Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Arendt, The Human Condition
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Chapter II: The Public and the Private Realm
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I’ve got some questions about Arend’s way of disclosing this topic. What is the value of understanding the difference between private and political in Ancient Greece and modern concepts of private and social, except knowing that we can misread Aristotles and Co? How it can help to understand the present situation?
She state the metaphor of family for the state was unknown to Greeks and first used by Plato, and Aristotle was more conservative by not using it. Really? If my memory does not play a trick on me, Presocratics used this metaphor and it certainly predates the greek philosophy.
Writing about early Christian communities, she classified it as private, but this contradicts the depiction in Paul’s letters. Also, they called the Church ἐκκλησία - the assembly of citizens. Members of the communities were free and equal (at least in theory) and Arend named this as the feature of the political in opposition to the hierarchical private sphere.
Alexey,I have problems with Arendt's ancient history too.
Alexey wrote: "What is the value of understanding the difference between private and political in Ancient Greece and modern concepts of private and social, except knowing that we can misread Aristotles and Co? How it can help to understand the present situation?"She stated the purpose of her history lesson in the prologue,
The purpose of the historical analysis, on the other hand, is to trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self, to its origins, in order to arrive at an understanding of the nature of society as it had developed and presented itself at the very moment when it was overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age.Maybe she will later make a case for some historical trends to explain the current human condition, extrapolate future human condition, or expose some knobs and handles to better control and or tweak the human condition in order to improve it? How effective her historical analysis is remains to be seen but at least it seems to fit her stated intention,
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (p. 6). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
Alexey wrote: "I’ve got some questions about Arend’s way of disclosing this topic. What is the value of understanding the difference between private and political in Ancient Greece and modern concepts of privat..."
In the broad scheme, I think she's trying to show how societies and the social world come into being. This is important for her because she thinks that in modern times the social has taken over the political. The poltical realm as the Greeks understood it has disappeared -- instead of a common, public, political sphere we have societies, political parties, teams, etc, which are all variations on the private household with a top down monarchical power structure. Societies demand conformism, whereas polities permit plurality. (She hasn't said that yet, but I think that's the direction she's going.) At this point I think she is examining how the common political sphere was overcome by the social, which leads to the possibility for modern people to recover a sense of commonality.
David, Thomas, thank you for making her points here more understandable. I am not sure I've got as far as you, but certainly more than before.Thomas wrote: "Societies demand conformism, whereas polities permit plurality. (She hasn't said that yet, but I think that's the direction she's going.) "
This is another point I cannot agree with her. She probably had Athenes in mind writing about greek polities (not Sparta or Thebes), the famous Pericles's speech draws the image of welcomed plurality, but the history of the city, as we know it, demonstrates the society (or the polity) obsessed with the conformity of its members. Nonconformists were either banned or killed.
David wrote: "How effective her historical analysis is remains to be seen but at least it seems to fit her stated intention,
What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing."
I cannot see this chapter in this way, but probably I should try better and will understand her way of thought.
Arendt says: The polls was distinguished from the household in that it knew only "equals," whereas the household was the center of the strictest inequality. To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled. Thus within the realm of the household, freedom did not exist, for the household head, its ruler, was considered to be free only in so far as he had the power to leave the household and enter the political realm, where all were equals.
I am struggling to understand why, since man is the household head, its ruler, he is not considered free within the household, why he has to leave and enter the political realm to be free. The closest I can come to understanding what she means is by drawing a parallel with Orwell’s essay, Shooting an Elephant. In it he describes how he felt compelled to shoot a runaway elephant only because it was expected of him to do so:
I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
I’m wondering if this is what she's getting at when she says the head of the household is not free in his house since his position as the household head forces him to behave a certain way. By contrast, in the political realm where all are equal, he is not subject to behave according to “forced” expectations.
Is that anywhere close to what she is saying?
