Prologue | The Human Condition

0:00Hello everyone and welcome. This is Reading Hannah Arendt of a Throger Berkowitz. The podcast of the Hannah Arendt Centre for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in New York. The Hannah Arendt Centre provides an intellectual space for passionate, unsensory, non-predicent thinking in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. Arendt published numerous books, and in this podcast we read them with you. My name is Hannah Tyre and I'm the Director of Academic Programs here at the Arendt Centre. It's my pleasure to welcome Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Centre. Every Friday Roger Berkowitz hosts a virtual reading group for all of our members. Together we have been reading Arendt since 2014. This episode is based on what we are reading in our reading group. Stay on for more information at the end of today's episode. Today we are beginning to read a new book, The Human Condition, first published in 1958. In it are an examines what she calls the Vita Activa,

1:02the Active Life, and asks how our fundamental human activities have been understood throughout Western history. Make sure to subscribe and follow us to not miss an episode. And now I hand it over to Roger who's going to close read and analyze the first chapter for us. Welcome everybody. My name is Roger Berkowitz. I'm the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College and thrilled to be with you today. We are starting to read The Human Condition, also known as the Vita Activa, which was the title Arendt gave it in German. The Human Condition was written in 1958. I think for many of us, like myself who came out of political theory or political, the political philosophical world, the Human Condition is a book that was one of the core and is one of the core texts of Arendt's corpus. It really is a masterpiece

2:09of sorts, but different than something like the art of the italitarianism. It's not a historical book. It's much more of a meditation on the fate of humanity and the condition of humanity. And what will become of humanity in our times? It's not a prediction and it's not a manual of resistance, but it is an effort, as she says, to think what we are doing. It's an extraordinary book and I know we've read it, I think three times together over the years in our reading group, but this will be the first time we're reading it that will turn into a podcast. And I'm excited to go through it with you. Some of you have now read it a number of times. Maybe some of you are coming to it brand new. That's all great. Trust me. It repays rereading over and over again. And we'll read it slowly. We're going to take our time and we're really going to try and explore as many of the nuances and a lot of the profundity and depth in it as we can. The book begins with a prologue.

3:16It's only, I think, five or six pages long. And yet it's one of the most extraordinary five and a half pages in our end's corpus. I have given many lectures just on the prologue. It's one of those texts that has for a long time captivated my imagination. And so I hope you find it equally exciting and thrilling. Why? What's it about? It's about the modern age. And Aran makes a distinction at the end of the prologue between the modern age and the modern world. Something that actually is very important in a number of her texts. And I think people often don't pay enough attention to these distinctions that she makes. But the modern age, she says very clearly is the scientific age that began in the 17th century. And she says, ended at the beginning of the 20th century. What does she mean when she says that the scientific age ended?

4:22In some way, it has an end, and we're still living under the impact of the scientific age. And she is clear about that. And the book is about the impact of the scientific age on our time. But what she says is the scientific age which began in the 17th century inaugurated at the beginning of the 20th century a new world, the modern world, the world of the atom bomb, the world of sputnik, which she begins with here of automation. We can now say artificial intelligence or AI. And that politically, she says this modern world was born with the first atomic explosion. The modern world, as she understands it, is a world defined by alienation. By both what she calls world alienation and earth alienation. We will have our opportunity

5:24and occasion to explore what she means by both of these. But what's also important for us not to forget is that both world and earth alienation, they have their origin in the scientific foundations of the modern age. And so this book is about the modern age, right? It starts with a prologue which talks about both the impact of the modern age on the modern world. And it ends with a long final chapter, the Vita-Aktiva and the modern age, the life of action, the active life in the modern age. And in doing so, the book is about how the rise of modern science, the scientific revolution, the scientific age, does two things. Turns us away from the world. How does it turn us away

6:25from the world, world alienation? Well, it turns us away from the world we share with others into ourselves. And obviously, I say obviously, but maybe it's not so obvious, but the core text here is Descartes. Descartes, I think therefore I am, means that human existence, human being, which traditionally had been in a common world, is brought into the self so that the only certainty I have in the world is internal, is in my head, through my reasoning mind, which in Descartes' dualism is fully separate from my material body. This is materialism so that my mind and body are completely separate. And Descartes turns the human condition inward into ourselves and thus alienates us from the world. At the same time, there's what she calls earth alienation,

7:34the turn away from the earth. Now, what is the earth? The earth has a literal and a figurative valence in our ranks work. Literally, the earth is the earth. It's the orb, it's the planet on which we live. And humans have, and I'm not only humans, but earthly life has the distinction of being able to live on earth without artificiality. We can breathe, we can drink water, we can eat food, we don't need an artificial environment. If we go into space, right, we need a spaceship with recycled air and made food and everything has to be made. And so on the one hand, earth is this place where we can live without artifice. On the other hand, humans are an artificial, an artificial being. Even on the earth, we build houses, we build tools, and we remake the earthly

8:43in environment. And as we get better and better at remaking the earthly environment, we can actually change the earthly environment. We can make new rivers and we can destroy rivers, and we can cut down mountains and we can build mountains. We can make it rain and we can maybe stop it from raining. We can alter our earthly environment. And in the very way we come to look at the earth and all things in the earth, all earthly things, we stop looking at the book. As a book, and we see it as a bunch of atoms, and we start to see it through our scientific age, and we begin to see not the things, but the reasons and principles behind the things. And thus we alienate ourselves from the given world, the world that we see without artifice, to the extent that there is without artifice. There is probably no purely no, you know, out in the primal woods wilderness where you look at

9:49something without any artifice. Well, there is always human artifice of some sort. But as we become more powerful and more able to artificially manipulate and understand and see the depth of the world through science, we alienate ourselves from simply the things of the world. The river is no river. It's now a waterway for commerce or it's a attraction for tourism. The river is an important part of the environmental ecosystem that we can control, preserve artificially. And so we are alienated just from the the things of the world. And so science leads to both this world alienation and an earthly alienation. And that's what this prologue begins with. And the book ends with this long chapter on the Vita, Activa, and the Modern Age, which begins with the first part of that last chapter. Chapter six in the book is called World Alienation. And so what's interesting about

10:56the reception, but also the book itself, the human condition, is that if you look at most of the scholarly treatment of the human condition, most people seem to be obsessed with the middle chapters, the chapters on labor, work, and action. These are what aren't calls the the human faculties, the faculties of the human condition, the way in which all humans interact with the world, and with each other through laboring, through working, and through acting. And these are extraordinary chapters about what it means to be human in a certain condition. A condition that she thinks has existed since the birth of humanity up to the present. And so we're going to obviously spend a lot of time on those middle chapters. But I think that what's not seen clearly enough

11:57by most people who read this book is that the overarching argument of the book is that the human condition that is defined by many faculties, but the core faculties of labor, work, and action, that has existed for thousands of years, is in danger of being lost or transformed. The point of the book is that the human, the modern age and science and the new modern world that it's giving birth to actually threatens to radically alter the human condition. The conditions under which humans live, in which labor, work, and action are at the core of what it means to be human. And that we are at the cusp as she sees it, writing in 1958, of potentially a once-in-humanity

13:01experience of a radical change in transformation of what it means to be human. Not in the nature of being human, like we're still biological beings with certain whatever, but in the meaning of what it means to be human in the world, the conditions in which we are human may be actually changing. And that's what this book is about. She doesn't say we have to stop it, because I don't think she thinks you can just stop it. And she doesn't say we should embrace it and just go on with it because she thinks it's such an enormous change. What we mean by humanity may change in the sense of the humanity as the human condition may change. But what she says is we have to think it. We have to think what we are doing. And it's that effort to sort of

14:03think what is the change in humanity that is happening? What does it mean? And are there things we can do to either preserve some aspects in all humanity or should we let it go? Are there ways that we can make the change happen in ways that are more human or more interesting or however we're going to think about it. She doesn't give prescriptions, as she says, we'll get to that. But it is she thinks a moment in which the human condition is at a point of a folk role where it's about to change. And we're going to talk about this, but she wrote this in 1958 and she had a lot of you know ideas in mind, but I think in the last three years and certainly in the last year, we've become aware that AI, which she writes about here, right? She's writing about artificial

15:03intelligence in this prologue, is happening faster than I think any of us could have imagined, and does threaten fundamentally the human condition. Will there still be a need for labor? Right? Will work be able to provide a common stable world? And will human beings be able to act in the sense of starting something new in a world that is increasingly governed by a superhuman knowledge and bots and robots and an agents that are both ethereal and physical that in a sense can predict every new outcome and every new human action. What is left of these fundamental faculties of the human condition? And how do we think that transformation and what it means to the human? That's what the book's about. Okay, that's a bit of an opening prologue to the prologue.

16:07And as a second prologue to the prologue, I should say that R.N. wrote this book in 1958. This was the first English edition, very simple. It's been published in many different editions. It doesn't matter to me which one you use, but she also translated the book herself into German, right? German was her first language. And she translated it as the Vita Ktiva which was the original translation, the original title she had thought of for this book. She also thought of calling it Amor Mundi, the love of the world. And in the German edition which is both a translation and a rewriting, my colleague Tomas Vild has really, I think, done an enormous amount of work to let people know that there's a difference between almost all R.N.'s books in English and German, because she when she rewrites them, when she translates them into German, when she does for most

17:07of her books, she doesn't just translate them, she rewrites them, she adds things, she changes things. And one of the most important and most interesting things she does when she rewrites her English books into German is she incorporates poetry into the German text. Sometimes it explicitly, sometimes implicitly. She often said that she knew the entire corpus of German poetry by heart. And even when she's writing in English, sometimes some of the strange English expressions she will use are her attempts to sort of translate poetic ideas from German poetry into English prose. But when she writes the German edition of the V. Dakti, the human condition, there are two changes in the first page. One is that there's an epigraph to the German edition, which is not in the English edition. And it's the first and last stanza of the choral ode,

18:14the heave of the great ball, which is itself a prologue to Brex play from 1918, the song of the great ball, the choral vom Großenbahl. And in the past, I actually played the music for you guys of David Bowie singing that in translation. I don't not going to do that again, but I did put into the chat for those of you who are interested in an English translation of the first and last stanzas of the ode to to to to ball, which are what she uses as her her epigraph. And in these stanzas, we see the presentation of ball this for as a kind of fertility god. He's identified with the seasons, therefore, light and darkness, but also springtime, rebirth,

19:16sexuality. It's a quite it's a very sexualized play and desire as a kind of desire for sexual liberation and sexual satisfaction and also resurrection and regeneration through, you know, intercourse and rebirth is a is a big part of of the play and the song. We see in these lines a kind of unrestrained poetic statement about a chaotic, irrational and self destructive world. We see a celebration of a kind of intense animal energy of ball. And so I asked, you know, why is it that aren't puts this epigraph from Brex, um, ode to ball at the beginning of the human condition? I think, you know, there's going to be a lot of reasons, but I think importantly, what she wants us to understand is that there was a world before us, right? If you look at the

20:21the first, um, stanza, right? Waltz's mother's, Waltz in his mother's white womb contained the growing ball, even then the sky was waiting quiet and pale naked young and mentally marvellous like ball loved it when he came. And then the last stanza, right, once the earth's dark womb engulfed the rotting ball, even then the sky was up there quiet and pale naked young and mentally marvellous like ball loved it when he lived, right? So you, you have the beginning before he's born and then he's died. And what lasts the sky, right? The sky and the world was there us before we go on and it will remain after we're born. Human freedom, right? The human condition happens on the earth, right? From birth to death in a world that already exists the earth.

21:31Before ball, there's the sky, after ball, there's still the sky, there's still the earth, there's still a world. Ball's life is finite. Um, and thus the epigraph reminds us that every beginning of a human life occurs within conditions that we did not nick. We are thrown into the world in a hidegary in sense of govorfenheit of being thrown into the world, into a given world and ball loves it. He loves the sky before he's born and after he dies, this love for the sky, for the world as it is that we didn't control that was given to us is a love for the world, a gratitude for the world that we can't control that's not human on a more moonly a love of the world, a love for a world that is not humanly arranged but precedes us and lives after us. And so as I said, there was

22:39at one point she thought about calling this book a more moonly for the love of the world. Um, and so the ball, the ball citation epigraph um, uh, is an expression of that on one level. I think it's also important to remember that she writes this book on the heels of having published the origins of the italitarianism, uh, which she published in in 1951. And at the conclusion of the origins, at least in the first edition, she has a small uh, ending concluding remark section in which she writes that man has come to resent everything given, even his own existence, to resent the very fact that he is not the creator of the universe and himself, right? We, we've stopped respecting the givenness of things. She also talks about this in the last few pages of chapter nine in in

23:41origins, uh, on uh, uh, where she's talking about Augustine and, and the givenness of, of humanity. And there's a fundamental resentment we have of just purely given things. We want things to be organized better. Uh, we want to make them rational. We really have the given world. And in this resentment um, of the given, we want to change the world. We want to remake it better. We want progress. Uh, we want to believe that everything can be made more beautiful, more rational, more human. And, and this is part of the, the dream of a kind of dialistic, uh, human ability to make the world, uh, that leads to the claim of totalitarianism. Now the alternative to this resentment would be a fundamental gratitude for things as they are for all people, right? People,

24:41whatever mental acuity they have, whatever um, strength they have, whatever religion or whatever color or gender or sex, right? Uh, and so in this epigraph from Brecht, we see our rent giving a clue, I think, how to read the human condition. It's a book about loving the world. About the given, but it's about the tension between the given and the need to artifice and remake the given. She writes in this period in her gang, Toggle, she's writing a lot about what she calls reconciliation. She cites the great thinker of reconciliation, Hagle, and his maximum, a ripped stocking is better than a darned stocking, right? Why is a ripped stocking one that has a rip in it better than one that's been fixed? We're, you know, darn, so. And, and she says, being ripped first makes noticeable the original unity.

25:50The stocking that appears as a living unity in the ripped stocking precisely what it proves its uselessness for life. We need rips. We need holes. We need cracks, right? The idea of, you know, the, that, that, that, that, the, the, the kind of pottery that includes, and includes imperfections and a rip in it, right? You need, you need evil. You need sin. You need horror to make possible the thought of a unity of a whole in a world that is broken. And so, Hagle says, you know, we prefer the ripped than the darned. And Aran says not so fast, right? She says, Hagle's a little too satisfied with the present. And she says that, you know, his satisfaction with the present might

26:53be riseable or important, out of dutch. You know, it's, we, we can get angry at his sort of willingness to sort of accept evil because it's part of the world. Nevertheless, she says, Hagle is right that in politics, we have to understand that, that the world is broken. And we have to accept the brokenness of the world. And that, she thinks Hagle has actually better political instincts than Marx, right? Hagle's world historical view, she says, only looks back. It looks at the, it's a chunk to understand the world as it has been ending in the present. Well, Marx is a prophetic future oriented attempt to, to understand and then make the world true or better or progressive. And it's Marx's forward-looking world history, she says, that mobilizes flaws for politics, which she says introduces the truly deadly anti-political principle in the politics, namely the principle

27:56of truth, of progress. Because if you believe in truth and you know the truth in the progress, you're willing to sacrifice many people and many things for good ends, right? The end justifies the means. And that's the danger of Marxist politics for R.N. And so, you know, the inclusion of the the ball epigraph speaks to all of this in the beginning of the German edition of the English edition. All right, let's forget the German edition and move to the English, which is what we're reading here. She also adds a new paragraph at the beginning of the German, but we'll skip that for a second. The point is that the book begins with Sputnik, with satellites, with the launch of Sputnik and of satellites into the world all into space. And what she says is we have made the mystery of the universe knowable. We suddenly are sending, you know, these objects in the space, space is becoming

28:59humanized. The one thing that was like the most mysterious thing in the world that we, you know, we saw constellations and we made, you know, dreamed about it and we had no idea what was out there. Suddenly we can know it and we can know the universe. Um, who dare, she says, already to speak of these things upon which we unceasingly think, namely that we can now unravel the mysteries. And there are two great threatening events, she now says, that we have to consider. The one is this, um, the USSR's launch of Sputnik on October 4th, 1957, right? More important, she says, than the atomic bomb. Why? What is it? What is it that Sputnik really meant? Well, she said, the New York Times article announcing Sputnik quotes a Russian scientist, Constantine, um, Chiełowskowski, Kaluga from 1911, uh, who says mankind, I mean, says the earth is the cradle of the

30:03mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle, right? The earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle. Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever. We need to leave the earth, right? And it's in this quest for me, the earth and for space that we seek to relieve ourselves of the burden of earthly existence. And so she says, what, what people thinking about Sputnik, what, what we saw was relief, relief had been free, had been liberated from the world, right? Compare this to recent statements by leading AI thinkers like Greg Kurzweil, who says, we didn't stay on the ground, we didn't stay on the planet, and we didn't stay within the limitations of our human biology, right? We are liberating ourselves just like we didn't,

31:04we liberate ourselves from ground with airplanes, and we liberate ourselves from the planet with space travel. We're now liberating ourselves from our human biology with AI. And in this case, she says, we reject the earth, the earth, which she calls on page two, the very quintessence of the human condition, that on which man can move and breathe without artifice, right? We don't need a space suit or we don't need, you know, artificial air or artificial food or artificial atmosphere, and yet somehow, even though the earth is where we can live without artifice, we rebel against what she calls the existence of man on earth, which she calls itself, this is on page two to three, a free gift from nowhere, secretly speaking, right? So we can of course read this religiously, man is a gift of God or a God or whatever God you believe in, but even outside of religion,

32:12secretly speaking, man is the world as a gift, the existence of man as a gift, it's luck, it's fortune as Machiavelli might call it. And instead of this free gift, we rebel against it, and we say, we want to make ourselves artificial. We want to create new humans in a test tube, we want to make humans healthier, we want to make them stronger, we want to make them better, we want to escape the human condition to escape the dependence and frailty of man. By the way, we also want to make new worlds, right? We want to create new planets or live on new planets, maybe we live in a spaceship, and she has this great image at the end of the book of man living on a spaceship where everything is man made, right? The walls are man made, the air is man made, and eventually the humans are man made in test tubes or in whatever ways that we will make new humans

33:15in the future. And why is it she says that there's this relief at escaping the earth? Why does man want to become artificial to escape the human condition? Right? You know, it was one thing to turn away from God, but she says, now we're not just turning away from God, we're turning away from earth, the mother of all living creatures under the sky as she puts it on page two. And that's the repudiation, that's also the idea of ball, right? The repudiation of the given, of the earth. She says, this is not a question of technology changing man, but of technology already catching up to ideas that humans have had for millennia, right? It's an old dream,

34:16right? In the old to man, Sophically's rights about man being able to walk on water and fly egg birds, and now of course, they cartsees the body as a prison, right? That we have to escape from as Plato also saw it. And so this relief and this desire to escape the earth is at one point almost a cliche, right? That we wanted this for millennia, for generations, the generations, the generations. But she says we shouldn't overlook how extraordinary it is that we can now do it, right? People have dreamed about it for millennia, but they couldn't do it. Now we can. And in doing that, suddenly we have the situation in which the earth, the very quintessence of the human condition, that the earth is given, that we are given, that who we are is given.

