Franchesca B.

Mendiola 20160152

Theology Paper

Machiavelli & Hannah Arendt

Machiavelli

During our first few meetings, we focused on Niccol

Machiavelli and his thoughts on gender and politics. Machiavelli

is infamous for his view of power politics. He is an essential

figure in the history of political views even connecting it to

religion. His perspectives of human instinct, society and

government stamp a break with medieval theory and political

thought based on presumptions about Gods purposes for man. He

said that the states function is to work exclusively for human

purposes and built principles that were educated by a realistic

and practical perspective of the world. He drastically

secularized political ideas and started better approaches for

looking at man and society. He was the one who started the modern

social and political theory.

Machiavelli was best known for his work The Prince. In

here, he meant to pioneer another trail of analyzing politics,

withdrawing from the strategies and methods of others, keeping in

mind the end goal to compose something valuable for practical

politics. Personally, I am a fan of Machiavelli and his works. He

greatly widened my thoughts on political views regarding power.

That the medieval understanding of the universe is law is not

made, but only found, by men.

Machievellis time had a new practice of autonomy springing

from recovery of Aristotle and Plato. Machiavelli talked a lot

about citizens. The difference from Aristotle and Plato is in

size. Which is small unlike Machiavellis very large who even

talked about citizens serving Republic of Florence. Machiavelli

didnt write while he was in Republic in Florence. When he

retired, thats when he started The prince. (He wrote it to

bring Medici down)

His work The Prince was composed in the time where the

genre was books with the lists of virtues a good prince should

have. He aimed to cleanse legislative issues and purge this kind

of moralizing and thinking. He wanted to remove that thinking. He

aimed to discuss facts of history and share his own experiences

as a civil servant and diplomat in the government of Florence.

Machiavelli underestimated that the main worry of a political

ruler was getting and keeping power. He wanted to establish what

kinds of qualities rulers needed to be in order to succeed. He

wanted to change the conception found in works of his

predecessors. He encourages the prince to be merciful, honest and

giving when he can. But the prince must be adaptable and know how

to do wrong when he needs to. His focus on his work The Prince

was on how a prince should behave successfully. He applies here

his method through the use of historical studies and own

experience in order to draw effective conclusions. He again

accentuates that means must be adjusted to conditions or adapted

to circumstances. It is this straightforward and crushing

message which has prompted the popular and mainstream

comprehension of Machiavelli as the creator of the critical

principle the end justifies the means and to the relationship

of Machiavelli's name with canny, sly and deceitful political

conduct.

Hannah Arendt

Vita Contemplativa vs. Vita Activa

Hannah Arendt is known for being a philosopher and a

political thinker. She argues that the vita active or active

life is the key state of human presence. She lays out the three

key elements of the viva active: labor, work and action. Arendt

takes the expression viva active from the traditional

qualification between the contemplative life (Vita

contemplative) and the active life (Vita activa). She fights

against the traditional thinking of the active being inferior to

contemplative. She shows that active is equal in worth to the

contemplative.

She also argues it is the platonic appraisal of the

philosophers way of life caused by entrapment with the wordly

politics and affairs. This philosphers way of life, is a life

devoted to contemplation and speechless wonder.

Vita Contemplativa is the philosphers way of life. It is a life

full of wonder. This wonder according to her, does not relate to

anything particular. However, once this moment of wonder

translate into something like works, she argues that

it will not begin with statements but will formulate in

undending variations what we call the ultimate questions

What is being? Who is man? What meaning has life? What is

death? etc. all of which have in common that they cannot be

answered scientifically (Arendt, 1990)

Vita contemplativa is withdrawal from the world. Which is the

opposite of vita active, which is active life. Vita contemplativa

is concerned with seeking the truth, while vita active on the

other hand is concerned only with opinion. Arendt fought to the

distinction between both vita active and vita contemplativa and

believes that both are vital and are correlative and

complementary of each other for her.

Connecting our study of philosophy to the philosopher Hannah

Ardent really widened my knowledge about the ideas. She

exceptionally distinguishes between these three elements of human

life labor, work and action. Through studying her works and

works about her, I was able to learn a lot about those three

elements. For a quick preview - First is that labor consists of

the actions we choose to do in order to stay alive. Labor

produces things that are intended to be devoured or spent. These

things are meant to be used up like food, and clothing garments

for example. Work, on the other hand, is greatly connected to the

third element of human life, which is action. It produces

enduring items that fabricate the human world. Work is creates

the environment for action. Lastly, action, the third element of

human life, is made up of who we are as people and what we do in

our everyday lives and what life really means to us. Vita Activa

or Active life consists of these three elements. I believe that

we constantly need labor, work and action in order to grow.

Arendt takes the distinction between a life of action and a life

of contemplation to be two different ways of life. She says that

regardless of the possibility that one claims that the objective

of all activity is contemplation, there are individuals who

experience their entire lives without this, and nobody can carry

on with an existence which comprises only of contemplation;

quoting the active life, at the end of the day, is way most men

are occupied with as well as even what no man can escape by and

large." Contemplation relies upon a wide range of different

activities and actions, like the labor needed to be done in order

to remain alive, the work required to make homes, and the action

required to organize people. The individuals who take after the

contemplative way have dependably depicted or described the

active life. It is a privation, an absence of the conditions that

make contemplation possible, compared to the attitude of silence

the contemplation has. This misses many details about the active

life. Moving the topic to religion.. Christianity, with its

accentuation on the hereafter, gave a religious sanction to the

dismissal of the active life, while the command to love one's

neighbor was a stabilizer. However, the beginning of the

progression is to be found in Greece after Plato, which

considered the citizen to be less superior to the philosopher.

The Greek valorization of the contemplative life was intensely

challenged in the nineteenth century by Marx and Nietzsche two

of the greatly known philosophers, however this did not exactly

bring about a valorization of the active life as such. Rather, it

was labor that rose to the highest point of the chain of command,

since all Marx and Nietzsche truly did was invert and reverse the

Greek-Platonic view. Contrast this with Arendt's rundown of the

human activities, labor-work-action, in which action gets the top

spot. A pecking order with action in the best spot is pre-

Platonic; when the concern for contemplation showed up, the chain

of command of the trio was changed and work turned out to be more

vital and important than action. Arendt conceives that the

Platonic discussion demonstrate to us the rise of the craftsman.

Remained at the bottom was labor, yet politics was just commended

and praised to the degree that it was just like craftsmanship,

that is, work: "Only if seen in the image of a working activity,

could political action be trusted to produce lasting results.

And such lasting results meant peace, the peace needed for

contemplation: No change." Today, in the modern times, the

reversal involves labor glorification. But in reality, it isnt

labor as such but rather labor which is productive. It is all

about results that last.

 Labor, Work and Action

Focusing now on the first element, which is labor. Labor is

an activity, which corresponds to the processes of the body which

are biological. Our bodies depend on labor. We do things in order

to keep our bodies alive. Also, labor is connected to the cycle

of birth and death. Labor is interminably redundant and

repetitive which never comes to an end. Work closes when the

object is done, while labor is gotten in the hover of the living

life form and just closures with death. Labor makes consumer

goods for people to use. Two stages of the biological life are

laboring and consuming. Labor, is needed for us to live, unlike

any other human activity. It is a necessary, I believe. The goal

of the revolution in Marx is not just the liberation or being

free of the working class, but the freeing of man from labor, for

"the realm of freedom begins only where labor determined through

want" ends. However, this freeing is not possible through

political liberation, but rather technology "to the extent that

it is possible at all". Since labor is attached to life itself,

it is also attached to lifes toil and trouble and the sheer

bliss which we can experience our being alive. Each occupation

has some work in it, even the most elevated, seeing that they are

employments by which we make our living. Their tedium or

repetitiveness is the thing that provides satisfaction and

contentment, which is similarly as fundamental as moments of

happiness.

Work, the second element, comparing it to labor of our

bodies, is what makes the world we live in. Work does not create

consumer goods (which is what labor does) but objects with use

wherein their use does not cause their extinction. Quoting they

give the world the stability and solidity without which it could

not be relied upon to house the unstable and mortal creature that

is man." However, their durability is not forever. We utilize or

they decay and rot. The things work make and produces is

independent they have their own objective freedom. It is that

sturdiness, which makes their freedom from man, gives them their

objectivity, and gives them a chance to remain against for a

period the needs of their living users. Without the artificial

environment, we would not see nature as objective.

Durability, objectivity, and reification are the result of work.

Solidity originates from the matter which is transformed into

material. Arendt says:

"Material is already a product of human hands that have

removed it from its natural location, either killing a life

process, as in the case of the tree which provides wood, or

interrupting one of nature's slower processes, as in the

case of iron, stone, or marble torn out of the womb of the

earth. This element of of violation and violence is present

in all fabrication, and man as the creator of the human

artifice has always been a destroyer of nature. The

 experience of this violence is the most elemental experience

of human strength, and by the same token the very opposite

of the painful, exhausting effort experienced in sheer

labor. . . homo faber becomes lord and master of nature

herself insofar as he violates and partly destroys what was

given to him."

Work is reversible. What human hands make, human hands may

destroy too. This applies with everything. There are no product

humans made which we cannot destroy as well. Something that is

present in work, but not in labor and action, is mastery.

Work is controlled by means and ends. The object of work is

a finished result in two senses: the process comes to an end in

it, and that the process is only a means to this end. Comparing

this with labor, where labor and consumptions are two phases of

the same procedure, fabrication and usage are totally different

processes. Fabrication ends and is not rehashed or done again.

The craftsman's repetition comes from the need to earn a living,

the element of labor in his work, or the demand for

multiplication on the market. The repetition is not tied to the

process in itself.

Man is a tool-maker. Tools are used in the process of labor

in order to help man lighten their burden. Tools are servants of

man, while machines make the man adjust to them. Probably our

most essential experience of instrumentality originates from the

manufacture fabrication procedure, where it is " true that the

end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes

them. Like what Arendt says. I believe it says that the the end

justifies the act of violence done to the environment to get the

material and the end product organizes the work. While the object

is an end for the means, it itself is not an end, unless it is

used. It is quickly put into another methods end chain.

In the circle of work, there is just a single sort of protest

which the unending chain of means and ends does not have any

significant bearing or apply: art. It may be the most useless but

durable thing people make. Any art can be put into a museum and

be removed all possible usage and will be stagnant. The purpose

of art is to accomplish perpetual quality rising above utility.

Moving on to the third element, Action. Men are filled with

connections and live in a web of relationships. Every new act

decided to be done by a person will get included in that web and

can start a new process. Through this already existing web,

action never succeeds. Action makes stories as often as work

makes things. Action creates stories that tell us about subjects

more than the table tells about their makers. Each life has a

story. History come from the outcomes of actions that were done.

Each activity sets off a chain response of eccentric procedures.

That is inevitable; it can't be kept away from by restricting

one's activities to constrained systems or by ascertaining

results with computers. One action can be sufficient to roll out

enormous improvements and changes. Actions are irreversible and

unpredictable. Activities can't be destroyed unlike the materials

or objects made by workers. The irreversibility and flightiness

of action can not be deleted, just tempered. Once an action is

done, it is forever irreversible and cannot be undone. For

example, if I take an action of fighting my mom and answering

back because of my feelings at that exact moment. If I feel calm

already and regret what I did, I cannot unchanged how I reacted

towards my mom. The only thing left that I can do is ask for

forgiveness. An actions irreversibility can be tempered by the

personnel of pardoning, (through asking for forgiveness about the

past) and unpredictability can be tempered by guarantees (through

giving promises about the future). Once we are forgiven from a

past action, we may not need to go through the consequences of

it. Without forgiveness, we would dependably be attached to our

past actions and may affect our future. Quoting Arendt:

"Without action, without the capacity to start something new

and thus articulate the new beginning that comes into the

world with the birth of each human being, the life of man,

spent between birth and death, would indeed be doomed beyond

salvation. The life span itself, running toward death,

would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and

destruction. Action , with all its uncertainties, is like

an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are

not born in order to die but in order to begin something

new. Initium ut esset homo creatus est 'that there be a

beginning man was created,' said Augustine. With the

creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the

worldwhich, of course, is only another way of saying that

with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared

on earth."