Lecture 7: Arendt's Account of the Human Condition (cont) & Lecture 8: World Aliention

17. This provisional account of some of the major elements in Arendt's causal explanation of the rise of the social helps explain her hostility to its consequences. She views the social as the bearer of leveling demands (HC39). Thus Rousseau's explorations of intimacy is no reaction against public life but a rebellion against the intrusion of leveling social demands into the formerly private realm of the household where citizens had formerly been protected from the glare of publicity. The leveling demands of the social are a displacement of the domestic command of the patriarchal head of the house that individuals act as members of one big family into the new realm in the shape of a social conformism of one interest and one opinion (HC39). This displacement is explained by the domination of the social by the rhythms of life processes formerly confined to the household. Public existence has not changed the fundamental character of these processes. The realm of necessity does not somehow undergo a sudden metamorphoris and become a source of freedom. To the contrary, necessity possesses a driving force unmatched by the so-called higher desires and aspirations of man (HC70). As Tocqueville already well understood the urgency of life-processes give them a decisive advantage in the struggle for hegemony over man. However, when this urgency is coupled with the homogeneity of life as mere species existence, we can understand the monolithic character of the social. To reduce individuals to their species life as totalitarianism did is to annihilate individuality and threaten the diversity, unpredictability and spontaneity that is the core of humanity. For Arendt, the rise of the social and its contemporary hegemony threatens to realise such a barbaric outcome without explicit violence or terror. When every individual is driven by similar economic motives, when we all define ourselves as jobholders, consider this activity primarily as a way of sustaining our own life, where the modern division of labour continuously extinguishes skill in favour of undifferentiated labour power, where our aspirations are dominated by homogenous consumption and our life-world convulsively mobilised by dynamic social processes which appear irresistible and beyond human control, there is such a threat. These are just a few of Arendt's examples of a rising tide of homogeneity. The modern celebration of labour as the motor of our own human self-creation simply fails to recognise the silent victory not of humanity but of life, not of freedom but of the necessity of life-process, of our subtle reconquest by nature in the form of a highly technicised and fabricated monolithic species-life. For Arendt, the extent of this despotism of the social can be measured by the degree to which the political realm itself has been reduced to merely a function of the social. The fact that modern politics is largely pre-occupied with economic issues demonstrates that the classical realm of freedom is now under the sway of a necessity where men do not appear as actors with opinions but as interest groups whose behaviour can be predicted with statistical accuracy on the basis of function, social status and the ideologies to which these subscribe.

18. While Arendt acknowledges that the modern private realm has been enriched by modern individualism and no longer bears the stigma of "privation", she does not count this as sufficient gain to offset these costs of the rise of the social. Arendt is also highly suspicious of modern individualism. Its Christian and bourgeois roots infuse it with a self-regarding and inward looking orientation that renders it radically subjectivist, moody, neither at home in society nor able to live outside it and rent with internal conflicts and disquiet that distinguishes it from classical individuality. The latter may have lacked this intricate depth, but it was saved the accompanying perpetual self-doubt and driven by the simple aspiration to public performance and communal recognition in great deeds and fine words. Thus it is not surprising that she interprets the inwardness of modern individualism itself as a retreat from the pressures of the social. Not only has the modern social imperialised and functionalised the public, reducing public space and distorting public performances, but it has also scaled the walls of the private, which made it the domain of respite and seclusion. Arendt views the modern development of intimacy as a defensive reaction on the part of modern individuals to the invasion of the social. Lacking a tangible objective space of its own, the social also invaded the private. Bourgeois modernity is characterised by the manifest increase of social pressure anticipated in the work of Rousseau. Arendt views the pressure of "rank" in the late feudal society of the 18th century, "class" in the middle of the 19th, or "function" in the middle of the 20th, as a continuum. Only the marginalised can escape the progressive absorption into society (HC41). As Arendt sees it, what intimacy provides by way of cherished interludes, is but a momentary release from the loneliness of the masses.

Lecture 8: World Alienation

 

