kind from animal group life. Animals, in order to survive, also live in groups and form structures. The ancient Greek proposition that “man is a political animal” obviously does not mean “man is a gregarious animal.” The meaning of “politics” must exceed the concept of “society”; the significance of human aggregation must exceed the natural need to preserve life. The point of the polis lies in the pursuit of excellence.

17[27] “A speaking being.” In Latin this phrase was translated as “a rational animal,” just as the preceding phrase (political being) was translated as “social animal,” and both translations cause fundamental misunderstandings. Aristotle was neither offering a general definition of human beings nor indicating human beings’ highest capacity. For him, the highest capacity of human beings is not logos, that is, speech or reason, but nous, the capacity for contemplation, whose chief feature is precisely that its content cannot be brought before words. In these two famous definitions of his, he is merely expressing the common opinion of the polis about human beings and the political way of life. According to this opinion, anyone outside the polis—slaves and barbarians—is speechless, not because they have lost the function of speech, but because they have lost a way of life in which speech acquires meaning and in which only speech is meaningful, since all citizens’ chief concern is to talk with one another.

// The point of the polis is precisely to make idle chatter, seemingly the most empty of activities, attain the highest significance.

18[29] According to ancient thought, “political economy” is itself a contradiction in terms, because anything “economic,” that is, everything related to individual life and the continuation of the species, is by definition a nonpolitical household matter.

// Thus the appearance of the term “political economy” also signals the alienation of politics. In Arendt’s view, “the family” represents a realm ruled by necessity; the family’s task is daily sustenance, that is, to deal with human animality. Only after leaving the family, in the public realm, can a free life begin. Thus we can understand why the ancient Greek slave was mainly a “household slave,” part of the family’s property, responsible for farming and domestic work, and absolutely forbidden to set foot in public affairs such as war. In ancient Greece only free men could fight; slaves could not be used as cannon fodder. This sounds strange, but now it is easy to understand. It is precisely because the true purpose of war is not plunder and domination, not to seize the necessities that sustain life, but to “win fame through deeds.” War is the stage on which heroes who establish immortal achievements are born; how could such a stage possibly admit the presence of slaves? Of course, is the Greek meaning of “home” the best? Not necessarily. Arendt did not examine the Chinese case. In fact, the situation in ancient China is rather curious: in China, “the family” or “the clan” is not only devoted to meeting the necessities of life, but is also one of the bearers of “immortality.” Ancient Chinese secured immortality within the clan through ancestral tablets, incense offerings, and genealogies Securing Immortality in the Clan. And in the Chinese official world there were likewise two kinds of concern: one was the “altars of soil and grain,” that is, the necessities of the people’s survival; the other was the “blue history,” the judgment passed after the coffin is closed. “Judgment after the coffin is closed” is similar to the ancient Greek attitude toward the meaning of life, but in China it appears through a wholly different social structure. I have emphasized that ancient Chinese culture was fundamentally a historiographical culture; the core elements of Chinese culture are not some kind of unity of Heaven and humanity or harmonious mean, although these traditions are also very important, they are not fundamental. Arendt’s work perhaps also opens up an entirely new space for comparison between Chinese and Western cultures.

19[31] All Greek philosophers, whatever degree to which they opposed city-state life, naturally assumed that freedom exists only within the political realm, and that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, peculiar to the organization of the private household; force and violence are justified only in the private sphere, because they are merely means to conquer necessity and gain freedom—for example, by ruling over slaves to conquer necessity and gain freedom. Since all people are subject to necessity, they have the right to use violence against some; violence is prepolitical activity, by which one frees oneself from the necessities of life in order to seek the freedom of the world.

// In Arendt’s view, what modern people call power is basically violence, and the replacement of power by violence means the replacement of politics by household management.

22[36] Leaving the family (originally to undertake some adventurous and glorious enterprise, and later simply to devote one’s life to the affairs of the polis) requires courage, because only within the family does a person first and foremost take his own life and survival into account. Anyone entering the political realm first prepares to risk his life; valuing life too highly and abandoning freedom is precisely the mark of slavishness. Courage is therefore the primary political virtue, and only those who possess it are permitted to enter a partnership organized in content and purpose as political, thereby transcending that sheer aggregation imposed on all by the urgency of survival—slaves, barbarians, Greeks no exception. The “good life” (Aristotle’s civic life) is not only better, more pleasant, or nobler than everyday life; it is of an entirely different nature. It is “good” because it masters sheer necessity of life, frees itself from labor and work, and overcomes the intrinsic drive of all living animals toward survival, no longer subject to the biological life process.

// I originally meant to say this when interpreting One Piece: that the premise of “adventure” in One Piece is the courage to set life aside. What does that mean? It does not mean some blind indifference to life, but rather a courage that can transcend life and pursue meaning beyond it.

26[41] What matters is that society, in all its aspects, excludes the possibility of action (whereas earlier, action was merely excluded from the family). In its place, society expects from each of its members a certain behavior, and through the imposition of countless rules of every kind, society “normalizes” its members and excludes any spontaneous action or singular achievement. …… With the advent of mass society, after several centuries of development the social realm finally attained the ability to surround and control all members of a particular community to the same degree and with the same force. The leveling of society in all situations, and the victory of the principle of equality in the modern world, merely politically and legally recognized a fact: society had already conquered the public realm, and being different and original had become a private matter.
Modern equality is based on the conformism inherent in society and is possible only on the condition that behavior replaces action as the primary mode of human relations. This modern equality differs in every respect from ancient equality, especially that of the Greek city-state. In the Greek city-state, belonging to the few “equals” meant being permitted to live among one’s peers; while the public realm itself, the polis, was permeated by a strong spirit of competition, where each person had constantly to distinguish himself from all others and prove himself the best among all through a unique deed or achievement. In other words, the public realm was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where people could display who they truly were, in their irreplaceability. It was for this chance to display excellence, and out of love for such a political body that gave everyone the opportunity to reveal themselves, that each person more or less willingly shared the responsibility of judging, defending, and handling public affairs.

