Polytropy

Contents:

• 7 the public realm: the common
• 8 the private realm: property
• 9 the social and the private
• 10 the location of human activities

The first three sections of the chapter were the previous reading.

Key words

Public, private, intimate, real, relevant, wisdom, goodness, love.

I am not sure what use such a list is, but there it is. “Relevant” is used a number of times, and I do not really know why.

Questions

Autocracy

Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. Just from what we have read in The Human Condition though, what can she tell us about the autocrat?

• He may be effectively the head of a family, thus missing out on the reality that comes with public life:

  The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves … (p. 50, ¶ 7.2)

  … the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised … This is the meaning of public life, compared to which even the richest and most satisfying family life can offer only the pro­longation or multiplication of one’s own position … (p. 57, ¶ 7.14)

  (I made those quotes in the initial post too.)

• Particularly if he is not a hereditary monarch, the necessity he feels to keep his position may make him unfit for public life. He is like a poor man, and on page 64 (¶ 8.9),

  Poverty forces the free man to act like a slave. Private wealth, therefore, became a condition for admission to public life not because its owner was engaged in accumulating it but, on the contrary, because it assured with reasonable certainty that its owner would not have to engage in providing for himself …

Thinking and feeling

A theme, or the theme, of this chapter is the distinction between the public and the private and how the distinction is blurred, to our detriment, by the rise of what Arendt calls mass society or just society. See e.g. in the previous reading, page 28 (¶ 5.2), “the dividing line [between the public and private realms] is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family.”

I wonder if (or what) the whole problem has to do with the distinction between thinking and feeling.

It is true that Arendt is not supposed to be much interested in thinking at present. She did say in the Prologue, on page 4 (¶ 0.11), “the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking, is left out of these present considerations.”

Arendt does say some things about thinking. In Chapter I, on page 16 (¶ 1.8), she mentioned “the very discovery of contemplation (theōria) as a human faculty, distinctly different from thought and reasoning, which occurred in the Socratic school,” along with “the discovery of contemplation as the philosopher’s way of life.”

Again, the distinction between the private and the public is a theme; but this seems to correspond to the distinction between feeling and thinking. Feeling is private, while thinking is somehow public.

In practice, thinking may be public only to oneself, and indeed one may need to do it within “the four walls of one’s private property,” which “offer the only reli­able hiding place from the common public world,” as Arendt says on page 71 (¶ 9.7); “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.”

On page 50 (¶ 7.2), Arendt seems to lump feeling and thinking together. She discusses the transformation of “the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses— … into a shape to fit them for public appearance.” The artist effects such a transformation; but then so do we all, just by talking. Does this mean language is art, and we are all artists?

Moreover, even though Arendt includes “the thoughts of the mind” among the “forces of intimate life,” is it fair to say that art, or language, is the conversion of feeling into thought—more precisely, the conversion of what is only felt into something that can be thought about?

Philosophy

Recall Arendt’s announcement on page 5 (¶ 0.10) that she intends “to think what we are doing”:

What I propose in the following is a re­consideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless reckless­ness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty—seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

Such thinking would seem to be doing philosophy. Arendt is doing this in public, although, by the account on page 76 (¶ 10.8), “solitude can become an authentic way of life in the figure of the philosopher.” Even in solitude though, the philosopher has her- or himself as company, as Arendt has pointed out on the previous page (¶ 10.6): “The philosopher, even if he decides with Plato to leave the ‘cave’ of human affairs, does not have to hide from himself.”

Etymologically speaking, as Arendt reminds us earlier on page 75 (¶ 10.4), philosophy is the love of wisdom, and this love somehow comes out of “Socrates’ great in­sight that no man can be wise.” How does that happen?

