9.
Thus far, with her nomination of a hierarchy of human activities and their
corresponding conditions, of life, worldliness and plurality, Arendt has
supplied an incomplete interpretative framework for an analysis of modern
experience. Nevertheless, she has at least pointed out that the activities of
labour, work and action constitute a human world. Each activity has an
indispensable role to play in human life. Labour sustains life and its
reproduction, work forms a human artifice that becomes a home for man and
action makes life meaningful and constitutes a sense of personal identity and
distinction. Arendt also demonstrates the interdependence of these activities:
each presupposes the other and makes the others possible. Thus without labour
and its reproduction of life neither work nor action would be possible, while
work and action provides a world and the meaning that makes human life both
secure and something distinguishable from the mere circularity of biological
processes. Arendt even allows that it is possible for the higher activities to
assume the characteristics of lower ones if they become routine as when they
are annexed to the domain of jobholding. Despite this interdependence, Arendt
still wants to affirm the autonomy of each distinctive activity. To confuse
these specific activities or to think that the standards and aims of one can
simply be applied to the other in the way that modern political philosophy has
done is to invite disaster. Modernity threatens to take this road by
translating the criteria of labour into the domain of work and the criteria of
work as a sort of making into the domain of action and politics. Finally,
Arendt claims that while all these activities are vital, they are not equally
human in a value sense. For her, the respective activities are hierarchically
ordered in terms of human value by the degree of freedom involved and the sense
of a human reality confirmed by them. Politics is the most free because it
transcends both the necessity and violence that characterises the household and
the domain of fabrication.
10.
Arendt’s phenomenology of the fundamental activities of the human condition is not just a hierarchy of practices but
also of spaces. Human activities are not usually undertaken indiscriminately
without due regard to their appropriate settings. To fill out this dimension of
her phenomenology she returns to the classical world. The ancient life-world
was divided between the oikos
(household) and the polis (public sphere).
Despite their desire to escape from the burdens of political life, neither
Plato nor Aristotle doubted the distinction between the private and the public
and the subordination of the former to the latter (HC37). For the Greeks the
realm of the household, the sphere of the privacy, was one of privation. A life
confined to the household is not a fully human life: it does not allow for the
full realisation of human capacities. The household is not a domain of
equality, nor therefore do its permanent inhabitants have the opportunity to
demonstrate their excellence either in speech or action. This explains why the
private was held in contempt. The household is a natural community born of the
necessity to reproduce life. Men overseer the reproduction of the material
means of life while women are preoccupied with the reproduction of the species
(HC30). Yet, the very necessity of this reproduction reinforces the futile
circularity of the process that ends only in human mortality. This sense of
futility is a burden that gives rise to an institutional sphere in which men
can excel in a fully human manner by striving for immortality. However, release
from the cares of necessity presupposes that women and slaves will attend to
the necessities of life. Necessity can only be mastered by violence. The use of
violence in the mastery of necessity explains why the household is a
pre-political sphere of inequality, why its relations were not based on
equality or justice. The private sphere has no law or justice because here the
head of the house exercises an absolute total authority. Arendt argues that it
was only long after the collapse of the ancient polis and the feudal expansion
of the household to encompass the entire state that justice entered the realm
of the private (HC34). This, however, is an important concession because it
demonstrates that Arendt acknowledges the essential historicity of these
distinctions and their content.
11.
While the domain of the household has a subordinate position in relation to
public life, it still fulfils an absolutely vital societal function. The
household was a sacred place where natural events like birth and death,
impenetrable to human knowledge, were appropriately hidden (HC62). The fact
that without a household the individual could neither be a citizen nor
participate in the affairs of the world reinforced this sanctity (HC29). In the
classical world the oikos and polis exist in a relation of
complementarity: the former was the indispensible precondition for latter, not
just in terms of functional dependence, but even in terms of meaningfulness.
The very idea of freedom is meaningless without a realm of necessity. The
exposure of the public also requires a sphere of retreat, of renewal and
nurture. However, the obvious complementarity of the private and the public in
the classical world does not exclude the already mentioned reality of their
tension and opposition. The rise of the polis was at the expense of the family
and the private sphere; all organised units based on kinship had to be
dissolved to make way for the polis
(HC24). This opposition leads to the value hierarchy already noted. The Greek
notion of man as zoon politikon
implies much more than the idea that humanity is a social animal. More than a
natural association imposed by biological need (HC 24), this idea presupposed
the capacity for political organisation as a second artificial realm of human
affairs, excluding the useful and necessary, devoted purely to excellence and
immortality.
12.