Alexey wrote: "This is another point I cannot agree with her. She probably had Athenes in mind writing about greek polities (not Sparta or Thebes), the famous Pericles's speech draws the image of welcomed plurality, but the history of the city, as we know it, demonstrates the society (or the polity) obsessed with the conformity of its members. "It's a fine point, but I think her argument is that Athenian citizens were equal first. To be equal meant they were allowed to compete amongst their peers in an "agonal" way -- they were able to demonstrate their individual excellence through competition (language and debate) and have that excellence validated in public. This is why she can say that "the public realm was reserved for individuality." This is quite different from the monarchical "household" type of rule where the family unit follows a leader unquestioningly, and it's also different from social conformism, where people follow the majority (the "communistic fiction") unquestioningly.
Tamara wrote: "I am struggling to understand why, since man is the household head, its ruler, he is not considered free within the household, why he has to leave and enter the political realm to be free. ."Arendt says "To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled."
She says that the distinctive trait of the household was that the community within it was driven by necessities, their wants and needs. "The driving force was life itself -- the penates, the household gods, were, according to Plutarch, 'the gods who us live and nourish our body'..." To be free meant to be freed of this responsibility. It reminds me a little of the argument Benjamin Franklin made that public servants should not be paid, lest they run for office out of self-interest (their necessities) rather than the public interest.
"The Greeks, whose city-state was the most individualistic and least comformable body politic known to us were quite aware of the fact that the polis, with its emphasis on action and speech, could survive only if the number of citizens remained restricted."Arendt offers as justification for this that, as the social sphere increases in number, pressure increases towards conformity and despotism. But surely she is including Athens in any polis that is rich in action and speech, and Athens was the 800 pound gorilla of Greek city-states. It was huge by Greek standards, and was probably the cosmopolitan center of the Mediterranean.
I can envision Greeks from other city-states sitting in pubs (symposiums?) wondering to one another what the hell is going on over there? I can even envision some Spartans wondering if Athens is even Greek anymore?
Athens not only had a large citizen base but also had a huge Metic population. Athens entertained visitors from all over Greece, and people from all over Greece chose to settle down in Athens. Yet I never think of Athens as suffering in action or speech because of size. Quite the opposite. You couldn't shut an Athenian up. Meanwhile I can't think of any of that happening in Sparta. What kind of diversity of speech or action did Arendt think existed in Sparta?
So I want to question this notion that size has anything to do with conformity and despotism. Seems to me that a people's history (and maybe geography) matters more than size.
I also want to question this idea that the social sphere tends more towards conformity and despotism than other spheres of influence. Conformity and despotism are always present to some degree, but isn't the pressure towards conformity and despotism present more in the political sphere? Isn't the point of political rhetoric to win people over to your ideas -- to make them conform , to speak as one? And isn't it possible that Athens' democracy, Assembly, Agora, and People's Court were catalysts for action and speech? I mean Athens had to be one of the most opinionated (and litigious) places on earth.
Xan, you are mostly right about Athens in the Greek world, if we can imagine how Hellenes from other cities saw them.Number of citizens, who can participate in assembly, should have been quite small in relation to the whole population, though still huge for other cities, as you've said. And examples show that citizens were under scrupulous controls of others in their following rules, traditions and rituals of the cities, while among meteks a woman can run a business (what a scandal). Greek variant of famous Latin saying should be Quod licet bovi non licet Iovi.
Yes, Alexey, and the Metics, while not citizens, had influence. They owned businesses and hung around the agora talking to Socrates wannabes. They had opinions like everyone else. Women were not citizens and so like Metics couldn't participate in the assembly, but that doesn't mean they didn't influence the debates, directly and indirectly. It's early still, but right now Arendt looks like she's investing heavily in categories being distinct and independent of one another -- citizens, non-citizens, public life, private life, the social sphere -- while I think each influences the others and always has.
Alexey wrote: "What is the value of understanding the difference between private and political in Ancient Greece and modern concepts of private and social, except knowing that we can misread Aristotles and Co? How it can help to understand the present situation?."I feel like someone is questioning my choice of a major all over again 😂 I think the main point here is that culture and with it a way of thinking are continuous processes - understanding the past makes us much more able to understand our present (by contrast, understanding where the concept originates etc.) Otherwise I absolutely agree with the previous responses, so I won't go more into that.
