Author: john mcgowan

Arendt on Life (Continued)

At times Arendt appears to believe (desire?) that action be “pure” in the same exact way that Kant tries to disengage (in Critique of Judgment) the aesthetic from any “interest.” Action would be unmotivated, a pursuit purely for its own sake, unproductive. That stance can seem a form of vitalism (ironically returning us to the “life” that Arendt is trying to spurn.) Action for its own sake, in an almost Nietzschean way, is the outflow of the energy of the living being. Taken a bit less mechanically, a bit more Romantically, this outflow can be considered “expressive.” It manifests (in the space of appearances) the being form which it emanates. There is more than a little expressionism in Arendt on action. After all, she tells us action is identity disclosing; even more, she suggests that action is identity creating. Like a speaker who doesn’t know what she thinks or believes before the words are spoken, the agent in Arendt discovers who she is in the act of acting. The “natality” that Arendt ties to the “miracle” of acting is, first and foremost, the appearance of a unique being in the world. “Plurality” is Arendt’s name for this singularity, for the fact that every living human (perhaps every living being, although Arendt probably believes only humans are capable of action) is distinctive. The “world” in Arendt is diminished, its plurality compromised, if any single human is denied the “freedom” that enables “action.” That is the over-riding sin of totalitarianism, its hostility to plurality, its attempt to reduce all human singularity to “the same.”

Pursuing this logic, “meaning” is the product of “action” being taken up by the community, which tells “stories” about the actions of its members. We can’t know the meaning of our actions in advance (just as the consequences of action are also unpredictable). Meaning is a communal product, dependent on what J. L. Austin calls “uptake.” A good example is saying something unintentionally funny. The fact that I didn’t mean it to be funny is under-determinative of the meaning that my statement acquires. No one owns or can control the meaning of an action or a statement. Rather, meaning unfolds in the intersubjective exchanges between people located in the world, in the space of appearances. Thus, action both constitutes that space of appearances (as described in the last post) and initiates the interchanges that create meaning. Here again Arendt seems Hegelian; although she doesn’t use the language of “recognition,” she does seem to believe that action and identity only acquire substance—a meaning, even a reality—when witnessed by others and taken up by them through some kind of response (debate, agreement, and story are all modes of response that her work considers). Love of the world, then, is partly love for (and care of) the enabling conditions of selfhood. If each being strives to persist in being (Spinoza’s conatus), then the world is required for that persistence to register (as it were), for it to be perceived, experienced. Self-consciousness—the ability to understand that one is enjoying “freedom”—depends on the existence of the self in communication with others, an interaction that creates, even as it requires, “the world,” the polis.

The paradox, then, is that life (“bare life”) does not require the polis—which is the source of Arendt’s worry that life-obsessed humans will not love the world, will pursue the swinish pleasures of satisfying the necessities of bodily persistence, and neglect striving for meaning, freedom, and identity. This is the element of aristocratic hauteur in her thought—not to mention an implied boundary between humans (capable of freedom and the self-conscious attachment to the worldly, political conditions of its achievement) and non-humans (governed by the relentless, unthinking pursuit of life’s necessities). The non-humans labor, humans act. Which has the disturbing Aristotelean corollary that humans who only labor are best understood as sub-human.

Action, then, is the guarantee of humanness, so it does have a product: the very distinction between a free life and a life tied to necessities. Judith Butler, rightly in my view, objects at precisely this point that Arendt “naturalizes” a distinction that should, rather, be understood as produced by power. (A basic application of the Foucualdian notion of “productive power.”) It is human social arrangements, established and maintained by coercive and discursive power, that relegates some to a life of labor and others to the enjoyment of freedom. Furthermore, the very distinction between labor and action is produced discursively to denigrate one form of human behavior over the other. Cooking food is not inherently (“naturally”) and for all time ‘meaningless.” The foodie revolution of the past thirty years attests to the ways that the meaning of activities shifts radically over time and in different social contexts. There is plenty to say about how the emergence of celebrity chefs introduces new insidious distinctions into a practice (cooking and eating) common to all humans, but there can be no denying that the meaning of those practices has been considerably altered. The status of Arendtian labor is hardly fixed in the ways she seems to think it is. Meanings are much more fluid that her triad of “labor, work, and action” indicates. (Several Arendt scholars have called that triad “ontological,” and see it as establishing the fundamental grounding of her argument in The Human Condition). Her mistake was taking the ground as fixed, as non-mutable.

