the human condition book by hannah arendt

Labor is something we share with the beasts work, with the gods. Systematically, therefore, the book is limited to a discussion of labor, work, and action, which forms its three central chapters. It deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition … the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking, is left out of these present considerations. “What we are doing” is indeed the central theme of this book. The idea that reality depends on other people, with different points of view, was already in The Human Condition:

No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. I seem to have read only a fraction of the book, but I highlighted this passage:ĭimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school-it amounted to a mild case of aphasia- apologized, saying, “Officialese is my only language.” But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché … To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk”-except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. My memories are dim of the film, except that there was an obnoxious detractor who accused Arendt of not understanding people’s feelings. I saw the film Hannah Arendt in Washington in July, 2013, and subsequently bought Arendt’s own book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963/2006). After March 13, the meeting time is 7:30 PM EDT, which is 2:30 TRT. The dates on the table are Thursdays, and until the second Sunday in March, the discussions are at 7:30 PM EST for me in Istanbul, that is 3:30 TRT. After this preamble, this post features the first reading.

The human condition book by hannah arendt