Babies, Things, Wealth, Deeds, Words — or Nothing?

What will you leave behind? What will you show for your life?

“Take only pictures. Leave only footprints.”

So goes the admonition of rangers to wanderers in the nation’s parks. Don’t take anything that doesn’t belong to you. Don’t leave anything behind, except the barest trace of your having been there, an ephemera that will disappear with the next rain, wind, falling leaves, or passersby scuffling along the same path.

Even the picture you chose to share on social media or tape in a family scrapbook, if it’s not accompanied by words, by description or explanation — like so many faded pictures of long dead babies left unlabeled and undated in a box handed down to me from my grandmother — will mean little to your descendants. So many tiny lost souls merited at best a barely marked grave, a scant line in a church register, a hasty portrait inherited by a distant future relative in a box.

What will you leave behind, you who are old enough now to read this, having survived your one month anniversary and infant photo?

Hannah Arendt, in the opening prologue and first chapter of The Human Condition, presents the reader with various sets of options, derived from pre-Socratic or post-Socratic political thought, or from medieval Christendom, for the forms of life one might live. For most of history, if a person lived beyond the first few days or weeks of life, he or she lived one form of life. There was no choice. No one combined forms at different life stages. Most of us were the 99%, and even the 1% had little or no choice.

This is not the case today. What form of life will you choose right now?

Arendt draws on Aristotle to present a useful taxonomy of six basic forms of life. First there are three un-free ways of living. At base there is the form of the slave, who labors for food and to keep the species alive. If lucky, a slave will have children to carry on the race, just as animals do. He otherwise has no freedom in status, inviolability of body (he could be “violated” at any time through murder or rape), no economic freedom, no freedom of movement.

Next there are craftspeople, banausic workers, who make things. They have minimal status and bodily inviolability and no or little economic freedom since the work is under contract, and they probably cannot leave the workshop. Then there are the merchants, who make money through trade. In ancient Greece, merchants were foreigners in the city, non-citizens, again possessing minimal status even amidst great wealth, operating by the city’s permission, still constrained by trade agreements, but with relative freedom to move about.

Real freedom is reserved for those having to do with beauty. First of all, there are the pleasure-seekers, the hedonists, those who consume beauty, whether through food or art or sexual lust. Next there is the class of people who produce beauty, especially the creators of beautiful words and beautiful deeds, the poets and politicians. The politicians especially are of form of life: bios politikos, Arendt’s favorites. Finally, there are the contemplators of beauty, which reveals itself as Truth. These happy few live the bios theoretikos.

Come medieval Christian times, Aristotle’s bios politikos is renamed to the Latin vita activa, the active life. Those who contemplate mysteries via wordless prayer, quietly — quintessentially the monastics — follow instead the vita contemplativa. Medieval politics was reduced pejoratively to active life, noisy life. In dire times, politics was thought to be a largely thankless yet necessary activity performed by kings and nobles to keep the law and order “of the age” (secular) — so that the genuine worthies, contemplatives, could visage eternal Truth on high.

Arendt rebelliously focuses her book on the vita activa and the three activities that constitute the condition (not the “nature”) of human beings, as given by earth to life. Should humans somehow escape the earth, we would still be human, but our conditions as given would no longer apply.

These three activities are:

1. labor, to maintain the life of the species through the struggle for food and the resources necessary to live at all;

2. work, to construct the things of the world — and to run the markets through which the goods of workshops can be traded — a world in which individuals can create and interact with one another, sitting around the table, as it were; and

3. action, the activity of a diverse multitude of humans exchanging words and performing deeds, possibly achieving a degree of immortality lauded by poets or judged by historians.

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So what will it be for you?

Will you leave behind children to perpetuate the human race, spending your time laboring to support a family?

Will you leave behind works — or wealth — having produced artificial (artfully-contrived) things to make up a world, a place that might, if you create well, outlast your mortal lifespan?

Will you be driven by pleasure in consumption, taking in beauty but leaving nothing behind — except possibly a footprint in a forest, or a picture in a scrapbook?

Will you perform words or deeds, politically enacted, possibly remembered, possibly lauded, potentially achieving a small post-bodily immortality?

Or will you come and go quietly, silently, wordlessly, contemplating (if you’re so blessed) a bit of eternal Beauty or Truth — genuinely leaving nothing behind, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” escaping the human condition altogether from this veil of tears designed to lead elsewhere?

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Or… will you question the taxonomy itself? Will you use the power inherent in your natality — having survived to an age to read this — to begin something altogether new in a new age? Could you be a distinct human in multiplicity, thinking what we are doing, questioning Arendt herself?

Traditions evolve, histories can be broken. Fragments can be re-constellated, like stars reconfigured, to show novel shapes.

Arendt thinks that Marx and Nietzsche turned the world upside down and re-ordered the classical hierarchy, re-valuing all values. After them — and after the shattering of totalitarianism in the 20th century — history broke. There can be no further continuity with the past. A few remembered fragments can be retrospectively gathered.

We are, of course, left with the same kinds of questions posed about how to live, but with no clear ordering, no ancient or medieval sureties. In the great reversal, perhaps we are called to buck the opposite trend from the ancient one. If Marx re-ordered all human activity to labor, to survival, if capitalist work and markets have turned classical aristocracy on its head, what might come next? A few isolated contemplatives remain, but they are wont to escape, especially from a place increasingly inhospitable, from a world that no longer supports them, that no longer accords them glory or honor.

What next?

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Or… perhaps you might desire to escape from the confines and givenness of earth altogether, the human condition as such. That option is increasingly possible, too.

In 1957, a satellite was launched into orbit, says Arendt in the very first line of her book, changing everything. In 1969, a human walked on the moon, a feat not repeated in the decades since — although Elon is trying. Perhaps a new form of escape is soon available?

In the late 1950’s, when Arendt was writing, human labor in factories was being replaced by manufacturing machines. Today, it’s robots and AI. What is becoming of labor, the growing of food, or of work, the making of things, as life options?

What about the invention of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the human splitting of the atom and the unleashing of energies and destructive powers previously unimaginable, to the tune of a human ability to destroy the planet. If not nuclear power, then climate power, and the power to wreck planetary biodiversity through mass extinction on land and sea. Humans can now destroy the very earth that gives us and all other life forms sustenance and perpetuity.

Tackling Arendt’s thinking about the human condition instructs us for the task before us qua humans in a new era. Whatever we are, whoever we are, in large part constantly re-making ourselves, now at least we are often able to choose a desired form of life. We are no longer the 99%.

How are we going to be good humans in the Anthropocene?

Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash