Dani’s Reviews > The Human Condition > Status Update

Marx predicted correctly, though with an unjustified gkee, „the withering away“ of the public realm under conditions of unhampered development of the „productive forces if society“, and he was equally right, (…), when he foreswae that the "socialized men“ would spend their freedom from labouring in those strictly private and essentially worldless activities that we now call „hobbies“

The blessibg of labour is that effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming the means of substinence, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself, just as pleasure is a concomitant of the functioning of a healthy body (…)

Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until eventually dead matter, the result of small, single, cyclical, life processes, returns to the over-all gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition (p. 96)

„The world of human affairs depends for its continued existence upon the presence of others and on the transformation into the tangibility of things. Without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfilment and which makes it, the mother of all arts, the action, speech, and thought would lose their reality and disappear as though they never had been.“ (p. 95)

„(Men) are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times. The end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective“ p. 58

„…even the greatest forces of intimate life — the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses — lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatised and deindividuslised, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance“ p. 50

"Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constitued by one‘s peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one‘s equals or inferiors"

"To be free meant both not to ge subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another AND not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule or to be ruled. (…) this equality of the political realm (…) meant to live among (…) peers, and it presupposed the existence of 'unequals' who (…) were always the majority of the population"