I don't think she thinks the life of contemplation really matters, that it has an elevated position with regard to political action whereas this should be reversed with contemplation being subservient to political action
The end of chapter 2, The term Vita Activa, which you cited in the previous post, suggests otherwise:
The modern reversal shares with the traditional hierarchy the assumption that the same central human preoccupation must prevail in all activities of men, since without one comprehensive principle no order could be established. This assumption is not a matter of course, and my use of the term vita activa presupposes that the concern underlying all its activities is not the same as and is neither superior nor inferior to the central concern of the vita contemplativa.
(which, weirdly in my view, encompasses action and talking as the same thing, but not thinking).
Later in the book, Arendt in effect notes the distinction that Dafyd makes about the different purposes of thinking.
The reason why Christianity, its insistence on the sacredness of life and on the duty to stay alive notwithstanding, never developed a positive labour philosophy lies in the unquestioned priority given to the vita contemplativa over all kinds of human activities. Vita contemplativa simpliciter melior est quam vita activa ("the life of contemplation is simply better than the life of action"), and whatever the merits of an active life might be, those of a life devoted to contemplation are "more effective and more powerful."[84]
84. Aquinas Summa Theologica ii. 2. 182. 1, 2. In his insistence on the absolute superiority of the vita contemplativa, Thomas shows a characteristic difference from Augustine, who recommends the inquisitio, aut inventio veritatis: ut in ea quisque proficiat—"inquisition or discovery of truth so that somebody may profit from it" (De civitate Dei xix. 19). But this difference is hardly more than the difference between a Christian thinker formed by Greek, and another by Roman, philosophy.
I'm definitely familiar with the worldview that "actions speak louder than words," that reflection is superfluous except insofar as it relates to deeds, but I'd also be a little skeptical of that life.
Then again, an online discussion board would probably self-select for people who are prone to reflection. It's kind of hard to do anything else here.
I can also see how contemplation can feel like a luxury to some folks. But it's a damned cruel world to live in.
The philosopher J L Austin wrote a book, How to Do Things with Words, to show that using words is an action.
He starts by looking at actions like naming a ship or giving a verdict, and then shows that the line between those kinds of actions and stating facts is a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind.
According to Hannah A, the important part about being in the Polis is the ability to think of political zingers on the hoof, as it were.
Thinking wasn't necessarily required.
That's quite a strange way to understand oratory, I suggest.
If it's a strange way to understand oratory then it may be that the strangeness is in the interpretation not the text.
As to the point about prerequisite knowledge, the purpose of the exercise I'm engaged in is to read the work on its own merits. I'm not really convinced a knowledge of Aristotle helps much in this instance.
That's an odd use of "on its own merits". I feel that if a work repeatedly refers to another text then ignoring the work to which it refers isn't reading the work on its own terms.
When Arendt says "as we know from the last lines of Antigone" it's reasonable to refer to the last lines of Antigone if Arendt could reasonably have expected her readership to know them. (Would a German philosopher have expected their audience to know Antigone...) Not that they're much help here, since they read (Fagles translation):
The mighty words of the proud are paid in full/
With mighty blows of fate, and at long last/
Those blows will teach us wisdom.
I can't say what Arendt thought the relevance was from the extract you gave; but it's clear she's not talking about political zingers on the hoof.
Given that this is Antigone, the "mighty words of the proud" are presumably Cleon's order that for the good of the polis but contrary to natural piety the "rebel" Polynices should be unburied. That is, a political action not a piece of repartee.
If Arendt is talking about Aristotle's distinction between the active life and the life of contemplation then it's reasonable to remember that Aristotle distinguishes between active deliberation and philosophical deduction, and to suppose that by "thought" Arendt may mean the latter - at least it does if Arendt makes more sense that way.
The philosopher J L Austin wrote a book, How to Do Things with Words, to show that using words is an action.
He starts by looking at actions like naming a ship or giving a verdict, and then shows that the line between those kinds of actions and stating facts is a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind.