Arendt views the household as an indispensible foundation, of both inescapable
necessity and futility. Its opposite is the glorious classical polis. In her
beautiful, if one-sided phrase, the polis was "organised
remembrance". Here the futility of the biological life process was
challenged by a collective quest for freedom and transcendence. Great deeds and
words were immortalised in collective memory. Note Arendt’s emphasis on
transcendence: it reinforces her view that humanity cannot be exhaustively
defined, that humanity by definition signifies a new beginning and cannot abide
unfreedom. The quest for immortality, overcoming the futility and necessity of
mortal life, is the deepest societal motive of the institution of the polis (HC
56). To leave the household also demands courage (HC36). The polis required a
devotion of one's life to public affairs, the courage to leave behind comfort
and pleasure, the potential sacrifice of life itself to a collective enterprise
and fellowship. The "good life" was not only "better" and
more "noble" than ordinary life: it was qualitatively different. It
signified the mastery of the necessities of biological life expressed in the
innate urge to survive (HC37). This motive of triumph over necessity gives
shape to the defining qualities of public life. Arendt understands these as
publicity and commonality (HC50-52). In the polis, citizens appear amongst
others. Far from this appearance being the mark of an inferior reality bound up
with transience, she views it as the only way of securing reality. We have
already seen in her analysis of the atomisation of the mass individual that the
loss of normal social relations leads to the diminution of common sense and
disorientation. Our feeling for reality, she argues, depends upon appearance
for others. This generates common sense by processes of recognition, discussion
and confirmation (HC51). A world apparent to all is also a common world. Unlike
our privately owned place, we share the public realm with other citizens. This
provides the public realm with a pronounced "objectivity" that
consists in the fact that this single shared domain is exposed to a multitude
of perspectives (HC57). The common world presents itself simultaneously from
innumerable perspectives. Far from imposing its own uniform vision, Arendt
views the public realm as a guarantor of human plurality. Ideally in this realm
all dimensions and aspects of common concerns get a full airing. The bourgeois
retreat from the public into the private world deprives individuals of multiple
perspectives and entraps them in the singular vision of their own subjectivity
(HC58). To reinforce this perspective Arendt mentions that while the modern
notion of intimacy signifies its discovery of the intensity of private feelings,
we have bought this at the expense of the assurance of reality (HC50).
13.
Multiple perspectives are not simply a consequence of natural difference but a
product of the artificial world that is public space. Natural diversity in the
space of the family does not give rise to pluralism. Only a structure of human
artifice can create a space that both relates and separates. The polis as
institution had a power to bring together, to relate and separate. The polis
knew only equals (HC32); citizens knew neither ruler nor ruled. The Greeks
spoke of “isonomy”. Common concerns allowed them to relate to one another,
while their equal status separated them sufficiently to give full scope to
different perspectives. Arendt highlights the gulf separating this vision of equality
from our own. The modern concept of equality is bound to the notion of justice,
as for example "equality of opportunity". The classical notion of
equality was an expression of the aspiration to freedom. The polis rested on
inequality. The great majority of the population were confined to the
necessities of the household and excluded from the public realm (HC32). In the
ancient world, equality was no threat to freedom as it was to become for
Tocqueville. The equality of the polis presupposed an agonal competitive spirit amongst citizens. They struggled amongst
themselves to demonstrate excellence and earn immortal glory (HC41). Diversity
of opinions produces not only multiple perspectives but also rigorous
competition for public recognition and ascendency. As Arendt puts it ‘it was
for the sake of this chance to become individuals that citizens were prepared
to bear the burdens of public affairs’ (HC41). However, commonality is not
reducible to multiple gazes trained on the same object. The condition of this
convergence is the existence of a public space and, one might add, public
identity. You will recall that the activity of work is tied to the human condition of worldliness.
However, this worldliness is not only a matter of the creation of an artificial
world that survives its creators-- public space and buildings--but also
involves a political-cultural worldliness in the sense of collective commitments, promises and a spiritual
world transcending the individual. Arendt finds the political expression of
this worldliness in the citizen's subordination of their own life to that of
the community and public affairs. The Greek citizen entered a world that
existed before he was born and would survive long after him. The very meaning
of a project whose highest aspiration was immortality presupposed permanence in
shape of institutionalised commitments and memory. Here permanence means more
than monuments, buildings and spaces: it means the cross-generational
transmission of memory and the preservation of a fragile domain of action. This
sense of involvement in a collective communal enterprise based on continuity
and durability reinforced that sense of commonality that, for Arendt, is a
striking feature of the public realm.
14.
