Note: Huawendao holds a weekly reading group on Arendt’s The Human Condition, reading and discussing the Chinese translation of The Human Condition paragraph by paragraph on site. This video and text excerpt come from one such passage, and the discussion is closely related to the aims of DAO. The video production and text arrangement were completed by Jiang Gungun, with 『華』 doing the polishing. The quotations below are selected from the original text of The Human Condition; the main text consists of explanation and discussion. The explainer is 『華』. Because many cuts were made in the整理, most of the on-site discussion was not recorded.
Chapter 2 The Public and the Private Realm
7. The public realm: the common
The word “public” signifies two closely interrelated but not completely identical phenomena.
First, it means that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—being seen and being heard not only by others but also by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with this reality, which comes from being seen and being heard, even the strongest force of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the pleasures of the senses—produces only an uncertain, shadowy existence unless and until they are transformed into a form suitable for public appearance, that is, depersonalized and deprivatized. This transformation most often occurs in storytelling and, more generally, in the artistic transformation of individual experience. But we do not need artists to witness this metamorphosis: whenever we speak of things that happen only in private life and intimate relations, we bring them into a realm where they acquire a certain reality, even though they may previously have been intense in private life but could not possibly have had such reality. The presence of others assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves, because they see what I see and hear what I hear. And even the intimacy of a fully developed private life—such a private life was never known before the rise of the modern age and the simultaneous decline of the public realm—always only vastly intensifies and enriches the whole sphere of subjective feeling and private sensation, and this intensification is always purchased at the cost of certainty in the reality of the world and of human beings.
Indeed, the strongest feeling we know, so strong that it effaces all other experience—the experience of acute bodily pain—is at the same time the most private and the least communicable of all experiences. It is not only the one experience we cannot transform into a form suitable for public appearance; it actually deprives us of our sense of reality to such an extent that we forget it more quickly and more easily than anything else. There seems to be no bridge there from the most extreme subjectivity—where I am no longer “recognizable”—to the external world of life. In other words, pain is indeed a boundary experience, between life and death [for life is “among the people”], so subjective and so far removed from the world of people and things that it cannot possibly be rendered present.
Since our sense of reality depends entirely on appearance, and thus on the existence of a public realm in which things emerge from the darkness of concealment and show themselves, even the dim light that illuminates our private lives and intimate relations ultimately comes from the brighter light of the public realm. Yet many things cannot endure the noise and glaring light produced by the constant presence of others in public; thus, only those things considered relevant to the public realm, worth seeing and worth hearing, are permitted by it, and whatever is unrelated to it automatically becomes a private matter. Of course, this does not mean that what concerns the private sphere is trivial; quite the contrary, we note that there are many vitally important things that can survive only in the private realm. Love, for instance—unlike friendship—is killed or faded into pallor the moment it is publicly displayed (“Never try to tell of love / Love can never be told”). Because of its intrinsic worldlessness, love becomes false or distorted if it is used for political purposes, for example, for changing or saving the world.
Things that the public realm deems unimportant may also have an extraordinary magic, a contagious charm, so that many people adopt them as a way of life, yet this does not in itself alter their essentially private character. The little trifles adored by modern people, and enthroned in the poetry written in almost all European languages at the beginning of the twentieth century, found their classical expression among the French petit bourgeois. Ever since their once great and glorious public realm declined, the French have become masters of the art of finding pleasure in “little trifles”; within the space enclosed by their four walls, among cabinets and beds, tables and chairs, cats and dogs and flowerpots, they play the master and extend their concern and care for the public realm to these little trifles. In a world where rapid industrialization is constantly wiping out old things in order to produce new products, these things may well seem like the world’s last purely human corner. Yet even if such private objects, so to speak, extend their charm to everyone, that does not mean they become public things, nor does it constitute a public realm. On the contrary, it merely means that the public realm has almost completely withdrawn, so that grandeur everywhere gives way to charm; for the public realm may be great, but it cannot be enchanting, precisely because it cannot contain anything irrelevant to itself.
Second, the word “public” denotes the world itself, insofar as the world is common to all of us and is distinguished from the private place we possess within it. Yet this world is not the same as the earth or nature, which as finite space provides the general conditions for human activity or the existence of organic life. What is associated with the world are man-made objects, the products of human hands, and the affairs that occur among the people who dwell together in this man-made world. To live together in the world fundamentally means that a world of things exists between those who have it in common, as though a table were placed between those who sit around it. The world, like every “in-between,” both connects people and separates them.
It can be said that the public realm as a common world both gathers us together and prevents us from falling over one another. What makes mass society so unbearable is not that it is populous, but that the world between people has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and separate them at once. The oddity of this situation is something like a seance: many people are seated around a table, and suddenly, through some magic that has abruptly arrived, they see the table between them disappear, so that the two people sitting opposite one another are not only unable to keep apart, but also have nothing tangible whatever to connect them.
What is being discussed here is shared life, co-presence, the common world, being-in-the-world together… there can be many names for it; in any case, we need a world, and this world is not just an objective world. The objective, natural world is one of its foundations or conditions.
Essentially speaking, the world is something that functions as a medium. This mediating function both connects and divides people. Of course, this very important concept is already present in Heidegger’s thought, but Heidegger does not really emphasize active life. My interpretation of Heidegger as a “philosophy of media” is, in effect, a further development of his concept of “being-in”—“the in-between.”
