Abstract
This chapter aims to analyse Hannah Arendt’s approach to sustainability of life in The Human Condition, where she tries to separate life-sustaining activities from political issues, without denying their great importance. I will analyse the arguments offered by Arendt, in her interpretation of Greek tradition, to exclude from the public sphere those activities which are related to survival.
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Notes
- 1.
See Herrero, Y., «Propuestas ecofeministas para un sistema cargado de deudas», Revista de Economia Critica, n°13, 2011.
- 2.
The ecological crisis is linked to the depredation of natural resources at a rate incompatible with that required by nature to regenerate them. A paradigmatic case, although not the only one, is that of fossil fuels, upon which a production, distribution and consumption model such as the current one, intensely energyvore and in continuous growth, inexorably depends.
- 3.
If the ecological crisis is linked to the overcoming of the material limits of the earth and its capacity for reproduction, the care crisis is linked to the translimitation of people’s time (which is also finite). The organizational changes of time dedicated to the attention of human needs has caused a crisis of social reproduction. By breaking the past model of care management (based on the domestication of women), conflict erupts in the sexual division of labour. The traditional feminization of domestic care tasks has become problematic. This change in the classical distribution of tasks according to gender requires a new social reorganization of reproduction. This redistribution is still far from being a reality and many women who do paid work are forced to a double shift, combining this work with care tasks at home. In these circumstances, there is a decrease in the time that can be devoted to care. In addition, recently, some social transformations have taken place that significantly complicate the management of this care, aggravating the effects of the crisis. Some of these transformations are the following: The increasing requirements for care associated with the aging of the population and the maintenance of life to older ages, the urban growth model that does not take into account the needs of care, the precariousness of the market labor (which means that the scarce conciliation rights do not reach more than a privileged fraction of the workforce) or the loss of social and community networks at the same time that there has been a growing individualism.
- 4.
See Pérez Orozco, A., Subversión feminista de la economia: Aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2014.
- 5.
The notion of asymmetric responsibilities helps us out of the dichotomy, one in which you are either guilty or you are a victim. We are all responsible for maintaining the current socio-economic system, which favours the aforementioned crises; however, we do not all have the same responsibility. Our degree of responsibility depends on the place we occupy in “White Capitalist Patriarchy” (I share Donna Haraway’s doubts about the name of this socioeconomic system: “how may we name this scandalous Thing?”).
- 6.
See Arendt, H., The Human Condition, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 7.
- 7.
See Ibid., pp. 94–96.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 84.
- 9.
See Ibid., pp. 136–139.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 11.
See Ibid., p. 175.
- 12.
Ibid., pp. 22–23.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 176.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 24.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
See Ibid., 25.
- 17.
I use the possessive pronoun “his” here and I do not mention the feminine “her” because being a male was a necessary condition (although not sufficient) to be recognized as an equal in public space.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 19.
The fact that this division of spheres was axiomatic, even self-evident, shows that it was something that could not be discussed, could not be problematized.
- 20.
Also hidden from the public sphere was violence in the family, which the Greeks regarded as necessary to govern biological needs. This question could lead us to ask whether an expression such as “non-violent family association” is also an oxymoron according to classical opinion.
- 21.
Arendt points out that this division of tasks was obvious, that is, self-evident (not problematic): “That individual maintenance should be the task of the man and species survival the task of the woman was obvious, and both of these natural functions, the labor of man to provide nourishment and the labor of the woman in giving birth, were subject to the same urgency of life. Natural community in the household therefore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it” Ibid., p. 30.
- 22.
According to Arendt, in the polis “Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society—a society of the faithful, as in the Middle Ages, or a society of property-owners, as in Locke, or a society relentlessly engaged in a process of acquisition, as in Hobbes, or a society of producers, as in Marx, or a society of jobholders, as in our own society, or a society of laborers, as in socialist and communist countries. In all these cases, it is the freedom (and in some instances so-called freedom) of society which requires and justifies the restraint of political authority. Freedom is located in the realm of the social, and force or violence becomes the monopoly of government” Ibid., p. 31.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 32–33.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 36.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 37.
- 26.
While Arendt underlines the differences between necessity and violence and is especially concerned with its dangerous identification, she does not deny its close connection. See Arendt, H., On violence, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.