Life in Arendt, then, can be seen as having two different drives: the first one is to sustain itself by securing the necessities (food, shelter) required to survive, the second if to secure meaning and freedom. She is afraid pursuit of the first will overwhelm a desire to satisfy the second. But she rather muddies the water by trying to describe the action that would secure meaning and freedom as unmotivated, taking freedom to mean something we are not compelled to do, but only do for its own sake. Thus, she is 1) not clear about the motives that underlie “free action,” and 2) afraid that under- or un-motivated “action” will not be attractive enough, not be compelling enough, to insure that humans actually undertake it.

Finally, Arendt introduces yet another motive for love of the world. The polis is not only a space of appearances that allows us to acquire a meaningful identity through the interaction with others, but also a form of “organized remembrance.” It turns out that she believes we have a deep desire to leave a trace of our existence, that our response to a self-consciousness about death (suggesting, again, that knowing we will die distinguished humans from other living creatures) is to create a social structure that allows for (hardly guarantees) we will be remembered. That drive for remembrance underwrites actions that aim to be memorable; in short, we crave fame. We want to be the stuff of stories, to exist in the mouths of others. We should love the world because only something that persists after our own lives are over can provide a means toward our being remembered after our deaths. Machiavellian virtú, which Arendt associates with virtuosity, is the agonistic striving to be memorable, to be extraordinary, which is inevitably competitive and comparative. Arendt appears to endorse the fierce competitiveness of the Greek heroes of The Iliad, even though it seems plausible to me to see their boasts and insults as hyper-masculine and sadly adolescent posturings that justify an aggression that is hardly appealing. Not every one gets to be remembered; only the great.

Two final comments: life, Arendt seems to be saying, is only fully satisfying if we can claim a victory over death insofar as we will be remembered after our life is done. Thus, even as she denigrates “life” as the supreme motive, she ends up wanting a victory of life over death—and uses “action” as a means to garner that victory. It is, it seems, not so easy to banish “life” as the supreme motive. Instead, what really seems to be the crux is not “life” versus “non-life,” but (instead) bodily life versus some notion of a “higher” (more meaningful, more self-conscious) life. We are invested in “life”—and, even more, in our own individual life and its persistence. In the “higher” form, that investment entails a stake in achieving an identity through action in the space of appearances, and in having that unique identity, recognized (minimally) and admired (maximally) during our lifetimes and remembered after our deaths.

Still, even if we conclude that Arendt cannot banish life as fully from our imagination of the polis as she wants to do, we can accept the performative paradox that troubles her as worthy of some worry, even though I take her anxieties on this score overblown. We ensure the survival of a language every time we use it to communicate. A language exists and persists by virtue of its being used; nothing else secures that existence. Yet speakers of the language only contribute to its survival inadvertently. In talking with others, I am not aiming to keep my language alive. Of course, in some circumstances, a language can be seen as endangered and various linguistic activities can be undertaken with the explicit aim of preserving the language. But in a thriving speech community, with a large number of members, no one is speaking with the purpose of preserving the language. (In this vein, I would argue that grammarians, those who teach language in schools, are, in fact, futilely trying to hold back the changes internal—and inevitable—to any language in use. But that’s another story).

Arendt’s worry seems to be that, in pursuing life, the persistence of the space of appearances, the public square that is the polis, will not be insured. Unlike a language that survives precisely because it is being used, the space of appearances might disappear because people lose their taste for “public happiness.” The split she introduces between labor and action, a split between pursuing necessities and acting freely, means that “bare life” could proceed (maybe even flourish) in the absence of action, the loss of “the world.” Maybe we will (as a species) lose our longing for fame, our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Again, the hint of an aristocratic melancholy at the disappearance of “honor” as a motivating factor for the bourgeoisie lingers in Arendt’s work. If “getting and spending” comes to be the all in all, “the world” will be lost—and with it any hope to be remembered.

Enough for now. I will try to think about “honor” in subsequent posts.

Arendt On Life and Love of the World

Arendt is famously adamant that politics cannot and should not devote itself to issues focused on the maintenance of life. Attending to such issues can only lead to disaster, as exemplified by the French Revolution being hijacked by the enrages. Lurking underneath her analysis of the French Revolution, one suspects, is a fierce anti-communism. The problem with Marxism (she implies without ever fully stating) is that it turns politics over to “questions of life,” to precisely “economic” issues, and thus a) loses what is distinctive and valuable about the political and b) leads to the massive infliction of death, a terror that makes the sins of Robespierre pale in comparison.