“Media” has a double meaning. On the one hand, it separates people. So many so-called (shallow) philosophies of media are studying how to penetrate this medium, how to pierce that barrier. But on the other hand, the barrier itself gathers people together and connects them. Because human beings are animals that cannot in fact connect directly: simply collapsing into one another, colliding into one another, cannot produce any direct connection. Human beings are not atoms or particles or the like, as if merely putting them together would make something happen. Human connection itself requires mediation, requires an appropriate space.
So the function of this public realm is precisely to gather us together and also to separate us, which is an extremely important matter. Thus, if one wants to form and construct a public realm, both aspects are important: how to bring people together and how to separate them at the same time.
So it is necessary to say here: why is it that I am now thinking of making this DAO? First of all, it is because some related technical conditions—especially blockchain and NFT technology—have, in my view, solved a very crucial problem, namely, that they can separate people again.
In the digital world, people can originally be brought together, but this togetherness is very mixed or messy, flat, and indistinct. For example, your personal image, or an article you wrote, or an avatar I used, can at any time be copied by others with ctrl c + ctrl v, and then your thing is simply copied away. Of course, you can say that this is piracy, and I want to appeal for my rights. But in fact, when you want to appeal for certain rights, you are not appealing within the digital world itself; you have returned to the traditional world, and you go looking for a notary office or some traditional institution to vouch for you before your boundary can be confirmed. Within the digital world itself, because of the replicability of digital objects and the boundarylessness of digital objects, before the emergence of blockchain there had never been a reliable, effective thing that could distinguish people from one another and draw boundaries between them. Your identity in the digital world is either blurred or infinitely replicable. Your identity is unreal, illusory.
So when you are in the digital world and still need a stable identity, you need to rely on your real-world identity to vouch for it. This is also one reason why实名social networking like Facebook could rise. It gives you a real-name endorsement, making your account more real, and your sense of boundaries emerges.
Now, with the help of technologies like NFT, one of its functions is that when I want to establish a personal boundary, I no longer have to go back to the real world to seek endorsement. I can establish a boundary within this digital world itself. For example, now a small avatar can clearly identify who is a pirate and who is not. And then my thing is again a property under my control, just like a piece of real-world real estate: once this property is recognized as yours, others cannot use it privately, nor can they enter it privately. But who is to manage this matter? There is no need to go back to the real world to find a manager; the boundary issue can be solved within the digital world itself.
Historically, we know of only one principle that was ever devised to keep together in a community a group of people who had lost their interest in a common world and felt that they were no longer related and separated by a world; this is the principle of the Christian community. The main political task of early Christian philosophy was to find among human beings a bond strong enough to replace the world, and it was Augustine who proposed that not only Christian “brotherhood” but all human relations be founded on charity.
Worldlessness as a political phenomenon is possible only on the assumption that the world will not last; in fact, under this assumption, one form or another of worldlessness will inevitably dominate the political scene. This situation occurred after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and although for different reasons it may also occur in our time, in very different and even more disturbing forms. The Christian way of renouncing earthly things is by no means the only conclusion that can be drawn from the belief that man-made objects, the products of human hands, are, like their makers, mortal. On the contrary, this belief can equally well be strengthened into an enjoyment and consumption of worldly things, into all such forms of intercourse in which the world is understood not primarily as something held in common, something common to all. Only the existence of a public realm, and with it the transformation of the world into a community of things that gathers people together and relates them to one another, depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public realm, it cannot be built for one generation alone, nor planned only for the living; it must transcend the span of mortal life.
Without this transcendence toward a potential earthly immortality, there is no politics, and strictly speaking there is no common world and no public realm either. Unlike the Christian understanding of the common good—which takes the salvation of individual souls as everyone’s common concern—the common world is a place we enter at birth and leave at death; it exceeds the length of our lives while remaining open to both past and future. It was there before we came, and continues to exist after our brief sojourn. It is something we share not only with those who live with us, but also with our predecessors and our descendants. But such a public world can outlast the hurried passersby of generation after generation only insofar as it appears in public. It is precisely the publicity of the public realm that can, over the course of centuries, gather in and make radiant those things people want to rescue from time’s natural erosion. In many generations before us, people entered the public realm because they wanted what they owned themselves, or shared with others, to last longer than their mortal lives; but such an age has now irretrievably passed. (Thus the evil of slavery lay not only in the fact that slaves were deprived of freedom and visibility, but also in that it drove these people, lowlier than dust, into such fear: “because they are sunk in obscurity, after their death they will leave behind no trace that they ever existed.”) Nothing more clearly shows the loss of the modern public realm than the fact that modern people have almost completely lost any real concern for immortality, even though the simultaneous loss of any metaphysical concern for eternity seems to obscure this loss of concern for immortality. The latter, as an object of concern for philosophers and the contemplative life, lies outside our present consideration. But the loss of concern for immortality can be confirmed by the current habit of dismissing the desire for immortality as the private vice of vanity. For under modern conditions, no one can sincerely pursue earthly immortality, so much so that we may perhaps have reason to think such a pursuit is nothing but vanity.
The Christian worldview twists the common view because they only pursue that eternal world; they do not pursue immortality. For this world is temporary, this world is ultimately destined for the Last Judgment, and after the Last Judgment this whole world simply disappears, and we human beings all go to the kingdom of heaven. In Christianity, the possibility of this-worldly immortality is taken away, so this world itself is not worth lingering over. In modernity, this is no longer the monopoly of Christianity; it has become a common feature of the whole modern society. Modern society has likewise entirely lost any realistic pursuit of immortality in this world. People no longer seek, in actual reality, something that transcends their own life, something that transcends the scale of life; the only thing they pursue is the scale of life itself.