- 27.
Among the multiple dichotomies present in Arendt’s analysis (oikos/polis, private/public, necessity/freedom, government/equality, etc.) we find the one established between the things that must be shown in public and those that have to remain hidden: “The most elementary meaning of the two realms indicates that there are things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all”, Arendt, H. The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 73.
- 28.
Moruzzi, N., Speaking Through The Mask: Hannah Arendt and The Politics of Social Identity, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 115.
- 29.
“Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author” Arendt, H., The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 184.
- 30.
“On Arendt’s account, identity is the performative production not the expressive condition or essence of action. This feature of Arendt’s work, combined with the public/private distinction upon which it is mapped, have led feminist critics of Arendt to fault her for theorizing a politics that is inhospitable to women and women’s issues. [...] The problem is that Arendt grounds that rejection in a refusal to treat private-realm identities, like gender, as potential sites of politicization” Honig, B., «Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity», in: Honig, Bonnie (ed.): Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, p. 136.
- 31.
“I want to ask how in fact the very project of female emancipation would even be thinkable without such a regulative principle on agency, autonomy, and selfhood?” Benhabib, S., «Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance», in: Feminist Contentions, New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 21.
- 32.
For Arendt, being among men is a condition of the possibility of the revelation of identity and political action. For that reason she praises the Romans for understanding life from a relational dimension: “Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words ‘to live’ and ‘to be among men’ (inter homines esse) or ‘to die’ and ‘to cease to be among men’ (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.” Arendt, H., The Human Condition, op. cit., pp. 8–9.
- 33.
See Ibid., p. 192.
- 34.
Ibid., 73.
- 35.
“The social question began to revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of poverty, and the laboring poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal.” Arendt, H., On revolution, London, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 22.
- 36.
“It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom.” Ibid., p. 29.
- 37.
“Human action depends upon all sorts of supports-it is always supported action.” Butler, J., Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 72.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
See Ibid., p. 141.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 75.
- 41.
“To be deprived of it [space of appearance], means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; for what appears to all, this we call Being, and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality” Arendt, H. The Human Condition, op. cit., p.199.
- 42.
“The jettisoned life is thus saturated in power, though not with modes of entitlement or obligation.” Gayatri Chakravorty, S. and Butler, J. Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, London, New York, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2007, p. 32.
- 43.
Butler, J., Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, op. cit., p. 78.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 80.
- 45.
The performative contradiction consists in exercising a right that has not been recognized by the hegemonic legal and political order. An example that Butler refers to is the demonstration of undocumented persons, who do not have the right to express themselves in public space (as they are not recognized as citizens) and yet exercise it. This kind of action is paradoxical or contradictory because it re-presents a right that was never present. See Gayatri Chakravorty, S. and Butler, J. Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, op. cit., pp. 58–63.
- 46.
See Butler, J., Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, op. cit., p. 84.
- 47.
Quoted in an interview in Women’s Own in 1987.
- 48.
The idea of “good living” (or “good co-living”) is widely used by indigenous movements in Latin America. The Quechua word that refers to this idea, Sumak Kawsay, and the Aymara word, Suma Qamaña that refers to living in harmony with human beings and nature (of which we are a part), from a non-egocentric or non-anthropocentric view, recognize our interdependence and ecodependence. This notion has resurfaced strongly in recent decades as an alternative to the Western civilizing model, playing an important role in social movements and government initiatives of several Latin American states. It is relevant that the notion of life does not appear as a noun in Good Living but as a verb. In the formulation itself, therefore, a performative dimension is already present. Good Living does not refer to a good life that is likely to be verified at a specific time and place, but emphasizes its dimension of becoming, which allows for new reconfigurations.
- 49.
See Ferreiro Lago, S., «El buen vivir como alternativa a un modelo civilizador en crisis», Res Publica: revista de historia de las ideas politicas, Vol. 21, N°. 3, 2018, pp. 559–570.
References
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Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
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Ferreiro Lago, S. (2021). The Privatization of the Sustainability of Life in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. In: Rodríguez Lopez, B., Sánchez Madrid, N., Zaharijević, A. (eds) Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_2
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