Hannah Arendt writing in THE HUMAN CONDITION:

_______________________________________

A nation of "jobholders" dedicated to the definition of the successfully lived human life as one in which I make enough money, by working hard, to finance my life as a succession of pleasant experiences.

This mode of life becomes, inevitably, an exclusively private life, by reason of the fact that sensual pleasure is an exclusively private experience.

Such a life, because it is exclusively private, would be considered, by the ancients of our civilization, to be the life of a slave, inasmuchas it is cut off from the concerns of the polity. The terminal state of this is to neglect to even vote.

It is the life of one cut off from the community, absorbed into the sensuality of the self, and consequently, for the Greeks, a subhuman way of life. The Greeks used the same word to express the ideas of "private" and "idiot"

______________________________________

The ancients of our civilization thought they saw something specifically distinct about being human.

To reduce that thought to one word would be to speak the Greek word "nous" or the Latin word "intelligere." It means "understanding," and out of its meaning comes the three activities which, taken together, make up the greatness of the human achievement.

The fulfillment and the consequent peace that evolves from this vision depends upon our understanding the profoundly complementary nature of a person as a seer, as a maker of the useful and the beautiful, and as the wise doer of their life.

Homo Contemplativo. . . .for whom the passive act of seeing is filled with awe. . . . . the vision of the scientist, the mathematician, or the vision of any person who simply is willing to lay his or her mind open to reality.

Homo Faber. . . . .the person as a maker of the beautiful and the useful. e.g. coming across the bridge from Oakland to San Francisco on a moonless night. It is all artifact! There is nothing

produced by nature, except by the natural activity of a human intellect and its power to mold nature to its purpose.

Homo Sapiens. . . .the person as the wise doer of his or her life, with the product being, in this instance, neither a useful or beautiful artifact, but something that transcends each of the other two orders, i.e. a good human being.

________________________________________

Our tragedy according to Hannah Arendt:

1.- We abandoned the contemplative order in the name of productivity and the technological powers that drive it.

Is the accusation true? What is the condition of the liberal arts in the contemporary curriculum of our colleges and universities?

2.- We abandoned the whole idea of attempting to live wisely by implementing the notion that morality is simply a matter of personal preference,and that, consequently, there is no such thing as moral truth or moral falsehood. e.g. Allan Bloom,

e.g. H.D. Rhodes at Harvard

3.- Coming into a state of narcissism (de Toqueville, Robert Bellah, and others) we subordinate MAN, THE ARTISAN OR MAKER, to the endless pursuit of money, and subordinate that wealth to the definition of a successfully lived human life as one of successive moments of pleasure, and with this final state, we leave life in community, and take up the life of the jobholder, i.e. the exclusively private life of what the Greeks would call a slave.