That is why people nowadays like to say, “A bad life is better than a good death.” In ancient times this was an ironic remark, not something one could say openly and straightforwardly. But in modern times many people say exactly this, and say it with great airs of propriety, because modern people simply no longer have a “good death.” When ancient people said a bad life is better than a good death, what they were essentially saying was that such a bad life is shameful, whereas a good death is what is worth pursuing. What is a good death? It means dying immorally? No—what it means is dying in immortality, dying so as to be everlasting. To die in the midst of an achievement, after a great feat, that is a good death; you die well. Ancient people did have this notion of “dying well.” For example, a hero ought to die at the height of his powers; a warrior ought to die on the battlefield. That is the most glorious thing. If he lingers on until he is old and frail, half-dead, dying only when he is no longer able to control his own urine and excrement, then for a hero that is a humiliation. So what is a good death? It is dying honorably, dying gloriously. The reason this pursuit could be called a good death is that one’s works, one’s achievements, one’s deeds, one’s words—all of them would remain; they would stay in this world, stay in the public realm, and then be passed down and sung by later generations. Then the scale on which one’s accomplishments circulate far exceeds the scale of one’s individual life. In this way one can transcend one’s brief life, can pursue immortality—and this immortality must be shared, not private, because in order to attain such immortality, one must engage in public life and participate in public life; only then can one achieve immortality within that public life.
But that possibility is gone now; no one can remember you, and your achievements will not endure, so you no longer have a good death. You are left only with the bad life, and thus the distorted modern view becomes: if you pursue immortality of reputation, doesn’t that just mean you’re a vain person, chasing fame and profit?
Our DAO white paper is talking about exactly this. People always like to lump chasing fame and chasing profit together, and even regard chasing fame as worse than chasing profit. If you chase profit, at least you are a real scoundrel; if you chase fame, you are a hypocrite—and a hypocrite is worse than a real scoundrel. This seems to be the mainstream view now: if you are greedy, make money, or harvest the “leeks,” people think you’re actually not bad—a good person, a real scoundrel, a KOL. But if you say you want to do good, you want to pursue reputation, you are very aloof—hypocrite! Where on earth is there such a person? That’s how we broadly feel society is now. Arendt gave an explanation for this atmosphere: the loss of the public realm gave rise to this culture. Society no longer permits immortality, so you can only become this way: the nihilism of social culture. Society has homogenized all these public achievements. When you say you have accomplished something, what others care about is how much it is worth, or how much productive force it can generate; and things like money and productive force are all anonymized, all homogenized—there is no room left for your individuality to remain there.
Why exactly has the public realm been lost? There may be many reasons, not merely that science has predicted the finitude of this world. I think it is not just science or materialism and the like; a bigger factor is the loss of public life. As I said earlier, if you want immortality, the prerequisite is always public life, action, political action, someone to sing your praises, someone to discuss your deeds, to record your deeds.
Someone discusses them, someone evaluates them, and in the end someone sings them, and so on. All of that is gone. Nobody discusses these things anymore; what people discuss is what our opportunities for making money are, what to invest in to make a profit, and things of that sort. So-called celebrities are nothing more than people from whom we can make money by following them—look at those moments when Musk shills a coin, or the “dog庄” shills a coin, and everybody rushes in together to do it. It is not that people are discussing his immortal reputation. What everyone discusses are things that are themselves anonymous, or familial, or in any case not public topics. No one discusses public topics; without the continuation of the public realm, of course there is no immortality.
- forgetful epimetheus：更关心钱，更关心数字，可能也还是由于我们假定世界不会持续存在下去吗？就是说反正这个世界都无法持续存在下去，那么把这辈子过得舒服一点，那是一个自然而然的推论。反过来如果人们觉得这个世界它会持续存在下去，如果这个假定取消了，那么其实有的人可能就会觉得，我这辈子活得苦一点，但是我这人生长个几千年那还是值。现在有个假定告诉你，这个世界200年后啥都没了，那这个大家就会觉得我这个东西，我这么追求个名，200年后也没人记得，那干嘛不在200年之内再好好活着。
Why would no one remember fame after 200 years? It is not only because of things like an energy crisis, or physical causes of that sort; I don’t think it is entirely due to these reasons. The timescales of physics are extremely large. Among ancient people, too, there were doctrines of cycles on vast scales, or of extinction and quiescence, but these do not affect so-called immortality. Immortality itself is not eternity; it is not an infinite scale, but “unboundedness,” something that can be continuously handed down.
Of course, what you said is certainly one factor. That factor itself is also what gave rise to the so-called death of God: the whole scientific worldview drove out God as well, drove out the realm of eternity. And now people discuss more the way modern science has expelled the realm of eternity, while forgetting that the realm of immortality has likewise been expelled.
The role of science is not mainly that the final doctrine of decline leads to the disappearance of the realm of immortality; it is precisely the doctrine of continual progress that leads to the disappearance of the realm of immortality. That is why one can say that ever since the Renaissance, the world has been continuously “refreshed,” and continual progress means that whether in ideas or in things, newer is better, and there is no longer any great event that can be sung about for millennia. If you study science, you no longer need to read Newton, nor Aristotle; you just read the latest works and that is enough. If you examine economics or investment now, you only need to look at the latest hot topic. Only the newest thing matters; the older something becomes, the less important it is, and then it can no longer be immortal—you have just decayed. The longer the time, the more it decays. So it is precisely the doctrine of continual ascent and continual refreshing that has brushed away this world of immortality.