I think maybe what she's saying is that it is relatively easy to write memorable books, so we know quite a lot about Plato and Aristotle's ideas because their works survive.
But we know more about Socrates and what he was really made of because the great moment in his life was a moment of action/speech in public. We don't know this about Plato and Aristotle.
Similarly we might say that we know something about Hannah's ideas from her surviving books but we know who she was (and what she was made of) when we know her biography, how she acted on the public stage in a great political moment in her life.
Speaking of terrible 20th century history, Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind as a similar figure who did a lot of writing and displayed a strong character in life. And because he's recent enough, we can trace both of these trajectories through is life.
I studied him a bit in seminary so he always comes to mind as an example, I know there are others.
Speaking of hell and capitalism, Thomas Jefferson is probably a darker example, writing a lot of great words about freedom while also producing an unacknowledged child with a slave, and his dealing with her and his children were...nowhere near so simple as his expressed values. I did some reading to brush up on the history and learned a few things.
It's an experience learning exactly how hard some of America's founders wrung their hands over their blatant moral failure.
Yes, interesting! I've long been intrigued that in Islam charging interest is haram ie forbidden. I've no idea how their banks work or whether Muslims can have a mortgage on a house.
They can. Islamic banks lend money at zero interest but charge fees that are pretty much the same in value.
I don't know how it works for personal loans like mortgages; for business loans Islamic banks give loans and get an equity share in the business and receive a cut of the profits.
…I can also see how contemplation can feel like a luxury to some folks. But it's a damned cruel world to live in.
It's a world of our own making, so if we're to be damned, we can at least recognise that the cruelty is human cruelty. And has the modern relegation of contemplation contributed to our cruelty?
Which is interesting I think because it is hard to imagine oneself in a private situation where there was no social realm. That idea of private isolation seems to me to have entirely vanished, if it ever really existed.
As I understand it, modern privacy, being in opposition to the social realm, is rather different from the classical notion of the private realm. And individualism plays a role:
This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man's capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter—as it is to the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related.
Relating that back to thoughts about hell, I was wondering how this influenced thoughts on the afterlife (if at all). In normal speech I think Europeans tend to associate crowds with hell. That somehow one's identity is diminished and reduced when one is in a big group of people. Hell as other people.
Or hell as a shared experience. Or even a "social" experience. The modern association of crowds with hell is an interesting idea.
To explore how Arendt's arguments relate to modern conceptions of hell, I think we'd need to take into account sin and the concept of social sin (which Arendt doesn't directly address, although she does address evil). And also forgiveness, which Arendt directly addresses in relation to the irreversibility of action.
Speaking of hell and capitalism, Thomas Jefferson is probably a darker example, writing a lot of great words about freedom while also producing an unacknowledged child with a slave, and his dealing with her and his children were...nowhere near so simple as his expressed values.
Sorry Bullfrog, but that doesn't seem appropriate for discussion here.
Speaking of hell and capitalism, Thomas Jefferson is probably a darker example, writing a lot of great words about freedom while also producing an unacknowledged child with a slave, and his dealing with her and his children were...nowhere near so simple as his expressed values.
Sorry Bullfrog, but that doesn't seem appropriate for discussion here.
It doesn't seem to me to be a point of discussion but rather a statement.
As such it seems quite relevant to the point I made and Hannah Arendt's description of those in the Greek polis: free men associating with other free men in the public realm whilst being autocrats to their slaves and women in the household private realm.
It occurs to me that this is another facet of the social realm she's describing. She says that the whole country or community is treated like a large household. Which presumably also means that those who were autocrats in private are now seen being autocrats to the whole of society.
Literacy has been a luxury for most of history, even having the time to contemplate. Even for people who have thinking-jobs, there's only so much time to engage in recreational thinking rather than thinking about one's various businesses, lucrative or otherwise. And it takes wealth to really have time to sit back and read, to study, to become a scholar if it isn't one's profession.
