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Studio Killers - Jenny (I Wanna Ruin Our Friendship) OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO

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THE WITNESS

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Night Club - "Show It 2 Me" (Official 360 Video)

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SearchSystem™ | Japanese graphic design, Promotional design, Graphic design inspiration

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Aug 17, 2019 - Shirow Masamune, Kodansha Ltd. & Sony Computer Entertainment / Liquid Room 3rd Anniversary — Megatech Body Night / Poster / 1997

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The Human Condition:
Prologue

In this book, Arendt is interested in describing what it means to be human -- but not through human nature. Instead, she wants to think through the things that people do, broadly conceived, and make sense of our life-world. To do this, she needs to develop a language that she can consistently use to describe our life-situation, which is what she does in the first part of the book. In the prologue, she takes a moment to say why this matters. She does so indirectly, through our scientific activity. In so doing, she is able to link the things we do (creating artifacts, laboring to sustain ourselves) to our inter-dependent activity (what she will call action), with the goal of giving us a set of tools with which to "think what we are doing".

Arendt starts w. the launch of Sputnik. She says that this is an event, "second in importance to no other". Why? What is it about the launching of a satellite, something we take for granted today, was so significant?

The answer lies in what it represents. It represents the historical longing of human beings to escape the 'bonds' of earth-bound existence. This desire represents a desire to live in a world not as given, but instead a world that we have created. To make the conditions of our lives of our own making. The launch of sputnik is the first step in being able to make this goal a reality.

Arendt sees this as a move that needs careful consideration. The human creative capacity, specifically through science, has outpaced our political/communicative capacities. That is, "The trouble concerns the fact that the 'truths' of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. ... It could be that we .. will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do." (p.3)

IF this happens, then we become slaves to the things we know how to do, but do not understand.

Meaningful life (political life), according to Arendt,rests on communication, which modern scientific achievement cannot readily partake in. "Men in the plural, ..., can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves."

This ends the first part of the prologue, which, as will become clear later, describes the conditions of action and creation. She next turns to the conditions that lead to human sustenance: labor.

Building again on scientific achievement, she says that automation will lead to "a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won."

Ours is a society where almost everything we do has been converted to a means of subsistence. As such, we spend our time not creating for the purpose of creation, or in a life of contemplation, but instead a much more 'basic' animal life of living. This relates directly to Marx's discussion of species being.

What makes this life possible -- what creates a situation where we have a world of laborers, is part of the problem Arendt is seeking to answer. She will, in the remainder of the book, provide us with a set of concepts that allow us to "think what we are doing." (p.5).

Chapter 1.
{1} The Vita Activa and the Human Condition.
Arendt uses the Vita Activa to refer to three fundamental human activities: Labor, Work, and Action. There is a fourth element of human activity, thought, which is NOT the subject of this book. The three are identified as

"fundamental because each correspond to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man." (p. )

Labor: Activities that support life. "The Human Condition of labor is life itself." (p. )

Work: Activity that corresponds to the 'unnaturalness' of human existence. It is the production of artifacts, i.e. things created by re-shaping the world, that are intended to outlive the maker. "The human condition of work is worldliness." (p. )

Action: The only activity that goes on directly between individuals. Corresponds to Plurality. The best direct definition I've found comes from Conovan's book on Arendt. She says that action is,

"A very broad category of human activity that covers interactions with other people that are not matters of
routine behavior but which require personal initiative." (p. )
I think some of the key elements of action is that it is intended to create something entirely new, this is why it corresponds to the human condition of 'natality' of 'beginning.' Under most circumstances we all know exactly what to do -- there are norms and guides, precedents and habits to fall back on. Under certain circumstances, people create interactions, or found new forms of organization that are entirely new. New associations, under particular conditions are a central element of action. (I'm thinking here of her point that promises between people in the political realm form the conditions for action - examples could be Ghandi, or M.L. King's movements).
Action Requires plurality, and follows from plurality.

"Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live." [p.8].