Summary

• 7 the public realm: the common
  • ¶ 7.1 “Public” indicates two things.
  • ¶ 7.2 First, the artist makes experience public in the sense of apparent and thus real.
  • ¶ 7.3 Bodily pain may be the most intense experience, but has no appearance, though death does in the form of old age.
  • ¶ 7.4 Many things cannot stand publicity and are in that sense irrelevant and private, though a private thing like love, as distinct from friendship, may be very relevant.
  • ¶ 7.5 Being considered by the public may not change something’s private character: the example is French domesticity.
  • ¶ 7.6 Second, the public is the common world, which relates and separates us, like a table.
  • ¶ 7.7 Mass society is difficult because the table is missing.
  • ¶ 7.8 Only one principle, the Christian charity of Augustine, has been able to replace the missing table. Charity can bind saints or criminals, provided they know the world will end. The Christian community is a body, like a family. It may need rules, as in a monastery, to prohibit excellence and thus pride, so that a public realm does not develop, though it was not likely to develop anyway, since that doesn’t happen in a family.
  • ¶ 7.9 A public realm requires permanence. Conviction of impermanance, as after the downfall of the Roman Empire or today, may produce Christian worldlessness or a spirit of carpe diem.
  • ¶ 7.10 The public realm used to be where one sought immortality; but almost nobody seeks this anymore.
  • ¶ 7.11 The polis, the res publica, were “guarantee against the futility of individual life.”
  • ¶ 7.12 What is sought now is only admiration or money, to feed one’s vanity.
  • ¶ 7.13 Reality depends on plurality, found in public life, but not family life.
  • ¶ 7.14 That plurality needs also a common concern, which is lost in radical isolation (as in tyranny) or in mass society (or mass hysteria).
• 8 the private realm: property
  • ¶ 8.1 Private life offers no reality, no “objective” relations, no permanence.
  • ¶ 8.2 Without mass society, private life may be pleasant, as in Rome, though no replacement for political life.
  • ¶ 8.3 That Christians and socialists see public life as a burden shows that something has already withered away.
  • ¶ 8.4 When the public goes away, so does private property, which is not private in the privative sense.
  • ¶ 8.5 We don’t understand this, because we confuse property and wealth.
  • ¶ 8.6 Property used to be sacred, but not wealth.
  • ¶ 8.7 Greek law was about boundaries.
  • ¶ 8.8 The private was the other side of the public.
  • ¶ 8.9 Wealth became a condition for public life, to ensure that a person was free to engage in it.
  • ¶ 8.10 Before this, there was no shame in menial occupations.
  • ¶ 8.11 Proudhon was right that property is theft, in the sense that wealth accumulation started with expropriation.
• 9 the social and the private
  • ¶ 9.1 Society began with the demand, not to enter the public because of one’s wealth, but to have safety to accumulate more wealth.
  • ¶ 9.2 Wealth as capital has permanence, but not like that of the shared world.
  • ¶ 9.3 Unlike Marx, we understand that the contradiction of using public government to protect private wealth has submerged both private and public into the social.
  • ¶ 9.4 This loss of privacy provokes the flight into subjectivity which is intimacy. Property is no longer a place, but has its source in us.
  • ¶ 9.5 That is Locke’s idea, likely to become true.
  • ¶ 9.6 Two non-privative traits of privacy precede intimacy. First is that we need our private possessions more than anything else. Elimination of this need, through excess wealth, is effectively elimination of freedom.
  • ¶ 9.7 Second is that we need a place to hide from the world. Entirely public life is shallow.
  • ¶ 9.8 A public realm needs fences around the citizens’ property; modern political and economic theory disregards this for the sake of private wealth accumulation.
  • ¶ 9.9 It used to be the necessities of life that were hidden: thus slaves and women.
• 10 the location of human activities
  • ¶ 10.1 Every activity has its proper location, one extreme example in particular.
  • ¶ 10.2 The example is good works, a Christian invention.
  • ¶ 10.3 The good deed as such cannnot be seen, even by the doer, as the Gospel teaches.
  • ¶ 10.4 Compare with the thirty-six righteous men of the Talmud, unknown even to themselves; or with Socrates, who saw that nobody could be wise. This led to the love of wisdom, as Jesus leads to love of goodness.
  • ¶ 10.5 These loves cancel themselves if their object can be achieved.
  • ¶ 10.6 However, the philosopher need not hide from himself.
  • ¶ 10.7 The lover of goodness cannot be alone, but must be lonely. Thought can be remembered and made tangible in writing; not so good deeds.
  • ¶ 10.8 Not all can be philosophers, but all can love goodness. They still need the company of God.
  • ¶ 10.9 Machiavelli knew the negative ruinous quality of doing good.
  • ¶ 10.10 Our concern has been only “to indicate that the historical judgments of politi­cal communities, by which each determined which of the activities of the vita activa should be shown in public and which be hidden in privacy, may have their correspondence in the nature of these activities themselves.”

41. This is also the reason why it is impossible “to write a character sketch of any slave who lived. … Until they emerge into freedom and notoriety, they remain shadowy types rather than persons” (Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, p. 156). [50]

I propose that the transformation of the intimate into the public is what Collingwood calls expression in The Principles of Art. A clue is how Collingwood identifies art and language, while Arendt effectively makes us artists whenever we speak.

I don’t think Collingwood quite says that expression is the transformation of feeling into thought, but it is suggested in Chapter VIII, “Thinking and Feeling”; § 1, “The Two Contrasted”:

… there is a special kind of privacy about feelings, in contrast with what may be called the publicity of thoughts. A hundred people in the street may all feel cold, but each person’s feeling is private to himself. But if they all think that the thermometer reads 22° Fahrenheit, they are all thinking the same thought: this thought is public to them all. The act of thinking it may or may not be an entirely private act; but a thought in the sense of what we think is not the act of thinking it, and a feeling in the sense of what we feel is not the act of feeling it … The cold that our hundred people feel is not the physical fact that there are ten degrees of frost; nor is it even something due to that fact, for if one of them had lately been living in a colder climate he would not feel cold in those physical conditions; it is simply a feeling in them, or rather a hundred different feelings, each private to the person who feels it, but each in certain ways like all the rest. But the ‘fact’ or ‘proposition’ or ‘thought’ that there are ten degrees of frost is not a hundred different ‘facts’ or ‘propositions’ or ‘thoughts’; it is one ‘fact’ or ‘pro­position’ or ‘thought’ which a hundred different people ‘apprehend’ or ‘assent to’ or ‘think’. And what is here said of the relation between different persons in respect of what they feel and think respectively is equally true of the relation between different occasions of feeling and thinking re­spectively in the life of a single person.

Collingwood allows that the act of thinking may be private, and perhaps this is corroborated by Arendt’s listing of “the thoughts of the mind” among “the greatest forces of intimate life.” Would Arendt follow Collingwood in allowing a thought itself to be public to oneself over time?

42. I use here a little-known poem on pain from Rilke’s deathbed: The first lines of the untitled poem are: “Komm du, du letzter, den ich anerkenne, / heil­loser Schmerz im leiblichen Geweb”; and it concludes as follows: “Bin ich es noch, der da unkenntlich brennt? / Erinnerungen reiss ich nicht herein. / O Leben, Leben: Draussensein. / Und ich in Lohe. Niemand, der mich kennt.”