// A few years ago I mentioned that the replacement of “freedom” by “equality” is the common root of the predicaments of modern science and modern democracy, and I meant something similar: in ancient Greece, “equality” served to safeguard free competition and unquestioned victory. The aim of Greek democracy was not “equality,” but the pursuit of excellence. The spirit of the Olympics was similar as well; it was absolutely not a pure attitude of “play,” not the sense of Game often used in the modern sense to mean “recreation,” but must be the spirit of competition.

30[46] The emerging social realm transformed all modern communities into associations of laborers and wage earners; in other words, they were all suddenly organized around activities necessary for life (of course, to form a laboring society, it is not necessary for every member actually to be a laborer or worker…… it is enough that whatever all members do, they first consider how to sustain their own and their families’ livelihoods). Society is thus a pattern in which the fact that people depend on one another for life, and not for anything else, acquires public significance

// This is what was said earlier: “society” ultimately replaced “politics.”

33[51] ……Our sense of reality is entirely dependent on presentation, and thus on the existence of a public realm in which things emerge from the darkness of concealed existence and show their appearance; therefore even the faint glow of intimacy that illuminates our private lives ultimately derives from the more dazzling light of the public realm.

// A sense of reality, or actuality, depends on “presentation,” but this presentation is not merely presentation to an isolated Dasein; it is presentation to Dasein essentially as “being-with.” The difference between dream and reality does not lie in the intensity of sensory stimuli, but in the fact that “reality” is always at the same time, or potentially capable of being, jointly participated in by others from different perspectives. We will return to this issue later.

34[52] The word “public” denotes the world itself, insofar as it is common to all of us and different from the private place we possess within it. However, this world is not identical with the earth or with nature, the latter of which, as a finite space, provides the general conditions for human activity or for the existence of organic life. What is related to the world are man-made objects, products of human hands, and the affairs that occur among people dwelling together in this artificial world. Living together in the world fundamentally means that a world of things exists among people who share it, as if a table were placed between the people seated around it. This world, like every “in-between” thing, both connects and separates people.

// Human-made things constitute a world, and this world gives people their respective places or positions, separating person from person, thereby enabling people to interact “directly.”

35[53] ……to build all human relations on the basis of love of neighbor. Brotherly love… is, like the world, something that exists between people.…… This surprising formulation of the Christian principle is in fact highly selective, because although the bond of brotherly love between people cannot establish a public realm of its own, it is more than sufficient for Christianity’s essentially unworldly principle; it can quite well carry a group of beings who are essentially without world, a group of saints or a group of sinners, through this world, so long as the world itself is understood as destined to perish, and any activity within it is carried on provisionally, in a “while the world still lasts” manner. The Christian community…… the structure of this communal life imitates the relations among members of a family,…… A public realm can never be formed among members of a family, and therefore cannot develop out of Christian communal life, so long as the governing principle of that life is brotherly love and nothing else.

// What I have always emphasized as loving everything has never been Christian brotherly love in the Christian sense, but differentiated love. What I emphasize as loving everything is precisely cherishing this real world; Christian brotherly love, by contrast, precisely seeks to detach itself from this world.

36[55] Only the existence of a public realm, and the consequent transformation of the world into a commonality of things that gather people together and connect them to one another, depends entirely on durability. If the world is to contain a public realm, it cannot be built only for one generation, nor planned only for the living; it must surpass the lifespan of mortal beings. Without such a potential transcendence toward earthly immortality, there is no politics, and strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm.

// The meaning of the political body does not lie in sustaining the lives of its members, but in establishing a stage for the pursuit of immortality.

37[55] Nothing makes it clearer that the modern public realm has been lost than the fact that modern people have almost entirely lost any true concern for immortality, although the simultaneous loss of concern for the metaphysics of eternity seems to obscure this loss of concern for immortality. Concern with the metaphysics of eternity belongs to philosophers and the “contemplative life,” and is not among our present concerns. But the loss of concern for immortality has already been confirmed by the current popular tendency to classify immortality as the vice of vanity. Under modern conditions, no one can sincerely pursue earthly immortality, to such an extent that we may perhaps have reason to think that such pursuits are nothing but vanity.

// Pursuing immortality and vanity are completely different things. In fact, precisely because there was first the pursuit of “glory,” there emerged the false pursuit disguised as glory, namely vanity. Those who pursue glory value not superficial flattery, but the posthumous fame of immortality; the vain, by contrast, are intoxicated by transient brilliance and hypocritical ingratiation. But in modern people, it seems there is not even any “glory” left at all; “vanity” no longer means “false glory,” but has come to mean “glory as falsity.” And even if we take a step back and say that “vanity” is still a good feeling, if a person does not even care about vanity, to what shameful extent would he have descended?

38[57] The key issue here is not that the modern world lacks public admiration for poetry and philosophy, but that such admiration is insufficient to constitute a space that can protect things from the destruction of time. On the contrary, in the modern world public admiration is consumed emptily, day by day, in ever larger quantities, so that monetary reward, the emptiest thing of all, comes to seem more “objective” and real.
The sole basis of this “objectivity” is money as a common standard for measuring the degree to which all needs are satisfied. Unlike this “objectivity,” the actuality of the public realm depends on the simultaneous presence of countless perspectives and aspects, in which a public world presents itself; for this no common measure or standard can be designed in advance. Because the public world is a common gathering place for all, each person who appears there occupies a different position, and one person’s position differs from another’s, just as two objects occupy different positions. The significance of being seen or heard by others comes from this fact: everyone sees and hears from a different angle. This is the meaning of public life,…… only where things are viewed by many from different angles without changing their identity, so that those gathered around them know that what they see out of sheer multiplicity is the same thing, only in such a place can the reality of the world truly and reliably appear.
In the condition of a common world, actuality is not first guaranteed by the “common nature” of all those who constitute the world, but by this fact: although each person has a different position, and therefore a different perspective, they are always concerned with the same object.

// Here one can offer a deeper interpretation of my earlier idea of “preserving the same while seeking differences”—a dialogic conception of pluralism. The “difference” in preserving the same while seeking differences is, in essence, the individual’s “excellence”; and the “same” is this prior identity, while “plurality” is the different perspectives of people who appear from different positions.