I don't feel competent enough to react to your other remarks. Most of the time, I think that Arendt's analysis of antient Greece is good or even great and inspiring, but there are surely some places where she slips. I think it shows that she is an expert on Augustine, because when it comes to him, Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle her analysis is usually very good (or it could just be that I didn't read enough of them to notice), but she sometimes stumbles when it comes to Plato and I'm not sure if she ever mentions presocratics... but I never studied those so I can't tell if they could add to her thesis.
She probably had Athenes in mind writing about greek polities (not Sparta or Thebes), the famous Pericles's speech draws the image of welcomed plurality, but the history of the city, as we know it, demonstrates the society (or the polity) obsessed with the conformity of its members. Nonconformists were either banned or killed.
I see what you mean...
I would say that we have to consider if only what was actually done is important, or it the idea behind it has importance as well even when they don't completely agree with each other. I would say that even the idea itself has it's importance, because it's often the idea that gains continuity.
Second, I think that there might be misunderstanding of what "plurality" means. I don't think that it's supposed to mean diversity of difference of opinions. It means that there are a lot of individuals involved who can express themselves through action/speech. Which of course means some diversity, but not a lot necessarily.
Third, I really think it matters at what time of Athens we are looking at. The period you are talking about are Athens in one of it's extremes...
I think what you are saying still has a lot of merit though. I need to think about it a bit more, I'm running myself in circles.
Edit: Reading Thomas' reply, my blundering seems a bit unnecessary.
Xan wrote: ""The Greeks, whose city-state was the most individualistic and least comformable body politic known to us were quite aware of the fact that the polis, with its emphasis on action and speech, could ..."I understood this in a very simple way that direct democracy can only exist in a state with a limited number of citizens - because the place of speech and action is Agora... But I didn't finish the chapter yet, so I can't really speak on the finer details of your comment.
Thomas wrote: "And why does the political life have to be opposed to family life (at least in the ancient Greek scheme of things)?"I think the answer is hidden in the translation of phratria and phylē which I found to be mean brotherhood or kinfolk and clans or tribes. It makes sense that a city-state political organization would have to remove or incorporate any family-based competition.
It was not just an opinion or theory of Aristotle but a simple historical fact that the foundation of the polis was preceded by the destruction of all organized units resting on kinship, such as the phratria and the phylē.The city-state was not opposed to families per say. This would not make sense since the city-state was comprised of the heads of the very families they would be opposed to. Instead the city-state model of government is naturally opposed to the competing family-state models of government.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (p. 24). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Coming to terms with Arendt seems an unfortunately difficult task; maybe this is another way she forces us to think about what we are doing?
Because necessity can be so subjective, I found the potential abuse attending this unqualified human entitlement to be alarming,Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others;Even defining violence as she does does not seem to help because it used to justify slavery.
violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (p. 31). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
I am also curious to learn what I am missing regarding the following assertion in the face of something like the Peloponnesian Wars which are such obvious examples of violence between groups of public sphere political city-states, rather than the prepolitical private sphere entities.The prepolitical force, however, with which the head of the household ruled over the family and its slaves and which was felt to be necessary because man is a “social” before he is a “political animal,” has nothing in common with the chaotic “state of nature” from whose violence, according to seventeenth-century political thought, men could escape only by establishing a government that, through a monopoly of power and of violence, would abolish the “war of all against all” by “keeping them all in awe.”21 On the contrary, the whole concept of rule and being ruled, of government and power in the sense in which we understand them as well as the regulated order attending them, was felt to be prepolitical and to belong in the private rather than the public sphere.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (p. 32). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Xan wrote: ""The Greeks, whose city-state was the most individualistic and least comformable body politic known to us were quite aware of the fact that the polis, with its emphasis on action and speech, could ..."Aristotle writes in the Politics that one of the reasons that the polis must be limited in number is because of the relationship between friendship and politics. Friendship, for Aristotle, is rooted in virtue and an interest for the common good. It is caring for other citizens as friends and wanting the best for them and the city. But there is a point at which this becomes untenable. How many friends can one citizen have? How big can the forum get before friends choose sides and stop honoring dissent, or alternatively, withdraw into the private?