There is a feedback under capitalism as we notice time is itself a resource to be allocated, that time given to contemplation had better be lucrative. If it is not, it is cut off. And I think I see this attitude in a lot of popular commentary on "the humanities" or "the social sciences" at least in the USA. Though that isn't profitable is relegated to second rate and before long, who has time for that?
And I do think, if that's where you're going, there can be a feedback loop as the tightening of time makes less time to reflect, leading to a people even more crushed - even in their mental lives. This may fairly be considered cruelty.
To the discussion of Jefferson, my purpose was not to discuss slavery directly, but to bring up a very powerful example of a man who was clearly very contemplative in his life and yet also marked by some rather glaring hypocrisy. His contemplation did not prevent him from being positively horrible to other human beings who, it seems, he was on some level aware of as humans.
Far as the bounds of the discussion, I will happily defer to a host in this matter. You need not apologize, since you lack that authority.
I know from my own experience that it is possible to do quite a lot of contemplation while working in the garden, washing dishes, or doing other physical work that doesn't require much in the way of judgement. In fact, it's the only thing that keeps me from going completely mad while pulling up the thousandth dandelion. I pull weeds and think about the Trinity (or whatever). I suspect our ancestors did too, some of them.
I know from my own experience that it is possible to do quite a lot of contemplation while working in the garden, washing dishes, or doing other physical work that doesn't require much in the way of judgement. In fact, it's the only thing that keeps me from going completely mad while pulling up the thousandth dandelion. I pull weeds and think about the Trinity (or whatever). I suspect our ancestors did too, some of them.
True dat, and thank you for the reminder.
And it's probably a tragedy that, until pretty recently, a lot of these reflections never got written down. Ah, the myopia of the present!
I know from my own experience that it is possible to do quite a lot of contemplation while working in the garden, washing dishes, or doing other physical work that doesn't require much in the way of judgement. In fact, it's the only thing that keeps me from going completely mad while pulling up the thousandth dandelion. I pull weeds and think about the Trinity (or whatever). I suspect our ancestors did too, some of them.
St Baithéne mac Brénaind (who would be the patron saint of my home island if we had one) reputedly would harvest corn with one hand while raising the other aloft in prayer.
I think Hannah A is distinguishing between contemplating and thinking. If you are verbalising, writing down or even thinking about the thing you are contemplating, you've stopped contemplating the eternal.
I think this is probably a false dichotomy although I think I see what she means. Those who experienced that awe of contemplating the eternal needed the space away from the concerns of work and labour to do it and then to write about it.
But I think generally she seems to do a job on the definition of words she's using to the extent that it stretches their meaning.
Another example in a chapter I've just been reading is where she claims 'goodness' (in the sense of 'good works') are ephemeral things that can't draw attention to themselves and therefore by definition cannot be public things, which she says must always be noticed to exist.
I see what she means on one level, but on another it seems ridiculous because it implies the person actively trying to be good can never be a politician because either they're corrupted by the politics or the political system itself is broken by their worldlessness.
In fairness it does make a bit more sense when I write it down like that.
I think Hannah A is distinguishing between contemplating and thinking. If you are verbalising, writing down or even thinking about the thing you are contemplating, you've stopped contemplating the eternal.
In my experience, that sounds a lot like Zen meditation. My recollection from having some basic teaching on that from experienced practitioners was "just sit." Your thoughts are supposed to just go where they will, and any attempt to direct, record, or manipulate them is a kind of error.
…I can also see how contemplation can feel like a luxury to some folks. But it's a damned cruel world to live in.
It's a world of our own making, so if we're to be damned, we can at least recognise that the cruelty is human cruelty. And has the modern relegation of contemplation contributed to our cruelty?
@pease : Good question, and I think there's a feedback loop, and as I'm thinking on your question, I'm wondering if it's uniquely modern.