39[59] Under modern conditions, this loss of “objective” relations with others, this loss of the actuality secured through others, has developed into the phenomenon of mass loneliness and taken the most extreme, most inhuman form. It is extreme because mass society not only destroys the public realm, but also destroys the private realm, not only deprives people of their place in the world, but also deprives them of their private families.

// The various distinctions Arendt makes in modern times are not simply a relation of one rising and the other falling, but a relation of confusion, alienation, tearing apart, distortion, and so on.

34[65] To possess property means to become master of one’s own life’s necessities and thus potentially to become a free man, free to transcend one’s own life and enter a world shared by all.…… If the property owner would rather expand his property than use it to lead a political life, then he would rather sacrifice his freedom and willingly become a slave against his own will, enslaved by necessity.

43[67]  The vast and still ongoing accumulation of wealth in modern society, because it originates in the deprivation of property, has never shown any concern for private property, and at any time will sacrifice it as soon as it comes into conflict with wealth accumulation. … The view that considerations of private ownership should be excluded in order to promote the continual growth of social wealth is not in fact Karl Marx’s own invention; it exists precisely within the nature of this society.

44[68]  The rise of society that we mentioned above historically coincided with the transformation of private property from a matter of private concern into a matter of public concern. Society, when it first entered the public realm, disguised itself as an organization of property owners—not property owners who demanded entry into the public realm because they had become rich, but those who needed the protection of the public realm in order to accumulate still more wealth.

// Arendt emphasizes the distinction between property and wealth. Property ensures that one can go beyond laboring over the necessities of life and have leisure for free activity; it also grants one a kind of sheltered private domain, thereby providing a “status” or position for entering the public realm. But the sole meaning of “wealth” in modern society is self-expansion and consumption, akin to the processes of biological reproduction and decay, utterly at odds with the meaning of “property.”

45[69]  In Roman law, the distinction between “exchangeable things” and “consumable things” lost all meaning, because every tangible, “exchangeable” thing became an object of “consumption”; having lost the private use value determined by its place, it acquired a purely social value determined by a constantly changing exchangeability, whose fluctuations could be temporarily fixed only through its connection with money as a common standard of measure. Closely linked to this social dissolution of tangible things is modernity’s most revolutionary contribution to the concept of property: property is no longer a fixed place acquired by its owner in this way or that, a firmly belonging part of the world; quite the contrary, its source lies in the human being himself, in the fact that he has a body and indisputably possesses the force belonging to that body, what Marx called “labor power.”

46[70]  The greatest danger here is not the abolition of private ownership of wealth, but the abolition of private property, that is, the abolition of a person’s actual, tangible place in the world that belongs to him.

// As “wealth” expands, “property” is expelled from the “world” and ultimately retreats into the animal body of the human being. One can exchange one’s “labor power” for a little leisure. But what is lost with that is one’s “position” in the world.

61[81]  One point, however, is very important linguistically: namely, that the usage of these two words (labor and work) as synonyms, whether in antiquity or in modernity, breaks down when it comes to forming their corresponding noun forms. We find that antiquity and modernity are completely identical in this respect. The word “labor,” though usable as a noun, can never denote the finished product, the result of labor; it remains a verbal noun that can be classified as a gerund. Conversely, the word “product” is invariably derived from the word used to refer to “work,” even when popular usage has followed the actual development of modern society so closely that the verb form of the word “work” itself has become somewhat outdated.

// The result of “labor” is not a “labor product,” but at most a “consumable good,” because the labor process is closest to the natural process and remains throughout in a cycle of growth and consumption, without producing anything durable. Producing durable things is the business of “work,” and therefore the result of work is a “work” or an “achievement,” something that can endure in the world.

62[84]  Slavery was defended and justified precisely on grounds of this sort. Labor means being enslaved by necessity, and such enslavement is inherent in the human condition. Because human beings are ruled by the necessities of life, they can win their freedom only by ruling those who are compelled to submit to necessity. The lowliness of the slave is a blow of fate and a destiny worse than death, because it transforms the human being into something close to a domesticated animal. … In antiquity, and even in the near modern period, slavery was not a means of exploiting cheap labor or a tool for maximizing profit, but an attempt to exclude labor from the human condition.

// Arendt of course is not here to defend slavery. The issue is not that modern people oppose slavery, but that modern people no longer know how to understand slavery.

69[94]  The things of the world, in which active life operates, have a completely different character; they are created by completely different kinds of activity. The products of work, and not the products of labor, are regarded as part of the world and guarantee the world’s durability and solidity, without which it could not endure. It is in this world composed of durable things that we can find the consumer goods that provide the means for the continuation of life. Consumer goods, though needed by our bodies and produced by bodily labor, do not possess durability in themselves. In an environment of things made not for consumption but for use, these things meant for continual consumption appear and disappear incessantly, while with respect to our use-objects we grow accustomed to them without noticing. Yet it is precisely the latter that make the world familiar and close to us, producing the customs and habits of human intercourse and mutual exchange; consumer goods are to human life as use-objects are to the human world. It is from use-objects that consumer goods receive their thing-character (thing-character).

// The distinction between use-objects and consumables is one that is overlooked in Heidegger. For Heidegger there are only equipment and works of art. But consumer goods are different from tools—when tools are used as tools in ready-to-hand use, they withdraw, and we use them in practice without noticing them. This “withdrawing” nature of tools precisely signifies their stable and enduring character in the world. Typical “consumer goods,” such as food, cosmetics, medicine… when they are properly “used,” do not “withdraw”; rather, they disappear before our eyes in a conspicuous way. When I eat a dish, the dish is brought forth by use-objects like knives, forks, bowls, and plates, and presents itself to us with the thing-character of “food”; but when it is completed as “consumption” as a “consumable good,” its thing-character also perishes with it. Even if the boundary between consumables and use-objects is perhaps blurred, just as the boundary between use-objects and works of art is even more ambiguous, that does not prevent this distinction from being important.