Why doesn’t Arendt condemn Marxism forthrightly? Because she is appalled by the know-nothing anti-communism of McCarthy and his ilk in the 1950s America and does not want to be welcomed into their camp as a fellow traveler. But, as starkly as Hayek, Arendt insists that the economy is private and must remain private. The dire consequences of mixing economic and politics are actually not that far different in Arendt’s analysis as in Hayek’s. He predicts “serfdom,” she sees an inability to access the “freedom” that action enables (where action—as distinct from labor and work– is only possible in the political realm.) Only action, in Arendt’s theory, is free. Labor and work unfold under the sign of “necessity.” And it is fair to say that in both Hayek and Arendt, “justice” (or, at least, “social justice” which concerns itself with a fair distribution of material goods along with equal protection under the law and equal access to political participation) gets short shrift. Very explicitly in Hayek, who fulminates against the “mirage” of social justice and sees “envy” as the only motivation driving any effort to achieve social justice. But almost as explicitly in Arendt, who seems to think the attempt to achieve such justice by the French revolutionaries as a destructive quest to the impossible. To attach politics to the promise of ending poverty is to raise hopes for a goal that cannot be reached—and the resultant disappointment generates a fury that tears society apart. In On Revolution, Arendt appears as fatalistic as Hayek about the possibility of achieving anything remotely like economic equality. Rather, political equality can be achieved, but only by building an impenetrable border between inevitable economic inequality and the equality that is to reign in the “space of appearances.” One type of status (economic status) is to have no impact, no bearing on a different kind of status, the political status enjoyed by the citizen.

The problem in the real world, of course, is that status and power don’t work that way. Power clings to status, but is mobile (extremely so) from one form of status to another. You can’t build a wall to keep economic power from generating political power. Rousseau was right to say that economic inequality was fatal to democracy. Plutocracy is the almost inevitable result of tolerating large economic inequalities.

Arendt does have an escape clause in her reflections on these issues—one that she, oddly enough, borrows from Marx. Oddly because she is generally anti-Marxist (because he substitutes economics for politics) and because the notion she does adopt is one of the most implausible Marxist tenets. Economic matters, Arendt claims in several places, are merely matters of “administration,” not of politics. Marx, of course, argued that the state would wither away in a classless society, leaving only the question of the “administration of things” (a wonderfully vague phrase). The idea seems to be that such administrative matters are conflict-free, simple questions of means. Politics is the realm of conflict, of argument, of disagreement—which Marx abhors and wants to abolish and which Arendt celebrates and wants to enhance. But such Arendtian conflict is never to be over material things—or, at least, over the distribution of material things. Or something like that. I am not the first to complain that it is not clear what Arendtian politics is “about.” She wants a free space of appearances where opinions are enunciated—and sees that speaking in public in agonistic deliberation with one’s equals as uniquely identity forming. But she rarely, if ever, considers the end point of those deliberations. In fact, she insists that the “action” which is epitomized by that public speaking is “unproductive.”

Now, in one sense, I think it fair to say that Arendt’s idea is something like this. We can all have an “opinion” about whether or not a bridge should be built over the river. We can offer reasons in a public debate about this decision, but there is no “truth” of the matter. Politics, then, would encompass the deliberation. But once the decision to build the bridge is made, its actual construction is a matter of “administration.” You call in the engineers and they get it done. It is not a matter of opinion, something we can argue about, to construct a bridge that can actually carry traffic without collapsing. “Truth,” which she calls “pre-political” (or maybe should be considered “apolitical”) takes over when it comes to the engineering decisions.

An obvious problem, of course, is that many “administrative” matters are much less cut and dried than building a bridge. (And even with the bridge, there will be disagreements about its look, and constraints connected to budget, amounts of traffic, availability of materials etc., some of which will entail debate beyond the expertise of the engineers.) Thus, for example, we can agree, after deliberation, that we want to decrease infant mortality rates. But there are no cut and dried methods that advance that goal, while there are also trade-offs involved (i.e. non-desirable side effects) with any method we do choose. There will be disagreements, then, about effectiveness and about the extent to which we should tolerate negative side-effects. Just as it proves difficult to segregate economic power/status from political power/status, it proves difficult to segregate “administrative decisions” from “political decisions” (about which we expect and even welcome disagreement and spirited debate).

Arendt’s escape clause does not only entail adopting the idea of non-political administration. She also, again in a quasi-Marxist way, seems to believe we are living in, or are on the verge of living in, a post-scarcity society. Our productive capacities have now reached the point where poverty will be abolished if we just administer things correctly. For the first time in history, every person (not just the citizen, not just the make head of household, not just the non-slave) will have the leisure to step into the public arena as an equal among equals. The terrible reign of labor, the drudgery of producing the necessities of life, will come to an end.

To Arendt, unlike Marx, the terrible danger is not that this potential to end poverty will be derailed by an unequal distribution of the goods modern technology produces. She pays no heed to the economic imperatives—namely the drives to profit and accumulation—that will generate “poverty amidst plenty.” Rather, she is worried (in classic 1950s style) about the psychological pathologies of “consumer culture.” What she, with a mandarin distaste and disdain that links her to her supposed nemesis Adorno, rails against are bourgeois subjects so enthralled by consumer goods, by the baubles connected to an enhanced life (but still “life”), that they will willingly work harder and harder to buy more “labor-saving devices,” instead of using their potential liberation from labor to embrace (non-productive) political action and freedom. The moderns have lost their taste for, even any understanding of, “freedom,” and are addicted to “necessities”—ever more elaborate meals, houses, clothes etc.

On another hand, action is not entirely non-productive. What it produces is the conditions of its own possibility. (Arendt was nothing if not a Kantian; she is always attuned to enabling conditions.) By appearing together in a public square to speak and act is to constitute that public square. It does not exist except when we inhabit it together doing our thing. When we go back home, it dissolves. (Arendt is mostly antipathetic to institutions, associating them with a reification akin to rigor mortis. Certainly, she never really considers the nature of institutions—and the way that they can provide some kind of stability, even permanence, that what is transitory. She obviously greatly prefers the spontaneity of what is produced through actual interactions over the formal structures that people devise to give those spontaneous productions a chance to survive beyond the moment of their creation.) Arendt, in her most grandiloquent moments, calls that public sphere, that space of appearances, “the world.”

Quite basically, Arendt says we will have disaster if we do not have people who “love the world.” Practically, that means people who prefer the political action that produces the space of appearances over the pleasures of consumption. Non-productive action produces nothing except the political realm that makes that action possible. The circularity here can be head-ache inducing. Still, Arendt insists that there is something to be called “public happiness” and that happiness is the “lost treasure of revolutions.” It is a heady pleasure discovered in the “acting in concert” that is a political movement, and is a pleasure disconnected from whether the movement succeeds in achieving its stated goals or not. For Occupy, the focus on that pleasure, on that creation together of a space to occupy, made even enunciating goals irrelevant—and even threatening. The point was this space the occupiers had created, not some leverage toward change in some other space. Creating our own world was the point, not influencing some other world.

What Arendt fears, then, is that attachment to “life” means attachment to consuming, to the pleasures associated with satisfying bodily necessities. She wants to advocate for a different set, a different order, of desires, ones connected to sociality, to what can only come into being intersubjectively, collectively.

Thus Arendt, like Ruskin and Mill, is worried about an attachment to life that is overly bodily, or bestial. (I am thinking of Mill’s famous passage about a swinish life as not worthy of human beings.) We have a “higher” destiny for Arendt—and she is contemptuous of those for whom working toward acquiring a second car and a vacation home provides more than enough meaning in their lives. We can go even further, I think, and say that Arendt buys into the basic premise of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. To be overly attached to life, to have nothing that you value enough above life to actually forfeit life to preserve that more valuable thing, is to be a slave. Life can’t be the highest value is you want to be human, to be more than a beast. There must be something you identify as unlivable, some set of conditions that you would not tolerate, and that you would die rather than endure. (In her later work, Arendt will associate this idea with Socrates, and insist that “when the chips are down,” the “moral” human would have chosen death over submission to the evil—no matter if understood as radical or banal—of the Nazis.) To return to the vocabulary of The Human Condition and On Revolution, to take “life” as the highest value is to chain oneself to “necessity.” Life compels; it confines us to “labor,” to the production of those necessities that sustain it. Freedom, the opposite of necessity, is only available to the person who refuses to cede life such power, who refuses to says that its claims trump all others. “The world” is one way Arendt designates that “other” to life, that something else to which we can pledge allegiance, which we can learn (?) to “love.”

The story doesn’t end there. There are issues of “organized remembrance” and “meaning” still to be addressed. So that’s where I am headed next.

Bleak Thoughts on a Grey Day

We interrupt the regularly scheduled blog posting for some passing gloom. I will get back to Arendt on life tomorrow.

Reading Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. (Harvard UP, 2015). It is sensible and clear and convincing. Except for the continual exposure of “contradictions.” It remains an article of faith on the left that contradictions are symptoms of instability. Yet the contradictions cited are, often, simply logical ones. For example, Butler’s belabored discussion of how soldiers are “dispensable” (i.e. cannon fodder) even while their existence and work is “indispensable” to the nation’s survival. That barely works above the level of wordplay. Even more substantial contradictions—for example, between needing consumers to fuel the economy and failing to pay workers adequate wages—are manageable in both short and long terms. The periodic “crisis” of capitalism have done little to undermine it. We could say, I guess, that capitalism’s ingenuity is endless, or (more to my liking) that power’s ability to withstand both protest and dysfunction should never be doubted.

Power, as Boltanski’s work considers, sometimes yields to critique, mollifying it by adopting certain reforms, and sometimes simply ignores critique, refusing to give an inch. Which strategy is adopted depends on the situation and the calculations that situation elicits. But power does not abdicate. Which is perhaps a way of saying that I have lost my liberal faith. Instead of thinking there is “some justice” to be had, I am more inclined, in these dark times, to say that people find niches, that they find out ways to hide in the interstices of a system big enough and complex enough for there to be corners that aren’t totally colonized. That is, we don’t live in a fully totalitarian world just yet—and a fully totalitarian world would be awfully hard to actually construct and maintain. But the “colonization of the lifeworld” (Habermas’s phrase) proceeds apace.

I usually dislike abstractions like “capitalism” and “power”–and dislike imputing agency to them. But there is something to be said for systematic imperatives. The US manufacturer who must lower labor costs or go out of business because the product can be produced more cheaply elsewhere. The maufacturer’s agency in such a case is so compromised as to be almost non-existent. The same cannot be said as easily for politicians or judges. The Paul Ryans and Samuel Aliotos of the world have much to answer for–and are (this is what hurts) generally immune from ever being held to account. So the theoretical issue is how to adequately account for both human agency and for systematic functionings. I don’t think the notion of “contradiction” helps in either case–and I certainly don’t believe that “contradictions” drive the system’s evolution over time. Tensions between competing goals that require trade-offs yes, opposing forces yes, conflict yes, but contradictions no. All kinds of things can co-exist without compelling change or adjustments.

I met up with a former student yesterday who has been spending time in Ladakh in Northern India, writing a book for school children that aims to help preserve the local language and culture. The community is about 250,000 people and was relatively isolated until recently. Now it depends heavily on tourism in place of its traditional pastoralist economy. 300,000 tourists last year. Eco-tourists, trekkers, but also cultural tourists, so we are in ethnicity inc. territory. Creeping colonization. His work is honorable, but it will also be monetized. How to think about the “contradictions” involved here, that the preservation of a culture is also a means for incorporation into a global tourist industry? Certainly, these contradictions do not imply instability. They just entail different goods, each of which will find ways to accommodate the others. The results will be messy–but so are all social systems, all cultures. The messiness may often our sense of logical coherence or consistency, but it doesn’t mean the result will be short-lived or a source of deep discomfort to those living within it.

Population Control and Violence

To go back a few steps, one puzzle is why Arendt, Foucault, Taylor and others believe that taking “life” as the primary value leads to states that kill (in large numbers?)

James Scott’s Against the Grain (Yale UP, 2017) (which I have just about finished reading) offers some ideas along that line. Scott accepts that both slavery and war existed before the emergence of the state. But he sees the state as obsessed from the start with population control. So much for Foucault’s bringing the question of population on board somewhere in the eighteenth century. For Scott, it is all about people, and almost nothing to do with territory, when considering the underlying motives of war.

Life, in its barest form, is about subsistence, about producing enough to sustain life. (In that sense, Scott is a materialist of a fairly straight-forward Marxist/Darwinian type.) The state always creates classes of people who do not directly (or even indirectly) produce the stuff needed for subsistence. Thus, any state must 1) organize production in such a way that a surplus is produced, and 2) appropriate that surplus for distribution to those who do not produce the basics (food, clothing etc.) Furthermore, states create a need for non-subsistence goods (metals, luxuries, the implements of war, the ceremonial architecture of hierarchies) that necessitate 1) trade and 2) even more laborers who are not directly producing subsistence goods and who must be fed.

The problem with life—if we think in Arendt’s terms—is that it requires “labor.” The problem of the state, in Scott’s rendering, is that it amplifies the need for labor because states invent so many more things to labor on. War is a primary means to gain access to more labor. The most important prize of a successful battle is prisoners who can be turned into slaves. Or, alternatively, the threat of violence can make a neighboring society agree to pay tribute.

The state, then, has a stake in keeping its slaves alive, in increasing its population in order to secure an adequate supply of labor. But it also has to coerce people into doing that labor because there is no good reason to voluntarily do the work. It’s economic exploitation and appropriation from the get go—and all the way down. States are always kleptocracies—and taxes are the form that robbery takes.

Scott has written a book called Two Cheers for Anarchism that is not very good. His other work is off the charts fantastic. (Seeing Like a State, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Weapons of the Weak, and The Art of Not Being Governed.) He comes down squarely on the side of organized violence is far worse (because more effective and more systematic) than the sporadic but ever-present violence found in non-state societies. Far be it from Scott to accept Steven Pinker’s insistence that the rule of law curbs violence. If we go by the numbers, the legitimate violence of the state always claims more victims than free-lancers.

Still—does a state that claims to be working in the service of life inflict more death than a state that locates its raison d’être elsewhere. And does it even make any sense to think in those terms? What would a state look like that did not claim to be enhancing, protecting, sustaining the life of its subjects? Even the most brutal regime, one that accepts, without putting any kind of pretty face on it, that power must be deployed ruthlessly and continuously, still sees that power as enhancing and protecting the lies of the powerful. The wielders of power don’t will their own death.

The alternative is a sacrificial culture, one centered around a death cult. The Nazis approach that elevation of death over life. “Balanced against this life, this death.” (Yeats). It seems plausible to me that, in certain circumstances, a kind of fatalistic embrace of death, an even joyful embrace of destruction including destruction of the self, would be possible. In all the stuff about killing that I have been reading, about the ecstasy, the “high,” of battle, I haven’t seen anyone talk about the ecstasy of embracing one’s own death in the general conflagration. Surely, however, that’s an ecstasy of submission, not one of power. (The ever presence of those two sides of Nietzsche, his celebration of the “beast” who acts unapologetically out of the will to power shadowed by the masochism of the Dionysian figure who glories in suffering and in willing to live his whole painful life over and over again.) To embrace death is an odd combination of hatred for life and never feeling more alive than when the end of life is imminent.

The point, if we take the Darwinian perspective that also appealed so much to Engels, is that the preservation of life (enabling its reproduction) is the first requirement imposed upon us by biology. No state could possibly escape that imperative. Scott is simply arguing that the state is not necessarily the most efficient and preferable (according to a variety of criteria) means for preserving life—and employing the state as the means for subsistence comes with some very high costs. He clearly believes that non-state solutions to the problem of subsistence are actually better for most involved (if not for the elites at the top of state hierarchies.)

Scott’s conclusion is driven by his not valuing the achievements of “civilization” very highly and by his firm belief that “culture” (as opposed to “civilization”) is preserved (and can ever flourish) in the stateless conditions that we have mistakenly thought of as “dark ages.” Arendt’s take, it seems to me, would be the exact opposite. She sees the polity—and politics—as the pinnacle of human achievement precisely because it transcends labor and the necessities of subsistence. “Man’s life would be cheap as beasts” (King Lear) if we didn’t aspire to—and actually achieve—something more than mere subsistence. “Freedom” is only granted to us by the polis and precisely means escaping from the bonds of necessity, of being able to indulge in the non-productive “action” that politics enables. Arendt is motivated by a horror of production, of doing something for the sake of securing or making the means to life. She values those things that are not conducive to preserving or sustaining life.

Thus, she also wants a state not oriented toward life. Instead, her ideal state (just like her ideal political actor) is motivated by a “love of the world.” That’s where I will pick it up tomorrow.