By the way, let me return once more to what we were saying about the digital world. Even before, the digital world already had social interaction, already had public platforms of communication, including social media, WeChat, Weibo, and so on; all these things enabled communication within the digital world. But the traditional problem is that the digital world itself is illusory; people think the digital world is virtual, and what is virtual is not important. There is nothing lasting in the digital world itself; you have no lasting things. It is itself virtual, illusory; what matters is constant “refreshing”: what you pay attention to are “new happenings,” and the action is “scrolling your phone.” So people do not treat social activities in the digital world, or its speech and actions, as public matters, as actions, because these things leave behind nothing lasting; the digital world itself is just empty, and it leaves behind no real thing, no durability whatsoever.
So this is also one problem that NFTs solve. What basic problem do NFTs, or blockchain in general, solve? Durability. There is durability in the digital world: once a block is written, there is a kind of durability by which it is not erased. This durability has been rediscovered. It is not that the digital world only acquires durability once there is blockchain; rather, blockchain has brought this out again. It originally relied on the durability already present within the digital world to shape blockchain technology, and blockchain technology in turn helps people identify those works, or properties, or creations that durably exist within the digital world and make them recognizable as such.
So I think the expansion of blockchain has the potential to reverse the situation of public space within the digital world; at last we may be able to make a public realm in the digital world, to open up a public realm there.
What is immortality? Immortality is not eternity. The reason many confusions arise now is that our perspective has been stretched too far; we too readily adopt a godlike viewpoint, as if standing outside space and time and treating time as a simple time axis, and from that angle we look at things and feel that humanity will inevitably be destroyed, or that the earth will inevitably be destroyed, so what meaning can anything have? Nothing has meaning anymore. But this scale is too large; ancient people did not have such a lofty scale, such a lofty vantage point. That vantage point does not exist. What is immortality? Immortality is somewhat like the difference between potential infinity and actual infinity. Actual infinity means that you must see its end all at once; if, from a god’s-eye view, you cannot see the end, the completed infinite thing, then you call it infinite. Conversely, as long as, from the god’s-eye view, you can see its endpoint, then whether it is 300 years or 3,000 years or 30,000 years, it is still finite. That is the logic of actual infinity.
The logic of potential infinity is, for example, “their sons and grandsons without end” (子子孙孙无穷匮也), which is potential infinity. My son can remember, my grandson can remember; since my grandson remembers, my grandson’s son can also remember, and it can continue on. If I ask you what happens after 300 generations, you cannot imagine that far. It is just a simple recursion, a simple inference: my son, my grandson, my great-grandson—beyond that one does not necessarily think so far. What you can infer is that at some generation of descendants, we can still keep this thing in memory, can still make it immortal, and then in the next step it still can be so; that is basically the logic. That is immortality.
So much confusion now comes down to human beings overstepping their own place and thinking about things like gods. Before the eyes of God, everything is finite; if everything is finite before the eyes of God, then of course immortality cannot exist. So the pursuit of immortality is not some extremely, extremely transcendent thing. What it seeks is actually similar to a person’s pursuit of living: you live by taking one day at a time; you want to live one more day, and after living one day you still want to live another day. It is really just this kind of infinity. Immortality merely enlarges the human scale; it stretches an individual human life into the public realm. But the public realm is like this too: the public realm can live 100 years, then 200 years, then after 200 years it can still live another 300 years—that is how one thinks. You are 70 now and want to make it to 71; at 71 you want to make it to 72. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to live to 70,000 years old? That kind of leap is not made in that way. It is simply a continuation into the future: I can continue indefinitely into the future.
Durability is not eternity; that is precisely the distinction Arendt is making here. Eternity and immortality must be distinguished. Eternity is what requires establishing an expectation of something permanently undying; immortality merely means that it can continue to endure into the future.
And there’s another very crucial point: that lastingness is not taken for granted. It has to be worked for constantly. That is to say, the public realm still has to keep developing in order for us to remember it, to keep remembering it; that is what is called lastingness. So why is it that pursuing immortality requires “action”? My acting continuously is not enough; future generations must also keep acting, continue maintaining the existence of this public realm, in order to maintain that immortality as well. This immortality, in the first place, is not absolute. It is something that can vanish at any moment. No comet need strike the earth, no energy need run out, none of that is necessary. All you need is for your community, that city-state, to disappear; if your city-state is smashed by the Persians, then is your immortality not gone, and are not those traces of yours gone as well? The Greeks could imagine this possibility too, which is why their attitude toward fighting the Persians was completely different from their attitude toward fighting other city-states. Fortunately, the possibility of disappearance is not a necessity; that possibility also includes the possibility that it will not be wiped out, but will keep flourishing and growing. So the expectation of immortality was never about having a definite, eternal guarantee. It was simply the possibility of continuing on: living one more year, then two more years, and if you live two more years, then there is the possibility of living three more years. In fact, that is just such an ever-continuing possibility, and this possibility still requires people to keep striving for it, to keep extending that pursuit.
