Polytropy

Since the discussions of The Human Condition ended, I have found myself so busy that I wonder how I had time to read Arendt before; but maybe I am doing things I just would not have done before, and they are not as satisfying.

For me at least, The Human Condition turned out to be a difficult and sometimes frustrating book. I don’t know how else one can read it, other than slowly and – preferably – in a group, as we did. I still don’t know why it was on the reading list for a course on human rights at my university, here in Istanbul.

I haven’t come to terms with The Human Condition as a whole, but want to make some comments – first, about the “invisible hand,” of which Arendt writes on page 185, in §25, “the web of relationships and the enacted stories,”

the simple fact that Adam Smith needed an “invisible hand” to guide economic dealings on the exchange market shows plainly that more than sheer economic activity is involved in exchange and that “economic man,” when he makes his appearance on the market, is an acting being and neither exclusively a producer nor a trader and barterer.

We must be doing more in our lives than making stuff and exchanging it: this seems to be what Arendt is saying. For example, if we are producers, simply, this does not explain why we might produce bicycles rather than watermelons.

When she writes as quoted, Arendt has been talking about the Platonic god and his successors,

with which Christian and modern philosophers of history tried to solve the perplexing problem that although history owes its existence to men, it is still obviously not “made” by them.

I continue to be unsure what this means. Now I wonder if any illumination comes from an article to which my attention was drawn by a recent tweet, though the article itself, in Aeon, is from 2019.

In “The real sexism problem in the discipline of economics,” Victoria Bateman writes,

The whole idea of ‘the invisible hand’ was that the economy could arrive at the best outcome only if people are free to make their own choices.

Like Arendt, it seems, Bates is talking about some hidden factor, which economists recognize only to the extent of giving it the name of “invisible hand.” Giving it a name does not explain it or tell us what it is.

I am not quite sure that Arendt explains that factor as action. For all I know, the factor is a fictitious force, like the so-called centrifugal force that pulls a weight away from you when you swing it around on a string. As I understand it, physics says there is no such force: nothing is pulling the weight from you, and this is precisely why its motion deviates from a straight line.

For Bateman, it seems, freedom explains the invisible hand. She says further:

economics operates on the basis of assumptions that render us genderless. According to its ascendant orthodoxy, we are all rational, calculating, independent agents. Love, sex, dependency and society fall outside the economists’ way of looking at the world. Furthermore, economists typically presume that we are all free to make our own choices. Potential restrictions on those freedoms (from access to birth control to the criminalisation of sex work and even types of clothing) are ignored. Economics instead focuses on what we do with our freedoms …

In short, it seems, Arendt’s “economic man” must be understood to include the economic woman, who is also an acting being, although economists avoid thinking about what this means. But are Arendt and Bateman really on the same page in this way?

I continue to be intrigued by the idea that Plato was inspired in his philosophy by craft. Here is Arendt on page 229, in §31, “the traditional substitution of making for acting”:

Plato and, to a lesser degree, Aristotle, who thought craftsmen not even worthy of full-fledged citizenship, were the first to propose handling political matters and ruling political bodies in the mode of fabrication. This seeming contradiction clearly indicates the depth of the authentic perplexities inherent in the human capacity for action …

The key point seems to be that the craftsperson works from a plan or model; Arendt says more about this on pages 302–3 in §42, “the reversal within the Vita Activa and the victory of Homo Faber”:

There is, however, another side to this matter, which shows itself most articulately in Plato’s doctrine of ideas, in its content as well as in its terminology and exemplifications. These reside in the experiences of the craftsman, who sees before his inner eye the shape of the model according to which he fabricates his object. To [302] Plato, this model, which craftsmanship can only imitate but not create, is no product of the human mind but given to it.

Has Plato no sense that the full complement of crafts performed in a community has ever changed? He himself enlarged the library of writing available to us. Where does a Platonic dialogue come from – was Plato taking dictation from an angel, as the Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have done?

