Finished The Human Condition

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I finished Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition this morning.

A passage from the last chapter was especially significant, because it hit several of my own core themes from the last several years (which were, in fact, indirectly implanted by Arendt herself, via Richard J. Bernstein):

  • That humanity is most fully actualized when automatic behavior is transcended in the conscious decision to think, deliberate with others, and  act intentionally.
  • Seeing human life from an exterior position rather than an interior point has ethical consequences.
  • That behaviorism wishes to understand humanity as that which is observed from outside (empirically observed, like science observes its objects), but that only human beings restricting themselves biological-social automatism can be understood in this manner. Fully actualized human behavior requires speech, and it has the power to change the worldview of the “observer”, so that theoretical frameworks and research methods are in question, and the observer is deprived his uninvolved, neutral, outsider perspective.
  • That science is significant as a cultural phenomenon, an extremely effective method of coming to agreements, but that these agreements are not the only kind of agreements possible between human beings, nor are they the highest. (However, they are the easiest agreements to reach, and in a world starving for agreement and its attendant stability, this value can eclipse all others combined. And in fact it has, even in spheres of human activity that call for higher forms of agreement, namely in education, in government and in business. Business defines its goals strictly in terms of quantitative profits largely because this is the easiest standard to set and the hardest to argue against. It makes people feel all hard-nosed and tough to assert it against their inclinations, but in fact this is a cheap and easy move, and it is not a heroic sacrifice, but a cowardly self-betrayal.)
  • That much of commercial life is dominated by behaviorist psychology, and the scientific mode of agreement, both of which eliminate the “revelatory character of action” (which, in Arendt’s definition, includes speech). (“Revelatory character” is antithetical to predictability. Whether predictability is a defense against revelation, or suppression of revelation is a means to predictability, the need to predict and the desire to not be surprised are two of the most powerful, unquestioned and universal corporate values. (This twofold force is singlehandedly responsible for that repellent quality we call “corporateness” (and constitutes the single most obstinate impediment to innovation, which is simultaneously celebrated in word and undermined in action in most groups.)))

Here’s the passage:

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Influence over reverence

Synesis

Quantity of reverence matters less than quality of influence.

To revere someone excessively — to make a person an object of worship instead of a teacher with a relevant, practical and surprising lesson — can even be a defense against influence.

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It is easy to revere something of one’s own invention, but the kinds of disruptive revelations a teacher can impart to a willing student cannot be invented by any individual.

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Idolatry displaces involved relationship with an infinite subject with a relationship to a finite object. An object relationship is distanced, defined and possessable.

(In Buberian terms, idolatry relates to Thou in I-It terms.)

A new way to see?

Ideas

The following is not  an argument. It is nothing more than a way to see things, which can be entertained, tried on or ignored. One person can compel another to accept certain facts through use of logic and empirical evidence (under threat of excommunication from the world of the reasonable), but understanding of worldviews is entirely different. Here there is no compulsion, only invitation. Invitations can always be declined (otherwise it is a disguised summons)…

Continue reading A new way to see? →

Embracing blame

Ethics

An active, blameworthy life is worth more than a life dominated by the avoidance of blame.

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Anaximander’s Maxim:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

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Arendt, from The Human Condition:

… Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relation- ships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

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Humanity is a choice. Dignity acknowledges this choice; respect actualizes it.

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To be human is to resist automatism. Automatism comes from two sides, 1) the artificial (the demands of life in society) and 2) from the natural (the impulses of our own animal nature). Humanity lives between.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was both artificial and natural. The social context was artificial, but it all played out naturally.

Solitude

Metaphysics

Solitary confinement deprives a human being of all intentional objects. The continua of mind, of time, of cosmos are truncated to I, now and here, which, despite all narcissistic new age notions are perfectly meaningless apart from the being beyond them. Life is lived in reference to the metaphysical, through the medium of world.

Infinity

Ethics

The infinite is not definable, for the very reason that once something is defined it has been bestowed edges and separated out from infinity.

