Interview with Sean D. Kelly: A Genealogy of Redemption in the Western Tradition (Part 2)

This edition of Philosophy and the Mirror of Technology is the second installment of a two-part interview with Sean Kelly. Read the first part here.

Last week we began a discussion with Professor Sean D Kelly about authenticity in our modern age, reflecting on his forthcoming book, The Proper Dignity of Human Being.  Consistent with the charter of this series to examine the evolving relationship among science, philosophy and faith, he is exploring what it means to be authentic – in the way Heidegger talked about being “one’s own”.  In the last piece, Sean traced the genealogy of redemption in the Western tradition.  He described how the Judeo-Christian moral vocabulary, inherited and developed philosophically by Enlightenment figures, understands the self or authenticity in terms of an economic exchange – whether redeemed or bought back, owned like a property right, or mastered through self-actualization.  Sean suggested that this notion of control or mastery is especially dangerous, and reflective of the existential stakes of technology.  In this final installment, he expands on what we might call, following Heidegger, a technological form of existence – transcending all the devices we may develop and use.  To understand this risk, Sean describes evil in its banal form.  Drawing on Arendt and her example of the absolute evil in the concentration camps, he outlines the ontological danger of our time, where a technological form of being is ruthless in its mechanical efficiency, eviscerating our freedom.  However, Sean wants to move beyond the Enlightenment (Kantian or Sartrean) conception that our actions entirely ground our existence – that to be human is for one’s behavior to be an expression of spontaneity. In his conclusion, Sean leads us to his book – to understand how our authentic dignity as human beings arises out of a freedom rooted in the world.  Where our free actions are meaningful in the complementarity between us and our world, a world whose significance simultaneously governs our action and is grounded in it.

Question: Thank you again for your willingness to contribute to this series, exploring authenticity in our post-modern, technological world.  Let me start with a few general questions to ground this final installment. How would you describe what’s special about the situation of the post-modern, technological world? What is our situation, in historical context, and who are we in the face of it?  To what extent is the Enlightenment inheritance of the Judeo-Christian moral vocabulary more dangerous?  How can we reclaim our freedom and be saved from a technological form of being?

3. Technology and Our Historical Situation

Whatever the right way to articulate the challenge we confront, it is unique to our moment in history. Our world takes place against the background of a century that placed the Holocaust at its center and was bookended (in the developed Western countries at least) by dramatic forms of income inequality and capitalistic abuse. It is set in place by what we might call, following Heidegger, a technological form of existence. This form of existence transcends all the technological devices we develop and use. It goes beyond this to put in place the sense that human being itself either is a kind of technology or is what must ultimately be formed by technology. This presents a danger to us that is quite distinct from the Christian danger of living sinfully.^[i] If we attempt to read our condition in terms of the moral vocabulary that sees sin – understood as rebellion against God – as the ultimate form of evil, we will underestimate and ultimately misunderstand the danger that we confront. The way to see this is to take very seriously Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the banal form of evil that lies at its ground. This is especially fruitful if we interpret Arendt in the light of her teacher Heidegger’s account of technology.

3.1 Evil in its Banal Form

It seems to be a contradiction in terms to say that there is a form of evil characterized by its banality. And indeed, if we stick assiduously to the moral vocabulary that we have inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition, then it is. To be evil, in the Christian tradition, is to rebel against God. Satan, who is after all the manifestation and ground of evil in that tradition, is the rebel angel. This interpretation of evil goes back at least to the fourth century. As Augustine reminds us in his story about stealing the pears, for instance, the essence of evil for Christianity lies in the kind of loathsomeness^[ii] that knows what is good but loves intentionally to do the opposite of that. Recall that Augustine’s confession is that he stole the pears not because he was hungry or in need of food, and not even because he liked them, thought they would be tasty, or wanted to own them. Rather, he stole the pears because he knew it was wrong to do so and because he loved the idea of doing wrong. It was, in other words, rebellion.^[iii]

If there is anything that counts as the opposite of rebellion, it is banality. The rebel is the one who refuses obedience to an authority. The word derives from the classical Latin rebellis, meaning one who makes war afresh; it was used (among other things) to describe those who refuse the king’s call to make war on his behalf, or even those who fight against that call. By contrast, the word banal, although it comes to mean commonplace, trivial, and petty, in fact has its origin in a feudal metaphor that is the opposite of rebellis. Something is “banal,” still in the 18^th century French use of the term, if it belongs to compulsory feudal service. It is what everyone does precisely because everyone comes under the “ban,” the prohibition, to do otherwise.^[iv]

The opposition between these ideas could not be more stark. The rebel is the one who loves to refuse what is required; the banal is what everyone does precisely because it is required. The idea that there could be a form of Christian evil characterized not by rebelliousness but banality is, therefore, literally a contradiction in terms. The further idea however, which in my view Arendt also insists upon, that the banal form of evil is in fact absolute, that it is not just a different kind of evil but the one that grounds and makes possible the Christian kind, takes us into unexplored terrain. Somewhat astonishingly, I believe, Arendt finds the paradigm of this banal form of evil in the concentration camps themselves. I think she is right to do so. If this interpretation reveals something worth attending to then – if it characterizes some important aspect of the ontological danger that we confront at our point in history – then it is not too severe to say that the Judeo-Christian moral vocabulary is concealing that danger from us, and in that sense is making it even more dangerous.