Marx had an explanation: we extrude literature as the silkworm does silk. Arendt mentions this twice, first in note 36 on pages 99–100 in §13, “labor and life”:

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality …” … Obviously, Marx no longer speaks of labor, but of work – with which he is not concerned; and the best proof of this is that the apparently all-important element of “imagination” plays no role whatsoever in his labor theory … [99] … Marx remained convinced that “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason a silk worm produces silk.”

This is one of only two referents for Imagination in the Index, which (according to the Publisher’s Note on page 328) is more detailed than the one that Arendt herself saw made for her book. The other referent for Imagination is on page 310, in §43, “the defeat of Homo Faber and the principle of happiness”:

While the ancients had relied upon imagination and memory, the imagination of pains from which they were free or the memory of past pleasures in situations of acute painfulness, to convince themselves of their happiness, the moderns needed the calculus of pleasure or the puritan moral bookkeeping of merits and transgres­sions to arrive at some illusory mathematical certainty of happiness or salvation.

That is interesting, but perhaps not illuminating as to the source of literature and of art in general. The silkworm returns later, at the end of the second paragraph of §45, “the victory of the Animal Laborans,” on page 321:

Socialized mankind is that state of society where only one interest rules, and the subject of this interest is either classes or man-kind, but neither man nor men … now even the last trace of action in what men were doing, the motive implied in self-interest, disappeared. What was left was a “natural force” … What was not needed … could be justified only in terms of a peculiarity of human as distinguished from other animal life – so that Milton was considered to have written his Paradise Lost for the same reasons and out of similar urges that compel the silkworm to produce silk.

In the simile of silkworm and artist, Arendt thinks there’s something funny, but I’m not sure what it is. To my mind, the difference is that the artist creates something, or makes something new. The silkworm is doing only what her ancestors have been doing for countless generations. Better to liken the artist to Nature herself, who, through the mysterious process of evolution, has given us a fiber that we can weave into warm and elegant clothing.

By the way though, to return to the earlier theme, evolution seems to need an “invisible hand” to explain its production of specifically useful things. Scientifically, nature has no purpose; it just happens. To make sense of it, I think, we have to think in terms of purposes, so that silk evolved to serve the purpose of protecting the larva as it metamorphosed into pupa and imago.

I remain perplexed by Arendt’s treatment of the artist, even though she was apparently one herself, in the sense of writing poems. We are in §23 now, “the permanence of the world and the work of art,” here on page 170:

Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be “made,” that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves.

I suppose Arendt is alluding here to the composition of the Homeric epics, which may have happened without writing. In this regard, let me note the plausible assertion that the characters of the epics are uniquely developed individuals, such as would not be found in a purely oral tradition. This is what Caroline Alexander says in the Introduction of her 2015 translation of the Iliad:

My own views are shaped by my experience in the 1980s establishing a small department of classics at the University of Malawi, in southeast Africa. In discussing Homer, my Malawian students and colleagues, who had grown up with genuine, living oral traditions and knew the genre intimately, were emphatic that the Iliad did not “feel” like an oral poem. To their sensibilities, despite the obvious evidence of an oral legacy, Homer was a literary poet. He did not honor oral conventions. In particular, his characters are “round,” which is to say fully formed. The Iliad’s dramatic speeches serve as much to reveal a speaker’s character as to further epic action, for example, while traditional oral poetry, being intensely communal, is not similarly invested in individual characterization. Homer is celebrated by literary people in literary cultures, my associates maintained, because his compositions meet literary expectations.

What Alexander goes on to say is like what I would say to Arendt. Whether a poem is only spoken or also written down, it is always a tangible thing, because it makes an impression on organs of sense, be they fingers, eyes, or ears. Even if the poet never utters the poem out loud, but keeps it in the isolation of his or her own mind, neuroscientists could still extract it, in theory, the way they are learning to communicate with patients who have locked-in syndrome.

