And you are very kind to take the time to say so. One really cannot, it seems, please all the people all the time - but the main thing is to please some!
You are very kind and your comment made me smile. At least nowadays there is the opportunity to come upon content outside the mainstream media and we must be thankful for that. I hope you find some of my other videos of some interest.
I had to read this book in 3 weeks for my political theory course, and although I researched a lot in order to understand its complexity, I have not run into something as useful as this video! Thank you so much
Thank you for this video, I read it and found it a little bit confusing but this video was very helpful to understand the concepts from the book, and I definitely agree with your last bit of optimism.
THANK you!! I had to read the first two chapters in Hannah Arendts text on the human condition (vita activa) and try to explain what she thought and also write about how I think it could be (or not) applied to teaching in a church setting.. 🙄🤦🏼♀️ And I really struggled hard to understand, but you really helped me a lot! 👍🙌
Wow! Thank you so much! I was getting frustrated because I just couldn’t get what she was saying, especially since English is not my first language. I have a quiz about this this week, and this will help me a lot
Very informative. Just finished the book and wanted to make sure I was on the right track on interpreting her argument. There are so many very interesting sub-arguments made in the book, that I often found it hard to see the big picture. This video definitely helped me!!
Thank you so much for summarizing it helped me to get my knowleadge somehow together:) do u think u could mention also something about vita activa x vita contemplativa and the sphere of intimate,private and public?
Nice video. I'm not an expert or anything. But I just find it amazing the intuition philosophers can have about the human mind. I had looked into neuroscience before really getting into philosophy. I'm cautiously finding a corroboration between the two. The way you describe Arendt's divisions of 'Labour', 'Work' and 'Planned Activities' - these seem to fit with our Motor Sensory Cortex, then higher functions like Working Memory in the DLPFC (Associations), and then our most evolved parts in the Frontal Lobes.
Thank you for producing this video! I like it enough to view it twice. I probably don’t intend to act upon your video after writing this; in fact, I might forget about it soon. All that is left is TH-cam collecting data about your production and my viewing of this video; their algorithm will decide who to present this video to next. So we’re both just part of the system, which is controlled by an algorithm. I assume that you had satisfaction producing it. I enjoyed watching it. Hannah Arendt would probably have liked this to have happened, but her book says all these activities are pointless. But then, why did she write this book? She must have found her act and the potential reactions by future strangers worthy of her effort. Excellent review!
Thank you for your reflections Edward. It's good that we shared this moment together and that my video gave you some content for reflection. I think that shows none of this is completely without point.
A couple of notes, sorry I'm a nitpicker 1. Starting by saying that HC is Arendt's "social philosophy" is problematic, given her critique of "the social" and the growing encroachment of this concept. It is all the more puzzling to use that label since, while it is used in certain academic departments, it is not really present in common parlance, which would most naturally have "political philosophy". This latter is also not what Arendt was doing, but it would have been a less confusing choice probably. What she was doing in general, according to her own definition, is "political theory", but the Human Condition itself is meant more as a prolegomena to politics than as actual political theory. If instead we wish to define the HC by its method and specific object, then we should say it's a phenomenology of the active life. Either way, it is not a social philosophy and Arendt would have hated such label with a passion. 2. It is confusing to refer to "work" and "labour" as actions, and then to "action" as another particular kind of action. To avoid this confusion, Arendt uses "activity" as the more general concept, and then "labor", "work", and "action" for the three main subdivisions. 3. In Arendt "schematic history", labour has not been the dominant activity "through most of history" (as stated here @12:16). That becomes true only in late modernity (as the video explains later on, actually). The very schematic gist of what Arendt says is that in antiquity "action" was considered the essence of the active life, then the active life as a whole was supplanted by the contemplative life (philosophy, theology), then in modernity the active life came back on top, but this time with work being the dominant activity, and then gradually the prominence shifted to labor (aided and abetted by a confusion between labor and work, which Arendt is the first to explicitly distinguish as two separate concepts). 4. The discussion of forgiveness here may leave one with the impression that, according to Arendt, we are not responsible of what we do. This is emphatically not what she was trying to say. If anything she was quite fixated on the issue of responsibility, understandably so given her experience of first, and then academic engagement with, Nazism. 5. While the dominance of labor is in some sense "slave-like", Arendt was primarily a thinker of distinctions, and she would have never been happy to call "mass slavery" what very clearly is not, and is actually very different from, mass slavery. 6. The "paradigm of politics" is not the ancient city state. That is a very useful example, for phenomenological purposes, because it shows with relative purity the peculiarity of action and the private-public distinction, while at the same time coming "before" what Arendt takes to be the distortion introduced by philosophers and (much later) social scientists. Nowhere in her work Arendt says that we should aim to imitate it, and if you read carefully the relevant chapters of the HC you can see that "the Greek Solution" was by no means the correct solution, according to Arendt. As a good, and relatively brief, explanation of Arendt's complex attitude toward the ancient Greeks I would suggest: Tsao, Roy T. “Arendt Against Athens: Rereading The Human Condition.” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 97-123.
