Dialogues
Seven Voices
Existence

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

Existence - The Human Condition

Christopher Lasch •

A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future.

Thomas Berry •

We were the sane, the rational, the dreamless people, the chosen people of destiny. We had found the opening to a more just society, a more reasoning intellectual life. Above all we had the power to reengineer the planet with our energy systems, our dams and irrigation projects, our great cities. We could clear the forests, drain the marshes, construct our railways and highways, all to the detriment of the other living forms of earth, to the elimination of needed habitat, to the obstruction of migration paths, to the cutting off of access to waterways. We could subdue the wilderness, domesticate the planet. We were finally free from the tyranny of nature. Nature was now our servant, delivering up to us its energies, altering its biological rhythms in accord with our mechanical contrivances.

The human condition could be overcome by our entrepreneurial skills. Nuclear energy would give us limitless power. Through genetic engineering we could turn chickens into ever more effective egg-laying machines, cows into milk-making machines, steers into meat-making contrivances, all according to human preference, not according to the inner spontaneities of these living beings as determined by their genetic coding, a coding shaped through some billions of years of experiment and natural selection.

Hannah Arendt •

The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. ...With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labour, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labour is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labour. The human condition of labour is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

Christopher Lasch •

...The capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general.

The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they differ. Love, on the other hand&emdash;flesh-and-blood love, as opposed to a vague, watery humanitarianism&emdash;is attracted to complementary differences, not to sameness.

Jacques Ellul •

The purpose of our human techniques is ostensibly to reintegrate and restore the lost unity of the human being. But the unity produced is the abstract unity of the ideal Man; in reality, the concrete application of techniques dissociates man into fragments...It is understood, of course, that in modern work the human being accomplishes nothing; at best he performs a neutral function during the "dead time" of the working day. He must exercise his own personality, if he exercises it at all, during the eight hours of leisure.

Maria Montessori •

Love is conceded to man as a gift directed to a certain purpose, and for a special reason, and in this it resembles everything lent to living beings by the cosmic consciousness. It must be treasured, developed and enlarged to the fullest possible extent. Man, alone among living creatures, can sublimate this force which he has received and can develop it more and more. To treasure it is his duty. It holds the universe together because it is a real force, and not just an idea.

By its means man, also, will be able to hold together all that he creates with his hands and with his intelligence. Without it, all he creates will turn (as so often it has) to the bringing of disorder and destruction. Without it, with the growth of his own powers, nothing of his can last, all will collapse.

Hannah Arendt •

...Human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of manmade things which it never leaves or altogether transcends. Things and men form the environment for each of man's activities, which would be pointless without such location; yet this environment, the world into which we are born, would not exist without the human activity which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things; which takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic. No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

Jacques Ellul •

The human being does not feel at home in the collective atmosphere. This is true of societies that differ in many ways among themselves; it applies to the primitive sociological collectivism of Africa, to the individualistic civilization of Europe, and to the collective adaptation of a higher type in the United States. In all these societies everyone is affected by a certain malaise. The change of sociological structures is occurring at a very rapid tempo and affects everyone; and the state demands an immediate collective effort from all the citizens. A sufficient respite is never afforded the individual to allow him to assimilate all the new criteria.

Hannah Arendt •

All human activities are conditioned by the fact that men live together, but it is only action that cannot even be imagined outside the society of men. The activity of labour does not need the presence of others, though a being labouring in complete solitude would not be human but an animal labourans in the word's most literal significance.

Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god&emdash;not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths. Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it, and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.

...What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic seance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.

Jacques Ellul •

In spite of leisure and abundance, supposing that leisure and abundance come in the way men expect them, there is a great difference between this state and Paradise. The difference has to do with the cost. The old dream that has tempted man from the beginning, the medieval legend of the man who sells his soul for an inexhaustible purse, which recurs with an enticing insistence through all the changes of civilization, is perhaps in process of being realized, and not for a single man but for all. I say perhaps. Modern man never asks himself what he will have to pay for his power. This is the question we ought to be asking.

Christopher Lasch •

A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today. Having trivialised the past by equating it- with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present.

Hannah Arendt •

Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public. Whether an activity is performed in private or in public is by no means a matter of indifference. Obviously, the character of the public realm must change in accordance with the activities admitted into it, but to a large extent the activity itself changes its own nature too.

Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible...the common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.

Jacques Ellul •

To acquiesce in the thesis that work is "neutral" is to acquiesce in this profound rupture. Indeed, the individual cannot be "absent" from his work without great injury to himself. Work is an expression of life. To assert that the individual expresses his personality and cultivates himself in the course of his leisure (we have already considered what may be expected of man's leisure) is to accept the suppression of half the human personality. History compels the judgment that it is in work that human beings develop and affirm their personality.

Hannah Arendt •

Man, in so far as he is homo faber, instrumentalizes, and his instrumentalization implies a degradation of all things into means, their loss of intrinsic and independent value, so that eventually not only the objects of fabrication but also "the earth in general and all forces of nature," which clearly came into being without the help of man and have an existence independent of the human world, lose their "value because [they] do not present the reification which comes from work."

Christopher Lasch •

The narcissist has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past. He finds it difficult to internalise happy associations or to create a store of loving memories with which to face the latter part of his life, which under the best of conditions always brings sadness and pain. In a narcissistic society&emdash;a society that gives increasing prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits&emdash;the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist's inner life.

Willard Gaylin •

To be human is to be able to take the nurturing that was given us in childhood and, with a peculiar kind of linear justice, reciprocate by giving selfless nurturing to our children and beyond that to all of the helpless, infantile, and dependent in our community.

Christopher Lasch •

The man of ambition is still with us, as in all times, but now he needs a more subtle initiative, a deeper capacity to manipulate the democracy of emotions, if he is to maintain his separate identity and significantly augment it with success...

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