1. I have already intimated that Arendt views a loss of worldliness as one of the chief characteristics of modernity. She takes over this concept from Heidegger for whom it has a very precise philosophical meaning. For him, the world is not a thing, nor does it consist of things. The coherence of the world is not explained by the real connection of real beings and things. Rather, the world’s coherence issues from the significance, which Dasein (Heidegger’s term for the finite, culturally located, conditioned and dependent individual) derives from the relations and their possibilities in which he is a priori embedded. These possibilities belong to this finite and dependent being and are the product of their anticipated relations with the possible things and other beings with whom they are co-located. This articulated web of reference relations in which and from which Dasein refers himself constitutes an ontological structure that Heidegger designates worldliness. The horizon of this world is a transcendental in the sense that it constitutes a framework of meaning that it so familiar we don’t even notice it. The world is comfortable for Dasein because it expresses a typical manner of being in the presence of others that takes it’s bearing from the everyday standards of the public. This concept of worldliness is important for Heidegger because it stands at the crux of his critique of the western philosophical tradition. This tradition, as far as he is concerned, has stripped the world of its worldly character in order to objectivise it into a sum of mere material substances located in indifferent space. In this way, from the beginning of philosophy theory has passed over the world in favour of an abstract nature but this presupposes Dasein to be worldless and ignores the fact that this significant reference whole is the presupposition of all investigation in relation to which all other inquiries are secondary and derivative. Arendt takes over the general conceptual contours of this analysis and makes it the basis of a critique of Marx. She wants to expand the orbit of alienation and find its sources deeper in the cultural dynamics that produced modernity. We live a society of labourers and jobholders. A society preoccupied with the consumerist values of the life-process that has ignored the importance of the creation of a lifeworld that is durable and objective, that provides for spaces and activity which reinforce human plurality and the higher capacities that encourage human meaning and individual distinctiveness. Unlike Marx, she is reluctant to fix the source of all the fundamental problems of modernity in economic relations. On the basis of her analysis of totalitarianism, it is already clear that she attributes a great deal of responsibility for the crisis of modernity to the bourgeoisie and it championing of the values of labouring and the social. However, in the final chapter of The Human Condition Arendt attempts to construct a new theory of alienation that locates the source of the crisis of modernity more broadly in she calls "world alienation".

 

2. Arendt's fundamental charge against Marx is that he was too closely aligned to the spirit of the modern age. He shares the modern age's "extreme subjectivism"(HC254). His concern for the economic is fixated in the domain of life and the rhythms of labour and consumption that increasingly threaten the world and human plurality. This shared spirit is manifest in the Marxian reading of alienation as "self-alienation". On this reading, the modern pursuit of accumulated capital leads to the creation of an alien world of commodities that dominates and controls its creators. The worker loses him/herself in the very act of labour as the self loses control over the process, does not own the product and is compelled to conform to externally imposed rhythms and goals. Marx suffers from the subjectivist illusion of mastery that the problem is to bring this entire process under the control of the worker. You will remember that the idea that “everything is possible” is one of the fantasies of the totalitarian imagination. Her point will be that while the worker is an actor, he/she is a conditioned being and can never hope to master this process as if they could be the measure of all things. Reflecting on the origins of capitalism, Arendt argues that Weber was much closer to the truth: the enormous everyday activity of capitalism was not generated by material aspirations and a being-at home-in-the-world but by otherworldly considerations stemming from "worry and care about the self" (HC254). The hallmark of the modern age is not man's new confident self-assertion within the world but rather the suspicion, outrage and despair that throws him back entirely on himself. On this Arendtian reading, the problem is not the loss or distortion of self but the radical turning in on the self which has multiple causes but which generally reflects a loss in confidence in, and place within, the world. This latter mood also issued in a programme of individualist self-assertion and attempt at world mastery culminating in the thought that "everything is possible". It is Arendt's contention that this is a compensatory reaction to human insecurity and the sense that man no longer has a home, a secure place in the world. The inner core of the crisis of modernity is a retreat into the self in the face of a pervasive cultural experience of alienation from the world.

3. The historical determinants of this experience of world alienation are the events of global exploration, the ex-appropriation of church lands and peasantry in the Reformation and the new science. For Arendt, these are "events" in the sense of great historical turning points that could neither be foreseen nor predicted: she is not interested in historical causality. These events ruptured the chains of everyday causality and set in train consequences which nobody could have foreseen or foretold. The furthermost thing from the mind of the great explorers would have been the shrinkage and closing in of the world. Nevertheless, the consequence of their discoveries was the conquest of space. We are now inhabitants, not of countries but of the earth (HC250). However, to be an "inhabitant" does not mean to be at home. On the contrary, the great discoveries of this period of exploration were prefigured by the modern aspiration to survey the world. As she remarks, ‘nothing can remain immense if it can be measured’ (HC250). Yet already this surveying capacity presupposes an alienation effect whereby humans disentangle themselves from all involvements and from things close at hand. It requires that they distantiate themselves (HC251). The achievements of Renaissance exploration were bought at the cost of a theoretical alienation from immediate earthly surroundings. This was brim full of consequences.

4. The Reformation is another decisive determinant of world alienation. As already mentioned, Arendt attributes the spirit of Capitalism not to worldly but to other worldly motives. The spirit of asceticism crucial to primitive accumulation came from Calvin and Luther's efforts to construct a Christianity uncompromising in its otherworldliness: enjoyment in the things of this world was denied for the sake of the world to come. This new religious ethos provided the spirit of perpetual accumulation while the acts of ex-appropriation provided an immediate reservoir of untapped wealth to be fed into it and a new ready source of labour power to exploit. This ex-appropriation was ‘the greatest single factor in the breakdown of the feudal system’ (HC252). The Reformation is responsible for a two-dimensional alienation. Firstly, the Christian concern for the eternal soul alienates the individual from immediate this-worldly satisfaction. This spirit both fuelled and compounded the physical uprooting of large strata of the population now deprived of their sense of secure worldliness in the shape of ancient feudal rights to tenancy and commons. This loss of worldliness is the forerunner of the homelessness and mass statelessness that traumatised the 20th century.