Chapter 6 of The Human Condition: The Vita Activa and the Modern Age

I have posted a first pass at annotating Chapter 6, "The Vita Activa and the Modern Age" of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. The posted versions are: plain text and text with my emphasis added.

For all of Arendt's attention to homo faber she has no mention of garments or clothing.  She comes close: mentioning "weave" and "silk".  She does mention the "toga" in a footnote on slaves.  This may be because she escaped before the requirement to wear a yellow Star of David.  The word "naked" occurs a few times but not "nursing" or "breast-feeding". The word "rape" occurs twice. She speaks even of "the labor of the woman in giving birth" but may herself never been engaged in the deliberate effort to act so as to increase her own chance of becoming pregnant.

She says: "women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of their species" but has no comment to parallel those of Heidegger on her own clothing when she first entered his office, wearing a hat which obscured her face.

Quote:

The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes and the women at nearly the same historical moment must certainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden. It is all the more symptomatic of the nature of these phenomena that the few remnants of strict privacy even in our own civilization relate to "necessities" in the original sense of being necessitated by having a body.

The depth psychologist would be struck by the term "remnants". The experience of the body is neglected by this student of  post-phenomenology.

She speaks of "marble torn out of the womb of the earth" but her consideration reification is pre-feminist. She speaks of "tame animals" as if oxen were parakeets or Syrian cats or gerbils - as if horses are "tamed" and not "broken".

The one occurence of "sex" is in "the odd notion of a division of labor between the sexes".

The word "gender" is absent.

The word "procreation" is present and birth is analyzed in the abstract: but what in experience precedes procreating is absent.

Had she lived to re-write or revise her book today, she could not ignore the two healthful activities of vigorous sex and vigorous exercise - both of which she, a heavy smoker, may have viewed as lacking telos.

There is no question that her marriage to Guenther Stern began as loveless and certainly was for some time sexless before she met Blücher.  Heidegger's language both in his letters and elsewhere makes it very clear what she, his "saucy wood--nymph" disclosed to him.

Sex without disrobing was practiced in a variety of communities in the western world in the early decades of the 20th Century.  The issue of nudity is documented by Bertrand Russell with regard to his first marriage.  Heidegger, like Wittgenstein, was very particular about his garb (both so unlike, say, Iris Murdoch.) but there is no reason to think that his "open marriage" with Elfride was any too modest (and the recent claim that Hermann Heidegger is not his son may be seen as confirming this.)

The current view of Neandrathal is that both sexes hunted, had elementary animal hide garments and decorated their skin.  It is too little appreciated that grooming for lice and skin decoration lie at the heart of the hominid social life as much as the hunt or seeking shelter: they were very important activities.  Unlike the apes, whom she mentions, the hominid female does not have an estrous cycle: experience and procreation are different activites in homo sapiens than in distant hominid species.  What is now clear, is that the "tool-maker" hominid may have come much earlier than previously thought.

In the annotations to Chapter Six the limitations of the Heideggerian view of man and technique should be made clear in so far as his standpoint constricted her view on topics ranging from the advances in arrow heads in the New World to the place of calculation in science.