Ancient China was actually similar in this respect, so talk of the lineage of the Way and the like is similar too: it all requires continual maintenance. This includes China’s talk of ancestor worship, genealogies and family lines, and transmitting the incense and flame. Why do you want to transmit the incense and flame? Because you are seeking immortality. You want your descendants to keep going without end, you want your name and your ancestral tablet to keep on being carried forward. Everyone knows this thing can be extinguished at any time; the incense and flame can go out, so you have to keep striving, keep transmitting it onward. Ancient Chinese architecture was like this too. Ancient China did not like that kind of “eternal” architecture, the megalithic sort. Ancient China preferred wooden buildings, and wooden buildings decay. But what did it require? It required that the people living inside continue to dwell there, and that the house keep being repaired and rebuilt; then you could live in it for the long term. So in ancient China it was said that buildings were alive with spirit; if there were no human presence, the building would die too. There had to be continual human presence there. That was how they understood so-called immortality. Immortality is not a definite guarantee that remains eternally unchanged from the perspective of God; it is simply the possibility of being handed down to another generation, and then handed down to the next generation after that. That is immortality.
Aristotle’s celebrated line appears quite fittingly in his work on politics: “Do not say that as human beings we should think only of human things, and as mortal beings only of mortal things, but rather, as far as possible, think of them so as to achieve immortality.” For the city-state, for the Greeks, just as the republic was for the Romans, its primary significance lay in providing a space to resist the emptiness of private life and to preserve, if not immortality, then at least a relative endurance for mortal beings.
Since society rose up and acquired its striking public importance, the way modern people view the public realm is made very clear in Adam Smith’s words. With unguarded candor, he says that “the poor and unfortunate are often called men of letters,” and for them, “the applause of the public always forms part of the recompense they receive … a very considerable part in medicine, perhaps a larger one in law; almost the whole in poetry or philosophy.” It goes without saying that here public applause and monetary remuneration are of the same nature and can be substituted for one another. Public applause is also something that can be used and consumed, just as what we today call status satisfies one need, the way food satisfies another: public applause is consumed by personal vanity, just as food is consumed by hunger. Obviously, from this point of view, the standard for testing reality does not lie in the public presence of others, but in the greater or lesser urgency of a need. Yet no one other than the person suffering from such a need can testify to whether it exists or not. Moreover, since the need for food has an undeniable basis in reality within the life process itself, it is obvious that the purely subjective torment of hunger is more real than “vanity” (Hobbes’s name for the need for public applause). But even if needs such as hunger were miraculously shared by others out of sympathy, their emptiness would still not be enough to establish anything as stable and enduring as a common world. The key issue here is not that the modern world lacks public applause for poetry and philosophy, but that this applause is insufficient to constitute a space that can keep things from being destroyed by time. On the contrary, in the modern world, public applause is consumed emptily and in ever greater quantities every day, so much so that monetary remuneration, the emptiest thing of all, instead appears more “objective” and real.
Money, as the common standard for measuring the degree to which all needs are satisfied, is the sole basis for this “objectivity.” Unlike this “objectivity,” the reality of the public realm depends on the simultaneous presence of countless perspectives and aspects, in which the public world presents itself on its own; no common scale or standard can be designed in advance for this. For the public world is a gathering place shared by all, and each person who appears in it occupies a different position, just as one object occupies a different place from another. The significance of being seen or heard by others comes from this fact: each person sees and hears from a different angle. This is the meaning of public life. By contrast, even the richest and most comfortable family life can offer only an extension or duplication of a private standpoint with fixed positions and perspectives. The subjectivity of private life can extend or be duplicated within a family, and can even become strong enough to make its influence felt in the public realm; but such a family “world” will never replace the reality that arises when one object is presented before a multitude of observers and emerges from the sum of all these perspectives. Only when things are viewed by many from different angles without changing their identity, so that those gathered around them know that from sheer multiplicity they are seeing the same thing; only in such a place can the reality of the world truly and reliably appear.
Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not first guaranteed by the “common nature” of all the people who constitute the world, but by the fact that although each person has a different position and thus a different perspective, they are still always attending to the same object. If the identity of the object can no longer be observed, then neither a common human nature nor the unnatural conformism of mass society can withstand the destruction of the common world. Usually, before the common world is destroyed, what has already occurred is the destruction of the multiple aspects through which it presents itself to plural human beings. Such things happen under conditions of extreme loneliness, where no one can reach agreement with anyone else, as is usually the case under tyranny. But they also happen in mass society and mass hysteria, where we see everyone suddenly behaving in exactly the same way, as if they were members of a single family, each person copying and spreading his neighbor’s views. In both of the above situations, human beings become thoroughly privatized; that is to say, they are deprived both of the chance to see and hear others and of the chance to be seen and heard by others. They are completely imprisoned within the subjectivity of their own singular experience, even if that same experience is replicated countless times, and this can never change the character of its singularity. When the common world is seen only from one standpoint and is permitted to show itself only from one angle, its end has arrived.
Why the modern public realm comes to an end: my view is actually pretty much the same as Arendt’s. I mean this modern homogenization and anonymization brought about by monetization. But Arendt puts more emphasis on the leveling of perspectives. What is reality? Precisely plural perspectives are reality. A single perspective, no matter how many times it is repeated, is still just something highly illusory, dreamlike; at most it becomes a collective dream, collective madness, illusion. Reality, by contrast, means that there are many angles: different people have different standpoints, but within those different standpoints there is also some shared understanding, and everyone can still see the same thing. At that point, the reality of that thing becomes stronger.