70[96]  From the standpoint of the world, the common factor between action, speech, and thought far outweighs anything they share with work or labor. They do not “produce” anything by themselves; they create nothing, and are as empty as life itself. In order to become things of the world—that is, achievements, facts, events, thoughts, or forms of ideas—they must first be seen, heard, and remembered, and then be objectified in the form of poetic lines, written sheets of paper or printed books, in the guise of paintings or sculptures, becoming all kinds of archives, documents, and monuments. For the entire factual world of human affairs to obtain its reality and continued existence, it must first rely on the presence of others, on their seeing, hearing, and remembering, and second on the transformation of the invisible into the visible. Memory, as the Greeks believed, is the mother of all arts; without memory and the reification needed to turn memory into reality, the living movement of action, speech, and thought would vanish as soon as the activity ended, losing its reality, as if it had never existed. Materialization is the price they must pay in order to remain in this world, in which “dead letters” take the place of momentary “living spirit,” and of what is born from “living spirit.” They must pay this price because they themselves do not possess worldliness at all, and therefore need the help of an activity of a completely different nature; that is to say, in order to gain reality and material form, they must depend on a skill of the same kind as the one employed in building other things in human craft. The reality and reliability of the human world lie first of all in the fact that we are surrounded by things that outlast the activities that produced them, and potentially outlast even the lives of those who created them. Human life, insofar as it builds the world, is devoted to a continuous process of objectification; and the worldliness of their products, that is, of what together constitutes the world of artificial products, depends on whether they can exist in the world for a longer time.

// The world of artificial things sustained by “work” plays a kind of mediating-platform role, enabling things to exist in the world as things. “Worldliness” is in fact durability.

70[96]  Among tangible things, the least durable are those needed for the life process. These things are consumed almost as soon as they are produced, … they are at once the least worldly and the closest to nature of all things. Although they are man-made, their coming and going, the process of producing and consuming, is most in keeping with the unchanging cyclical movement of nature.

73[100]  Also related to the cyclical movement of nature, but not as urgently imposed upon human beings as “the human condition of life” itself, is the second task of labor—its task of endlessly resisting nature’s process of rise and decline. Nature is continually eroding man-made objects in this way, threatening the durability of the world and its suitability for human use. Keeping the world from being eroded by natural processes is a tiresome daily chore, requiring labor repeated day after day. This labor is a struggle, unlike the essentially calm satisfaction that labor experiences when it submits to the commands of bodily need; though perhaps it is less “productive” than the direct metabolism between humans and nature, it is more closely related to the world, and resists nature in order to protect the world.

// Whether in following nature or resisting nature, in any case the meaning of labor lies in “dealing with” the “necessity” of natural processes.

74[102]  In order to rescue labor from the obvious shame of being able only to produce “perishable things,” Locke had to introduce money—a “durable thing that people can keep without damaging it”—as a god to come to the rescue. Without money, the laboring body, which is subject to the life process, would never become the source of anything as durable and stable as property,

76[105]  The crudest modern superstition—“money makes money”—and the sharpest modern political insight—power makes power—are both built on the fundamental metaphor of the natural reproduction of life. Among all activities, only labor, and not action or work, is endless; it automatically follows life itself forward, unaffected by the decisions of will or by any consciously chosen human goal.

// Modern people’s pursuit of meaning has already fallen into these cycles: what is money for? Money can make power. What is power for? Power can make money…

78[107]  The pleasure inherent in labor is, basically speaking, the joy of being alive; this joy cannot be found in work, nor should it be misunderstood as the brief sense of relief and delight that comes after a task has been accomplished and a goal achieved. The happiness of labor is a sequence of toil and satisfaction, just as production and consumption follow closely one after the other as means of sustaining life, so that happiness is merely an accompaniment of this process itself, just as pleasure is an accompaniment of the healthy functioning of the body.

// What some romantics pursue is precisely this kind of pleasure. Arendt concedes that this pleasure is real, but not human. What those romantics praise is indeed a way of life as primitive as possible, so as to come close to the animal.

84[118]  Marx correctly predicted the “withering away” of the public realm under conditions of the unobstructed development of “social productive forces” (though his rejoicing over it was unwarranted); likewise, when he foresaw that future “socialized human beings” would be liberated from labor and spend their free time on activities that are, strictly speaking, private and essentially unworldly (what we today call “hobbies”), he was also correctly carrying through his concept of human beings as laboring animals.

// In this sense, Marx is also a romantic, though that was by no means his intention, nor did he wish to be confused with animals.

87[122]  Tools and implements that can greatly lighten the intensity of labor are themselves products of work, not of labor; they do not belong to the process of consumption, but are components of the world of use-objects. No matter how great a role they have played in the labor of any civilization, they cannot acquire the kind of fundamental importance they have in various forms of work. Without tools, products cannot be made; in fact, the emergence of craftsmen and the formation of an artificial world of things always goes hand in hand with the invention of tools and implements. From the standpoint of labor, tools reinforce and increase human physical strength, even to the point of replacing it; as a result, not only material substances but also natural forces—such as domesticated animals, water power, or electric power—are brought under human control. Likewise, tools also increase the natural reproductive power of the laboring animal and provide more abundant consumer goods. But all these changes are only quantitative changes, while the quality of the manufactured thing (from the simplest use-object to the masterpiece of art) depends directly on whether there are adequate implements.

// The original word for “adequate implements” is adequate, which may perhaps be better translated as “appropriate” or “competent.” Arendt gives a new interpretation of the concept of “tools” that we often speak of. We often reduce modernity to “instrumentalism,” but in Arendt’s view the problem is precisely the opposite—modernity is not the expansion of tools, but rather the disappearance of tools. The “tools” in the sense of “instrumentalism” pursue mere “efficiency,” that is, quantitative change within the process of consumption. But as tools, tools are in essence not measured by efficiency; they should instead be measured by competence—that is, by their fitness for the “end” (the work) and judged accordingly. So genuine “instrumentalism” should be teleological, and should by no means be utilitarian. Once tools, which originally belonged to the realm of “work,” are alienated into a link in the labor (consumption) process, they essentially lose their tool-character and merge into the endless natural cycle—just as we cannot say that a chicken is a tool for egg-laying eggs, nor that an egg is a tool for chicken-laying chickens. Once caught up in such a natural cycle of proliferation and consumption, “tools” no longer make sense.