I wonder how Arendt would respond to the socializing ( if, indeed, such a term could be applied) of social media, particularly in relation to the current political and social unrest in the U.S.
Could society or humans be creating machines, as you mention, to replace labor to push ourselves out once more to debate and become more individually represented? Loved the video! Thanks.
Yes your right. I suspect the issue is whether humans can live contentedly without work which gives disciplined purpose to life. Too much debate and politics might drive us all mad!
Thanks! I'm a few pages into chapter 4 and i thought action was only behaviors. Good to learn that it's also dialogue and speech! I haven't finished the book yet but your summary really helped! It gives context to this book. Without it, it'll be utterly boring. Haha.I see how Ardent would say those things i 1958! Also, after WWII, the atom bomb, and during the cold war, I get why she was so pessimistic about man's political abilities. Now, back to this reading. Ugh! Still boring but a little bit better :)
I'm very glad to hear that my video helped to ease the path of your reading the book. I'm sorry you find the book a bit dull. I hope it improves for you as you go along and there are some good amusing passages towards the end esp in regard to modernity. Keep going!
Here is the written version. resources.finalsite.net/images/v1581066551/habsboysorguk/cd6iuo1em85gtxtoupj8/OP-27-St-John-Arendt-and-Human-Condition-.pdf
The only problem I have with this brilliant work is she unnecessarily caused confusion with naming the 3 tenants of human action. Labour , work, and action are misleading and confusing when compared against traditional meanings of the terms.
As a human being as high art musician polymath autodidact and hyperphantasiac and a visual artist, I have experienced in my lifetime also the human condition of which Arendt describes. It may well be pessimistic as I rejected the lifestyle of which she describes in favour of creativity and the practice of high art music and visual creations. I also read, study, write. I do not partake of financial remuneration very much because no one is interested in what I do. Too much for what I do not enough for what I could do. I fall through the cracks of arendt's Web net. For my money meaning is more important than being a consumer and time-waster. Yes, I'm as poor as William Blake was, but my life is rich and full, unlike the humans in Arendt's human condition. Obviously, I don't fit in with her definition of what a human is. I wonder about the stupidity of ignoring the obvious consequences of Brexit are by saying that Cameron didn't know what they were. Probabilities aren't guaranteed but in the case of Brexit everything the Remainers warned against would happen have happened and are happening just as night follows day. As the UK shrinks, fails and disappears life goes on towards extinction thanks be to the rubbish produced as discarded waste that Arendt acknowledges but doesn't recognise. Obviously, she ignores my lifetime calling as a high art musician and artist being rejected in Britain because I am a foreigner and discriminated against because of it. I buck the system and survive but do not prosper. I laugh constantly because my schadenfreude has increased thanks be to Brexit and the Brittunculi. Arendt is too simple-minded in her understanding of the human condition by her cherry-picking. It's a pity she is not still around to discuss it.
Well I'm a great pipe smoker so when I thought of doing a video I added that as something different. I know some people don't like it but there are a lot of videos with no pipes so I think there is room for one with a pipe!