…
And I do think, if that's where you're going, there can be a feedback loop as the tightening of time makes less time to reflect, leading to a people even more crushed - even in their mental lives. This may fairly be considered cruelty.
What frames The Human Condition is a classical distinction between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa - the contemplative life and the active life. It isn't contemplation as we understand the word - contemplating something while engaged in another activity - it's devotion to a life of contemplation, in contrast to devotion to a life of action. I don't think this is a choice we can easily imagine in modern western consumer societies.
And, as with much of the book, the distinctions aren't always straightforward or consistent. It's also worth noting that this was before the Eichmann trial, which had a significant effect on aspects of Hannah Arendt's philosophy, including about evil and thinking. This strikes me as being relevant to the cruelty of the world we live in, but I concluded that the context makes discussion about this aspect more suited to Epiphanies.
Meanwhile, in her last, uncompleted, work, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt examines the three "fundamental faculties" of the vita contemplativa, being thinking, willing and judging.
I think there's a distinction to be made between contemplation as prayer searching for union with God (or nirvana outside the Western tradition) and contemplation as devotion to a life of rational knowledge for its own sake.
(AIUI Arendt does make the distinction in passing although it's not her focus.)
Comments
Then again, an online discussion board would probably self-select for people who are prone to reflection. It's kind of hard to do anything else here.
I can also see how contemplation can feel like a luxury to some folks. But it's a damned cruel world to live in.
He starts by looking at actions like naming a ship or giving a verdict, and then shows that the line between those kinds of actions and stating facts is a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind.
That's an odd use of "on its own merits". I feel that if a work repeatedly refers to another text then ignoring the work to which it refers isn't reading the work on its own terms.
When Arendt says "as we know from the last lines of Antigone" it's reasonable to refer to the last lines of Antigone if Arendt could reasonably have expected her readership to know them. (Would a German philosopher have expected their audience to know Antigone...) Not that they're much help here, since they read (Fagles translation):
The mighty words of the proud are paid in full/
With mighty blows of fate, and at long last/
Those blows will teach us wisdom.
I can't say what Arendt thought the relevance was from the extract you gave; but it's clear she's not talking about political zingers on the hoof.
Given that this is Antigone, the "mighty words of the proud" are presumably Cleon's order that for the good of the polis but contrary to natural piety the "rebel" Polynices should be unburied. That is, a political action not a piece of repartee.
If Arendt is talking about Aristotle's distinction between the active life and the life of contemplation then it's reasonable to remember that Aristotle distinguishes between active deliberation and philosophical deduction, and to suppose that by "thought" Arendt may mean the latter - at least it does if Arendt makes more sense that way.
Works for me.
But we know more about Socrates and what he was really made of because the great moment in his life was a moment of action/speech in public. We don't know this about Plato and Aristotle.
Similarly we might say that we know something about Hannah's ideas from her surviving books but we know who she was (and what she was made of) when we know her biography, how she acted on the public stage in a great political moment in her life.
I studied him a bit in seminary so he always comes to mind as an example, I know there are others.
Speaking of hell and capitalism, Thomas Jefferson is probably a darker example, writing a lot of great words about freedom while also producing an unacknowledged child with a slave, and his dealing with her and his children were...nowhere near so simple as his expressed values. I did some reading to brush up on the history and learned a few things.
It's an experience learning exactly how hard some of America's founders wrung their hands over their blatant moral failure.
I don't know how it works for personal loans like mortgages; for business loans Islamic banks give loans and get an equity share in the business and receive a cut of the profits.
As I understand it, modern privacy, being in opposition to the social realm, is rather different from the classical notion of the private realm. And individualism plays a role: Or hell as a shared experience. Or even a "social" experience. The modern association of crowds with hell is an interesting idea.
To explore how Arendt's arguments relate to modern conceptions of hell, I think we'd need to take into account sin and the concept of social sin (which Arendt doesn't directly address, although she does address evil). And also forgiveness, which Arendt directly addresses in relation to the irreversibility of action.
