HANNAH ARENDT (2-12-24)

The human activity of work is fabrication, making, manufacturing, reification

(making something solid), and building an artifice.
The purpose of work is stability, unlike labor, which is focused on survival. Labor is
in a cycle, and humans create this sense of stability in something that is not meant
to be destroyed. You don’t make it to make it break. There is a blurring of the two
(labor and work).
The aspect of humanity is that animal laborans - a slave of nature; you cannot
escape it.
Homo faber - someone who fabricates; we are exerting our mastery of nature
rather than a servant of nature.

In an ideal world, there is no conflation between labor and work. She is

romanticizing the distinction between both. When we were making tools, we were
exercising our being a master. She inserts a 20th-century criticism: She says the
problem is that animal labor does not dominate the world. We now create
machines.

We are supposed to be servants of nature; we now become a slave to the forces of

that machine. Humans now have to adapt to the machines when, in fact, we should
be adapting to nature. You are now a slave of the machine itself. Now, we have an
“assembly line.”

We fashion the world as if it were a machine. We suddenly become a slave to

institutions and organizations.

The only things that we fabricate today are tools. Art is an example purely about
durability; you did not make art as something that will be used.

It is important to keep work and action clear.

Labor - object is the earth
Work - is man-made objects; in work, I transform nature to destroy it, but when I
try to treat action as work, I end up doing violence to human beings.
Action - its object is for other human beings;

For example, totalitarianism engineers human association to be like a machine, to

make a clear, predictable way because humans are unpredictable. Now, schools
are created like a machine that produces students who are graduates of such a
field.

The social model of disability is that they lack something; there is something that
this person is not able to do. That there is something missing. It is the society that
creates social disability.

HANNAH ARENDT (2-14-24)

Action is the most central of her political thought. She tries to create a new theory,
disagreeing with Locke on the state of nature of the polis.

Immortality meant for Ancient Greece is that your deeds are recognized, and your
story is told and retold over generations. Great is doing something great in battle
against enemies - that is greatness.
 Labor Work Action
Corresponds to Life Worldliness Plurality
the human
condition of
It provides or The necessity for Human artifacts Deeds and words
“results” in … biological life and ‘an artificial’
world of things
… which bestows the survival of a sense of political life
or leads to both the stability/
individual and durability/
the human permanence
species
its temporal cyclical clear beginning only a beginning,
character is and end no end

Work now can be conditioned for action; that it now facilitates action. Table
stabilizes a common world that gathers people, a common point of reference that
highlights we are sharing space and not individually in the space - each of us has
our own perspective.

What work does is that it creates a common world. We have a common human
world in which we can have conversations. Work is the experience where the
objectivity of the world (where I am the master of the wood) is heightened. The
table makes people around it not collapse at each other.

When you have a stable world, it’s where the action takes place.
Action is not about defining what it means to be a human. In action, we reveal and
learn the who (not the what) of humanity. In action is where meaningful human life
resides.

Love is anti-political (?) -the public realm distorts; goodness does not have a place
in the public realm. You must refrain from talking about the language of goodness
in the place of the public realm. Once you put it in the public realm, it distorts it.
Using the language of morality in the public realm (morality is the language of the
absolute) could lead to totalitarianism.

Politics, by its very nature, is that we will disagree and have different positions.
Politics is the acceptance of the agonism; that there is always a disagreement
between politicians.

Common inter-est - is what unites people who are in disagreement.

Solitude - when you are back in the private realm, you have a conversation with
yourself - Arendt’s moral philosophy. It is not, however, based on a concept and
principles. It has values on human activity, and that activity is thinking.

2 difficulties of Action: (1) it is unpredictable (2) it is irreversible

Promising is one way that is “somewhat” predictable.
Forgiveness - an action that releases us from the actions of the past.
Politics is about the ability to create new beginnings.
HANNAH ARENDT (2-16-24)
Between Past and Future was written in 1954-1958 and published in 1961.
Arendt chose the six essays; however, she added 2 to those essays. These essays
emerge from living in the US as an immigrant (not a refugee). She is reflecting on
the events of the 1950s in the US - that’s when they started to become a
superpower.
In the 1950s, the American economy grew when it became the manufacturer of
many goods. While others were still trying to reconstruct. In the civil rights
movement, they were a bit backward in their system. They maintained a
segregated population (Jim Crow Laws).
In the civil rights movements, there were protests (mass rallies)
The post-war period is the time of decolonization for other countries (The Algerian
War was very violent, unlike others)
– ALL OF THESE WERE PART OF ARENDT’S THINKING

Xtian is like “now” and continues to heaven, then to eternity after the second
apparition of Christ.

Jewish conception of time is all about the present; the present connects the past
and future.
They re-read and make the past present of the story and live it in the present. It is
moving the future. She is very concerned about the space between the past and
the future. The space is freedom, and the interior within this space is thinking that
ends in acting that releases yourself from the necessity of the past and your action
toward the promised future.

Parables in the Jewish tradition are functionally different. What they do is tell a
different interpretation of the story.
Treasure - lost treasure of the revolutions - a reference to many revolutions that
happened in time.
1776 Philidelphia - Declaration of Independence. By signing it, they were
committing treason against Britain.
1789 Paris - French Revolution - Removal of the King and monarchs, creation of
the Republic.
1956 Budapest - Hungarian Revolution - revolt against communism, attempt to
escape communist party.

On Revolution - the idea of what the treasure is; the minimum requirement of
revolution is the change of government and its leadership.
Revolution creates new freedom. To release yourself from old ways.
In the PH, in 1986-1987 - there were no clear laws in the Philippines. (This is the
gap)
Gap - you are not tied to the past and don’t know what will happen in the future. In
that gap, you can create something new.
Revolution creates a treasure in which everyone can participate in creating
something new - this is public freedom (everyone in the public is creating
something new).
Over time, these changes can cause freedom to become lost. We do have to
create somehow a common world that stabilizes that pure natality - that is the
function of the constitution. Constitution behaves like monuments for Ancient
Greece - to immortalize the image. The principles are embodied.
The question: How do we find the negotiation of the tension and the gap between
the past and the future?

The struggle between past and future, the continuous struggle, is about what I
already know, what I think is right, and what I hope for the future. This is her
thought on what makes action possible, and it is thinking.
In Life of the Mind, she uses the persona of Socrates as the thinker and the
metaphor of the wind. Whenever you think of a concept, Socrates gives another
thought. To think is to allow it to be always shaken and changed. To not be
totalitarian. To think is to have a dialogue; when we have a dialogue with others - I
am consistent and demanding that you believe my thoughts. And after the
dialogue, I dialogue with myself (solitude) - the third image of thinking.

Thinking leads to judgment. Thinking releases you to be able to decide for yourself
how you want to realize your will. It is in that gap that birth (and natality) happens.

Revolution is potentially emancipatory, but not really necessarily.