Sound familiar? Welcome to the Anthropocene

In which we continue a reading of Hannah Arendt's book on The Human Condition

If you haven’t yet, please go read yesterday’s post first. This little series is trying to make sense of Hannah Arendt’s gospel.

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt is a massive book, not only in word count, but in its complexity of thought. Once you grasp her basic framework, however, the book is eminently open to dipping in, and it will reward every effort. You don’t have to read it straight through; an effective strategy is to work back and forth. Read one section, then a different section. Try to see the outline of the whole. Use the index (or an electronic copy of the text with search).

Arendt is a master guide, and above all someone to think with. Her gifts as a teacher and thought partner shine through. It matters little if you don’t ultimately agree with her. The value is in the thinking itself.

That’s the big picture. The micro challenge in reading Arendt is that her English prose mirrors her native German, and also classical Greek, a language she read fluently from her youth. I once edited the writings of a patristics scholar whose English prose so reflected the structure and thought patterns of classical Greek, the language of his primary sources, that some people thought was grammatically incorrect. It wasn’t at all! You just have to keep close track of main and subordinate clauses and assertions, phrases and modifiers, and where pronouns are referring back to!

Wrestle with Arendt’s text you will. — But 😅 I daresay it will be good for you.

That out of the way, let’s take the next step to make sense of Arendt’s gospel, after yesterday’s introduction to the basic framework. In The Human Condition she looks at the human vita activa (active way of life) comprised of three main components: labor, work, and action; along with their corresponding basic conditions of human existence “given to us as we live on earth.”

The upshot of the whole book will be that these fundamental human conditions are being changed, by us, in the modern age and the modern world, and this is what we have to think about, to think what we are doing (Prologue, p. 5).

Sound familiar? Welcome to the Anthropocene.

Constellations of Hierarchy

To pick up where we left off, now let’s look at Arendt’s take on redemption and miracles. I know we’re talking about gospel here but put out of your mind for a moment what you think you already know. Let’s re-think it from Arendt’s perspective and worry about whether there is a connection to traditional religious views later.

The key, as Arendt herself says, is to think in “various constellations within the hierarchy of activities,” both as we “know them from Western history” and in terms of what has happened in the modern age (Prologue, p. 5-6). This is the key to the structure of the book.

A “constellation” by the way is a configuration — like stars making recognizable shapes and figures in the night sky — but in this case of various historical “fragments,” which are brought together over time, re-configured into new shapes, re-configured again, and eventually dissolved back into fragments. It’s an idea Arendt takes from Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940 running from the Nazis in Europe, and whose Illuminations Hannah rescued as a manuscript and later edited and published on behalf of her deceased friend.

The “modern age,” the subject of Arendt’s last chapter in the book (“Action” is penultimate), has shifted radically the constellation of the labor-work-action hierarchy, departing from the traditional historical one. The modern age, and the modern world, have radically changed from the past, to the point where humans are trying even to flee the earth altogether, certainly to escape any basic conditions of life the earth might have imposed on us (see the Prologue as a whole). We have eerie analogues today to what Arendt was noticing in 1958!

Again, sound familiar? Welcome to the Anthropocene, in which “hockey stick” megatrends show humanity’s break-out from the historical demographic, economic, and technological age and world that had gone before.

Miracles and Redemption

It turns out that labor, work, and action are not merely three concurrent activities for humans. Yes, we do all of them. The key is that they have a hierarchical structure and relationship to one another, which is salvific or redemptive: Labor < Work < Action.

Work redeems labor, and action redeems work, at least in the traditional scheme of things. The next activity in the chain comes, as it were, from “outside” — not outside a person, but from outside the given activity as performed. Work comes from outside labor. Action comes from outside work. Homo faber, the working human fabricating the world, does something fundamentally different from animal laborans, the laboring human, who in respect of his laboring for basic, biological life necessities is effectively like an animal.

Having a force come from “outside” makes it miraculous. (Think of God intervening in nature from “outside” to perform something super-natural. — But note that Arendt is not saying here that what is miraculous in the vita activa hierarchy is from God!) A miracle is salvific or redemptive when it allows humans to move from a lower to a higher condition, to resolve the “predicaments” engendered by its activity.

Let’s read.