Arendt's argument seems to be that historically the social realm took over the public realm because "the public" lost sight of a common world. It sounds like people today who refuse to acknowledge facts simply because they don't accord with their beliefs. The common world, and the public world, have become a matter of social opinion.
Jassmine wrote: "Third, I really think it matters at what time of Athens we are looking at. The period you are talking about are Athens in one of it's extremes..."A very good point. The law is one thing and its execution is another and very different sometimes. In the end, you've figured out what I want to say better than I've ever could. The same polity can be pluralistic one day and uniformed another; the society may also differ more from itself yesterday than from the ancient polity in some specific period of time. The realm of ideas is no more uniform than reality, the city-state of Pericles (or Thucydides), Plato, and Aristotle is not the same polity; ideas explaining the society are no less contradictory.
My problem with Arendt's method in this chapter is that she traced only one set of ideas through history and try to explain the modern society only through the evolution of these ideas. While her understanding of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. is astonishingly deep (for me at least), the approach seems self-defeating.
David wrote: "Because necessity can be so subjective, I found the potential abuse attending this unqualified human entitlement to be alarming,Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitl..."
The word "entitled" is strange there, but it's a little less shocking in the context of a Hobbesian state of nature. Pre-political means uncivilized and lawless, and the way in which disputes are settled when authority isn't recognized is violence.
As a side note, Martin Heidegger wrote extensively about the phenomenon of "levelling" in Being and Time. The more technical term for this in Heidegger is inauthenticity. It's basically the same thing as conformism. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard had a lot to say on this topic as well, and Arendt is certainly picking up on it here.
Arendt uses the term "intimacy" in a rather pointed sense. How is privacy different from intimacy? I just read this section, and as I understand it, she makes the distinction between the previous notions of privacy, which included a sense of deprivation, with the current definition, which is simply with ones intimates, away from the world. She doesn't give many examples of what one would have been deprived of at home, and I'm no expert on ancient Greek home life. But I would assume she means your intimates weren't at home, they were your friends. Whereas by the mid 20th century, your spouse had taken on many roles they wouldn't have played previously, including being someone you had meaningful and even political conversations with.
At one point she argues that love is "worldless." (section 7) She says the proof of this is that it is "killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public." I'm not sure if that's true or not... but I wonder if the intimate is like "shared privacy", which I realize is a contradiction. She uses the term "world" in an odd way. I'm not entirely sure that I know what she means, but it seems to be at least public in nature. Does this mean that there is no such thing as a private world?
Interestingly, the other thing that is worldless is goodness. (section 10) Good works. like Jesus of Nazareth, are completely "not of this world.'
Thomas wrote: "At one point she argues that love is "worldless." (section 7) She says the proof of this is that it is "killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public." I'm not sure if that's..."From the start of the book, I find her interpretation of Christianity concerning her themes the fascinating part of her narrative. I am not sure whether I agree with her but she makes me think again about the ideas she mentioned.
In this case, I think she showed a clear distinction between goodness in the common meaning and strictly Christian meaning. The first belongs to the public sphere and the public gives a clear definition of what is 'goodness' and how to measure it. The second is the set of contradictions: it is outward works but concealed from the world; the reason is the needs of others but (ideally) others can not appreciate these works, so even moral satisfaction should not be achieved by 'good works' -- hence they must have their basis beyond the world because, in the ideal case, nothing in this world could justify them for the doer.
If I am reading this right Arendt set the tone for Christianity's farsightedness for heaven, i.e., the unworldly, when she said,The fall of the Roman Empire plainly demonstrated that no work of mortal hands can be immortal, and it was accompanied by the rise of the Christian gospel of an everlasting individual life to its position as the exclusive religion of Western mankind. Both together made any striving for an earthly immortality [i.e., wordly] futile and unnecessary.She then claims the prevailing motivation for any beneficial activity was removed from worldly secular humanistic sources and replaced by christian "goodness" to get into the preferred form of the unearthly and not worldly, after-life.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (p. 21). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
The Intimate seems to be the introduction of private personal subjective human development and fulfillment that became available beyond the necessities of Labor and the rise of Society and the conformity it brought with it. The private Christian attitude became widespread and common it became a large influencing factor on the public.