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One way to indicate infinity is to create a set that includes every possible discrete — defined — entity. This indication, however, misleads, because it falsely implies that zero precedes infinity and that infinity is somehow built upon it. But zero implies the absence of something. A something must be defined in order to exist as something other than a stretch of infinity — and in order for there to be a quantity of something, that something must understood as an instance of a category of which there can be instances. Only after Zero is a third-order entity derived from abstractions and subdivisions of infinity, not a metaphysical starting-point.

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To relate to that which is finite as if it is infinite, or to relate to that which is infinite as if it is finite may very well be the root of evil. Two points to consider: 1) The human mind can only possess and master that which is finite. 2) Every human being contains something of one’s own, possessed by no other human being, and therefore, in respect to another, contains a speck of infinity.

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Other human beings are unacceptable to us to the degree they are alien to us. The infinite contains everything that is us and everything that is alien and it holds them together in an inescapable but deniable unity.

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Levinas: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum — the adequate idea.”

Chord: mind over matter

Chord, Metaphysics

Some quotes on the theme of divorce of mind and matter:

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Arthur Eddington:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

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Hannah Arendt:

…While world alienation determined the course and the development of modern society, earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science. Under the sign of earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural science, so radically changed its innermost content that one may doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science existed at all. This is perhaps clearest in the development of the new science’s most important mental instrument, the devices of modern algebra, by which mathematics “succeeded in freeing itself from the shackles of spatiality,” that is, from geometry, which, as the name indicates, depends on terrestrial measures and measurements. Modern mathematics freed man from the shackles of earth-bound experience and his power of cognition from the shackles of finitude.

The decisive point here is not that men at the beginning of the modern age still believed with Plato in the mathematical structure of the universe nor that, one generation later, they believed with Descartes that certain knowledge is possible only where the mind plays with its own forms and formulas. What is decisive is the entirely un-Platonic subjection of geometry to algebraic treatment, which discloses the modern ideal of reducing terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical symbols. … Yet even more significant than this possibility — to reckon with entities which could not be “seen” by the eye of the mind — was the fact that the new mental instrument, in this respect even newer and more significant than all the scientific tools it helped to devise, opened the way for an altogether novel mode of meeting and approaching nature in the experiment. In the experiment man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, he placed nature under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.

…With the rise of modernity, mathematics does not simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at all. It is no longer the beginning of philosophy, of the “science” of Being in its true appearance, but becomes instead the science of the structure of the human mind.

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Jorge Luis Borges:

Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth: I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

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If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

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A face is a gate.

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It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?

Proud not to be right

Ethics, Pragmatism

It is easy to see how we are right. It is much more challenging — morally and intellectually — to see how we are not right, or less right than we wish to be.

To see ourselves as right, all we have to do is point our eyes at things, take them in passively in our usual way, and see what we always see.

To see where we are not fully right (or where others who disagree with us are right), we have to attempt to see in new, less familiar ways. To be sure, it requires a certain degree of ingenuity and inventiveness to discover new possibilities of understanding. And of course, it requires humility — preferring being right to merely feeling right. But most of all it requires courage. One must endure temporary but intensely uncomfortable strangeness, resist the constant urge to turn back and retreat to the familiar, and persevere until understanding has been reached. Only through this kind of struggle can a person make considered comparisons based on real insight that addresses an audience wider than those who already see as we see and ditto our opinions.

But it is worth it. The reward is growth and humanity.

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People who already know everything are unable to learn. To them, that of which they ignorant is nonexistent. Why would we learn about things that are nonexistent and unreal?

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Few of us believe we know every fact in the world. We can sense the gaps in our knowledge, and are open to filling those gaps with new information, if that information is understood to be relevant.

The same is true for skills. Most of us can see where are practical lives can be improved by learning new skills. We are open to learning new methods or techniques for solving problems we face, if these methods are understood to be important to our success.

What is much rarer is seeing the need for improving one’s own worldview. The reason? Because one’s worldview determines what is perceived as relevant and important. From the perspective of an isolated individual (whether of an individual or a like-minded collective), one’s worldview is the world itself. It requires belief in intelligence beyond one’s own sphere of intelligibility to see any reason to even consider worldview.

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Most people equate education with the acquiring of facts and skills. Through this process we prepare students for the realities of life. The need for this is well-established, and what else is there to learn?

