Quote of the Weeks

Meaning and the Duplicity of Nature

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt attempts to do justice to the curious relationship between human beings and nature by way of a fundamental distinction between two activities: labor and work. Put simply, labor describes the biological dimension of human life, caring for the needs of the body and all the necessities of an embodied existence. It is private and it is privative. Traditionally, those who have shouldered the collective burdens of labor have also been excluded from public life, consigned to the anonymity of the household. Work, on the other hand, describes the artificial dimension of human life. It produces a “human artifice,” removing materials from the natural environment and transforming them into an objective world to inhabit, which outlasts any individual human life.

Between Speechless Horror and Wonder

Hannah Arendt belongs to a generation who lived through the unprecedented violence of the twentieth century, as well as the creation of the postwar international order that underpins our volatile and vulnerable world. In trying to understand the political events of her time, she cautioned against the philosophical tendency to retreat from worldly affairs. Building on the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, and Jaspers, Arendt wrote about wonder as the origin of philosophical questions in various essays and books – e.g., “Philosophy and Politics,” “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind. However, she reflected on the relationship between horror and wonder most directly in “Concern with Politics in Recent European Political Thought.” Originally presented at the American Political Science Association in 1954, a few years after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her trips to Europe on behalf of the organization, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, the essay offers insights into three areas of Arendt’s interest: philosophy, politics, and the world. 

Action and the materiality of story

Arendt notes that the “hero” in the Homeric sense is not the seemingly “heroic,” but the free participant, “about whom a story could be told.” My research is concerned not only with these actions of free beings, but the way in which they have been archived. The production of stories in the movement for housing justice has led to a brilliant mixture of strategies and aesthetic practices for the recording, reworking, and preservation of stories.

Achilles, too, is a ‘speaker of great words’

Arendt’s historical analysis of speech before the polis prefigures her more focused and forceful treatment of speech and action in Chapter V. Connecting these two sections reveals something of Arendt’s unique sensibility for interpreting historical texts and figures, as well as her deft hand at weaving historical sources into her own positions. Even if we cannot know precisely what Arendt gleaned from Phoinix, I am grateful that her footnotes offer us a way to peer over her shoulder and share in her objects of wonder.

Arendt’s Anton Schmidt

During the Second World War, Anton Schmidt, a Viennese forty-year-old reserve soldier in the Wehrmacht, did something deeply unexpected: he helped Jews, and then also the Jewish underground, intentionally and consistently, for several months, until he was arrested in January 1942 and, a few months later, executed for treason. The story of his heroic acts, which moved Arendt and the rest of the audience in the courtroom in Jerusalem so profoundly, was not wholly unknown at the time of the Eichmann trial. Arendt notes that it was already published in Yad Vashem’s Hebrew Bulletin and that, following this publication, it was also mentioned in a few Yiddish-American papers. However, it does seem to have found its way into Arendt’s report as if by accident––told in the Israeli courtroom and then commemorated by Arendt only due to the prosecution’s interest in a relatively insignificant comment Schmidt once uttered. Apparently, Schmidt had told Abba Kovner, one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance in the Vilna Ghetto, who later became a renowned poet and a leading public figure in Israel, that he had heard rumours about “a dog, called Eichmann,” who “arranges everything.”

Anti-Fascism 101

The hidden heart of this quote, and of Arendt's thought in my view, is thoughtlessness. And the pathetic paragon of thoughtlessness in her body of writings is of course Adolf Eichmann, whom she treats—with a surprising degree of humor—as a comical figure. Arendt describes the "horrible" phenomenon of Eichmann's thoughtlessness as "outright funny." For example, “officialese,” as she terms it, “became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” As such, Eichmann’s role as an actor in the theater of his trial, according to Arendt, is “not a ‘monster’,” but rather “a clown.” The reason for this clownishness, Arendt concludes, is that Eichmann was—shockingly—too completely “normal,” specifically in a horrific Nazi context in which “only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to act ‘normally’.”

Stubborn Things: The Problem with a World that Won’t Fade

In The Human Condition, which is where the quote I have chosen comes from, Arendt famously assigns a central theoretical place to the distinction between the perishable character of the outcome of labour – goods that are either extinguished by consumption or immediately returned to nature – and the durability of the products of work – things that outlast their use. She is also very clear, however, that such durability – this unnatural, artificial attribute that men willingly bestow to the products of their work – is never absolute. It is only for a limited time, indeed, that things can escape the metabolism of nature.

Hannah Arendt, Pearl-Diving, and the Humanities

This is one of the most arresting passages and images in Arendt’s works. I read it as a highly original defence of the humanities, which are now greatly endangered throughout the world. It is rarely interpreted in this light, but I think it distills better than many other accounts the essence of a genuinely meaningful vocation of a humanities scholar and/or teacher. At least personally, it provides me with a self-interpretation that illuminates my teaching experience at the university.

When the World is at Stake: Arendt on The Value of Emersonian Wisdom

"What attracts me to this quote is that Arendt is expressing the value of Emersonian wisdom in the context of a world facing unprecedented meaninglessness. More specifically, this is a world where totalitarianism and the Nazi regime revealed to us that anything is possible, and our abilities to confront both understanding and independent judgment have become increasingly difficult. Further, Arendt identifies Emerson as occupying a unique space in the Western Tradition that is concerned with chiefly human matters and who embodies a kind of thinking that does not belong to the vita contempletiva – the philosopher’s way of thought that Arendt critiqued as detached from the world, experience, and the unpredictability of the realm of human affairs."