43. On the subjectivity of pain and its relevance for all variations of hedonism and sensualism, see §§ 15 and 43. For the living, death is primarily dis-appear­ance. But unlike pain, there is one aspect of death in which it is as though death appeared among the living, and that is in old age. Goethe once remarked that growing old is “gradually receding from appearance” (stufenweises Zurücktreten aus der Erscheinung); the truth of this remark as well as the actual appearance of this process of disappearing becomes quite tangible in the old-age self-portraits of the great masters—Rembrandt, Leonardo, etc—in which the intensity of the eyes seems to illuminate and preside over the receding flesh. [51]

How is bodily pain to be distinguished from emotional? I suppose a headache is bodily. I have also considered bodily ills to more real than anything else, since they demand attention. Their appearance blots out everything else, and as Arendt says in ¶ 7.2 and will again in ¶ 7.4, appearance is reality. I agree with her that we forget bodily pain more easily than emotional. Yet this may be because the emotional is less real until we verbalize it as a thought, which can be shared. Let us see what is to come, as note 43 says. Indeed, see ¶ 7.12.

Lots going on here! What does “relevant” mean?

Worldlessness will be coming back in charity in ¶ 7.8.

Recall the distinction in ¶ 6.3, between poetry, music, and novels on the one hand, and public architecture on the other. I’m not sure what Arendt means by petit bonheur; perhaps one can call it domesticity, although Wikipedia connects this with the American cult of true womanhood. For the French Wikipédia, “Petit Bonheur” is a 1969 song by Salvatore Adamo.

Things must be separate to have any relation other than identity.

Tables! What difference does it make whether a discussion is held around a table or not? What if all sat on the floor?

44. Contra Faustum Manichaeum v. 5.

45. This is of course still the presupposition even of Aquinas’ political philoso­phy (see op. cit. ii. 2. 181. 4).

46. The term corpus rei publicae is current in pre-Christian Latin, but has the connotation of the population inhabiting a res publica, a given political realm. The corresponding Greek term sōma is never used in pre-Christian Greek in a political [53] sense. The metaphor seems to occur for the first time in Paul (I Cor. 12: 12–27) and is current in all early Christian writers (see, for instance, Tertullian Apolo­geticus 39, or Ambrosius De officiis ministrorum iii. 3. 17). It became of the greatest importance for medieval political theory, which unanimously assumed that all men were quasi unum corpus (Aquinas op. cit. ii. 1. 81. 1). But while the early writers stressed the equality of the members, which are all equally necessary for the well-being of the body as a whole, the emphasis later shifted to the differ­ence between the head and the members, to the duty of the head to rule and of the members to obey. (For the Middle Ages, see Anton-Hermann Chroust, “The Corporate Idea in the Middle Ages,” Review of Politics, Vol. VIII [1947].)

47. Aquinas op. cit. ii. 2. 179. 2.

48. See Article 57 of the Benedictine rule, in Levasseur, op. cit., p. 187: If one of the monks became proud of his work, he had to give it up. [54]

Again (as last time), Socrates wanted the guardians to be as a family; according to Arendt, was this plan bound to fail?

If charity is distinguished from love by being between men, is love between a man (that is, a human being) and a thing (which may not love back)?

Concerning criminals, Arendt says in “Truth and Politics” (1967), as I quoted in “Plato and Christianity,”

[The] underlying principle [of Kant’s categorical imperative] is the axiom of non-contradiction – the thief contradicts himself because he wants to keep the stolen goods as his property – and this axiom owes its validity to the conditions of thought that Socrates was the first to discover.

Here is Collingwood on action in “The Devil” (1916):

The truth is that evil neither requires nor admits any explanation whatever. To the question, “Why do people do wrong?” the only answer is, “Because they choose to.” To a mind obsessed by the idea of causation, the idea that everything must be explained by something else, this answer seems inadequate. But action is precisely that which is not caused … An act of the will is its own cause and its own explanation; to seek its explanation in something else is to treat it not as an act but as a mechanical event.

In Arendt’s terminology, a mechanical event is an instance of behavior. I noticed the passage of “The Devil” while looking up the following, which is relevant to Arendt’s juxtaposition of saints and criminals (and which also brings in pride, forbidden in the monastery):

To set oneself against current beliefs and practices is the central character­istic of all heroes, and it is equally the central characteristic of all criminals; of Christ and of Lucifer. The difference is not psychological; it is not that the hero has noble and ex­alted sentiments while the criminal gives way to ignoble and debased passions. The essence of crime is the pride of Lucifer, the feeling of nobility and exaltation, of superiority to conven­tion and vulgar prejudice.

In Aquinas, Question ii. 2. 181. 4 is, “Whether the active life remains after this life?”

I answer that, As stated above (A[1]), the active life has its end in external actions: and if these be referred to the quiet of contemplation, for that very reason they belong to the contemplative life. But in the future life of the blessed the occupation of external actions will cease, and if there be any external actions at all, these will be referred to contemplation as their end. For, as Augustine says at the end of De Civitate Dei xxii, 30, “there we shall rest and we shall see, we shall see and love, we shall love and praise.” And he had said before (De Civ. Dei xxii, 30) that “there God will be seen without end, loved without wearying, praised without tiring: such will be the occupation of all, the common love, the universal activity.”

49. Barrow (Slavery in the Roman Empire, p. 168), in an illuminating discus­sion of the membership of slaves in the Roman colleges, which provided, besides “good fellowship in life and the certainty of a decent burial … the crowning glory of an epitaph; and in this last the slave found a melancholy pleasure.” [55]

Once men sought glory; now only vainglory. See ¶ 7.12 below.

Billionaires today are not building universities or museums (are they?). Perhaps some of them, along with people like Ray Kurzweil, are trying to live forever. Is this an “inauthentic” concern with immortality, because vain? Arendt did refer to such concern in ¶ 0.4: “the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man’s life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit.” Here is Alex Moshakis, writing in “Do we have to age?” (Observer, 3 Jan 2021) about biologist Andew Steele:

Eventually, he says, “I think we are very likely to have a drug that treats ageing in the next 10 years.”

Steele believes we will be hopelessly unlucky if scientists don’t make a breakthrough within that time, given how many human trials are in progress or upcoming. And although these breakthroughs won’t result in treatments that extend our lives by 100 years, they will give us enough extra time to ensure we’re alive for subsequent breakthroughs, subsequent treatments, subsequent additions in lifespan and so on. Our lives will be extended not all in one go but incrementally – one year, another year, suddenly we’re 150. In Ageless, Steele talks of a generation of people that grows up expecting to die but, thanks to an accumulation of new treatments, each more effective than the last, just doesn’t. “One after another,” he writes, “lifesaving medical breakthroughs will push their funerals further and further into the future.”

50. Nicomachean Ethics 1177b31.

In the translation of Rackham, the Aristotle (Bk X, Ch. 7) is

Nor ought we to obey those who enjoin that a man should have man’s thoughts and a mortal the thoughts of mortality, but we ought so far as possible to achieve immortality, and do all that man may to live in accordance with the highest thing in him.

οὐ χρὴ δὲ κατὰ τοὺς παραινοῦντας ἀνθρώπινα φρονεῖν ἄνθρωπον ὄντα οὐδὲ θνητὰ τὸν θνητόν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἐνδέχεται ἀθανατίζειν καὶ πάντα ποιεῖν πρὸς τὸ ζῆν κατὰ τὸ κράτιστον τῶν ἐν αὑτῷ.

51. Wealth of Nations, Book 1, ch. 10 (pp. 120 and 95 of Vol. I of Every­man’s ed.). [56]

Is admiration then the vain form of glory or renown?

52. For modern loneliness as a mass phenomenon see David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950).

53. So Plinius Junior, quoted in W. L. Westermann, “Sklaverei,” in Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. VI, p. 1045.

54. There is plenty of evidence for this different estimation of wealth and cul­ture in Rome and Greece. But it is interesting to note how consistently this esti­mate coincided with the position of slaves. Roman slaves played a much greater role in Roman culture than in Greece, where, on the other hand, their role in economic life was much more important (see Westermann, in Pauly-Wissowa, p. 984). [59]

How was wealth accumulated in Greece?

The physical types present in a society depend on the condition of medicine. Likewise perhaps the mental or spiritual types. I am thinking of introversion and extraversion. I am thinking of how, in the Turkey of my experience, and perhaps everywhere, at least if you go back far enough, it has been unheard of to live alone or even to be left alone while your spouse goes out visiting.

55. Augustine (De civitate Dei xix. 19) sees in the duty of caritas toward the utilitas proximi (“the interest of one’s neighbor”) the limitation of otium and contemplation, But “in active life, it is not the honors or power of this life we should covet, … but the welfare of those who are under us [salutem subdi­torum].” Obviously, this kind of responsibility resembles the responsibility of the household head for his family more than political responsibility, properly speaking. The Christian precept to mind one’s own business is derived from I Thess. 4: 11: “that ye study to be quiet and to do your own business” (prattein ta idia, whereby ta idia is understood as opposed to ta koina [“public common affairs”]). [60]

In the first sentence, I originally missed the emphasis on the privative trait as having weakened. The sense of privacy as being simply privation had withered away.

One longs for the withering away of the state, because this is what has taken the place of the polis.

The private and the public are not opposite, but interdependent (see especially ¶ 8.8), and this will be seen through the concept of private property. The term is apparently built up from three uses of the Indo-European root per¹, which is, according to the The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix,

Base of prepositions and preverbs with the basic meanings of “forward,” “through,” and a wide range of extended senses such as “in front of,” “before,” “early,” “first,” “chief,” “toward,” “against,” “near,” “at,” “around.”

Derivatives include far, paradise, afford, first, protein, veneer, probe, privy, pristine, and priest.

One does speak of public property, although it seems Arendt does not. In note 58 to ¶ 8.6 below we are going to see the peculium, which according to the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary is

private property of a son, daughter, or slave, held with the father’s or master’s consent.

The Indo-European root is peku-, meaning “Wealth, movable property,” according to the AHD; other derivatives include “fellow,” “fee,” “pecorino,” and “impecunious.”

I suppose Arendt is referring at the end to socialist countries.

Arendt’s distinction between property and wealth would seem to be the distinctions, or to be similar to the distinctions, between

• real and personal property,
• immovable and movable property (or immobile and mobile property, as in ¶ 9.4),
• fungibiles and consumptibiles (see again ¶ 9.4).

The term real property is significant, since

• publicity gives reality, as Arendt said in ¶ 8.2;
• having [real] property is required for a public life, as Arendt is going to say now, in ¶ 8.6.

• Prior to the modern age, which
  • began with the expropriation of the poor and then
  • proceeded to emancipate the new propertyless classes,

  all civilizations have rested upon the sacredness of private property.

• Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly distributed, had never been sacred before.

56. Coulanges (op. cit.) holds: “The true signification of familia is property; it designates the field, the house, money, and slaves” (p. 107). Yet, this “prop- [61] erty” is not seen as attached to the family; on the contrary, “the family is at­tached to the hearth, the hearth is attached to the soil” (p. 62). The point is: “The fortune is immovable like the hearth and the tomb to which it is attached. It is the man who passes away” (p. 74).

57. Levasseur (op. cit.) relates the medieval foundation of a community and the conditions of admission to it: “Il ne suffisait pas d’habiter la ville pour avoir droit à cette admission. Il fallait … posséder une maison. …” Furthermore: “Toute injure proférée en public contre la commune entraînait la démolition de la maison et le bannissement du coupable” (p. 240, including n. 3).

58. The distinction is most obvious in the case of slaves who, though without property in the ancient understanding (that is, without a place of their own), were by no means propertyless in the modern sense. The peculium (the “private posses­sion of a slave”) could amount to considerable sums and even contain slaves of his own (vicarii). Barrow speaks of “the property which the humblest of his class possessed” (Slavery in the Roman Empire, p. 122; this work is the best report on the role of the peculium).

59. Coulanges reports a remark of Aristotle that in ancient times the son could not be a citizen during the lifetime of his father; upon his death, only the eldest son enjoyed political rights (op. cit., p. 228). Coulanges holds that the Roman plebs originally consisted of people without home and hearth, that it there­fore was clearly distinct from the populus Romanus (pp. 229 ff.).

60. “The whole of this religion was inclosed within the walls of each house. … All these gods, the Hearth, the Lares, and the Manes, were called the hidden gods, or gods of the interior. To all the acts of this religion secrecy was necessary, sacrificia occulta, as Cicero said (De arusp. respl. 17)” (Coulanges, op. cit., p. 37). [62]

61. It seems as though the Eleusinian Mysteries provided for a common and quasi-public experience of this whole realm, which, because of its very nature and even though it was common to all, needed to be hidden, kept secret from the public realm: Everybody could participate in them, but nobody was permitted to talk about them. The mysteries concerned the unspeakable, and experiences beyond speech were non-political and perhaps antipolitical by definition (see Karl Kerenyi, Die Geburt der Helena [1943–45], pp. 48 ff.). That they concerned the secret of birth and death seems proved by a fragment of Pindar: oide men biou teleutan, oiden de diosdoton archan (frag. 137a), where the initiated is said to know “the end of life and the Zeus-given beginning.”

Birth and death must be hidden because we cannot explain them? How is that? In this connection, we might ask about activities that are usually hidden today, such as defecation and sexual intercourse; perhaps in ancient times the public latrines did not have individual stalls, and the brothels were easy to find (but that’s true in Amsterdam today too).

The Pindar fragment is numbered 137 (102) and headed “The Eleusinian Mysteries” on pages 590–3 in the 1915 Loeb edition of Sir John Sandys (the numbers seem to be of Bergk and Boeckh respectively):

ὄλβιος ὅστις ἰδὼν ἐκεῖνα
κοίλαν εἶσιν ὑπὸ χθόνα·
οἶδεν μὲν βιοτου τελευτὰν
οἶδεν δὲ δόσδοτον ἀρχάν.

Blessed is he who hath seen these things before he goeth beneath the earth; for he understandeth the end of mortal life, and the beginning (of a new life) given of god.

Pindar flourished during the Persian Wars.

In ¶ 8.11, there will be more on expropriation: “the expropriation of the peasant classes which in turn was the almost accidental consequence of the expropriation of Church and monastic property after the Reformation.” One should mention too the expropriation of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.

62. The Greek word for law, nomos, derives from nemein, which means to distribute, to possess (what has been distributed), and to dwell. The combination, of law and hedge in the word nomos is quite manifest in a fragment of Heraclitus: machesthai chrē ton dēmon hyper tou nomou hokōsper teicheos (“the people should fight for the law as for a wall”). The Roman word for law, lex, has an entirely different meaning; it indicates a formal relationship between people rather than the wall that separates them from others. But the boundary and its god, Terminus, who separated the agrum publicum a privato (Livius) was more highly revered than the corresponding theoi horoi in Greece.

63. Coulanges reports an ancient Greek law according to which two build­ings never were permitted to touch (op. cit., p. 63). [63]

64. The word polis originally connoted something like a “ring-wall,” and it seems the Latin urbs also expressed the notion of a “circle” and was derived from the same root as orbis. We find the same connection in our word “town,” which originally, like the German Zaun, meant a surrounding fence (sce R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought [1954], p. 444, n. 1).

65. The legislator therefore did not need to be a citizen and frequently was called in from the outside. His work was not political; political life, however, could begin only after he had finished his legislation.

The Heraclitus is DK B47, LM D107:

μάχεσθαι χρὴ τὸν δῆμον ὑπὲρ τοῦ νόμου ὅκωσπερ τείχεος.

The people must fight for their law just as for their city wall.

Lex is cognate with λόγος; the Indo-European root leg- means to collect.

Property could not from the beginning be the condition for admission to citizenship, because this would presume that a citizenry for setting the rules has already been constituted. Having real property was initially the condition for citizenship, simply because being a citizen by definition meant having this other side. Then could come the developments of the next paragraph. See also ¶ 9.3 in the next section.

66. Demosthenes Orationes 57. 45: “Poverty forces the free tu do many slavish and base things” (polla doulika kai tapeina pragmata tous eleutherous hē penia biazetai poiein) [64]

67. This condition for admission to the public realm was still in existence in the earlier Middle Ages. The English “Books of Customs” still drew “a sharp distinction between the craftsman and the freeman, franke homme, of the town. … If a craftsman became so rich that he wished to become a freeman, he must first foreswear his craft and get rid of all his tools from his house” (W. J. Ashley, op. cit., p. 83). It was only under the rule of Edward III that the craftsmen be­came so rich that “instead of the craftsmen being incapable of citizenship, citizen­ship came to be bound up with membership of one of the companies” (p. 89).

68. Coulanges, in distinction from other authors, stresses the time- and strength-consuming activities demanded from an ancient citizen, rather than his “leisure,” and sees rightly that Aristotle’s statement that no man who had to work for his livelihood could be a citizen is a simple statement of fact rather than the expression of a prejudice (op. cit., pp. 335 ff.). It is characteristic of the mod­ern development that riches as such, regardless of the occupation of their owner, became a qualification for citizenship: only now was it a mere privilege to be a citizen, unconnected with any specifically political activities.

Here is the first explicit indication of how wealth might be evaluated: in numbers of slaves.

69. This seems to me to be the solution of the “well-known puzzle in the study of the economic history of the ancient world that industry developed up to a certain point, but stopped short of making progress which might have been ex­pected … [in view of the fact that] thoroughness and capacity for organization on a large scale is shown by the Romans in other departments, in the public services and the army” (Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, pp. 109–10). It [65] seems a prejudice due to modern conditions to expect the same capacity for or­ganization in private as in “public services.” Max Weber, in his remarkable essay (op. cit.) had already insisted on the fact that ancient cities were rather “centers of consumption than of production” and that the ancient slave owner was a “rentier and not a capitalist [Unternehmer]” (pp. 13, 22 ff., and 144). The very indifference of ancient writers to economic questions, and the lack of documents in this respect, give additional weight to Weber’s argument.

The “puzzle” is why people have different inclinations; but the fact is that they do, particularly before the rise of mass society!

70. All histories of the working class, that is, a class of people who are with­out any property and live only from the work of their hands, suffer from the naive assumption that there has always been such a class. Yet, as we saw, even slaves were not without property in antiquity, and the so-called free labor in an­tiquity usually rurns out to consist of “free shopkeepers, traders and craftsmen” arrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, p. 126). M. E. Park (The Plebs Urbana in Cicero’s Day [1921]), therefore, comes to the conclusion that there was no free labor, since the free man always appears to be an owner of some sort. W. J. Ashley sums up the situation in the Middle Ages up to the fifteenth century: “There was as yet no large class of wage laborers, no ‘working class’ in the mod­ern sense of the term. By ‘working men,’ we mean a number of men, from among whom individuals may indeed rise to become masters, but the majority of whom cannot hope ever to rise to a higher position. But in the fourteenth century a few years’ work as a journeyman was but a stage through which the poorer men had to pass, while the majority probably set up for themselves as master craftsmen as soon as apprenticeship was over” (op. cit., pp. 93–94).

    Thus, the working class in antiquity was neither free nor without property; if, through manumission, the slave was given (in Rome) or had bought (in [66] Athens) his freedom, he did not become a free laborer but instantly became an independent businessman or craftsman. (“Most slaves seem to have taken into freedom some capital of their own” to set up in trade and industry [Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, p. 103]). And in the Middle Ages, to be a worker in the modern sense of the term was a temporary stage in one’s life, a preparation for mastership and manhood. Hired labor in the Middle Ages was an exception, and the German day laborers (the Tagelöhner in Luther’s Bible translation) or the French maneuvres lived outside the settled communities and were identical with the poor, the “labouring poor” in England (see Pierre Brizon, Histoire du travail et des travailleurs [1926], p. 40). Moreover, the fact that no code of law before the Code Napoléon offers any treatment of free labor (see W. Endemann, Die Behandlung der Arbeit im Privatrecht (1896), pp. 49, 53) shows conclusively how recent the existence of a working class is.

71. See the ingenious comment on “property is theft” which occurs in Prou­dhon’s posthumously published Théorie de la propriété, pp. 209–10, where he pre­sents property in its “egoist, satanic nature” as the “most efficient means to re­sist despotism without overthrowing the state.”

72. I must confess that I fail to see on what grounds in present-day society liberal economists (who today call themselves conservatives) can justify their optimism that the private appropriation of wealth will suffice to guard individual liberties—that is, will fulfil the same role as private property. In a jobholding [67] society, these liberties are safe only as long as they are guaranteed by the state, and even now they are constantly threatened, not by the state, but by society, which distributes the jobs and determines the share of individual appropriation.

In the last note, for “society” read “capital” or “the capitalist class”?

73. R. W. K. Hinton, “Was Charles Ia Tyrant?” Review of Politics, Vol. XVIII (January, 1956).

It sounds as if the “rise of the social” might not have coincided with making private property a public concern, and thus they are two. We shall have to look later for an account of the social as such.

74. For the history of the word “capital” deriving from the Latin caput, which in Roman law was employed for the principal of a debt, see W. J. Ashley, op. cit., pp. 429 and 433, n. 183. Only eighteenth-century writers began to use the word in the modern sense as “wealth invested in such a way as to bring gain.” [68]

What is a stable structure: a house, the land it is on, or something more abstract (the way a process is abstract)?

See ¶ 8.8 of the previous section on how, initially, private property was not simply a condition for admission to the public. Utter strangers cannot establish a club with rules for admission; they have to recognize their what they share first. To say otherwise would seem to be such a contradiction as Arendt is talking about now.

75. Medieval economic theory did not yet conceive of money as a common denominator and yardstick but counted it among the consumptibiles. [69]

Academic tenure is supposed to be what private property used to be, except you cannot inherit it.

There are things in the world, but they do not classify themselves; we have to do it.

Thus for example a piece of land becomes property, thus falling into the class of things that are owned, only when we recognize it as property.

Likewise, being male or female is a property (!) of many organisms, including humans, if we choose to recognize it. That doesn’t mean we can just decide to use the sex designations differently. I don’t know if this is connected with Arendt’s unease at the revolution in the understanding of property. See the next paragraph.

Apparently Arendt doubts that people started saying “This land is mine” only after they had worked the land. However, Locke’s claim would seem to be the basis of making property inalienable, and this is part of the move to make the public responsible for one’s own things. This lets you collect so many things that you cannot manage or “work” them alone. Nonetheless, you are not likely to get your things taken away; what you will lose is any sense of belonging to a place. Perhaps this is the key concern, though Arendt has not said it: rootlessness.

76. Second Treatise of Civil Government, sec. 27. [70]

77. The relatively few instances of ancient authors praising labor and poverty are inspired by this danger (for references see G. Herzog-Hauser, op. cit.).

See ¶ 5.5 (pp. 30–1): “the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis. Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society.”

The capitalists think workers will work better if paid less; Arendt says the capitalists need to be paid less, that is, given less public protection for their private interests.

Or is that really all she is saying? The analytic philosophers who debate free will: are they simply handicapped from never having had to go hungry?

But then if your experience determines or at least conditions your thought, why does not Arendt tell us of her own experience?

What would Arendt make of the idea that Huck is the freest character in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

78. The Greek and Latin words for the interior of the house, megaron and atrium, have a strong connotation of darkness and blackness (see Mommsen, op. cit., pp. 22 and 236). [71]

Is Arendt calling extraverts shallow? See ¶ 8.2.

Arendt said the following at a 1972 conference, according to a footnote in Margaret Canovan, “Terrible Truths: Hannah Arendt on Politics, Contingency and Evil,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 53, no. 208 (2), 1999, pp. 173–89:

I do not share Marx’s great enthusiasm about capitalism … He was surrounded by the most hideous consequences of this system and nevertheless thought that this was a great business. He was, of course, also Hegelian and believed in the power of the negative. Well, I don’t believe in the power of the negative, of the negation, if it is the terrible misfortune of other people.

I learned the first sentence from a tweet of February 18, 2022, by Arendt scholar Samantha Rose Hill.

79. Aristotle Politics 1254b25.

80. The life of a woman is called ponētikos by Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 775a33. That women and slaves belonged and lived together, that no woman, not even the wife of the houschold head, lived among her equals—other free women—so that rank depended much less on birth than on “occupation” or fanction, is very well presented by Wallon (op. cit., I, 77 f.), who speaks of a “confusion des rangs, ce partage de toutes les fonctions domestiques”: “Les [72] femmes … se confondaient avec leurs esclaves dans les soins habituels de Ia vie intérieure. De quelque rang qu’elles fussent, le travail était leur apanage, com­me aux hommes la guerre.”

81. See Pierre Brizon, Histoire du travail et des travailleurs (4th ed.; 1926), p. 184, concerning the conditions of factory work in the seventeenth century. [73]

What is left of privacy: the bathroom? Some people are still bothered by eating in public, but public feasting would seem to be age-old.

According to ¶ 4.2, p. 22,

• one can do labor and work alone, although one is not then doing them as a human; but
• “only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.”

In present terms, the latter must mean the “proper location” of action is public; but then does the former mean that everything human is public? According to the previous ¶ 9.9, pp. 72–3, labor was once thought to have its proper location of the private realm, but this is mostly no longer true.

82. Tertullian op. cit. 38.

83. This difference of experience may partly explain the difference between the great sanity of Augustine and the horrible concreteness of Tertullian’s views on politics. Both were Romans and profoundly shaped by Roman political life. [74]

Arendt is making the move that Socrates makes in Book I of the Republic, when he trips up Polemarchus by inducing him to think that justice is an art alongside medicine, cookery, and piloting. Replace justice with good and the same problem arises. No activity is simply just or good, but everything is good, as in the formula Quodlibet ens est unum verum bonum.

Maybe this is in Aquinas, but I seem to know it from Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements”; Pt. II, “Transcendental Logic”; Div. I, “Transcendental Analytic”; Bk I, “Analytic of Concepts”; Ch. I, “On the clue to the discovery of all pure concepts of the understanding”; Third section, “On the pure concepts of the understanding or categories” (B 113):

But there is also yet another chapter in the transcendental philosophy of the ancients that contains pure concepts of the understanding that, although they are not reckoned among the categories, nevertheless according tot hem should also count as a priori cooncepts of objects, in which case, however, they would increase the number of the categories, which cannot be. These are expounded in the proposition, so famous among the scholastics: quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum (Every being is one, true, and good).

The translation is that of Guyer and Wood, 1998.

You can set out to do good works, as you may set out to be an artist or a writer. You cannot simply write, but must have something to write; however, things to write about arise naturally, and so do things to be good about, as Jesus taught (John 12):

3 Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.
4 Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray him,
5 Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?
6 This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.
7 Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.
8 For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.

I brought this up in “Plato and Christianity,” in wondering “whether Socrates has concern for the weak and oppressed,” and before that, “who are those persons?” Arendt has told us in ¶ 7.10, p. 55,

the curse of slavery consisted not only in being deprived of freedom and of visibility, but also in the fear of these obscure people themselves “that from being obscure they should pass away leaving no trace that they have existed.

However, in ¶ 5.13, n. 30, p. 36,

Greek slaves … had proved their slavish nature by not committing suicide, and since courage was the political virtue par excellence, they had thereby shown their “natural” unworthiness, their unfitness to be citizens.

By allowing that something good may come out doing good openly, although she calls it being useful or dutiful, Arendt seems to follow Socrates, at the beginning of Book II of the Republic, 357b–8a, in his response to Glaucon, who lays out a trichotomy:

1. “Tell me, is there in your opinion a kind of good that we would choose to have not because we desire its consequences, but because we delight in it for its own sake—such as enjoyment and all the pleasures which are harmless and leave no after effects other than the enjoyment in having them?”

   “In my opinion, at least,” I said, “there is a good of this kind.”