90[124]  Since humanity as a whole has by no means yet reached affluence, we can only temporarily observe at the level of one country the way society overcomes the natural limits of its reproductive power. The solution seems very simple: treat all use-objects as consumables, make a chair or a table be consumed as quickly as a piece of clothing, and clothing be consumed as quickly as food. The way human beings deal with the things of the world perfectly matches the way things are produced: the Industrial Revolution replaced all handicrafts with labor, with the result that the things of the modern world became products of labor, whose natural destiny is to be consumed, rather than used as products of work.

// One characteristic of modernity is “speed.” The difference between modernity and antiquity is not merely a difference in the speed of development being somewhat faster or slower; this leap in speed also brings about a revolution in world order, whereby durable things become consumables, and even housing, originally the most typical thing handed down from generation to generation, in modern times becomes shorter-lived than a human being. What this “speed” brings is not only a problem of pace of life and pressure of life; it even raises a problem for the reality of the entire “world.” To put it bluntly, “nihilism” is related to the modern real-estate industry.

91[126]  The ideal of the craftsman (world-maker) is eternity, solidity, and durability. Now this ideal has given way to the ideal of the laboring animal—“affluence.”

91[126]  We live in a laborers’ society. This society does not arise from the liberation of the laboring class, but from the liberation of labor activity itself, the latter having preceded the political emancipation of laborers by several centuries. The key point is not that, for the first time in history, laborers were allowed to enter the public realm and obtain equal rights, but that we have nearly succeeded in leveling all human activity to a common standard: the acquisition of the necessities of life and the provision of material affluence.

92[128] The only exception that society is willing to recognize is the artist; strictly speaking, however, artists are merely the last “workers” left over from the laboring society…… The function that the artist’s playfulness fulfills in the process of social labor is similar to the function that playing ping-pong or pursuing a hobby fulfills in an individual life. The emancipation of labor did not lead to the equality of labor with the other activities within active life; rather, it led to labor’s almost unquestioned domination. From the standpoint of “making a living,” any activity unrelated to labor has become a “hobby.”

// The artist’s works still remain things of permanence (though “performance art” even turns artworks into commodities), but artistic activity is not regarded as serious “work,” and is instead seen as “leisure.” Only labor is truly a serious undertaking now.

96[135] The world—the artificial home erected on the earth, built with the material supplied by the earth to human hands—is not composed of things meant for consumption, but of things meant for use. If nature and the earth together constitute the general conditions of human life, then the world and worldly things constitute the specific conditions of human life, …… If it does not take material means from nature’s hands and consume them, if it does not protect itself from the erosive processes of natural rise and decline, the laboring animal cannot live. But if it does not have durability suited to use and to establishing a world—something whose permanence stands in sharp contrast to the brevity of life, and makes human beings feel at home in it—then this life is not human.

// This was mentioned earlier (78[107]). The condition to which romanticism wants to return is not a human home.

107[138] To the extent that the use-object comes into contact with the living organism of consumption, the process of wear and tear begins, use does indeed contain an element of consumption within it. And the more closely the body comes into contact with the thing used, the more the equation of use and consumption seems credible. For example, if someone explains the nature of a use-object by means of clothing, he will very easily come to the conclusion that use is nothing but slower consumption. Against this we must object with the point mentioned above: destruction, though unavoidable, is an incidental result for use, whereas for consumption it is an intrinsic property. The difference between a pair of shoes that wears out very easily and a mere consumable lies in this: if I do not wear the shoes, they will not break down; that is to say, however fragile they may be, they still possess a certain degree of independence, and no matter how capricious their owner’s moods may be, they can still be kept intact for a fairly long time. Whether used or unused, they will remain in the world for a period, unless they are wantonly destroyed.

// This was mentioned earlier (69[94]). The distinction between use-objects and consumables is real. The meaning of a consumable appears when it is finally consumed, whereas the meaning of a use-object is unrelated to the incidental process of wear and tear.

110[142] This eternal quality of the model had a powerful influence on Plato’s doctrine of eternal ideas, in that his doctrine was inspired by idea (“shape”) or eidos (“form”)—he was the first to use these two words in a philosophical text—and his theory was built on the experience of making (poiesis) or fabrication. And although Plato expressed through his theory a wholly different, perhaps more “philosophical,” experience, he kept drawing on examples from the sphere of fabrication to demonstrate the validity of what he said. In Plato’s doctrine, the eternal ideas, standing high above and governing the multitude of perishable things, are justified by the permanence and uniqueness of the model, from which the multitude of perishable objects are made by imitation.

// In A Travelogue from the Yimengdao Meeting, I mentioned the possibility of reexamining Plato’s “philosophy of technology.”

110[143] This process of fabrication is entirely determined by the categories of means and ends. The fabricated thing is, in a double sense, an end-product: the production process reaches its end in the product (Marx calls this “the process disappears in the product”), and the production process is merely the means to attain this end. Labor, of course, also produces for the purpose of consumption, but because this end—the thing meant for consumption—lacks the worldly permanence that a work possesses, the end of the labor process is not determined by the end-product, but by the expenditure of labor power; on the other hand, the product itself immediately turns into a means, into a means for survival and for the reproduction of labor power. By contrast, in the process of fabrication the end is beyond question: when a wholly new thing, durable enough to remain in the world, is added to the world of artifacts as an independent entity, the end has arrived. For things, for the end-product of fabrication, the process of fabrication does not need to be repeated; the impulse to repeat it comes either from the craftsman’s need to obtain the means of his own survival (in which case his work is identical with labor); or from the market’s demand for reproducing the product, in which case the craftsman who meets market demand, as Plato says, adds the art of making money to his craft. The point is that, in either case, the reason for repetition in the process of fabrication lies outside itself, unlike labor, which itself contains compulsive repetition: in order to labor one must eat, and in order to eat one must labor.

// This was mentioned earlier (87[122]). The essence of tools is purposiveness rather than efficiency; the pursuit of quantitative increase and the speed of repetition are not the mission of “tools.”

111[145] We often hear people complain that in modern society ends and means have been reversed, that human beings have become slaves to the machines they invented, compelled to “adapt” to the requirements of machines rather than using them to satisfy human needs; all these problems have their roots in the factual condition of labor. In labor, production is first of all preparation for consumption, and the distinction between means and ends (which is the typical feature of technical activity) loses its meaning; the tools invented by artisans and used to assist the laboring animal, once they are taken up by labor, also lose their instrumental character. Because labor is always a necessary component of the labor process and the background it can never transcend, within the labor process the question framed in terms of means and ends—whether, for example, people live and consume in order to have the strength to labor, or whether they labor in order to obtain the means of consumption—is meaningless.