What distinguishes this essentially Christian attitude toward politics from the modern reality is not so much the recognition of a “common good” as the exclusivity of the private sphere and the absence of that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance that we call “society.”The argument doesn't seem a strong one. There are those who still insist there can be no good without god, but for others, a "divinely" inspired other-worldly good is simply a another expression of a worldly human condition.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (p. 35). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Alexey wrote: "The second is the set of contradictions: it is outward works but concealed from the world; the reason is the needs of others but (ideally) others can not appreciate these works, so even moral satisfaction should not be achieved by 'good works' -- hence they must have their basis beyond the world because, in the ideal case, nothing in this world could justify them for the doer.Or maybe it's not beyond the world, just private. I think we can conclude from everything she's said that the private realm is not worldly -- only what is public, open and common to all, can constitute a world.
But I don't know how she can say that absolute goodness only became known to us with Christianity. Plato certainly has a lot to say about absolute goodness, and I think he argues that we can know it. On the other hand, he also shows that goodness in an absolute sense is not empirically demonstrable. In that sense, Platonic goodness is not of this world either.
Thomas wrote: "...In that sense, Platonic goodness is not of this world either."The right answer is ‘ask Arendt what she meant here.’ In my understanding, she argues that pre-Christian goodness is either public or private: it belongs to one of these spheres and follows the rules of this sphere, while Christian goodness transcends these borders and even borders of the world. I do not pretend to know enough about how people defined goodness (or its equivalents); whatever we can say about Platonic goodness, it had no demand to be concealed from the world. Indeed, it is the only clear difference I see.
When Arendt writes about antiquity, she often ignores examples contradicting her narrative, e.g. Roman law (the element of the political sphere) dealt with what she called private, and all Roman magistrates, except consuls, also dealt with private matters. I do not want to be judgemental and I like her books, but I think she is a good example of what Taleb calls ‘fooled by narrative’. Her statements about Christianity seem to be less prone to this.
A lot of her thinking seems to be based on breezy assumptions about what life was like in the ancient world.
I am not sure about breezy: perhaps, she followed consensus of the day, but she did it quite uncritically, imho.
Alexey wrote: "Thomas wrote: "...In that sense, Platonic goodness is not of this world either."The right answer is ‘ask Arendt what she meant here.’ In my understanding, she argues that pre-Christian goodness i..."
I think her point is rather simple: absolute goodness, like love, and like religious experience, cannot be publicly communicated. Its existence is entirely inward. In other words, private. Unfortunately she belabors this simple point with historical baggage that seems to confuse the issue.
When she speaks of the "otherworldly" I think she is speaking of the private. It isn't another world; it's not a world at all. It's ideality, or interiority. The world, on the othe hand, is where "the sameness of objects can be discerned." The sameness of love, or goodness, is not easily discerned, as the Platonic dialogues show. Everyone thinks they are doing the right thing, even if others disagree, because everyone has a subjective opinion that they are objectively correct. Her concern seems to be that the loss of common discernment can lead to a "prison of subjectivity" and the loss of plurality, which under the right circumstances can lead to tyranny.
Thomas wrote: "When she speaks of the "otherworldly" I think she is speaking of the private. It isn't another world; it's not a world at all. It's ideality, or interiority."I've read 'otherworldly' as something which cannot be wholely placed in the world of private and public, and so has its basis beyond this opposition. But I am reading in translation so it may work not so well in the original text.
Her thoughts about goodness would be interesting to map against Plato's ideas, though it does not look easy to do.
David wrote: "Because necessity can be so subjective, I found the potential abuse attending this unqualified human entitlement to be alarming,Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitl..."
It's so interesting how readers can take different things from the same text... I feel like at this point Arendt doesn't really makes any moral comments, she just describes what she "sees" (whether it's accurate or not is a separate matter). I didn't read the passage as justifying slavery, but just describing where it originates from - in which I think she makes an interesting observation. But it's still kind of uncomfortable to read, I agree.