2. “And what about this? Is there a kind we like both for its own sake and for what comes out of it, such as thinking and seeing and being healthy? Surely we delight in such things on both accounts.”

   “Yes,” I said.

3. “And do you see a third form of good, which includes gymnastic exercise, medical treatment when sick as well as the practice of medicine, and the rest of the activities from which money is made? We would say that they are drudgery but beneficial to us; and we would not choose to have them for themselves but for the sake of the wages and whatever else comes out of them.”

   “Yes, there is also this third,” I said …

“An Epicurean chooses [1]; Plato, Aristotle, and most other ancient theorists choose [2]; Stoics choose [3],” by the account in Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction (2018), by Brad Inwood, who continues:

Not only is virtue its own reward, but any additional benefits it might produce are not similarly valuable and cannot be a reason for choosing virtue. In fact, most Stoics would say that it would somehow degrade or taint virtue to choose it even in part for that sort of reason. Stoics aren’t alone in taking this extreme and even counter-intuitive position—the loosely defined group known as Cynics would join them and push the paradoxes even further on occasion; but Stoicism is the school that provides the best worked out and most credible version of the position.

I found this passage in a blog post by Donald Robertson called “Virtue Is Its Own Reward,” which features a collection of quotations about the saying that is its title, and which came up when I searched for the origin of that saying.

84. Luke 18: 19. The same thought occurs in Matt. 6: 1–18, where Jesus warns against hypocrisy, against the open display of piety. Piety cannot “appear unto men” but only unto God, who “seeth in secret” God, it is true, “shall re­ward” man, but not, as the standard translation claims, “openly.” The German word Scheinheiligkeit expresses this religious phenomenon, where mere appear­ance is already hypocrisy, quite adequately. [75]

Translated componentwise into English cognates, Scheinheiligkeit seems to be “shining holy-hood.” The standard translation seems to be “hypocrisy,” but the Wikipedia article for this links to the German article on Heuchelei. That article mentions Scheinheiligkeit, but the link for this is redirected to Bigotterie, which links to the English “bigotry,” which redirects to “prejudice.”

For the cited verses of Matthew 6, which include the Lord’s Prayer, here is the King James:

1 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
8 Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.
9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
16 Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
17 But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face;
18 That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.

Arendt is right that, in the latter parts of verses 6 and 18, “openly” is not in the Greek, which is respectively

καὶ ὁ πατήρ σου ὁ βλέπων ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ ἀποδώσει σοι,
καὶ ὁ πατήρ σου ὁ βλέπων ἐν τῷ κρυφαίῳ ἀποδώσει σοι.

But then, an expectation of any reward at all would seem to be an expectation of a reward that is open to oneself, at least. In the search mentioned in my previous comment, on “Virtue is its own reward,” I found another essay with that title, this one by Harrison Perkins (of Edinburgh Theological Seminary), who asks,

is there another way that we can explain why Christians need to pursue godliness regardless of whether we affirm final rewards? … many assume that the only reason for doing something is if we get something in return for ourselves … Divine command theory teaches that we must do something simply because God told us to do it … One plausible response to supplement what can appear like a superficial answer is to add the prospect of final rewards as the reason that we should pursue holiness … I believe that the Scripture offers other reasons that undergird the Christian pursuit of godliness … being made in the image of God entails that we were made to be a certain way and work towards certain ends, namely in this case to reflect the good character of our holy God … this vision for Christian holiness rests upon an understanding of virtue ethics. This ethical paradigm holds that certain things are good in themselves … virtue truly is its own reward because the reward is an unfettered enjoyment of our relationship with Christ, who guarantees our everlasting life by grace alone.

Arendt alludes to the fifth of the six Antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount (in Matthew 5):

38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.
41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

In The Godless Gospel (2020), Julian Baggini passes along the argument that Jesus was recommending nonviolent resistance against practices of the Roman occupation:

1. Slapping people to provoke their response, which would justify arrest.
2. Taking the clothing of debtors.
3. Ordering people to carry a soldier’s kit a mile (this much was allowed by law).

Pace Arendt, nonviolent resistance was possible then, as it was possible for Gandhi and his followers under the British occupation of India. See ¶ 10.9 below.

I don’t think anybody could claim to be happy inside the Brazen Bull: they would not survive to tell us. There is an ideal to be happy there, or on the rack, as Diogenes Laertius reports, ostensibly in the words of Epicurus (volume II of the Loeb edition, X.117–8, in the translation of Hicks):

There are three motives to injurious acts among men—hatred, envy, and contempt; and these the wise man overcomes by reason. Moreover, he who has once become wise never more assumes the opposite habit, not even in semblance, if he can help it. He will be more susceptible of emotion than other men: that will be no hindrance to his wisdom. However, not every bodily constitution nor every nationality would permit a man to become wise. Even on the rack the wise man is happy (κἂν στρεβλωθῇ δ᾽ ὁ σοφός, εἶναι αὐτὸν εὐδαίμονα). He alone will feel gratitude towards friends, present and absent alike, and show it by word and deed. When on the rack, however, he will give vent to cries and groans.

I learned the citation from “Stoics and Epicureans on Facing Pain and Death Positively” by Katharine O’Reilly and Chris Gill (November 16, 2019).

85. One finds this idiom passim in Plato (see esp. Gorgias 482). [76]

The goodness of a deed is forgotten by the doer; but is it not part of the goodness that others do remember? Matthew 27:

50 Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
51 And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;
52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,
53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
54 Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

This is where love of goodness comes in; read on.

Is a monk a philosopher?

If God can witness one’s good works, why not anybody who is better than oneself?

86. Prince, ch. 15.

87. Ibid., ch. 8. [77]

88. Discourses, Book III, ch. 1. [78]