Gotham Diary:
“They should learn”
27 March 2014
It turned out to be very helpful to read The Human Condition, even though, while I was plowing through it, especially through the outer chapters, which I barely understood (couldn’t see the need for), I worried that I’d made an awful mistake about Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem had shown me a writer of keen intelligence and reportorial diligence, with a seriousness leavened by blow-dart sarcasm. In Between Past and Future, the water was a lot deeper, but the philosophical tone was not too choppy. (I still don’t know how I came to read Between Past and Future “next” — a complete lack of plan is probably the best answer.) I knew that I should have to re-read the book, or at least parts of it, if I were to get my brain’s worth, but the occasional wisecracks refreshed my enthusiasm. Arendt talked about the most important things, but there was a comfortable familiarity in her tone of voice, as though the most important things were the things that we talk about most often.
The Human Condition seemed written by a different Arendt, all work and no play. Worse, it appeared to be an exercise in phenomenological philosophy, a discipline that it would be late in the day for me to be learning, much less assessing! I nearly lost my nerve in the final chapter, which portrays a world in which no one has recovered from the shock of Galileo’s discoveries (the earth really does orbit the sun!) and Descartes’s deflationary ideas. I didn’t recognize this world at all; either Arendt had let herself get carried away or I was somewhat dim. I skimmed a bit, something I never do.
When I went back to read the essay about art and culture in Between Past and Future, however, I saw pretty quickly that The Human Condition had been worth the trouble. I’ll get to that; first, let me take a minute to sketch the aspect of The Human Condition that I found enlightening. The bulk of this work is given over to a painstaking distinction between labor, work, and action. This analysis, although firmly rooted in the Western intellectual tradition from Plato to Marx, is all Arendt’s own. (Well, distinguishing work from labor was her idea, inspired by the fact that all Western languages have two words, such as “labor” and “work,” for activities that the Greeks bundled together.) This breakdown of the “vita activa” provides a very useful tool, I believe, for thinking about what it is that we are doing when we do anything. To put it very simply:
- Labor is drudgery. Marx called it man’s metabolic relation to nature. Labor keeps human beings alive, and, as such, it is endlessly repetitive. Arendt uses the term animal laborans to highlight the point that, although it makes use of faculties that other animals lack, labor is not peculiarly human. Having consigned labor to slaves, the Greeks didn’t give it another thought.
- Work involves means and ends: raw materials, tools, and human effort are consumed, not in the cyclical drudgery of labor, but in the production of lasting objects, which may be either use-objects (a table or a chair — or a tool) or works of art (such as a sculpture). Mastery of the skill (τέχνη) to produce lasting goods transforms the laborer into a worker.
- Action is political action: speech and deeds intended to persuade fellow-citizens.
The purpose of these categories, as I see it, is not to provide pigeonholes for every kind of human activity but to consider the nature of what we do. The range of work has expanded hugely since classical antiquity, and now includes the professions. But the number of workers appears to be set on a downward course, as the effort involved in work is increasingly outsourced to robots and laborers. Already in the mid-Fifties, Arendt was concerned about a world in which labor was no longer required of human beings — leaving them with nothing to do. This development has become vastly more worrisome in the ensuing decades, but few politicians — most of whom seem prudentially opposed to taking any kind of real action — dare to stare at the dawn of this ironic utopia.
Industrial labor, of course, did not exist in the ancient world; it has been a significant social factor for less than three centuries. But it is wise to see factory workers for what they are: laborers, not workers. Most factory work is endlessly repetitive, and in fact much of it regards overseeing the labor of machines. When politicians talk about “upgrading the work force” by teaching “workers” new skills, they are confusing laborers with workers. There is little current demand for a vastly enlarged work force, however — even if most laborers possessed the intelligence required to master genuine skills, a real question. The consolidation of business corporations invariably produces cuts in the demand for labor. The larger the operation, the more efficiently it can produce the same output — “efficiently” meaning “with less human labor.” What is good for investors and a bonanza for CEOs is terrible for ordinary laborers. The industrialization of work is terrible for workers. Arendt muses on “the consumer society,” in which cheaply-made use-objects replace the production of workers. (Think IKEA — unknown to her, of course, but clearly foreseen by her.)
There were no business organizations in the ancient world, and it is almost impossible to know where to place economists, marketers, consultants, human-resources specialists, and the ranks of other now common creatures on Arendt’s schema. Perhaps it is not important to do so, but I believe the case can be made that none of them are doing anything.
***
Art and culture. You think that’s bad, get a load of this: “The Crisis in Culture: its Social and its Political Significance.” Makes you look round for a fainting couch, doesn’t it. When it came to titles, the Fifties were fairly humorless.
The essay is so stuffed with ideas that I’m going to do little more than mention it now. There are two parts. The first considers the manifestations of “mass culture.” The second explores the relation between artists and politicians and concludes that aesthetic taste is a political faculty. Yes! Strange as it sounds, Arendt makes her case. I liked it the first time, but having ground my nose into the detail of The Human Condition, I love it now. It is tempting to type out the last three paragraphs, although they’re very long, but I don’t think that they can be excerpted — they constitute a grande finale that doesn’t make much sense (just a lot of noise) if you haven’t heard the symphony.
There is, however, one moderately-sized idea that I’d like to pass on, and that is Arendt’s discussion of culture. She does this authoritatively, by locating Cicero as the first person to speak of it and to speculate on “the cultivated mind.” Arendt shows that Cicero was building a metaphor on the field of agriculture, that the cultivated mind was for him the correlative of a well-worked farm. Productive farms don’t yield crops overnight or without a great deal of attentive care; nor do minds yield beautiful or useful ideas without intelligent management. If there is any idea in the world that I consider fundamental, elemental, paramount and core, it is this. I wrote that it is moderately-sized so as not to daunt, but it is the most important idea ever.
I learned it myself, years ago, from gardening. I knew nothing about gardening when we bought our house in the country, and much of what I taught myself could not be implemented amidst heavily-wooded properties. But what I was really teaching myself was how to build a model for growing a mind. Arendt has helped me to articulate this model, and I feel more confident than ever about insisting that the uncultivated mind is an outrageous waste of humanity that anyone possessed of a college degree ought to be ashamed of. (At the very least, demand a tuition refund!)
Have you seen Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt yet? Most of it is in German, but my favorite moment is in English. Arendt is going over Eichmann in Jerusalem with New Yorker editor William Shawn. It goes something like this.
Shawn (pediatrically): I see, Miss Arendt, that you begin with an epigraph in Greek. Now, many of our readers don’t read Greek.
Arendt (briskly): They should learn.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who dismisses Arendt’s retort as “arrogant” is no better than a laborer — and not necessarily a human laborer, either.