This summary is pretty thin soup. Your conflation of action work and labor at the end of the talk obscures more than it illuminates. It is important to note that the act of work is meant to produce durable goods (one reason why our consumerist throw-away society is so alienating) and thus can be understood as a linear activity that moves forward through time, as opposed to the cyclical activity of labor which seemingly moves us back and forth in time with no sense of lasting accomplishment or durable progress. I also think you are mischaracterizing her Vita Activa which, as I understand it, is exclusively an activity carried out in the public sphere. Composing a tweet falls short of that benchmark in a variety of ways, even if you buy into the fallacy of a "virtual town square". Arendt's distinction between the personal, private and public spheres is nearly as central to her thinking as other her tripartite distinction between labor, work and action. That important conceptual framework seems entirely absent here, unless i missed it. Nonetheless any discussion of Arendt and her ideas is a worthy use of our time. Cheers.
i don't understand the dislikes about this video. You're as clear as daylight about a very complex philosopher. Thank you very much for your efforts
And you are very kind to take the time to say so. One really cannot, it seems, please all the people all the time - but the main thing is to please some!
Thank you for this video... Studying political theory can be quite a challenge but when you find gems like this video, it makes everything easier!!!
How kind you are! I hope the video encourages you to pursue your interest in political theory.
Wonderful summary, and beautiful delivery from the Great Man.
Very well done in that it is rather easier to understand. Hannah Arendt's book is very complex and dense.
subscribed. As many of these as you can produce I will watch.
Ha ha thank you! I don't think I will ever produce so many as to monopolise your viewing.
Love how you focus more on capturing the essence, having barely any jargon to discern throughout the video. Thank you so much for uploading this!
Thank you for your kind words!
Really enjoyed this summary and appreciated the closing up-tick in optimism, many thanks for putting this video out.
Thank you for your support and actually getting thro to the end of the video!
This was beautifully summarised and analysed. Thank you!
Thank you for your encouraging comments.
Easy to understand! Thank you so much!
Thank you! I hope it helps.
I love listening to a classy, stylish British man like this!
Thank you so much for your explanation and for pointing out the main things that we as a society go through!!
And thank you for taking the time to say that.
This man deserves more subs than pewdiepie
I enjoyed your whole summary and your bit of optimism at the end that helped balance this out. Thank you
Thank you! We do need a little optimism in the world.
thank you, the world need more this type of video
You are very kind and your comment made me smile. At least nowadays there is the opportunity to come upon content outside the mainstream media and we must be thankful for that. I hope you find some of my other videos of some interest.
Thank you so much for this, so glad I found you. A life saver!
Ha ha I don't think I've been called that before! But thank you.
Thank you! Helpful and excellently delivered
I had to read this book in 3 weeks for my political theory course, and although I researched a lot in order to understand its complexity, I have not run into something as useful as this video! Thank you so much
Thank you Kevin. I'm really glad you found it helped and I hope your studies are going well!
Thank you - very useful for my impending essay on Observation and the Everyday!
Thank you! Very clear, direct, and insightful. Helped me with my class discussion.
I'm very glad. Thank you for taking the time to tell me!
EPIC!! So helpful. And I was particularly inspired by your commentary at the end. Thank you for making this video.
Thank you - your very kind!
thank you very much for this summary. You were really understandable!
I am sure that it will help me with my exam about her work!
I'm very pleased to hear that you found it comprehensible. And I hope your assignment goes well.
well summarized - thanks for doing this.
Thank you very much
The summary was so helpful! Thank you so much!
I really enjoyed this. Thank you.
"We might even, if you're particularly vein and self-indulgent, make a TH-cam video." Legend.
Ha ha thank you. I will see how my vanity develops!
vain not 'vein'
Suddenly, I feel like I’m back at university with my tutor. Good times!
This is very helpful and time saving for me, thanks a lot!
Oh I'm very glad. Time is a precious resource to save!
Thank you for this video!
Thank you for this video, I read it and found it a little bit confusing but this video was very helpful to understand the concepts from the book, and I definitely agree with your last bit of optimism.
Thank you for taking the time to let me know your thoughts. I am pleased that I was able to strike a slight note of optimism at the end!