When I want to confirm the reality of something, I will certainly try as much as possible to look at it from multiple angles. For example, if I first see it with my eyes, then I want to touch it; if I first touch it with my hand, then I want to look at it again. If I see a shape from the front, then I want to walk around to the side and the back to take a look…… Different perspectives are all different, but if they all confirm the same thing, then my confidence increases. But just me seeing it is not enough to make it real. For instance, if I see something fly past and I am not quite sure, then I will ask the people around me. Say Zhang San says he saw it too, and Li Si says he saw it too: then my own subjective perception acquires even more reality.
But if Zhang San and Li Si are nothing more than my copies, then no matter how many more people I find, it will be useless. Zhang San saw it, Li Si saw it—what they saw was all me seeing it. They are exactly the same as I am, as if they were all duplicated from the same mold, reacting exactly as I do. In that case, the reality of the whole society, the reality of the whole public realm, collapses.
Why do they react exactly the same way? Actually, it is still what I said before: modern commodity fetishism, or monetary-ism, or the supremacy of money, brings about anonymization. Money, this thing, this scale, has no “position” or standpoint. In other words, money provides a completely anonymous, objective, and monotonous standard of measurement. It is too objective. When everyone measures how great this person is, or what kind of hero this immortal person is, we will say things like “there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand readers’ eyes,” and so on, right? What each person reads out is not exactly the same. The points of brilliance you see, the greatness you see, are not exactly the same. There are also some disputes and different opinions, but opponents may still acknowledge that he is very important, and so on. It is precisely under such very different and plural perspectives that this person, as a living personality, a living individual, has his immortality emerge; or his reality—whether it be achievements, reputation, or fame—the reality of all these is thereby manifested. If we lose this thousand-people-thousand-faces perspective and instead everyone uses one and the same scale—how much is this person worth, how many billions is Musk worth, or how much GDP did his contribution create, how much productivity, how much wealth—then at that point there is no personality left, no standpoint left, no other individual different opinions. Then the standard of evaluation becomes unified, very objective, but also very illusory; everyone is the same.
For example, those so-called traffic stars: what are traffic stars? They are the embodiment of traffic. And traffic itself is also an anonymous, linear, one-way measure. Today’s stars have no character, or rather, their character is a persona; character is something assigned to them from the outside. How is it assigned? Whatever arrangement can bring in more traffic—that is how it is assigned. A persona is designed and put onto them, and then: this person is a big star. How big is this star? Roughly how much merchandise can they move? How much traffic can they bring to the platform? How large is their fan circle? That is all. These things are too “objective,” so they are all illusory things. They are not standing there as a living individual personality, remembered by the public and agreed upon by the public. They exist as a condensate of traffic; they are traffic itself.
This traffic itself is anonymous. It can condense upon you, and it can also at any moment condense upon someone else. Traffic flows away in an instant, with none of that sticking fast to any particular thing. All these things seem like very illusory things, with no durability.
This is the end of the modern public world. Its end comes from the flattening of perspectives, or, as Heidegger put it, the so-called “age of the world picture.” What does it mean for the world to become a picture? It means it has been flattened. Originally we were all entirely as individuals observing, examining, and feeling this world. But now we have all stepped back, retreated to the same place, like the vanishing point fixed by perspective. Everyone has retreated to the same point, right at that vanishing point. And this vanishing point is what science now tells you: only by looking at it this way are you objective; only by looking at the world this way are you objective and accurate. All other perspectives are subjective, arbitrary. Once it has fixed this viewpoint for you, the world becomes flat, because the world everyone sees looks the same. As long as everyone properly regards this world, what they see will be the same. In that case, paradoxically, the world becomes more illusory. So why is nihilism so prevalent now? It is because there are no individuals anymore; your perspective has been homogenized, the world has been flattened—that is all.
That is speaking in broad terms: the whole world has become flat. In a more limited, concrete sense, the public realm has become flat, and the public realm’s way of seeing people has become flat as well. That is to say, the way you regard other people, the way you regard the actions of others, has also become a flattened mode. In that case, the public realm is gone; it has ended. That is Arendt’s line of thought.
- forgetful epimetheus: Is this a historical trend? If we revive all those public realms, wouldn’t that just mean returning to the past?
No, there is no intention of returning to the past. First we have to understand this world. It is not a matter of saying that one can definitely do something, or that the past is definitely better. First, recognize the fateful nature of this matter, recognize how exactly this world has come to be as it is now. It is not as if we can reverse course, and in fact we cannot reverse course. And even if we could, reversal would not necessarily be a good thing. The key is how to inspire us to face the future and how to proceed next.
That brings us back to the question of why we are doing this DAO thing. Why do I say the digital world is a new opportunity? What I mean is that we are not going back; we are moving forward. We are going to meet the new digital world and enter the metaverse. It is not a return to antiquity. But we will discover that this new world has an opening for revival. In this new environment, in this new world, we may once again encounter an opportunity—a chance for the way we view the world to change.