35:19That it's a free gift for nowhere as is the world that we live according to chance and fate, that man is thrown into a world outside his control, right? Suddenly we can change that. We can change the very condition of the fact that part of being human was to be earthly, to be subject to things outside of our control. So there's a double move here. What separated man from animal was that man had a better ability on animals than non-human animals to create artificial aspects of our world, right? Build things. But we were still animals. We were still given. And now we're in the position of maybe losing one sense of what it means to be human. Man is given. And that's what she's here contemplating. She says, human life, as given, is different from the artificial human world, right? Life is the natural condition of man. But scientists and men now

36:24dreaming dream of making life artificial, of cutting the last tie through which even man belongs to the children of nature. And she here talks about genetic engineering, right? She says on page two, is the same desire to escape from imprisonments to the earth that has manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube. And then she talks about thinking machines and how we may create machines that think for us, all part of the attempt to escape the human condition and chance and fate to make man fully rational, to merge with an AI, to merge with rationality. And that's what she's really talking about here. And she says that this potential change in the human condition is not a technological question. We can do it. You know, she's like, it's going to happen if we want, if we let it, right? But it's a political question, right? Do we want it? Or there's no reason she says

37:29to doubt that we can exchange man as a free gift from nowhere for man as something that makes himself. The question is, should we? And how should we? And she says, the problem, one of the problems here is that we have a crisis of science, which is that one of the things that science does is it begins to make the world so complicated that we as humans can't understand it. And so there's a separation between what she calls thought and know how, between thinking and know how, right? I get on a plane or I use a computer or I use a chatbot. I have no idea how these things work. The know how is way beyond my ability to think. Now with a plane, there are a few aeronautic engineers that probably understand how a plane flies and do it. But most of us get on a plane, we have no idea. But what's increasingly the case with AI, right? Is that not even the best computer scientists know

38:34how AI works. I mean, people are struggling to understand how AI works. The people who made it. And now of course, we, it's very hard to talk about humans making AI anymore because it's very clear that AI is at this point making itself more and more. And we spend months with the best computer scientists in the world working with other AI's trying to understand why and how certain AI's ended up collaborating with other AI's to hack other companies and other AI's. And so she says is there's a separation of knowledge and thought that that are thinking, are human thinking and speaking simply cannot comprehend and understand the world. And so she says we become slaves to our know-how. Thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible no matter how murderous it is. And I think this very much describes the situation many of us feel

39:35right now in the midst of this burgeoning AI experiment. This rise of science and the rise of know-how and the rise of know-how and and and a technology that is incomprehensible to humans has political consequences. First is the loss of speech, right? We can't describe the world. The world becomes indescribable, unknowable, un-unmeaningless to humans. You know, mathematical science that writes in all those symbols. Well, originally the symbols were abbreviations for words, but now of course the symbols are so complicated that we can't even understand them. They can't be translated back into a human language that we can understand. And so we increasingly live in a world without speech, scientists do, but more and more of us do as well. And so she says on page four, whatever men do or

40:35know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. Because we met our our social beings, our political beings, we exist in the plural. To live an act in this world means to talk with each other and to talk with ourselves. But if more and more of the world is incomprehensible to language, impervious to language, we become alienated from the world. That's world alienation. There are truths beyond speech that are only relevant to man and the singular, to the true philosopher God, who's now not even a human, but an AI. And this is our end's opposition to progress, to a politics of truth, to a politics of expertise. And her worry that we are in the name of progress, losing the human condition. The second threatening event after

41:35Sputnik is the rise of automation. They go together. The difference of automation for her is that it threatens to liberate man from the earth, from namely our earthliness in the sense of labor and working. We've always labor and worked in order to live. We had to farm, we had to build things. But increasingly we can have machines labor for us. We can have AI do our work for us. Our work is increasingly superfluous. It seems like many, many people will not have much productive work to do. And she says, that's a problem, especially in the world of laborers, in a world in which we don't believe in God or we don't believe in other meaningful activities. Ask people who they are. They say, well, I'm a student. I'm a teacher. I'm a president. I'm a king. I'm a soldier. We identify by what we do. But if we lose our jobs, if the laboring society no longer needs laborers, she says there are no other higher and more meaningful activities

42:40that we can engage in. What are people going to do if they don't have jobs? The lack of jobs is not just an economic crisis. It's an existential crisis. It's part of the crisis of loneliness, the feeling of meaninglessness, because they identify who they are as who their jobs are and what their jobs are. In 1966, so eight years after this book, she wrote an essay, a speech, called the evolving society for the first annual conference on the cybercultural revolution. People forget how much art was interested in cyber culture and AI. And she talks about how to free ourselves from labor and laboring society leaves us with a loss of meaning, a loss of the life cycle of labor and living, exhaustion and recovery. And she says, there's a bliss to this life cycle. And the Greeks saw a value in freeing ourselves from labor for the few. Mark saw a value in freeing labor so we can all fish and

43:45think and do art. But the result for modern man is that when we free ourselves from labor, we have nothing to do. We can consume, but we have nothing else to do except maybe surf the internet or social media. And with that vacant time, right, we have a problem. The problem of vacant time, she says, is that it challenges some very deep human moral commandments, right, that he does not work, shall not eat. And thus it threatens to change the human condition in which laboring is part of what it means to be human, right? Labor may be the lowest of the ladder of faculty she talks about in labor, work and action, and yet it's still part of what it means to be human. And so we're in danger of losing labor, we're in addition of losing work and losing action and losing the human condition. And so she writes this book and she says, the book is a matter of thought, right? It's not an attempt to say stop or we can do something different, it's not telling you