112[147]  In order to achieve the best effect, labor (not work) needs to proceed rhythmically; and insofar as many laborers are gathered together, labor requires the rhythmic coordination of all individual movements. In such motion, tools lose their tool-like character, and the boundary between a person and his tools, and between him and his purpose, becomes blurred. What dominates the labor process and every work process carried out in the mode of labor is neither the person’s intentional effort nor the product he wants, but the movement of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes on the laborer. Labor tools are also drawn into this rhythm, until body and tool alike perform repeated movements in the same cadence. …… Precisely because the laboring animal uses tools and implements not to build a world but to lighten the toil of its own life process, since the Industrial Revolution it has in substance been living in a machine world; the liberation of labor has replaced all hand tools with machines, and in fact supplemented human labor power in one way or another with higher natural forces.

//  This was mentioned earlier (87[122]). Modernity is less “instrumentalism” than anti-instrumentalism, the disappearance of tools.

115[151]  Discussion of the general problem of technology, that is, the question of how the introduction of machines changed life and the world, is often strangely misled into focusing excessively on whether machines serve human beings or bring harm to them. This assumes that every tool and appliance was designed first and foremost to make human life easier and labor less painful—in other words, that their instrumentality is understood entirely from a human-centered point of view. But in fact their instrumentality is more fundamentally related to the objects they were designed to produce; their purely “human value” is limited to the laboring animal’s use of them. In other words, the craftsman, the maker of tools, invents tools and appliances in order to build a world, and not—at least not primarily—to help the life process of human beings. Thus the question here is not whether we are the masters or slaves of machines, but whether machines still serve the world and the things of the world, or whether, on the contrary, they and their automatic processes have begun to dominate and even destroy the world and the things of the world.

//  In antiquity, tools and implements were not obedient to human beings either, but to the “world,” and the “world” was something that transcended individual life; the purpose of implements was to shape this “world,” not to sustain individual life. But now this “world” no longer occupies a position transcending “life,” and therefore can no longer qualify to measure implements. The relation between implements and human beings is once again established according to the scale of “labor”: human beings labor to the rhythm of automated machinery, while machinery manufactures consumer goods that sustain life. Only then does the question arise of “whether we are the masters or slaves of machines,” but that is simply not the key issue.

116[152]  As far as the present situation is concerned, describing this world in terms of the categories of means and ends has become meaningless, just as it would be meaningless to ask nature whether she forms seeds in order to produce trees, or forms trees in order to produce seeds.

//  This was mentioned earlier (87[122]). I used the chicken-and-egg analogy.

117[153]  Tools and implements determine all productive and manufacturing activities, and also bring the craftsman his most elementary experience of instrumentality. Here it is true not only that the end proves the means correct; the end also creates and organizes the means. The end justifies the use of violence against nature in order to obtain material, just as timber justifies the felling of trees, and the table justifies the destruction of timber. Because of the end-product, tools and implements are designed and invented; the same end-product also organizes the work process itself, determining the specialized personnel required, the degree of cooperation, the number of assistants, and so on. In the work process, everything is judged solely by its appropriateness and usefulness for the desired end.

//  Again, see (87[122]). The logic of tools is suitability, not efficiency.

117[154]  In a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are destined to be temporary, and to be quickly transformed into means for the next end. This difficulty, latent in every coherent utilitarianism and in the philosophy of the most outstanding craftsman, can in theory be diagnosed as an innate inability to understand the difference between utility and meaning; in language, it can be expressed as an inability to distinguish “in order to” from “for the sake of.” Thus, the ideal of usefulness that pervades craftsman society—just like the ideal of comfort prevailing in laborers’ society or the ideal of profit dominating commercial society—actually ceases to be a question of utility and becomes instead a question of meaning. The craftsman judges everything and does everything in terms of “in order to,” which is precisely the general “for the sake of.”

//  Although the logic of the craftsman (the tool) is purposiveness rather than efficiency, the chain of purposes does not automatically break off. So in a sense, the craftsman’s “philosophy” is incomplete.

124[162]   Historically, the last public realm, the last meeting place, at least as far as the craftsman’s activity was concerned, was the marketplace where his products were displayed. Commercial society, which was a typical manifestation of the early modern stage and the initial stage of manufacturing capitalism, arose from this “conspicuous production” and the desire, accompanying the human condition, for the general possibility of transaction and exchange. And with the rise of labor and labor society, “conspicuous consumption” and the vanity that accompanied it replaced “conspicuous production” and the pride that accompanied it, thereby announcing the end of commercial society.

//  After the craftsman’s final blaze of glory, laborers’ society arrived.

145[184]  That an individual life between birth and death can ultimately be told as a story with a beginning and an end—this is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, that great story without beginning or end.

//  Laborers produce consumer goods, workers make “works,” and actors create “stories.”

146[186]  The difference between a true story and a fictional story lies precisely in the fact that the latter is “made,” whereas the former is not at all. The true story, into which we are necessarily drawn as long as we live, has neither a visible author nor an invisible author, because it cannot be made at all. The only “someone” the story reveals is its protagonist; and it is also through a retrospective tracing of deeds and words that a distinct “who” is made visible from initially invisible to visible, as the sole medium. In other words, who someone is or was can only be known from understanding the story or biography in which he is the protagonist; whereas what he is or was, including our understanding of his other aspects, his works created and handed down, can only tell us what sort of person he is or was.

//  A real “story” does not refer to a “work” made by a craftsman, but to something unfolded by an actor through his actions in the public world (political life). A true “story” has no author (at most one may call him an editor or recorder, a historiographer), only a “main character.”