Because the old way of looking at the world was, in essence, built with the aid of printing and mechanical industry—it was a vision formed under those technological conditions, within that technological environment. Now that we have a new technological environment, especially after the emergence of new media such as blockchain and metaverse technologies, we may have a new opportunity; we may change. But this change is not inevitable, nor is it inevitably for the better, nor is it inevitably a revival of anything. So we need to act, and perhaps we are able to act; we can go into action, do some things, and reopen certain fields. And the fields we reopen will not simply be a reconstruction of the old environment. We cannot possibly recreate a polis, but we can build communities on the internet. On the internet, communities can still be redrawn into territories, because that territory is itself brand new, and one can once again carve out a community of a thousand people, and so on. Under this new opportunity, how should we build internet communities? Today’s internet communities, DAOs and the like, are just a few hundred people, a thousand at most—about the size of a Greek polis—and that too is a kind of building of this “polis” from scratch. At such a moment, some people make it Spartan, some make it Athenian; then what should we make ours? How should we organize? After reading Arendt, we may arrive at our own policy, our own direction. I can do things here, because we are still moving forward; I certainly do not mean to go back. It is just that, as we adapt to the new environment, this historical retrospect can help us gain some inspiration and guidance, and discover some new potentials.The means of recording history are actually secondary; what matters most is why we record in the first place. For Sima Qian, history was not the objective science we mean today now that history has become a social science devoted to objective research. Rather, for Sima Qian it was “to understand the changes of antiquity and the present, and to investigate the relation between Heaven and humanity” (“通古今之变，究天人之际”), which is a very lofty ambition. How does one understand change? How does one investigate the relation between Heaven and humanity? To investigate the relation between Heaven and humanity is called “to connect with Heaven”; history is a means of connecting with Heaven. When we say that DAOs should revive the culture of the historiographer, what matters is not historical recording itself, but rather that we want to highlight the importance of action—we want to record action. We record actions, record achievements, record imperishable deeds; we must record such things. What are imperishable deeds? For example, we found our DAO, and within it, through speech and action, we confirm what is imperishable. First of all, consensus has to be formed; the formation of consensus and the recording of history happen simultaneously. Through recording history, we sustain consensus; but in essence, what is consensus about? Consensus is still about “action,” and moreover this action must be named—it is not anonymous action, but action with names and surnames, whose action it is, which people’s action it is. These things must be placed at the center, and then we record them. Of course, when it comes to recording, whether you use text or text plus images is a secondary question. Naturally, text is certainly important, because these imperishable deeds are determined not only by the deeds themselves, but also by the community’s speech and discussion; the speeches that discuss and praise those deeds are themselves part of the recording of the deeds.
- forgetful epimetheus：I’d like to ask a question related to our DAO. Since we’re talking about recording history, in antiquity, one might say the left-hand historian recorded words and the right-hand historian recorded events; that too depended on writing as a technology. In our modern society, technology is so rich—we have photographs, videos, and so on—so the methods of recording history have in fact become diversified. Should our historical record still be done the old way, through text, or should we use multiple methods to record history?
These few paragraphs are also very important—property and wealth are two different things. In ancient China there was also such a saying: “Without stable property, there will be no stable mind” (“无恒产者无恒心”). What is stable property? It does not mean having money. This saying absolutely does not mean that people without money have no stable mind, and that having money is all that matters. It is not a question of money or no money; the key is to have property, and property is not money. It has a “position.” Property is not homogeneous; wealth is homogeneous. You are interchangeable: my 1 million and your 1 million, we swap them, and each of us still has 1 million. In other words, wealth is something interchangeable, standardized, and anonymized. What is property? In essence, it is your household estate. For most people, their property is almost identical with where their home is. Your home implies your location, your place, which neighborhood you are in, which polis you belong to, which citizen of Athens you are, where you live, what place you are a resident of… this is a marker of your identity, a label of identity, and this thing is yours. Property itself is a natural boundary; this boundary means that no one can penetrate it and enter your private sphere. Within this property lies what is private to you. What is your property? It is the boundary of your private sphere: these things are private to me, and you cannot interfere. Unless I invite you into my home, you may come in. But if I do not invite you, then it is sacred and inviolable; if I have not invited you in, then you cannot enter my door. That is the sanctity of private property—that is what it means. It is not about the idea that you cannot casually take my money; that is not the point. Rather, it is about this boundary character: my turf, my call. That is roughly what it means. And this turf, because it is a boundary linking both sides, is not entirely private either; it is also the starting point for your entrance into the public sphere. It is from such an identity, such a standpoint, such a position that you enter the public sphere. So property is the starting point of your public sphere and the boundary of your private sphere. Our DAO’s way of thinking is also this. Through blockchain, through names, through Chinese characters, we set up just such a boundary. This private property is your NFT; this NFT is bound to your status. This thing can be transferred, and once transferred, it is no longer your identity; its identity is reset to zero. We also believe that so-called property and wealth are not the same. You may have wealth, but that does not necessarily mean you have a stable mind. Wealth can be cashed out and left at any time: I have a lot of shares, or I have a lot of cash, I’m very impressive—but if I can no longer make money here with this cash, I can transfer it somewhere else at any time to make money there; there is no stable mind in that. Only when you have something relatively fixed—not something that absolutely cannot be transferred, but something directly related to and directly bound up with your own public identity—property, then you have a stable mind, as well as fame. Your fame is in fact entwined around your property; you begin from such a position and standpoint to build your reputation and carry out your actions, and others also speak of you and approach you through this boundary of yours. Only with such a thing, I think, do you have a stable mind, only then do you have a mind for the long term, because this thing is not something that can be casually cashed out or transferred.8. Private Sphere: Property
In contrast to the multiple meanings of the public sphere, the word “private” derives its significance from its original sense of “deprived.” To live a wholly private life first of all means to be deprived of something that is essential to a truly human life: deprived of the reality that arises from being seen and heard by others; deprived of the “objective” relation established through a common world of things, a relation that both connects and separates people from one another; deprived of the chance to win something that outlasts life itself. The poverty of private life lies in the absence of others; in this respect, the private person cannot appear, and thus his existence is as if it were not there. Nothing he does has meaning or effect for others; what matters to him is of no consequence to anyone else.