Thanks a lot! It was very well condensed and simplified in layman terms. You ought to make more videos!!
Thank you! I do try tho they are a fair bit of effort to prepare and deliver. But I hope to add some more.
THANK you!! I had to read the first two chapters in Hannah Arendts text on the human condition (vita activa) and try to explain what she thought and also write about how I think it could be (or not) applied to teaching in a church setting.. 🙄🤦🏼♀️ And I really struggled hard to understand, but you really helped me a lot! 👍🙌
Thank you. I am glad my talk helped in any way and thank you for letting me know!
This has helped me a lot monsieur thank you very much
Wow! Thank you so much! I was getting frustrated because I just couldn’t get what she was saying, especially since English is not my first language. I have a quiz about this this week, and this will help me a lot
Thank you for being so appreciative. I hope you do well!
@@stjohnspipecasts6801 I hope you won't mind. I sent this to my classmates and professor through discord
@@KayKayArt of course not. The whole point is that it's of some use to people. I hope it is!
Very informative. Just finished the book and wanted to make sure I was on the right track on interpreting her argument. There are so many very interesting sub-arguments made in the book, that I often found it hard to see the big picture. This video definitely helped me!!
Thank you Thomas. I'm very glad it helped!
Thank you! It really helped me to prepare for my exam!
Fascinating works, and beautifully explained Sir! 💕👍🏼💪🏽💯
Thank you for taking the time to look at my channel and to say such kind words
Great video, ur a lifesaver ! Thanks for the help
Ha ha thank you. Really that is very gratifying to know!
Thank you so much for the video! This helps a lot with my postgrad research. The video is clear and very informative.
You are kind to say this. Good luck with your studies!
Thank you so much for summarizing it helped me to get my knowleadge somehow together:) do u think u could mention also something about vita activa x vita contemplativa and the sphere of intimate,private and public?
Thank you sir, this was very helpful!
I'm most pleased it was some help to you!
Thank you very much for that great summary.
And thank you for saying that. Good luck with your studies!
Thanks so much for this. Really helpful summary delivered well.
Thank you and thanks for taking the time to say that.
thank you so much for this video, i’m a first year philosophy student preparing for my exam, this was soo helpful!!!
Thank you Nika. I'm very pleased it helped you - it makes it worthwhile.
*WONDERFUL*
Nice video. I'm not an expert or anything. But I just find it amazing the intuition philosophers can have about the human mind. I had looked into neuroscience before really getting into philosophy. I'm cautiously finding a corroboration between the two. The way you describe Arendt's divisions of 'Labour', 'Work' and 'Planned Activities' - these seem to fit with our Motor Sensory Cortex, then higher functions like Working Memory in the DLPFC (Associations), and then our most evolved parts in the Frontal Lobes.
Thank you Chris for these interesting insights and your kind words.
Thank you!
Wise words have been spoken
This helped me so much. Thank you!
Thats great to hear. It makes it worthwhile!
Very helpful summary, thank you so much.
I'm glad you find it so. Thank you!
thank you! keep going. your videos are very useful
Oh thank you. I'm very pleased they have some use. I will try and keep going!
Thank you very much, it was very usefull and comprehensible
Thank you! I'm glad you found it so and thanks for taking the trouble to let me know.
Thank you for producing this video! I like it enough to view it twice. I probably don’t intend to act upon your video after writing this; in fact, I might forget about it soon. All that is left is TH-cam collecting data about your production and my viewing of this video; their algorithm will decide who to present this video to next. So we’re both just part of the system, which is controlled by an algorithm. I assume that you had satisfaction producing it. I enjoyed watching it. Hannah Arendt would probably have liked this to have happened, but her book says all these activities are pointless. But then, why did she write this book? She must have found her act and the potential reactions by future strangers worthy of her effort. Excellent review!
Thank you for your reflections Edward. It's good that we shared this moment together and that my video gave you some content for reflection. I think that shows none of this is completely without point.
Cracking video for a cracking chap! Mind doing a small study on table spoons? That would scratch my itch...
