Arendt and Heidegger
Alright, for the first post about the text itself, I'd like to take notice of a few Heideggerian points in section 1 of chapter 1: Vita Activa and the Human Condition
In the third paragraph Arendt says "The human condition of work is worldliness," that is, the human being cannot work without a world. Work is the activity that produces artificial things. Heidegger calls these things Zeug in the German which is usually translated to Equipment. According to Heidegger, the totality of equipment and their relationships to one another in terms of use and ultimately human use go to make up the "worldhood" of the world. (ie: I sit at a *desk* in a *chair* with a *pen* in my hand writing on *paper* to produce an article because that is part of being a professor) Arendt's worldliness is Heidegger's worldhood, and like Heidegger, she is saying that no artifact of work makes sense unless it belongs in a nexus of other artifacts.
Now, work both produces these artifacts while simultaneously using them. The two need one another. Arendt says exactly this in paragraph 6: "The objectivity of the world--its object or thing character--and the human condition supplement each other." Remember that work is part of the human condition. This is one of Heidegger's main points in Being and Time as he tries to overcome the duality and division between realism and idealism. There is a world and there are humans, but the world requires humans and humans require a world--you can't separate them. As Arendt says, the two condition each other.
Directly related to this is the distinction between earth and world that Arendt offhandedly makes in paragraph 6 before the above quote. Heidegger made a big deal of this distinction in "The Origin of the Work of Art." For Arendt, the earth corresponds to labor and biological processes while the world corresponds to work and artificial human creation. Both, however, are conditions of human existence. Now, the problem with making the distinction is that it seems to reintroduce the idealism/realism divide. Is the earth what is real and the world just a human construct? Heidegger would say no and I wonder if Arendt would even care.
In paragraph 8, Arendt says "Nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things" and she distinguishes between a "who" and a "what." That's straight up Heidegger. For Heidegger, the closest thing to human nature is actual human existence, which is conditional and subject to change and endless interpretation. In fact, because humans differs so greatly from every other created thing, we must speak of them only as a "who" in terms of their existence as opposed to a "what" in terms of its "whatness."
Existentialism and Phenomenology attract me partly for this reason. Human beings are unique. We cannot think of them as we think of everything else. We require a different "in terms of." Consider genetics on the other end of the spectrum. All life, human or otherwise, can be thought in terms of genes. All life, no matter how complicated or simple, is basically the same and can be thought the same. Folks like Arendt and Heidegger say No. Recognizing genetics and biology as well as the other sciences of man is necessary, but there is more to being human, something, well, these two would say something philosophical.
In the third paragraph Arendt says "The human condition of work is worldliness," that is, the human being cannot work without a world. Work is the activity that produces artificial things. Heidegger calls these things Zeug in the German which is usually translated to Equipment. According to Heidegger, the totality of equipment and their relationships to one another in terms of use and ultimately human use go to make up the "worldhood" of the world. (ie: I sit at a *desk* in a *chair* with a *pen* in my hand writing on *paper* to produce an article because that is part of being a professor) Arendt's worldliness is Heidegger's worldhood, and like Heidegger, she is saying that no artifact of work makes sense unless it belongs in a nexus of other artifacts.
Now, work both produces these artifacts while simultaneously using them. The two need one another. Arendt says exactly this in paragraph 6: "The objectivity of the world--its object or thing character--and the human condition supplement each other." Remember that work is part of the human condition. This is one of Heidegger's main points in Being and Time as he tries to overcome the duality and division between realism and idealism. There is a world and there are humans, but the world requires humans and humans require a world--you can't separate them. As Arendt says, the two condition each other.
Directly related to this is the distinction between earth and world that Arendt offhandedly makes in paragraph 6 before the above quote. Heidegger made a big deal of this distinction in "The Origin of the Work of Art." For Arendt, the earth corresponds to labor and biological processes while the world corresponds to work and artificial human creation. Both, however, are conditions of human existence. Now, the problem with making the distinction is that it seems to reintroduce the idealism/realism divide. Is the earth what is real and the world just a human construct? Heidegger would say no and I wonder if Arendt would even care.
In paragraph 8, Arendt says "Nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things" and she distinguishes between a "who" and a "what." That's straight up Heidegger. For Heidegger, the closest thing to human nature is actual human existence, which is conditional and subject to change and endless interpretation. In fact, because humans differs so greatly from every other created thing, we must speak of them only as a "who" in terms of their existence as opposed to a "what" in terms of its "whatness."
Existentialism and Phenomenology attract me partly for this reason. Human beings are unique. We cannot think of them as we think of everything else. We require a different "in terms of." Consider genetics on the other end of the spectrum. All life, human or otherwise, can be thought in terms of genes. All life, no matter how complicated or simple, is basically the same and can be thought the same. Folks like Arendt and Heidegger say No. Recognizing genetics and biology as well as the other sciences of man is necessary, but there is more to being human, something, well, these two would say something philosophical.