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If you think about the worst problems facing humankind, what is their nature? Are they a matter of lacking facts? Or lacking people with the technical skills to resolve them? Or are they the result of people who have no idea how to come to a mutual understanding?

Respect, dignity and honor

Ideas

Respect means to value another person’s worldview.

Dignity is the status of deserving respect.

Honor is the cultivation of dignity and the mutuality of respect.

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A pluralist respects differently from a monist.

For a monist, the essence of respect lies in the uniformity of worldviews, in agreement on what the truth is. Truth is the intellectual representation of reality, and the intellect is entirely adequate to the task of understanding that of reality a human being ought to know.

For a pluralist, the essence of respect lies in the differences between worldviews, and of the creative potential in overcoming difference in pursuit of truth. Truth is the human relationship to reality, and pursuit of truth is the attempt of a finite being to relate as fully as possible to reality, which is infinite, and not reducible to the finite terms of the intellect.

Both monism and pluralism are self-evident and self-consistent by their own terms.

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Both monists and pluralists seek unity, but the mode of unity differs.

The monist looks for oneness based in uniformity of ultimate substance. That substance might be the smallest unit of substance, of which everything is composed. Or the substance might be the greatest unit of substance, of which everything is a part. But finally, the self and other (that which is not the self) is made equivalent through the sharing of a single nature. Monism is homotropic.

The pluralist looks for oneness based on integration. The integration consists of establishing various kinds of relationship (material, practical, intellectual, etc.) between the self and other, and conscious participation in that which exceeds the self. The other can be another self, or the material world, or past or future, but the pluralist seeks to extend its participation in the world by seeking otherness and modes of relationship and participation with that otherness. Pluralism is heterotropic.

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A type of pluralist exists who stresses tolerance over relationship, and who seeks to hermetically preserve its sense of individual unity by simultaneously acknowledging the fact of otherness and discounting the practical importance of otherness. Also, a type of monists exists who asserts a preexisting or preordained unity, but who becomes intensely agitated if anything appears to contradict his conception of this unity by demonstrating inexplicable and undeniable otherness. These types pursue elimination of difference (either through withdrawing from difference or destroying it).

Analytic dialectic and synthetic dialectic

Ideas, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

Two forms of dialectic can be distinguished. They have different characters and different trajectories.

Synthetic dialectic moves toward monism.

  • Synthetic dialectic is reductionistic.
  • Its method  is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which preserve irrelevant, complicating and inhibiting distinctions.
  • Synthetic dialectic has a passionate and destructive character. It tends to destroy complex structure and release energy.
  • Synthetic dialectic tends to decrease the total number of categories as well as the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting these categories, while increasing the scope of the remaining categories.
  • Synthetic dialectic is experienced as liberation from de-centering illusions — oppressive notions that alienate a person from himself, prevent him from living according to his own experience and judgment, and which oblige him to live according to the experiences and judgments of others.
  • The thrust of synthetic dialectic is to detect the irrelevance and invalidity of alien claims and to reject them on that basis.
  • Whether idealistic or materialistic, synthetic dialectic attempts to finally subsume all being under a single, universal ontological category, or a monad. This category is understood to be basis of truth. Thinking from other bases is at best provisional and at worst, false.
  • Synthetic dialectic can appear absolutist, and often succumbs to absolutism.
  • Synthetic dialectic strengthens the will, but weakens the intellect.
  • Synthetic dialectic synthesizes — “puts together” — broader, more universal categories. Fewer and fewer particularities are perceived in their particularity, but are taken as generalities, types or manifested principles and are treated according to their abstract intelligible character. Anomalous particularities are disregarded as irrelevant.

Analytic dialectic moves toward pluralism.

  • Analytic dialectic is antireductionistic.
  • Its method is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which project unnecessary, simplistic and unproductive equivalencies.
  • Analytic dialectic has a moderating and constructive character. It tends to consume energy generating structures of increasing complexity.
  • Analytic dialectic tends to increase the total number of categories and the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting them, while decreasing the scope of each categories.
  • Analytic dialectic discovers diversity within apparent equivalency. It looks for failures to detect relevant distinctions made by other people, due to the crudeness of one’s own schema. It discovers both new distinctions and new, valid, obligating claims from others.
  • The thrust of analytic dialectic is to detect the relevance and validity of alien claims and to affirm them.
  • Analytic dialectic attempts to understand multiple, overlapping ontological existences in all being, which permits the understanding of diverse, valid and finite perspectives. The ground of being is understood as an engulfing infinity, to which human beings relate in finite terms.
  • Analytic dialectic can appear relativist, and often succumbs to relativism.
  • Analytic dialectic strengthens the intellect, but weakens the will.
  • Analytic dialectic scrutinizes broad, universal categories and analyzes — “loosens them up” — into finer categorizations more capable of doing justice to “particularities in their particularity”. Particularities are still treated according to their intelligible character, but intelligibility is obligated to answer to the truth of particulars and to accommodate them.

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Both forms of dialectic are necessary to human life. Neither is intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. The question is one of context and dynamic balance.

Novel imperfections

Ideas

Not only is perfection unattainable, even its value is questionable. A better attainment is the discovery of fresh imperfections that demand our attention: compelling problems.

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Perfection is an ideal which sets a goal for a pursuit. The locus of value is in the activity itself — the pursuit — not in final attainment of the ideal.

The futility of the pursuit of perfection is no argument against perfection, but a guarantee of pursuit’s permanent abundance.

If we fail to recognize this futility as a guarantee, and treat perfection as a chimera to ignore, life will devolve into slack laziness or hectic duty.

A meaningful life is spent in faithful and futile pursue pursuit of unattainable goals.

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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

— Rumi

How’s the water, boys?

Ideas

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

This story has a lot of philosophical truth to it, but it lacks psychological truth. Here’s how I see it playing out:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish answer ‘It’s great, thank you.’

Five years later they’ll say ‘Water? We don’t believe in that crap!’ or they’ll say ‘Hell, yeah! Water!’

Twenty years later they’ll know what water is or they won’t. Either way they will say ‘It’s great, thank you.’

Observations

Ideas

Nietzsche: “What Homer says of it is so true and so terrible it pierces us through: ‘the muse loved him dearly and gave to him good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet song.’ — This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good AND evil, that is her way of loving dearly! And everyone will interpret for himself why it is we thinkers and poets have to give our eyes in exchange.”

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The modernist fantasy is this: one day the world will be understood completely, exclusively through empirical observation and mathematical modeling. The project is set, all that is required is persistence and ingenuity. We will experience scientific revolutions (lowercase), but the Scientific Revolution (uppercase) is the last philosophical revolution humanity will ever undergo. Philosophy is spoken. Science has eyes only for the observable.

Modernity wishes the optical to not only dominate, but silence the word, by eliminating the need for it. If you protest this tendency, a modernist will see exactly what you’re doing, and will not listen to you. Only those subject to subjectivity object to objectivity.

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Heraclitus: “Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.”

Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”

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Subjectivity speaks and listens.

Objectivity sees and observes.

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James Spradley observed something interesting. When a researcher surveys research participants, the researcher doesn’t get answers to questions, but observable behaviors — responses to conditions.

Whatever the participant says during the survey is unanalyzable noise in the experiment.

For social science to be scientific, it must silence its subject and make it objective.

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Rilke: “A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”

Arendtian Apple fanboy apologetics

Ideas

Hannah Arendt , from the Human Condition:

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.

. . .

Viewed as part of the world, the products of work — and not the products of labor — guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all. It is within this world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our bodies and produced by its laboring, but without stability of their own, these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear in an environment of things that are not consumed but used, and to which, as we use them, we become used and accustomed. As such, they give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men. What consumer goods are for the life of man, use objects are for his world. From them, consumer goods derive their thing-character; and language, which does not permit the laboring activity to form anything so solid and non-verbal as a noun, hints at the strong probability that we would not even know what a thing is without having before us “the work of our hands.”