A couple of notes, sorry I'm a nitpicker
1. Starting by saying that HC is Arendt's "social philosophy" is problematic, given her critique of "the social" and the growing encroachment of this concept. It is all the more puzzling to use that label since, while it is used in certain academic departments, it is not really present in common parlance, which would most naturally have "political philosophy". This latter is also not what Arendt was doing, but it would have been a less confusing choice probably. What she was doing in general, according to her own definition, is "political theory", but the Human Condition itself is meant more as a prolegomena to politics than as actual political theory. If instead we wish to define the HC by its method and specific object, then we should say it's a phenomenology of the active life. Either way, it is not a social philosophy and Arendt would have hated such label with a passion.
2. It is confusing to refer to "work" and "labour" as actions, and then to "action" as another particular kind of action. To avoid this confusion, Arendt uses "activity" as the more general concept, and then "labor", "work", and "action" for the three main subdivisions.
3. In Arendt "schematic history", labour has not been the dominant activity "through most of history" (as stated here @12:16). That becomes true only in late modernity (as the video explains later on, actually). The very schematic gist of what Arendt says is that in antiquity "action" was considered the essence of the active life, then the active life as a whole was supplanted by the contemplative life (philosophy, theology), then in modernity the active life came back on top, but this time with work being the dominant activity, and then gradually the prominence shifted to labor (aided and abetted by a confusion between labor and work, which Arendt is the first to explicitly distinguish as two separate concepts).
4. The discussion of forgiveness here may leave one with the impression that, according to Arendt, we are not responsible of what we do. This is emphatically not what she was trying to say. If anything she was quite fixated on the issue of responsibility, understandably so given her experience of first, and then academic engagement with, Nazism.
5. While the dominance of labor is in some sense "slave-like", Arendt was primarily a thinker of distinctions, and she would have never been happy to call "mass slavery" what very clearly is not, and is actually very different from, mass slavery.
6. The "paradigm of politics" is not the ancient city state. That is a very useful example, for phenomenological purposes, because it shows with relative purity the peculiarity of action and the private-public distinction, while at the same time coming "before" what Arendt takes to be the distortion introduced by philosophers and (much later) social scientists. Nowhere in her work Arendt says that we should aim to imitate it, and if you read carefully the relevant chapters of the HC you can see that "the Greek Solution" was by no means the correct solution, according to Arendt. As a good, and relatively brief, explanation of Arendt's complex attitude toward the ancient Greeks I would suggest: Tsao, Roy T. “Arendt Against Athens: Rereading The Human Condition.” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 97-123.
Fabulous
Are you able to do a video or two around Foucault? Do you find him interesting?
Yes I do. I probably could as I have taught some stuff on him. But I would have to get my head back into it!
Very good presentation hope you will get more sub :)
Thanks! That was really helpful. :)
Thank you. I am really glad it helped you.
hi from shanghai. good cast.
very good video
Excellent review
Thank you!
Great!
I wonder how Arendt would respond to the socializing ( if, indeed, such a term could be applied) of social media, particularly in relation to the current political and social unrest in the U.S.
Please post more videos.. especially on Immanuel Kant
Thank you! I'm glad you find them useful. I fear Kant might be a bit of a big project!
Could society or humans be creating machines, as you mention, to replace labor to push ourselves out once more to debate and become more individually represented? Loved the video! Thanks.
Yes your right. I suspect the issue is whether humans can live contentedly without work which gives disciplined purpose to life. Too much debate and politics might drive us all mad!
*you're
I bet he's got weed in the pipe
the fourth essential sphere of the Human Condition (he's actually very good, it's just the pipe that is slightly amusing)
I kinda wish that were true
what does she mean when she says appearance constitutes reality?
Thanks! I'm a few pages into chapter 4 and i thought action was only behaviors. Good to learn that it's also dialogue and speech! I haven't finished the book yet but your summary really helped! It gives context to this book. Without it, it'll be utterly boring. Haha.I see how Ardent would say those things i 1958! Also, after WWII, the atom bomb, and during the cold war, I get why she was so pessimistic about man's political abilities. Now, back to this reading. Ugh! Still boring but a little bit better :)
I'm very glad to hear that my video helped to ease the path of your reading the book. I'm sorry you find the book a bit dull. I hope it improves for you as you go along and there are some good amusing passages towards the end esp in regard to modernity. Keep going!