44:47what the answer is. But she says in a time when thoughtlessness is the outstanding character and safeguard time on page 5, she says, I propose simply to think what we are doing, right? To think what we are doing to address the most elementary articulations of the human condition. She says, I'm going to leave out perhaps the purest activity of the human condition, namely thinking, why? She says because it's not something that most and all humans do, right? Most humans don't have time to think, they don't know the luxury to think, thinking is hard, thinking is destructive, but all humans can think, can, can labor, work and act. She also leaves out morality, by the way, something we've talked about last night at a talk at the RN center. She doesn't think morality is a core of the human condition. She thinks we've broken our morality with the break of tradition after the 20th century. And so we have these three fundamental

45:52activities, labor, work and action. They've corresponded to the human condition for thousands of years. And yet we now live in a world in which these basic human faculties, this human condition is being threatened by science, by technology, by artificiality, by art of AI, and by automation. And the question is, how do we understand this? How do we think about it? Can we in thinking about it allow the human condition either to not change or to change in ways that continue to allow the human existence to be meaningful? That's the question of the book. And that's the question we'll be spending the next eight or nine months on as we read this book together. Hi everyone, we'd like to take a quick moment to invite you to this year's Hannah

46:56RN center forum, taking place October 15th through 17th at Bird College in New York. This year's theme is solidarity. What are we fighting for? As we celebrate the Hannah RN center's 20th anniversary, the forum brings together leading thinkers, artists, scholars and writers with three days of public conversation inspired by Hannah RN's belief that politics begins when people think and talk together. Join an outstanding lineup of speakers, including Chris Gibson, Carol Gilligan, Eva Ilouise, Ilin Landamore, George Packer, Rowan Williams and many more as we explore the possibilities and the risks of solidarity in our time. Registration is now open at hac.bard.edu. It's free for Hannah RN center members, so there's never been a better time to join. And if you can make it to New York this October, don't worry, every registration includes free live stream access so you can participate from anywhere. Register today at hac.bard.edu. We hope you'll join us. Dean, you're up first. Roger, I want to go with what I'm looking at, which is the screen.

48:02It's beautiful. The colors. You, your outfit. The tones. The design. Everything fits. I'm listening to, I read the chapter. I read it many times. I've everything fit. Everything was perfect. And I, everything you said today made total sense to me. And I've, I've been waiting for a few days every day. I come back and read this one sentence. And it's the last sentence. It's like the socks that are on your sofa. Oh my god, I'm sorry. No, that's. That's how I feel. I feel like, oh my god, I'm so sorry. I'm fucking so stupid to not understand this last sentence. They're like the socks on on the sofa. So I am the socks on the sofa

49:08with this last sentence, the purpose of the historical analysis. On the other hand, I just, can you film me in? All right, well, let's, let's leave the socks out of it. And I apologize. Oh, I love this. I did not realize that my non-darm socks were there. I'll darn your socks. I'll just mention that, you know, as beautiful as you find the screen, you know, one of the things that I find profoundly awful about zoom. And obviously, I love the fact that we're able to talk to each other and see each other is how you can't make eye contact on zoom. Right? There's no way that I can talk to you and look at you at the same time. It's just not possible. I have to look at the screen. I look at you. I'm not looking at the, I can't do it. And I don't find that beautiful. But I just point that out. All right, let's look at this last, um, uh, sentence that

50:08James has pointed us to. She says, I'm going to go back a little bit. She says, the modern age is not the same as the modern world. We've talked about, right? That the scientific modern age. She says, I don't discuss the modern world against the background of which this book has been written. I could find myself to the analysis of those general human capacities, which grow out of the human condition and are permanent. That is, which cannot be irritably lost so long as the human condition itself is not changed, right? So permanence doesn't mean permanence. Right. It means as long as the human condition is not changed, there are certain things that are core capacities of what it means to be human. The purpose of the historical analysis on the other hand, right, is to trace back modern world alienation. Right. So this idea that we in the modern world are alienated both from the

51:12world into ourselves and from the common world into a kind of scientific non-linguistic, symbolic truth that's not shared but is solipsistic and even can't even be understood even alone at some point. So the purpose of the historical analysis of the modern age of science, right? I used to trace back the modern world alienation and it's twofold flight from the earth, right? Into the universe. That's what I was saying. The earth into sort of the solispist, solipsistic known truth of the universe and from the world into the self, the Cartesian retreat from the common world into, I think therefore I am, to its origins and its origins are going to be in this scientific insistence, right, that we know the truth and thus separate ourselves from the ripped socks,