Sorry Bullfrog, but that doesn't seem appropriate for discussion here.
It doesn't seem to me to be a point of discussion but rather a statement.
As such it seems quite relevant to the point I made and Hannah Arendt's description of those in the Greek polis: free men associating with other free men in the public realm whilst being autocrats to their slaves and women in the household private realm.
It occurs to me that this is another facet of the social realm she's describing. She says that the whole country or community is treated like a large household. Which presumably also means that those who were autocrats in private are now seen being autocrats to the whole of society.
I've been reading this book about pre-WWI Europe, and it strikes me how much of the concerns, debates, and general social issues are the same. People were fretting about being too busy in those days.
Literacy has been a luxury for most of history, even having the time to contemplate. Even for people who have thinking-jobs, there's only so much time to engage in recreational thinking rather than thinking about one's various businesses, lucrative or otherwise. And it takes wealth to really have time to sit back and read, to study, to become a scholar if it isn't one's profession.
There is a feedback under capitalism as we notice time is itself a resource to be allocated, that time given to contemplation had better be lucrative. If it is not, it is cut off. And I think I see this attitude in a lot of popular commentary on "the humanities" or "the social sciences" at least in the USA. Though that isn't profitable is relegated to second rate and before long, who has time for that?
And I do think, if that's where you're going, there can be a feedback loop as the tightening of time makes less time to reflect, leading to a people even more crushed - even in their mental lives. This may fairly be considered cruelty.
To the discussion of Jefferson, my purpose was not to discuss slavery directly, but to bring up a very powerful example of a man who was clearly very contemplative in his life and yet also marked by some rather glaring hypocrisy. His contemplation did not prevent him from being positively horrible to other human beings who, it seems, he was on some level aware of as humans.
Far as the bounds of the discussion, I will happily defer to a host in this matter. You need not apologize, since you lack that authority.
I know from my own experience that it is possible to do quite a lot of contemplation while working in the garden, washing dishes, or doing other physical work that doesn't require much in the way of judgement. In fact, it's the only thing that keeps me from going completely mad while pulling up the thousandth dandelion. I pull weeds and think about the Trinity (or whatever). I suspect our ancestors did too, some of them.
True dat, and thank you for the reminder.
And it's probably a tragedy that, until pretty recently, a lot of these reflections never got written down. Ah, the myopia of the present!
St Baithéne mac Brénaind (who would be the patron saint of my home island if we had one) reputedly would harvest corn with one hand while raising the other aloft in prayer.
I think this is probably a false dichotomy although I think I see what she means. Those who experienced that awe of contemplating the eternal needed the space away from the concerns of work and labour to do it and then to write about it.
But I think generally she seems to do a job on the definition of words she's using to the extent that it stretches their meaning.
Another example in a chapter I've just been reading is where she claims 'goodness' (in the sense of 'good works') are ephemeral things that can't draw attention to themselves and therefore by definition cannot be public things, which she says must always be noticed to exist.
I see what she means on one level, but on another it seems ridiculous because it implies the person actively trying to be good can never be a politician because either they're corrupted by the politics or the political system itself is broken by their worldlessness.
In fairness it does make a bit more sense when I write it down like that.
In my experience, that sounds a lot like Zen meditation. My recollection from having some basic teaching on that from experienced practitioners was "just sit." Your thoughts are supposed to just go where they will, and any attempt to direct, record, or manipulate them is a kind of error.
And, as with much of the book, the distinctions aren't always straightforward or consistent. It's also worth noting that this was before the Eichmann trial, which had a significant effect on aspects of Hannah Arendt's philosophy, including about evil and thinking. This strikes me as being relevant to the cruelty of the world we live in, but I concluded that the context makes discussion about this aspect more suited to Epiphanies.
Meanwhile, in her last, uncompleted, work, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt examines the three "fundamental faculties" of the vita contemplativa, being thinking, willing and judging.
(AIUI Arendt does make the distinction in passing although it's not her focus.)