Arendt III: The Triumph and Despair of the Modern Age

Even had we not started the course with Moravec's Mind Children, the "heaviness" of Arendt's text would have been obvious. A worthwhile question is whether the effort we have to expend in order to understand even the basic theses and arguments in The Human Condition is justified by what we learn from such (a) difficult work.

Of course if you read Arendt carefully, especially the final chapter, you realize that how we justify an experience like reading her book may reflect something of the values of contemporary (as opposed to pre-modern) life. For example, deciding the value of a book by what we "got out of it" illustrates a distinctly means-ends approach to evaluation. On the other hand, accepting the value of a work as established by tradition, or authority figures, regardless of whether we understand it, seems to go against the grain of modern (as opposed to classical) education.

So why did I assign this book? Here are two reasons that I hope justify some of the sweat that was required to read it carefully, and serve as a frame for our discussions today:

• Leaving aside the question of whether Arendt's analyses are correct, her discussion of the public, the private, the social, and the transformations of our self-image(s) in the Modern Age, make us remember the depth of the human condition in a way that Mind Children certainly did not. When we keep in mind how nearly all of our basic beliefs about ourselves and our societies are historically contingent (rather than timeless), we realize the difficulty in formulating adequate descriptions of ourselves, our societies, and our relationships with other people. I think Arendt's book provokes us to defend our beliefs in the face of this recognition of the power of history, but it also makes clear that any claims about what humans are (and what they are for) need to be evaluated in the context of a history of our own self-images.
• Arendt's book nicely illustrates a modern approach to certain "big" questions before the rise of information theory and computing. As we critique her work we call into question how we should properly describe the essence of persons, societies, and the activities of everyday life. Arendt provides us with an unsettling bridge between the concerns and arguments of Moravec and Hayles when she concludes:

  "If we compare the modern world with that of the past, the loss of human experience .. is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became 'reckoning with consequences,' became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfil these functions much better than we ever could. Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms of making and fabricating, only that making, because of its worldliness and inherent indifference to life, was now regarded as but another form of laboring, a more complicated but not a more mysterious function of the life process." (322)

Arendt's The Human Condition, Chs. 2 and 6

We'll begin with Jeff's presentation of the rest of chapter 2, followed by Yale's presentation of the first sections of chapter 6.

Here are some questions to consider in reading Chapter 6, sections 38-45:

• When Arendt writes "It was not reason but a manmade instrument, the telescope, which actually changed the physical world view .." (274), what does she mean, do you agree with her, and how might the computer (rather than biological theory, for example) be said to have changed our view of "life"?
• What is the significance, in Arendt's view, of "common knowledge" being all that is left of "common sense"? (283)
• In section 45, Arendt says that insofar as Modern humans assumed the world was real for the sake of doing science, once they could no longer believe that they knew that the world was real, they removed themselves "from the earth to a much more distant point than any Christian otherworldliness had ever removed [them]." (320) What does she mean and how would you either support or refute her argument?
• (How) Does Arendt's argument about our alienation from our own (human) existence, illustrated by our acceptance of anthropomorphic language in physics, apply to our evaluation of claims about humans being a variety of machine? (323)

A Brief Introduction to Hayles' Theory of the Post-Human

At the start of "Toward Embodied Virtuality," Hayles says the "post-human" is a point of view characterized by the following:

• privileging informational pattern over materiality in the identification of subjects, objects and activities
• thinking of consciousness as an epi-phenomenon
• thinking of the body as merely our original prosthesis
• thinking of humans and machines as seamlessly integratable.

As you read Hayles, come up with some examples drawn from your everyday life that illustrate this "post-human" view.

For Next Time:: Read the Prologue and Chapter 1 of N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Post-Human. Begin thinking about a topic for your first paper, and plan to post the topic to the CHV-L list by next Wednesday

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