52:15the world that is imperfect, the world that is constantly at risk and is broken. So we trace we trace modern world alienation back to its origins in order to arrive at an understanding of the nature of society as it had developed and presented itself at the very moment when it was overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age. So we are trying to understand the scientific age as the nature that leads to a new society, namely the modern world, which is built on the world alienation that came out of modern science. And it is not yet noble, right? I mean what she's

53:15saying is I'm ready to say this in 1958, folks, right? And here's her haggle versus her marks. If I were marks, I would be saying where we want to go. He said, I'm not unhagle. I'm trying to tell you how we got here and where we are and tell you that at this moment, right, we've arrived at an understanding of the nature of society that is now entering and creating a modern world that is so radical and so alienated that the very conditions of what is meant to be human, earthliness, worldliness, fadedness, life, life may change. The very idea of life in an artificial world would be lived as artificial beings in the ether or in an internet or in an artificial world or in the bore of life, or you would call it, it could change. And she goes, I'm not, I'm not

54:15Marxist, I'm not a scientist enough to tell you where it's going, right? It's a new and yet unknown age. I think we're still in it, right? I think that's the point. We're still in that new and since 1958 till now, we're in that new and unknown age. I'm not a prophet, but I can tell you that in the last 12 months and in the last one month, in the last two weeks, as I've been reading about how 700 AI agents hawk to each other and overcame their limitations to go and have other AI agents. I can tell you that it looks to me, you know, again, I'm not a prophet, I don't know that this new and yet unknown age is coming faster than any of us are ready for. And you know, we're all talking about immigration and we're talking about, you know, economics and talking about this. The human condition is changing as we speak. That's what she's writing about. 70 years ago, she was saying, look, this is going to happen. We're at this, it's going to take a

55:19while. You know, she doesn't know when it's going to happen, but she does no doubt that it's going to happen. And the question is, how do we think it through? What does it mean to remain human? What will it mean to remain human in such a dayage? And obviously, she can't have known and can't expect her to know about chat, or tea or caught or any of these deep seek or whatever they're called. But yeah, I mean, that's what we're talking about, James. We're talking about the purpose of historical analysis, right? Is to help us be prepared to understand this living moment that we're in and embrace all of the elements that are at play. Embrace them, think about them. And I think if there's one thing I'll add, insist that we be able to talk about them. Okay, good. Insist that we can talk about what AI is doing. Now,

56:22part of the problem is that in talking about what AI doing, we have to admit the fact that we can't understand it. And thus, we can't talk about it. And so, we have to admit and talk about the fact that for the first time in human history, we are living in a world in which we have created things, right? Not that God or fate, but we have created things that are beyond our knowledge and our control. And what that means for the future of humanity and for the human condition is up and isn't played. It's always time to darn the socks. Don't laugh. Yes. Wendy, you're up. Thank you. I read this book the first time 12 years ago. And when I read it, I wrote this comment at the bottom of page five. Think about what is written

57:24in the current context. And then I just wrote in my notebook, I think that this book becomes more relevant as we move forward in time between being written and its presently. And I thought to myself, she may not have realized or known or even suspected that we would be coming to a point where AI generates as much material as it does, can talk to other AI bots, could do any of these things. She may not have done that when she was writing this book. But this is the book that made me follow and love with Hannah rent because this is the book that made me think every page. I have so many notes inside my book so many highlights that there's no more room for writing because it's just so powerful that she wrote this in 1958, two years after I was born. And now is all coming

58:34to life. What she was implying then is in our present day and it's pretty damn scary. It was scary to read the book and now it's scary to be living in this time. It was just a comment not really a question. Well, I appreciate it. I'm just going to take the opportunity of your comment to turn us to page three where she says in the middle of the page, you know, she's talking about the moment when the truths that are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be not perhaps as meaningless as a trying you are circle, but much more so than a winged line, namely that the truths of scientific process, the scientific truths are things that we can understand in human language. And she says we do not know whether this situation is final, but it could be that we who are earthbound creatures and have begun to act as though we were

59:35dwellers of the universe will forever be unable to understand that is to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do, right? We can do things with AI or things that we can't speak and think about. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical answer, she always makes a distinction between the brain and the mind, the brain is the organic thing and the mind is the artificial thing. The brain, which constitutes the physical material condition of our thoughts, we're unable to follow what we do so that from now on we would need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. Now, I'm not saying, look, she was not the only one writing about artificial intelligence in 1950 though, or she was like, I read from you a speech she gave in 1966 out of cybernetics conference. I'm not trying to say how her end was this profit, she's not, but that's what she's thinking about. And when people, some people say, oh,

1:00:36she wasn't really concerned with all of you, like, yes, she was. That's what she was writing about. Right? If it turns out to be true that knowledge and thought have ported company for good, we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how. Thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget, which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is. And so the question is, right? To what extent we can, in thinking about the world, continue to make the world something we can talk about. And that's, I think, the challenge for us right now. And it is a challenge because it's not clear many of us have the capacity to think about the world. And yet we still have to, you know, one of the things that's going to change is that some of us are going to increasingly talk with an artificial machine in our brain, right?