152[193]  …… This unalterable identity of man, though its manifestation in speech and action is elusive, becomes truly visible in the life story of the actor and speaker; and only after his life has come to an end can it be known and become a visible, tangible existence. In other words, the essence of man—not human nature in the general sense (such a nature does not exist), nor the sum of a person’s merits and shortcomings, but the essence of who someone is—only truly takes shape when he has left the world, having left behind nothing but a story. Therefore, anyone who consciously pursues an “essential” existence and wants to leave behind a story and identity that win “immortal fame” must not only risk his life, but, like Achilles, explicitly choose a short life and an early death. Only if a person ceases to live after reaching the peak of his action can he incontestably become master of his own identity and truly dominate his possible greatness, because he has evaded the possible consequences and subsequent effects of the action he inaugurated, retreating into death. The story of Achilles has exemplary significance because it shows in an extremely condensed form that eudaimonia can be obtained only at the cost of life; only by giving up the continuation of life (in which we manifest ourselves bit by bit), by condensing an entire life into one great deed, and thus bringing both the story of action and life itself to an end at the same time, can one be certain of having attained eudaimonia (eudaimonia does not mean happiness, nor bliss; the word cannot be translated, nor even explained),

//  See (18[29]). What is meant by “the judgment of time” and “a bad old age” involves similar issues.

152[194]  Undoubtedly, we would say today that this concept of action is highly individualistic. It emphasizes the demand for self-display at all costs, and is thus relatively unaffected by the danger of unpredictability. In this way, it becomes the prototype of Greek action, and in the form of the so-called spirit of competition, influences that strong pursuit of self-expression and the desire to test oneself against others, which is precisely the basis of the political concept prevailing in the Greek city-state. A striking manifestation of its broad influence is that, unlike all later developments, the Greeks did not regard legislation as a political activity. In their view, the legislator, like the builder of city walls, belonged to those who had to complete their work before political activity could begin; thus legislation could be entrusted to foreigners without civic status, just like other craftsmen and architects. But the right to participate in politics (politeuesthai), that is, the right to engage in the countless activities that would ultimately have to be carried out within the polis, was entirely limited to citizens. For them, law was like the city walls surrounding the city: not a product of action but a product of fabrication. Before people begin to act, there must be a definite space and an established structure, within which all subsequent actions take place; this space is the public realm of the polis, and its structure is law. Legislators and architects belong to the same type of people,

//  This was mentioned earlier (26[41]). This basic spirit of the ancient Greeks—the spirit of competition—can also be seen in the Olympic Games: the rules of competition are like legal norms, and the drafting of the rules is a technical task, intended only to ensure a fair stage on which victory can be uncontroversial. But the fundamental meaning of the Olympics lies in athletic competition; the designers of the rules are not participants in the competition, just as legislators are not participants in politics. This should be easy to understand.

155[198]  We are not concerned here with the historical reasons for the rise of the Greek city-state; the Greeks themselves have made perfectly clear how they viewed it and the reasons for its existence. The polis—if we believe Pericles’ famous words in the Funeral Oration—ensured that those who had rushed to every sea and every land and made these places the stage of their adventures would not lose their witnesses; they did not need the praise of Homer or of anyone else; without the help of others, those who acted could, in common effort, establish a permanent memorial of their good and bad deeds, thereby arousing the admiration of contemporaries and of future generations. In other words, the common life formed by people in the shape of the polis seems to ensure that the emptiest and most useless human activities—action and speech—and the most invisible and fleeting man-made “products”—the accomplishments and stories resulting from words and deeds—can become things that never perish. The organization of the polis, materially protected by walls and formally protected by law—so that it would not be unrecognizable in later ages—is an organized memory. It guarantees mortal actors that their transient existence and evanescent greatness will not lose the authenticity they gain from being seen, heard, and generally appearing before a contemporary audience. And those outside the polis can obtain only a brief opportunity for self-display, and therefore need the help of Homer and “other skilled people” to appear before those who are absent.

161[206]  Thucydides (or Pericles) knew full well that when he realized that Athens’ glory lay in having left everywhere “a permanent memorial of their good or bad deeds,” he had already broken with the ordinary standards of everyday conduct. In Democritus’s words, the art of politics lies in teaching people how to display what is great and glorious; as long as the polis is there, inspiring people not to fear extraordinary things, all is well; if the polis declines, everything ceases to exist.

//  “The polis” is synonymous with “politics”; “politics” in Arendt’s sense is precisely such a form of existence.

163[208]  The belief that the greatest achievement available to human beings is their self-display and self-realization is by no means a self-evident belief. Opposed to it are the craftsman’s belief—that a person’s product lasts longer than the person himself and is more like himself—and the laboring animal’s belief—that life is the highest good. Strictly speaking, both beliefs are nonpolitical; they are inclined not only to dismiss action and speech as idle busyness and chatter, but also, more generally, to evaluate public activity in terms of whether it promotes a higher end—among craftsmen, making the world more useful and more beautiful; among laboring animals, making life easier and longer.

//  The actor’s end is to actualize the self as an immortal story.

178[229]  Replacing action with fabrication, and at the same time degrading politics into a means toward some supposedly “higher” end— in antiquity usually a means to protect the good from being ruled by the bad, especially a means to protect the philosopher’s safety; in the Middle Ages, a means to save souls; and in modern times, a means to productivity and social progress—this practice is as old as the tradition of political philosophy. …… In this respect, modernity has not overthrown tradition; it has merely freed tradition from the impediment that prevented it from openly claiming that the work of the craftsman is higher than the “talk” and “busywork” that constitute the realm of human affairs.

//  We might correspond labor, work, and action to the present, future, and past. The laborer concerns himself with present life—the laborer’s doings belong to the beginningless and endless cycle of nature; the worker concerns himself with future ends—the worker’s doings are guided by the use to be achieved by the things to be used; and the actor is attentive to the memory of the past—the actor’s doings are concerned with making his action become “past,” become the “past” remembered by the common memory of the polis.

236[297]  As long as the mechanistic worldview—especially the craftsman’s worldview—still holds sway, this inversion of means and ends remains latent. In the famous analogy comparing the relation between nature and God to the relation between a clock and a clockmaker, the mechanistic worldview set forth its most persuasive theory. What is relevant to this article is that the eighteenth-century idea of God was evidently modeled after the image of the craftsman; under such circumstances, the process-character of nature remained limited. Although all individual natural things had already been swallowed up by the processes that produce them, nature as a whole was not yet a process, but rather more or less the stable end-product of a divine maker. The image of the clock and clockmaker is astonishingly apt precisely because it contains not only the processual nature of nature, modeled on the motion of the clock, but also the still relatively complete object-nature of the clock itself and of its maker.

//  Arendt’s interpretation of the “clockmaker God” is very original; this metaphor hints at the transition from the craftsman to laborers’ society.

238[301]  The extreme degree of alienation in the modern world has expanded to the most worldly human activities, expanded to work and objectification, expanded to the fabrication of things and the building of a world; this fact, more sharply than a simple reversal of contemplation and action, of thought and deed, reveals the difference between modern attitudes and value judgments and traditional attitudes and value judgments. The modern break with contemplation does not reach its peak when the status of the human being as maker rises to the place formerly occupied by the human being as contemplator; it reaches its peak with the introduction of the concept of process into fabrication.

241[304]  Thus, if the modern challenge to the ancient superiority of contemplation over all forms of activity consisted only in reversing the existing order of making and viewing, then it would still remain within the traditional framework. But in people’s understanding of manufacture itself, the emphasis has already shifted completely—from the product and the eternal model that guides it to the process of making, from the question of what a thing is, what kind of thing is to be produced, to the questions of how to produce it, through what means and processes it is to be formed, and whether it can be reproduced. At that point, the traditional framework has already been broken. For this means that contemplation is no longer believed capable of bringing forth truth; it has lost its place within active life, and thereby also left the range of ordinary human experience.

//  What I mentioned at the beginning. The various distinctions Arendt makes do not undergo in modernity some simple alternation of gain and loss, but rather various forms of alienation and rupture.

244[309]  Now, everything that helps promote productivity and relieve suffering and toil is useful. In other words, the ultimate criterion is not usefulness or use at all, but “happiness,” that is, the total amount of pain and pleasure experienced in the production and consumption of things.

247[312]  As a last straw, life itself is forever the highest standard by reference to which everything else is measured; individual interests as well as human interests are always equated with the life of the individual or the life of the species, as if life were naturally the highest good.

//  The formation of a society of laborers is associated with the establishment of the belief that “life” is the highest standard of meaning. For life is what labor is concerned with; other levels of meaning, a life of freedom, can only be spoken of after one has first gone beyond concern for life.

248[314]  The modern reversal in fact follows and preserves Christianity’s most important reversal of the ancient world, a reversal that was historically far more enduring in its political effects, and in history in any case more enduring than any specific doctrinal content or creed. For Christianity’s “gospel” of the immortality of individual life reversed the relationship between human beings and the world in antiquity, elevating the most perishable thing—the human life of man—to the status of immortality, whereas before that it was the cosmos that occupied this position.

249[214]  This reversal brought hope to those who learned that their world was doomed to perish; and indeed it was a hope beyond hope, because this good news promised them an immortality they had never dared to hope for. But this reversal was disastrous for the dignity and value of politics. Before that, political activity drew its greatest impulse from the desire for earthly immortality; now it sank to the level of a lower activity governed by necessity, on the one hand assigned to remedy the consequences of human original sin, and on the other used to satisfy the legitimate needs and interests of earthly life. The desire for immortality now became merely vanity; things like fame, bestowed on human beings by the world, were only an illusion, because the world perishes even more easily than human beings do; the desire for earthly immortality was meaningless, because life itself is immortal.

250[316] Christianity’s emphasis on the sanctity of life tended to erase the distinctions made by antiquity within active life, and to regard labor, work, and action as activities equally subject to the necessities of earthly life. At the same time, it also helped laboring activity—that is, any activity necessary for sustaining the biological process—to free itself from the partial contempt ancient society had for it. In antiquity, slaves were despised because they served only the necessities of life, and because they were placed under the master’s compulsion by being willing to pay any price in order to stay alive; but in the Christian era, this ancient contempt for slaves could no longer be maintained. People no longer despised, along with Plato, the slave who preferred obedience to his master over suicide, because in any case to stay alive was a sacred duty, and suicide was considered worse than murder. It was not the murderer who was denied a Christian burial, but the person who put an end to his own life.

251[319]   In any case, modernity has always proceeded under the assumption that life, and not the world, is the highest good; modernity, though it most boldly and most vehemently revised and criticized the traditional faiths and concepts, never once thought of rebelling against this fundamental reversal that Christianity brought to the dying ancient world. No matter how clearly, how consciously modern thinkers attacked tradition, the belief that life stands above everything else acquired in them the status of a “self-evident truth,” and has continued right down to our present age.

//  The key lies in the loss of the pursuit of “immortality.”

256[324]  It is not without irony that those social members who have always, in the eyes of public opinion, practiced the least and concerned themselves the least with politics should turn out to be the very few survivors, the only ones who know how to act and how to act in concert. For the early organizations built in the seventeenth century for the conquest of nature have developed their own moral standards and their own laws of honor; these organizations have not only survived all the tides and ebbs of modernity, but have also become one of the most effective power-producing groups in history. Yet the scientists’ action, since it acts upon nature from the standpoint of the cosmos and does not act upon the network of human relations, lacks the revelatory quality of action, as well as the capacity to produce stories and to form history.

//  Just as the artist is the last worker, the scientist can indeed be called the last actor. In both artists and scientists, the pursuit of eternity and the pursuit of immortality have never been wholly opposed. On the one hand, the scientist seeks insight into eternal truth; on the other, he also seeks to establish an immortal achievement within the scientific community. The entire scientific community forms a kind of independent organization akin to a polis; within this organization, people work together to establish conventions and rules that ensure that those who build achievements enjoy “priority rights” and “naming rights,” and thus become immortal in history. So long as the scientific community continues, the name of Newton will never go out. Seen from this angle, why the history of science so often displays the strongest Whig characteristics is actually even more understandable, for Whig history in the history of science is in truth the last surviving “heroic epic” of modern society. Of course, as Arendt says, scientific activity ultimately lacks the character of action; the immortal fame scientists achieve often takes the form only of naming some constant, leaving the scientist with nothing but a pale name, and making it hard to leave behind a story of flesh and blood (his life story has nothing to do with his “achievements” in science).

 

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.

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