With this initial outline of Arendt's phenomenology of human activities and a
brief elaboration of the principal spaces in which they occur, we are now in a
better position to explain how all this serves her contemporary critical
purposes of "thinking what we are doing" and providing the foundations
of a new political theory. This reconstruction is far from innocent. It is
shaped by a contemporary diagnosis of modern problems. Already I have mentioned
certain decisive historical shifts that have transformed our modern
understanding of the relation between public and private. For Arendt, the most
fundamental change is what she calls “the rise of the social”. This development
is primarily responsible for the fact that in modernity the private and public
are no longer distinct, that politics has become merely a function of society
and that the household has exploded the limits which formerly constrained it
(HC33). As a result, the two realms now constantly flow into each other (HC33)
and, what, from her perspective, is much worse, the life-process has come to
dominate the imagination and practice of the modern world.
15.
In discussing the activity of labouring we have already seen that Arendt
identifies it with life itself, with the necessary and circular processes of
reproducing life. Initially housed in the oikos,
labour was confined to this domestic realm. Arendt identifies the rise of the
social with a complex set of historical changes that emancipated the
life-processes from their containment within the household. As a result, they
enter into the public realm and increasingly dominate public attention to the
extent that the public realm itself began to atrophy: attention to life and its
reproduction displaces plurality and its concerns. In The Human Condition
Arendt does not attempt to provide an exhaustive historical account of this
change and the multiple processes involved. She comes closest to doing these in
the final long chapter of the book on ‘The Vita
Activa and the Modern World’. For the moment, it is sufficient to
understand that Arendt identifies the rise of the social with the
commercialisation and mechanisation of productive activity. Whereas in
classical times politics dominated the provision of needs and subsistence and
there was very little strictly commercial activity, the gradually increasing
role of the market finally allows production to be dominated by other aims like
accumulation of wealth. The rise of the social "coincides" with a
transformation whereby private wealth was no longer just a private care but
became a public concern. Property owners demanded and received public
protection for the accumulation of wealth. The historical watershed in this
historical transformation is the metamorphosis of private possessions and
wealth into capital. This marks a vital change in the very meaning of private
property. In classical times property was primarily the “privately owned share
of a common world” (HC253), a political qualification of entry into the polis
signifying a place in the world. Only when the emphasis shifted from this
political meaning to its commercial significance in processes of accumulation
does it acquire its modern meaning of capital (HC 61). Private wealth was
impermanent and vulnerable to the mortality of its owner. Capital, however, is
immortal and assumes a life of its own. It has a permanence characteristic not
of stability but of process (HC68). A society of property-owners is "a
guise", according to Arendt, because the processes of capital accumulation
ultimately undermine the very meaning of property as a durable and permanent
home. Today we know that international capital resides in any nation state only
as long as the existing investment climate provides the highest returns to
shareholders. For Arendt, this last point is vital. The incessant processuality
of wealth accumulation is merely the circularity of the life-process itself now
unchained and emancipated in a new dynamic constantly expanding form. As we
have seen, she views the constant accumulation of capital dominating bourgeois
modernity as "the unnatural growth of the natural" (HC47).
16.
The second decisive factor in the rise of the social is the productivity of
labour power. While the market provided both a motive and mechanism of
accumulation, it was the enormous productivity of labour power that provided
the surplus making this dynamism possible. Arendt sees the most important
factor in this increased productivity as the division of labour. Even the
mechanisation of the labour process, which is associated with the industrial
revolution and implicates science in a vital role in this transformation, is
secondary to this initial division of labour (HC47). Arendt argues that the
division of labour takes its organisational principle not from the household
but from the public sphere. What is at stake here is an implicit debate with
Marx over the issue of role of economic factors in historical causation. Arendt
maintains that this fundamental organisational change is owed to the political
sphere where co-operation reigns because men have to act together and in
concert (HC123). Reinforcing this surprising argument, Arendt argues that the
"excellence" achieved in the revolutionary transformation of labour
is an attribute of public activities rather than household ones. Household
labour was always associated with necessity and misery but never
"excellence" (HC48). Lest we conclude that labour itself might be an
independent source of excellence, Arendt argues for a distinction between
professional specialisation and the modern division of labour. Specialisation
is an organic production of human co-operation guided by the fact of the
finished product itself requiring different skills. Arendt wants to sharply
distinguish this specialisation involving skilled activity with a strong human
element of initiative and purpose from the modern division of labour where
labour power is a mere natural force with few differentiating characteristics.
Labour power is not an end in itself but presupposes rather an equivalence of
all labour. Most characteristic of labour power is that it requires no special
skill. It presupposes the essential unity of the human species and has nothing
to do with co-operation (HC123). By means of this distinction, Arendt
endeavours to realign the modern division of labour not with the higher human
capacities of work or action but as an organic outgrowth of the bloated
life-process. While labour is a vital activity of the human condition of life, it contributes little to these
authentic higher human capacities. On the contrary, in its modern expanded
version it has typically has been an agent of their decay.
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