Distinguished from both, consumer goods and use objects, there are finally the “products” of action and speech, which together constitute the fabric of human relationships and affairs. Left to themselves, they lack not only the tangibility of other things, but are even less durable and more futile than what we produce for consumption. Their reality depends entirely upon human plurality, upon the constant presence of others who can see and hear and therefore testify to their existence. Acting and speaking are still outward manifestations of human life, which knows only one activity that, though related to the exterior world in many ways, is not necessarily manifest in it and needs neither to be seen nor heard nor used nor consumed in order to be real: the activity of thought. Viewed, however, in their worldliness, action, speech, and thought have much more in common than any one of them has with work or labor. They themselves do not “produce,” bring forth anything, they are as futile as life itself. In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things — into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfilment and which makes it, indeed, as the Greeks held, the mother of all arts, the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. The materialization they have to undergo in order to remain in the world at all is paid for in that always the “dead letter” replaces something which grew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed as the “living spirit.” They must pay this price because they themselves are of an entirely unworldly nature and therefore need the help of an activity of an altogether different nature; they depend for their reality and materialization upon the same workmanship that builds the other things in the human artifice.

The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors. Human life, in so far as it is world-building, is engaged in a constant process of reification, and the degree of worldliness of produced things, which all together form the human artifice, depends upon their greater or lesser permanence in the world itself.

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An insight that has inspired me: The world of commerce is the site where action (in Arendt’s sense) occurs today, and it manifests as brand.

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Some customers only want to consume and purchase products, to sustain their own labor and work activities.

A growing number of consumers, however, seem to be looking for something beyond mere sustenance and mere function. They respond to super-functional meaning, which corresponds to Arendtian action, and the vehicle for this meaning is brand.

This does not mean that brand is always the vehicle for action, any more than words are always meaningful. Brand can be — and in the hands of functionalists, usually is — merely a system of identification, a mnemonic device, or a functionalist promise. However, insofar as action occurs in business, it manifests as brand.

And because commerce has overgrown culture to the extent it has, what used to take place outside of commerce, now takes place within it. For this reason, the role of brand in our culture is changing.

So far, Apple is the purest example of what many seem to want brand to become, and it is still unique. This doesn’t stop people from trying to present it as exemplary of something already common — because (in the case of those who love it) we want it to be a norm, or (in the case of the apprehensive) we want to minimize its importance, or (in the case of the uncomprehending functionalist) we just can’t detect any important difference.

But, regardless, Apple is qualitatively in a class apart from Sony, Virgin, BMW and Microsoft.

And Apple is also in a class apart from philanthropic brands like Tom’s Shoes, Whole Foods, or Ben & Jerry’s. Those brands might “try to make the world a better place” but they seek to benefit humanity on the plane of labor and work.

What makes Apple far more interesting and inspiring is that Apple envisaged a world reordered to accommodate super-functional considerations. And it manifested this vision through superior function.*

Far more significant than the concrete accomplishment, however, was the vision that led Apple to see value in usability in a time when everyone preached “learning to be computer literate” with DOS and CP/M, etc. Apple believed technology exists for the sake of humanity and ought to accommodate itself to humanity, and not the other way around. And coming out of the 20th century where technology and economics and even history just happened to humanity, without humanity choosing any of it, this is a revolutionary idea, and even if you only feel the idea and cannot articulate it, the idea inspires passion.**

Apple makes a promise, but it isn’t the sort of functional promise we usually think of when we think of promises: Apple promises a world beyond functionalism, a world that includes technology but places within the broader context of the liberal arts.

*

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NOTES:

* Apple’s usability — its functional superiority — has always tempted functionalists to reduce Apple’s success to superior usability. Then these same functionalists proceed to criticize Apple in functionalist terms, pointing out Apple’s myriad functional shortcomings, and how fanboys are clearly fanatics for denying the importance of these problems. And it doesn’t help at all that the fanboys don’t really know how to say what it is they love about Apple, and that they themselves often try to explain it in functionalist terms.

* “…this is a revolutionary idea, and even if you only feel the idea and cannot articulate it, the idea inspires passion.” — Contrary to the attitude of romantics (who want to claim the domain of brand for the heart and gut, and leave the mind out of it)  this is how brand works: brand is an idea that is palpably real to a person, even prior to articulation.