Alexey wrote: My problem with Arendt's method in this chapter is that she traced only one set of ideas through history and try to explain the modern society only through the evolution of these ideas. While her understanding of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. is astonishingly deep (for me at least), the approach seems self-defeating. Yeah... the theme of the project is potentially so wide that it is impossible to carry out. So it poses the question if tracing just "one set of ideas" is worth it or without a much merit. I would argue that yes, it does, but I can understand your reservation, especially since Arendt doesn't really much address the limitations of her work.
Jassmine wrote: "David wrote: "Because necessity can be so subjective, I found the potential abuse attending this unqualified human entitlement to be alarming,Because all human beings are subject to necessity, th..."
She makes a similar argument in the next chapter -- that slavery is "natural" and necessary. That was a little shocking. But I think you're right that she is describing the genesis of slavery as an historical institution, not making a moral argument. That seems to be in line with her goal of describing the human condition, not human nature. Her objectivity about social history makes me a little uncomfortable, but it's the history itself that's hard to take sometimes.
Jassmine wrote: "I didn't read the passage as justifying slavery"The passage directly before it says,
What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and to become free.I agree she is just stating the facts of the day, but still, as you said, very uncomfortable.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (p. 31). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Continuing on the theme of slavery...It's definitely hard to hear that slavery (in looser sense of the word) is necessary, but the more I think about it the more I agree - not in a moral sense, or in utopian sense, I don't want for it to be necessary, but even in our days it is the reality. If we come from Arendt's thesis that for you to be free you have to be freed of necessities, (or just let's say most of them, because most of us aren't in such privileged position that we don't have to do our house chores, or even go to work...) it's simply true that someone has to do them for you - either a person or a machine. And in larger scale "we" (Europe, US,...) transfers lot of our necessities to developing countries - we may not call it slavery, but....
It seems to me that lot of times Arendt uses the term slavery in a looser sense that we immediately associate (but sometimes it's clear that she really means slavery).
Jassmine wrote: "So it poses the question if tracing just "one set of ideas" is worth it or without a much merit. I would argue that yes, it does, but I can understand your reservation, especially since Arendt doesn't really much address the limitations of her work."It seems that she did not realise them. She wrote as if she sincerely believed that Plato and Aristotle expressed the reality of the city-states or the word of ideas of their citizens, not their aristocratic worldview. In Athens, the majority of the citizens were small farmers working on their parcels of land or professional rowers (which may be associated with slaves but then were highly skilled professionals), and every citizen, if he did not fly the public life, would have his week in the government at least once in his life. And this majority certainly had different ideas about labour, work, and slavery than affluent authors.
Of course, you are right that the ideas of Aristotle have a significant impact on history and our life, perhaps, greater than the real situation in Greek city-states. Strangely, Arendt has not used this ' approach in this book but binds ideas to real society in a rather 'Marxist' way.
One question I had after reading the prologue was how Arendt thought Marxism was to fit into the human condition.
Alexey wrote: "It seems that she did not realise them. She wrote as if she sincerely believed that Plato and Aristotle expressed the reality of the city-states or the word of ideas of their citizens, not their aristocratic worldview."Yes, I tentatively agree (I feel it's still a bit soon in the book to make a "definite comment" on it). I think we could partly blame it on the time she is writing it in, perception of how academic texts should be written changes quite a bit over the time and from my experience the older texts are often more definite in tone and don't support the nuance of other possibilities quite as much as we prefer today. That said the reality of the text is still the reality.
On the other hand, I kind of enjoy the sure tone she uses in her writing. I'm just so used to speaking in the "in my opinion"/"I think"/ "It might be just me" etc. that I just find a woman philosopher who just states the things as she sees them as very relaxing. But that's just a personal thing.
Xan wrote: "One question I had after reading the prologue was how Arendt thought Marxism was to fit into the human condition."I think we'll definitely get to hear Arendts take on Marx in the upcoming chapters.