Here is Arendt from the beginning of Ch. 5, sect. 33 (p. 236), which begins the passage that leads directly up to the gospel quote we’ve been considering. She has built up her case over preceding sections of the book and now summarizes the state of her argument.

We have seen that the animal laborans [the laboring human] could be redeemed from its predicament of imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process, of being forever subject to the necessity of labor and consumption, only through the mobilization of another human capacity, the capacity for making, fabricating, and producing of homo faber [the working human], who as a toolmaker not only eases the pain and trouble of laboring but also erects a world of durability. The redemption of life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication. We saw furthermore that homo faber could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness, the “devaluation of all values,” and the impossibility of finding valid standards in a world determined by the category of means and ends, only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech, which produce meaningful stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects.

(Source: Hannah Arendt, Human Condition, Ch. 5, sect. 33, p. 236)

Work, which creates a “world of durability” and worldliness for humans, redeems laboring human-animals from the drudgery of sustaining the “ever-recurring cycle of life process,” finding food, consuming, reproducing, generation after generation, to keep the species alive.

Similarly, action and speech, which become the grist for historians to eventually produce stories, history, and meaning across human lives, redeem the meaninglessness experienced by the working human, homo faber.

(Here you can hear shades of Arendt’s engagement with and critique of Marx’s thought, along with her existentialism.)

What humans have uniquely done, compared to animals, is to create worlds, to build up civilizations, artifacts, cities, markets, “things,” and even art, all of which have some degree of durability on earth, and which outlast individual human lives. Think of the pyramids of Egypt or the great European medieval cathedrals, or the fabulous Buddhist temples and monasteries in Asia. Even if the human craftsmen and workers involved in producing these monuments remain completely anonymous, the world constructed from their effort and artistry is still here for us to see and to live within. It has attained some degree of durability and stability, and it forms quasi-permanent places for humans to interact with each other beyond private homes and farms. (The latter perish quickly and are places where (mere) sustenance activities take place.)

Worldly places for human interaction create the possibility for action, speech, and politics — but in and of themselves, working men, homo faber, must be redeemed from ultimate worldly meaninglessness, for example when a devotion to market-led and means-ends only valuation becomes the norm.

(Note: Arendt holds a classical — not modern romantic — view of pastoral, agricultural, household, and familial activities. What is uniquely human for her lies beyond the private and domestic sphere.)

Redemption doesn’t stop there. Arendt is concerned in this book with the vita activa, but she always has in mind the vita contemplativa (contemplative way of life) — thinking — as a fundamental human activity, too. She thus pushes the hierarchical analogy a step further. Only something “outside” can redeem thought, too.

If it were not outside the scope of these considerations, one could add the predicament of thought to these instances; for thought, too, is unable to “think itself” out of the predicaments which the very activity of thinking engenders.

A Different Kind of Miracle

The most remarkable thing turns out to be that there is nothing outside action that can redeem it.

The “predicaments” of action — namely, its irreversibility and unpredictability — are a case altogether different, and it drives Arendt’s discussion in the last two decisive sections in the chapter on Action, concluding with the glad tidings (gospel) of “a child is born unto us.”

The redemptive miracle for action must take a completely different form; it has to come from inside action itself.

What in each of these instances saves man—man qua animal laborans, qua homo faber, qua thinker—is something altogether different; it comes from the outside—not, to be sure, outside of man, but outside of each of the respective activities. From the viewpoint of the animal laborans, it is like a miracle that it [the laboring human] is also a being which knows of and inhabits a world; from the viewpoint of homo faber, it is like a miracle, like the revelation of divinity, that meaning should have a place in this world.

The case of action and action’s predicaments is altogether different…

(Source: Hannah Arendt, Human Condition, Ch. 5, sect. 33, p. 236)

Tomorrow we’ll have a look at forgiveness (what Jesus discovers) and promise-keeping (what Abraham discovers) as insider possibilities of redemption for action’s predicaments of irreversibility and unpredictability.

Finally, we’ll have to see how Arendt worries that the traditional constellation of redemptive hierarchy for labor, work, and action has been turned completely upside down in the modern age and the modern world.

What is this new human condition we have brought upon ourselves, as human beings have been acting into nature?

Sound familiar? Welcome to the Anthropocene.