The key point is that the neuroscientists would not be able to compose the poet’s own poem, just by studying the poet’s brain. Somebody who knew the poet’s existing poems might produce a forgery of the poet’s work, but specific knowledge of the physical features of the brain would be of no help in this. Words of Thoreau are apropos:

The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.

That is from “Friday” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. I note the passage just now, as I remind myself how Thoreau was been taken in by the forgeries attributed to an ancient Gaelic poet called Ossian (whom I hadn’t heard of, before reading Thoreau):

The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era we hear of no other priest than he …

Ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras, of Homer, Pindar, Isaiah, and the American Indian. In his poetry, as in Homer’s, only the simplest and most enduring features of humanity are seen, such essential parts of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of a temple; we see the circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone.

I think I would be agreeing with Alexander to say that the Iliad is more Gothic cathedral than Stonehenge: not stripped down, but as intricately developed as War and Peace.

Here I recall that Tolstoy was creating something new in that epic; I learned this from Amy Mandelker in the Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition:

Tolstoy was also writing within a European tradition in which the Napoleonic war had already acquired mythopoetic grandeur … By Tolstoy’s own account, the anxiety of influence and the pressure of literary precedent and convention was unendurable: ‘time and my strength were flowing away with every hour, and I knew that nobody would ever tell what I had to tell … Above all, traditions both of form and content oppressed me. I was afraid to write in a language different from that in which everybody writes. I was afraid that my writing would fall into no existing genre, neither novel, nor tale, nor epic, nor history …’ The key to artistic freedom was to reject any formal or stylistic requirements of literary genres, which Tolstoy happily found could be accomplished through an appeal to his own native Russian literary tradition, noted for its experimental character and flouting of literary convention. ‘We Russians don’t know how to write novels in the European sense of the word,’ he announced, proudly and provocatively …

By the way, I enjoyed joining a group, or project, learned of by me from a tweet by Elif Batuman, initiated and led by Brian Denton, to read War and Peace, a chapter a day, through the calendar year of 2017. But let me return to Caroline Alexander and what she says about writing in a tradition:

The attention lavished on the question of whether the Homeric poems owe their final form to oral or to literary composition has focused excessively on mechanics, on the physical act of recitation versus that of writing. The more interesting question is not whether a traditional poem was ultimately recorded by the spoken or the written word, but rather in what relationship the final poet stood to his tradition. Did Homer see himself as simply one poet in a long line of traditional poets, improvising and transmitting the tradition he had inherited, more or less as it had always been done? Or did he see himself as standing in a different relationship to the traditional material than the poets before him? Regardless of whether he sang, dictated, or wrote – did he see himself as doing something with the traditional material that had never been done before? This, it seems to me, is the fundamental Homeric Question.

I recall that for Arendt, the poet’s job was to give eternal life to the Greek warriors, and the polis was there to make sure he did that job. This is from §27, “the greek solution,” pages 197–8:

Homer was not only a shining example of the poet’s political function, and therefore the “educator of all Hellas”; the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence.

… it is as though the men who returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated home­steads.

I cannot fault Arendt for not sharing my own interests; but it seems important that some of the best humans in the Iliad – Hector, Priam, Sarpedon – are on the enemy side. For helping me to see this, I am going to credit Simone Weil, whose essay on the Iliad was translated by Arendt’s friend Mary McCarthy:

The Greeks, generally speaking, were endowed with spiritual force that allowed them to avoid self-deception. The rewards of this were great; they discovered how to achieve in all their acts the greatest lucidity, purity, and simplicity. But the spirit that was transmitted from the Iliad to the Gospels by way of the tragic poets never jumped the borders of Greek civilization …

Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.

Homer is as great an actor – a person who acts – as anybody he sings about.

I had no idea I would be going to so many sources when I set out to write this; but one thought led to another. It should go without saying that comments, questions, disagreements on any point are welcome.