It seems to me, Arendt's concepts of labour, work, and action function in the context of the polis and become disfunctional in the context of modernity where the patriarchal family has disintegrated together with the city state, mass culture is dominant, and economies at scale, rather than ethical actions carried out by free citizens, guide politics.
Marx's analysis, on the other hand, seems to be understood by the author himself as a scientific enterprise aiming at uncovering the mechanisms underlying the working of modern capitalism and how capitalism is likely or even bound to unfold in the future given those mechanisms.
While the two projects focus on different realms of reality, they might complement each other in the sense that Marx picks up from where Arendt's more existential ontological examination leaves off (theoretically, not temporally, of course) and zooms into the ballooning dimension of work as it engulfs everything else, not least human creativity and uniqueness, which can hardly emerge without the boundaries of a world where free citizens mutually recognise each other through what they say and do.
As to the issue of how Arendt's model can be used to inform what we could do in the present or how we could rethink a different future, I'm not sure, not least because the city-state of ancient Greece where the 3 dimensions worked in sync is no more and can hardly be restored.
However, Arendt makes us acutely aware of the loss of the realm of freedom and action we're undergoing, that which makes us authentically human, and consequently of the existential risk involved, ie, that of losing our humanity.
She's not telling what we can do, but she's certainly alerting us to the horrors of doing nothing.
Yes, exactly. In The Human Condition, Arendt was originally trying to respond to Marx, wherein all human activity (action, work) is reduced to labor. Her concept of the "rise of the social," which replaces the older private and public realms of the polis, is meant to capture the loss -- and the expansion/ballooning of the economics of consumption beyond the household.
Indeed, the old polis arrangement can't be restored -- we probably wouldn't want it to be, based as it was on women's and slave labor, confined to the household, with only heads of household able to be free to appear in public -- but her analysis does make us aware of what she thought were fundamental conditions of human life and activity that have now been lost. She's admonishing us to think carefully what we're doing.
Can we restore work and the making of a permanent world? Can we restore public realms of political freedom? Or do we give up our ancestral human conditions altogether? It's a mind boggling challenge, but she's made the stakes very clear!
I'm having some difficulty absorbing the ideas you're describing here, Tracy. I think a big part of it is, although I've often told myself that I should dig into Arendt's writing, I'm not sure I'm that motivated to understand the distinctions she's making here between labor, work, and political action. I'm confused how these relate, not to Marx (whose ideas I'm also a bit skeptical about digging deeply into) but to some type of working model of how to deal with the present?
Yes, understood. This post is merely on the level of attempted conceptual clarification. In my class last night we got into why she's doing all this. Her point is to **create and protect spaces of freedom** to protect against totalitarianism, without escaping the fundamental conditions of human life: our biological needs, our fabrication of a durable world into which we're born and for which we continue to make things anew (material, institutional, artistic), and our plurality, which "is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live." These spaces of freedom are at huge risk now because of the way the political tradition has evolved toward an "economization" of everything. According to Arendt, it leads to mass culture, homogenization, ever-expansionist growth (because of nation-states, imperialism, colonialism), and increasingly frenetic production and immediate consumption of non-durables. A really interesting observation for today had to do with "content creation" which I think is also now falling into this expansionist mindset of ever more, ever faster production and consumption! Agreed that THE task is to relate all this to some type of working model of how to deal with the present, especially for education!
Okay, gotcha. I'd like to hear more in this context, I think, about what you're covering in the class. I think that will make your conclusions easier to follow, rather than it feeling like I'm arriving late to a conversation that is already underway. Thanks!
It seems to me, Arendt's concepts of labour, work, and action function in the context of the polis and become disfunctional in the context of modernity where the patriarchal family has disintegrated together with the city state, mass culture is dominant, and economies at scale, rather than ethical actions carried out by free citizens, guide politics.
Marx's analysis, on the other hand, seems to be understood by the author himself as a scientific enterprise aiming at uncovering the mechanisms underlying the working of modern capitalism and how capitalism is likely or even bound to unfold in the future given those mechanisms.
While the two projects focus on different realms of reality, they might complement each other in the sense that Marx picks up from where Arendt's more existential ontological examination leaves off (theoretically, not temporally, of course) and zooms into the ballooning dimension of work as it engulfs everything else, not least human creativity and uniqueness, which can hardly emerge without the boundaries of a world where free citizens mutually recognise each other through what they say and do.
As to the issue of how Arendt's model can be used to inform what we could do in the present or how we could rethink a different future, I'm not sure, not least because the city-state of ancient Greece where the 3 dimensions worked in sync is no more and can hardly be restored.
However, Arendt makes us acutely aware of the loss of the realm of freedom and action we're undergoing, that which makes us authentically human, and consequently of the existential risk involved, ie, that of losing our humanity.
She's not telling what we can do, but she's certainly alerting us to the horrors of doing nothing.
Yes, exactly. In The Human Condition, Arendt was originally trying to respond to Marx, wherein all human activity (action, work) is reduced to labor. Her concept of the "rise of the social," which replaces the older private and public realms of the polis, is meant to capture the loss -- and the expansion/ballooning of the economics of consumption beyond the household.
Indeed, the old polis arrangement can't be restored -- we probably wouldn't want it to be, based as it was on women's and slave labor, confined to the household, with only heads of household able to be free to appear in public -- but her analysis does make us aware of what she thought were fundamental conditions of human life and activity that have now been lost. She's admonishing us to think carefully what we're doing.
Can we restore work and the making of a permanent world? Can we restore public realms of political freedom? Or do we give up our ancestral human conditions altogether? It's a mind boggling challenge, but she's made the stakes very clear!
I'm having some difficulty absorbing the ideas you're describing here, Tracy. I think a big part of it is, although I've often told myself that I should dig into Arendt's writing, I'm not sure I'm that motivated to understand the distinctions she's making here between labor, work, and political action. I'm confused how these relate, not to Marx (whose ideas I'm also a bit skeptical about digging deeply into) but to some type of working model of how to deal with the present?
Yes, understood. This post is merely on the level of attempted conceptual clarification. In my class last night we got into why she's doing all this. Her point is to **create and protect spaces of freedom** to protect against totalitarianism, without escaping the fundamental conditions of human life: our biological needs, our fabrication of a durable world into which we're born and for which we continue to make things anew (material, institutional, artistic), and our plurality, which "is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live." These spaces of freedom are at huge risk now because of the way the political tradition has evolved toward an "economization" of everything. According to Arendt, it leads to mass culture, homogenization, ever-expansionist growth (because of nation-states, imperialism, colonialism), and increasingly frenetic production and immediate consumption of non-durables. A really interesting observation for today had to do with "content creation" which I think is also now falling into this expansionist mindset of ever more, ever faster production and consumption! Agreed that THE task is to relate all this to some type of working model of how to deal with the present, especially for education!
Okay, gotcha. I'd like to hear more in this context, I think, about what you're covering in the class. I think that will make your conclusions easier to follow, rather than it feeling like I'm arriving late to a conversation that is already underway. Thanks!