Under modern conditions, this state of deprivation—having lost “objective” relations with others and the reality guaranteed through others—has evolved into the phenomenon of mass loneliness and taken on its most extreme, most inhuman form. It is extreme because mass society not only destroys the public sphere, but also destroys the private sphere; it not only deprives people of their place in the world, but also deprives them of their private household. In the household they once had a refuge from the world, and in any case, even those driven out of the world could find a substitute place by the warm hearth of the family, and gain the limited reality of family life. The full development of family life into an inner private space owed a great deal to the Roman’s outstanding political sense. Unlike the Greeks, they did not sacrifice private life for the sake of public life; rather, they understood that the two spheres could exist only in the form of coexistence. Although the condition of Roman slaves was hardly better than that of Greek slaves, it is still highly distinctive that a Roman writer believed the master’s household to the slave to be what the republic was to the citizen. And however bearable family private life may have been, it was by no means merely a substitute. In Rome, as in Athens, the private sphere provided ample room for activities that today seem to us higher than politics—for example, the Greek pursuit of wealth or Roman artistic and scientific activity. But this “free” attitude, which in certain situations produced very affluent and highly cultivated slaves, merely meant that getting rich had no reality in the Greek polis, just as being a philosopher in the Roman republic had no real significance.
The deprived character of private life—that is, the awareness of living wholly within the restricted space of the household and thus being deprived of what is essential to human life—of course began to weaken, and even fade, with the rise of Christianity. Christian morality, unlike its basic doctrine, insists that everyone should only take care of his own affairs; political responsibility is first and foremost a burden, and to undertake it is purely for the well-being of those who cannot bear the vexations of public affairs, so that they may be relieved. What is surprising is that this attitude continued into secular modernity, so much so that Karl Marx, here as in other respects, merely generalized this attitude, conceptualized it, turned the assumption that had underpinned modernity for two hundred years into a program, and ultimately foretold and desired the “withering away” of the entire public sphere. The difference between the Christian view and the socialist view here lies only in the fact that one regards government as a necessary evil because of human original sin, while the other hopes eventually to abolish government. Their difference does not lie in having different evaluations of the public sphere itself, but in having different views of human nature. Starting from either of these perspectives, one cannot recognize that prior to Marx’s “withering away of the state,” or the transformation of the state into a very limited governmental department, there was the withering away of the public sphere; in Marx’s time, government had already begun to shrink—that is, to be transformed into a nationwide “household administration,” until our own era, when it began to disappear altogether and even became a still more limited, inhuman administrative department.
The final stage of the disappearance of the public sphere would be accompanied by the danger of the elimination of the private sphere, and this seems to be the essence of the relation between the public and the private realms. It is therefore no accident that the whole discussion ultimately turns to the question of whether private property is desirable, because even according to ancient political thought, once the word “private” is linked with property, it immediately loses its sense of deprivation as well as its usual opposition to the public sphere; property clearly possesses certain attributes that cause it, though located in the private sphere, to be regarded all along as the most important component of the political community.
The profound connection between private and public, at its most basic level, is embodied in the question of private property. This is easily misunderstood today, because modernity on the one hand equates property with wealth, and on the other hand equates having no property with poverty. Adding to the confusion is the fact that historically, the importance of property and wealth to the public sphere has far exceeded that of any other private affair or consideration, and at least in formal terms they occupied roughly the same status, namely, they were the main conditions for entering the public sphere and obtaining full citizenship. It is therefore easy to forget that property and wealth are not only not the same thing, but are fundamentally and completely different. Today there are everywhere associations that are in fact or potentially very wealthy, while at the same time these associations are essentially propertyless, because any individual’s wealth consists in the share of annual income he receives from society as a whole. This situation clearly shows how irrelevant property and wealth are to one another.
Modernity began with the deprivation of the poor and the subsequent emancipation of the emerging proletariat; before modernity, all civilizations were built on the idea of the sanctity of private property. By contrast, wealth—whether privately owned or publicly distributed—was never sacred. In origin, property meant nothing more and nothing less than that a person occupied his own place in a certain part of the world, and thus belonged to a political body; that is to say, as the head of a household, he formed the public sphere together with other heads of households. This small privately owned portion of the world was so closely aligned with the family that owned it that to expel a citizen meant not only depriving him of his estate, but actually tearing down his house. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave could in no way replace this property, nor could poverty deprive a head of household of this place in the world and the citizenship that came with it. In earlier times, if a person happened to lose his place, he almost automatically lost his citizenship as well as the protection of the law. The sanctity of private life here resembles the sanctity of the shadowy realms of life and death, which as the beginning and end of mortal existence make man, like all living things, come from darkness and return to the darkness of the underworld. The non-deprived character of the household sphere lay originally in its being the place of life and death, a place that had to be hidden from the public sphere because it contained what human eyes could not pierce and human knowledge could not fathom. It is hidden because people do not know where they come from when they are born, nor where they go after death.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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