Good job sir
Tremendous! Do you have a transcript for the video? Thanks!
Thank you so much. I have a longer version of what is contained here. I will send you a link to it.
Here is the written version. resources.finalsite.net/images/v1581066551/habsboysorguk/cd6iuo1em85gtxtoupj8/OP-27-St-John-Arendt-and-Human-Condition-.pdf
@@stjohnspipecasts6801 Oh my god, thank you so much! I'm having a social science class at UChicago, and I would say you are a wonderful teacher!
And I would say you are very kind to say that and I do hope your courses at Chicago go well.
When is the next PipeCast?
I am of course planning more! But the summer holidays have a rather disturbing affect on my routines.
@@stjohnspipecasts6801 👌
Pls make more videos.
Thank you Carlos. I do plan some more!
The only problem I have with this brilliant work is she unnecessarily caused confusion with naming the 3 tenants of human action. Labour , work, and action are misleading and confusing when compared against traditional meanings of the terms.
I dropped the like when he relit the pipe
Sooo, basically, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. Right?🤗
As a human being as high art musician polymath autodidact and hyperphantasiac and a visual artist, I have experienced in my lifetime also the human condition of which Arendt describes. It may well be pessimistic as I rejected the lifestyle of which she describes in favour of creativity and the practice of high art music and visual creations. I also read, study, write. I do not partake of financial remuneration very much because no one is interested in what I do. Too much for what I do not enough for what I could do. I fall through the cracks of arendt's Web net. For my money meaning is more important than being a consumer and time-waster. Yes, I'm as poor as William Blake was, but my life is rich and full, unlike the humans in Arendt's human condition. Obviously, I don't fit in with her definition of what a human is. I wonder about the stupidity of ignoring the obvious consequences of Brexit are by saying that Cameron didn't know what they were. Probabilities aren't guaranteed but in the case of Brexit everything the Remainers warned against would happen have happened and are happening just as night follows day. As the UK shrinks, fails and disappears life goes on towards extinction thanks be to the rubbish produced as discarded waste that Arendt acknowledges but doesn't recognise. Obviously, she ignores my lifetime calling as a high art musician and artist being rejected in Britain because I am a foreigner and discriminated against because of it. I buck the system and survive but do not prosper. I laugh constantly because my schadenfreude has increased thanks be to Brexit and the Brittunculi. Arendt is too simple-minded in her understanding of the human condition by her cherry-picking. It's a pity she is not still around to discuss it.
what's with the pipe?
Well I'm a great pipe smoker so when I thought of doing a video I added that as something different. I know some people don't like it but there are a lot of videos with no pipes so I think there is room for one with a pipe!
This summary is pretty thin soup. Your conflation of action work and labor at the end of the talk obscures more than it illuminates. It is important to note that the act of work is meant to produce durable goods (one reason why our consumerist throw-away society is so alienating) and thus can be understood as a linear activity that moves forward through time, as opposed to the cyclical activity of labor which seemingly moves us back and forth in time with no sense of lasting accomplishment or durable progress. I also think you are mischaracterizing her Vita Activa which, as I understand it, is exclusively an activity carried out in the public sphere. Composing a tweet falls short of that benchmark in a variety of ways, even if you buy into the fallacy of a "virtual town square". Arendt's distinction between the personal, private and public spheres is nearly as central to her thinking as other her tripartite distinction between labor, work and action. That important conceptual framework seems entirely absent here, unless i missed it. Nonetheless any discussion of Arendt and her ideas is a worthy use of our time. Cheers.
this man has a pipe, I trust his judgement
I came here to learn the sophisticated skill of enunciating clever words while having a pipe secured between my teeth.
Ce n'est pas une pipecast
you got the pipe now you need the woman
Bruhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
10:00 Jesus never claimed to be god nor to be someone who forgives infac he is a prophwt who worshiped god alone as abraham and adam.