Each of these three factors is linked to a set of basic functions:

Labor : Providing sustenance

Work: Creating artifacts, a sense of permanence

Action: creating the social conditions for remembrance, for history. The category of action has primarily to do with creating, with doing something new.

Conditioned Beings:
Mankind is a conditioned being, because that which we create becomes the condition under which we live.

"Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence." [p.9].
Why is the Human Condition not the same as human nature?
The human condition consists of all the things we live in. Thus, the most radical change to the human condition would be to emigrate to another planet -- it would change all of the categories of thought. But humans would still be conditioned being -- critters who's world is made up of the stuff around them.

Theories of human nature attempt to describe people as 'what' instead of 'who'. Arendt finds this completely unsatisfactory. Furthermore, the conditions under which we live cannot 'explain' what we are or who we are, because we are not conditioned absolutely.

The key element to get out of this section is that Arendt is trying to make a space for human action -- that people are NOT the pawns of position and abstract social 'structure' but free, active agents, endowed with a will and ability to change the world. Her whole point, is simply that they can't change the world on their own. That the fundamental human condition of plurality requires that humans are simultaneously doers and sufferers -- we act and react at the same time.

[From a history of theory standpoint, she is reacting to two strains in social theory. On the one hand, there are theorist that argue all of mankind's activities are explainable due to some set of behavioral laws. ON the grand scale this is represented by Marx, in that the whole of history is the history of class struggle, and that the system has inevitable outcomes. A micro version of this (and the pun inherent in the 'conditioning' phrase) would be found in psychological behaviouralist theories like B.F. Skinner. The other pole she is reacting to are philosophers that say each person can do whatever they want. Thus she reacts AGAINST Neitzche and Sartre who argue that people have uniquely determining wills and can do essentially whatever they choose.]

{2} The term Vita Activa.
In this section Arendt basically points out how she is using this term, and contrasts it with the term ' vita contemplativa'. The only real key element to take from this section is her brief discussion of the Greek polis (p.13), where she points out that the political life in Greece "denoted a very special and freely chosen form of political organization and by no means just any form of action necessary to keep men together in an orderly fashion.' [p.13].

The polis was not a solution to the problem of order, but required that order exist (in Greece in the form of patriarchal slavery) for the freedom of the polis to generate action.

{3} Eternity vs. Immortality.
This section continues the discussion about the difference between the contemplative life and the active life. Immortality means endurance _in_time_, deathless life on this earth and in this world as it was given.

Eternal means without time -- unchanging foreverness.

"Politically speaking, if to die is the same as 'to cease to be among men,' experience of the eternal is a kind of death, and the only thing that separates it from real death is that it is not final because no living creature can endure it for any length of time." [p.20]

Mortals occupy a finite position in an immortal, ever- recurring world. "The mortality of men lies in the fact that individual life, with a recognizable life- story from birth to death, rises out of biological life." (p. )

[this is the contrast of human lives, which have histories of WHOs compared to the 'life-cycle' of (most) other species.]

In a world characterized by ever-recurring, immortal life, humans need to make a mark in a mortal life-span.

"This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order." [p. 19]
The connection with the contemplative life is mainly historical: Philosophers (and, as we see at the end of the book with the discussion of the Archemidian point, scientists as well) are/were concerned with 'timeless truths'.
In this section she makes a strong case for human distinction as well:

"The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best, who constantly prove themselves to be the best and who "prefer immortal fame to mortal things," are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasure nature will yield them, live and die like animals." She attributes this opinion to Heraclitus -

It is this "rectilinear" life -- the ability to tell stories & write biographies instead of natural histories -- that Arendt will try to explain with Action. Action involves the ability to do something that can lead to immortality.

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The Human Condition: Prologue In this book, Arendt is interested in describing what it means to be human -- but not through human nature. Instead, she wants to think through the things that people do, broadly conceived, and make sense of our life-world.

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https://monoskop.org/images/e/e2/Arendt_Hannah_The_Human_Condition_2nd_1998.pdf

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- 80s Japanese music videos
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-reoccurring imagery in each screen to tie all screens together

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Blade Runner

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ghost in a shell

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solarpunk
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