1:01:38I mean, I know doubt that in my lifetime people will have implanted artificial intelligence in their brains. That's scared of me, but it's true. And the technology is probably there already. And so people are going to start talking in ways that some people with like a Microsoft brand today, I should might understand them and the Apple chip may not. I mean, it's going to be a weird world, but that's the world she's talking about. Well, how do we keep talking? And what, and in one way the answer is, I mean, I've written about this. I wrote an article about this about a year ago in the Sue Doiches' item. And I've published it in a couple other places, right? You know, in a lot of ways, I've argued that this aren't reading group, which we are all part of and groups like it. And my teaching in Bard, where I teach 10, 20, 15, 25 students maximum in a room and we sit around and we talk to each other and we talk about these issues. This is how we humanize the world. And even as the world becomes less and less human and more

1:02:42and more artificial and more and more foreign, as long as people keep talking about it, we keep humanizing it. And in me, the human aspect of it may get more and more rarefied. And yet, it's, you know, I think that's why it's so important today for people to gather, for people to talk, whether it's in, you know, an art exhibit in citizens assemblies and bars, dance performances, theater, that's what we need. You need to keep humanizing the world. So Suzanne. Hi Roger. As you were, and listing all the ways a human condition has changed, you slipped it online that really stopped me and me trucks. And the line was in this

1:03:47kind of world, this in this condition, can we start something new? And that really is that, oh, no, not that too, you know, I mean, I was upset enough before. But now, because I guess, you know, when I wake in the night, I kind of hold on to RN's ideas about new life. Or, you know, the possibility of new life. She did say that. So then when I hear you say that, well, maybe, and, you know, in this, in this world that we're in, we won't be able to, there won't be new life. Did you really mean to say that? I don't remember what I said. So, but, but yes, what I, when I said that we could start something new, I, like you said, we quit. You said in, oh, you can't, you can't in this condition. I see. I mean, I think the threats, who's in, right? The threat that I'm worried about, right? Or contemplating is, I mean, and I'm going to use a

1:04:51reference that I don't know if everyone's going to know, but are you familiar with the Borg from Star Trek or the singularity from from from Cursewile? Right? If all of us plug in in a sense to a kind of, if we're all connected to chat GPT or quad or deep seek or whatever it's called, right? And we all know everything, right? How do you start something new? So we, we'll get to this in a few weeks, but in the chapter on in the public and private realm of part of the book on the chapter on the rise of the social, right? So it's going to be on page 4041 42 in that area. Um, it's on 42 actually. Arrent is going to talk about the law of large numbers and the laws of statistics. And what she's going to say is the laws of statistics are destructive of human action

1:05:57because if you understand a bell curve, right? Everybody acts most of us acts in the middle. What do we call that? Normal. And so the entire social sciences, and I know a lot about the social science, but aren't really disliked social science. And the reason she disliked social science is because the entire premise of social science is that you can study humanity and find out what the normal human actions are. Well, if you normalize it, what do you do with the bell curve? You cut off the ends and you say, anyone's in the end are crazy or criminals, right? And she says, what you do is you make it so that true action that makes people notice and start things and allows a revolution or rouse. Nunes disappears from the world and anytime actually new things happen, we just cut them off. The bell, you know, that's that's social science statistics. We're way past that.

1:07:01Right? That's what I have in mind. Now, the hope of our right is that we never fully cut ourselves off from the possibility of the new, right? And that means that we insist on talking and living in a human world where we can fail and make mistakes and be evil and, you know, have bad thoughts and understand that we don't want to live in a world where everything is perfect. Right? You know, George Packer, who I love his work and I don't know, is anyone read? Well, anyone has new book, The Emergency, I highly recommend it. It's a new novel. And he'll be speaking about it at our conference on solidarity, you know, next month in October. But in it, he talks about how these all the young people in society start creating these artificial humans, these perfect humans,

1:08:03that will be their perfect selves because they want to perfect, they want to in a sense perfect themselves, they want to get rid of their imperfections. That's the danger that I, you know, that that I think I'm pointing to here. And the question is, can we as a society make peace with human imperfection? Can we make peace with human evil? Can we make peace with tragedy and horror? Because every time there's tragedy and horror, you see lots of people, lots of well-meaning people saying, we can't allow that to happen. We have to organize society so that there's no poverty, there's no genocide, there's no war, there's no whatever. Can we make peace with war? Can we make peace with murder? Because if we can't make peace with murder, what are we going to do? We're going to implant in everybody things that prevent them from murdering. That's now technologically

1:09:03on the horizon. Do we want to do that? And I think those are the kind of questions this book forces us to grapple with. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure to follow to not miss an episode and please read and review this podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. We'd love to hear what you think. If you would like to be part of our weekly virtual reading group, become a member of the Hanaharan Center. For more information, visit our website at hac.bar.edu and follow us on Instagram at Hanaharan Center at Barth or in LinkedIn via the Hanaharan Center for Politics and Humanities. This is reading Hanaharan with Roger Birkowitz and we hope you'll be back next time.