Jassmine wrote: "If we come from Arendt's thesis that for you to be free you have to be freed of necessities, (or just let's say most of them, because most of us aren't in such privileged position that we don't have to do our house chores, or even go to work...) it's simply true that someone has to do them for you - either a person or a machine.."Being freed of some necessities would just change the priority of other necessities which cannot be taken care of.
Only the dead are freed of all necessities.
This cannot be a prerequisite for freedom. Or maybe my idea of freedom is very different from Arendt's.
Arendt's version of freedon accounts for the justification of slavery. Only the citizen is free because someone, or many, is relieving her of labor. As for the priority of necessities, once you have covered "necessities" anything beyond necessity is NOT a necessity.
Let me clarify a little. A version of Arendt's definition of freedom was used by those who justified slavery. This is an historical assessment. It applied to societies that accepted slavery as a component of their culture. (I am not saying that Arendt justified slavery.) That is because there were people deemed "citizens", distinct from the people deemed "slaves". And that freedom for those citizens meant delegating all necessities to either people or machines.**New Paragraph**
Freedom does not have prerequisites, in my understanding, it has requisites/ requirements in order to be called "freedom". Only citizens have it, and they have not really achieved the ideal of Freedom, because they would then have nothing they had to do. There is no rearranging necessities. Circulation of blood in the human is equally necessary as oxygen in the lungs. If it is "necessary" it is necessary.
BTW The Citizen has "standing" because she has a location, an address, which would imply ownership and property.
I readily admit that I find Arendt complex, difficult.
Sam wrote: "Let me clarify a little. A version of Arendt's definition of freedom was used by those who justified slavery. This is an historical assessment. It applied to societies that accepted slavery as a co..."As I understand, this idea came into Arendt’s work because of her reliance, in this work, on Plato, Aristotle, and Marx. The first two were aristocrats and slave owners whose political ideal was some kind of aristocratic republic, which they extensively defend and promote in their writing. From here comes the rationalisation of slavery as the prerequisite for freedom, and only aristocrats could be truly free, all others just ὄχλος. Marx creates the theory of history where slavery is the backbone of the ancient society and economy, though it is as true as Downton Abbey is the depiction of the British economy of the early 20th century.* On such a basis, Arendt had no other way but to portray slavery as the foundation of freedom.
*Ancient agriculture—by far the biggest part of the economy and society—was based on the small farmers who work on their land or tenants of big landowners. If something like Marx’s slavery society has ever existed then in some place of the Americas in quite recent times.
§4 Man: A Social or a Political Animal
How is social life different from political life? What does the family household have to do with this? And why does the political life have to be opposed to family life (at least in the ancient Greek scheme of things)?
§5 The Polis and the Household
How did the Greek polis make its citizens free? Could we say the same thing today, that modern cities make people free? Arendt says that it took courage to leave the household and embark on a political life, the "good life" of a citizen, as Aristotle put it. Why was this a risky decision?
§ The Rise of the Social
Arendt says "society" has blurred the distinction between the private and the political. How does society intersect with the political? Does the conformism that goes along with society endanger political life, or abet it?
Arendt uses the term "intimacy" in a rather pointed sense. How is privacy different from intimacy?
§ The Public Realm: the Common
Is there a common world that everyone can agree is real and true? Jump from one news channel to another and one has to wonder. Is this what Arendt means when she says that with "mass society" the world loses its ability to bring people together. Is that what has happened?
In both instances, men have become entirely private, that is, they have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and heard by them.
That sounds like the state of cable news and social media these days. People listen to their own "society" and fail to hear other points of view. Does a common public world exist anymore?
§8 The Private Realm: Property
What is the difference between wealth and property, and how is private property related to, or perhaps necessary for, freedom?
§9 The Social and the Private
Arendt suggests that the Social realm has swallowed up the public and private spheres. How did this happen? She also has some interesting things to say about privacy in its relation to necessity and as a "hiding place." Is there something shameful about privacy?
§10 The Location of Human Activities
Arendt states that "Goodness in an absolute sense...became known in our civilization only with the rise of Christianity." She says "good works are truly not of this world." Hmmm....