3.2 Banality and Technology

We can see this when we think about the connection between banality and technology. More precisely, we must aim to connect the banal form of evil that Arendt identifies in SS officers like Eichmann, about whom she wrote so eloquently but so controversially for The New Yorker during his trial in Jerusalem, and the danger of the technological understanding of being, which Heidegger locates in its ambition to treat everything as standing reserve (Bestand).^[v]

I go into this connection in greater detail in the book, so let me try just to sketch the main idea here. The absolute kind of evil that Arendt finds in the concentration camps, and that she analyzes in depth in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, consists in the ambition to control the prisoners there to such a degree that everything they do is completely predictable. She compares it to the kind of “training” that Pavlov gave to his dogs. Pavlov’s idea was to take a natural response to a meaningful and significant aspect of the environment – salivating when hungry and in the presence of food – and to pervert the animal to such a degree that the response is completely decoupled from the situation that normally brings it about. The dog is trained to salivate at the ringing of a bell for instance, or at some other completely random stimulus, which in the end bears no essential relation at all to the presence of food. In some important sense, this makes the dog a kind of “perversion” of itself. The dog still responds to the environment in the way dogs do, by salivating for instance; but it salivates in situations that have no significance, or the opposite significance, of what would normally bring about that response. “Pavlov’s dog,” Arendt writes, “was a perverted animal.”^[vi]

In Arendt’s reading, as I understand it, the goal of the camps was to take this kind of experiment one step further. They aimed not just to generate perverse human beings, but to generate human bodies whose entire form of existence is that of a thing. To understand this we must emphasize, as Arendt does, that to be human at all is not just to respond in some appropriate way to the meaningful situation in which you find yourself, but for that response to have some ground in the “spontaneous” capacity of the human will.^[vii] It is the aim of the camps, she argues, to create human bodies whose actions are divorced entirely from any ground in their own spontaneity. They achieve this end through the techniques of extermination, torture, and degradation. But these horrific practices are only techniques, only a means or an instrument, meant to serve a more “absolute” end. As Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing…^[viii]

In this passage, Arendt writes as if the camps had multiple, potentially equivalent, aims. But what her position requires, as I see it, is something even more radical. It is not that the camps are meant to exterminate and degrade human beings and also to eliminate their spontaneity. It is that the camps are meant to exterminate and degrade human beings in order to eliminate their spontaneity. This claim, at least as I interpret it, is subtle and radical. It is understandable neither in the Kantian idiom nor in the Christian one more generally.

We might think that Kant can help. One formulation of the categorical imperative, after all, says that we must treat human beings as an end not a means. Surely, one might think, this is precisely Arendt’s command to avoid “transforming the human personality into a mere thing.” But it would be a mistake to interpret Arendt’s position in Kantian terms. As far as I can tell, Arendt herself doesn’t help us very much to avoid this mistake – indeed, her use of the Kantian terminology of “spontaneity” threatens to draw us into it. So, we must draw out the position on her behalf.

There is a crucial difference between using a person as a means to an end, on the one hand, and transforming the kind of being a person is altogether. Perhaps the paradigm case of using a person as a means to an end is slavery. Slavery is awful, of course, and the threat of being made a slave (as we have seen) is the central threat to human existence as the Hebrew and Christian traditions understand it. Kant’s moral philosophy condemns this state and enjoins us never to act in such a way as to put another in it. Now, let me say very clearly that slavery is indeed a horrible thing. The point of my position is not to reduce the awfulness of the practice or the history of slavery, and certainly not to endorse the idea of using a person as a means to an end. The point, rather, is that as awful as the state of slavery is, we underestimate the evil of the concentration camps if we think that the prisoners there were “merely” slaves.^[ix] Likewise, as awful as the act of murder is, we underestimate the evil of the camps if we think the goal of the gas chambers there was “merely” to kill the people in them. Something even worse is going on, something we lack the vocabulary to describe. This, I believe, is what Arendt was aiming at in an unsent letter from April 8, 1951. “Is it not almost comic,” she wrote, to speak of murder and of “Thou shalt not kill” when one is faced with the building of expensive factories for the manufacture of corpses—and these factories were built by people who had not the slightest interest in these murders and had, so to speak, nothing evil (in the traditional sense) in mind?^[x]

To see Arendt’s point here, we must notice two things. The first is that the evil of the camps was tied up in some essential way with their use of technology. To build “expensive factories for the manufacture of corpses” is simultaneously to re-imagine what technology is and to re-imagine what the death of another could amount to. A factory that takes in the raw material of human beings and manufactures corpses out of that material is not just a new kind of factory. It is a technique for transforming human beings into raw material in the first place. To strip the prisoners in the camps of their spontaneity altogether, of any sense that they are even the kind of being who could be involved in taking a stand on what it is to be them, is to transform human beings into what Heidegger calls “standing reserve” [Bestand]. Standing reserve is what stands there as an infinitely flexible, inherently meaningless reserve of stuff that we must aim to use in an optimal and efficient way. Technology is the understanding of being that treats everything as standing reserve. One aspect of the absolute evil of the camps, in other words, is that they were an attempt to establish through their technology – through their expensive factories, their modern devices of torture – a technological understanding of human being.

The second thing to notice is that the people involved in this project had “nothing evil (in the traditional sense) in mind.” This is one of the more controversial aspects of Arendt’s analysis. She took enormous heat for saying that the evil of the camps and their functionaries was banal. Much ink was spilled, for instance, on the question whether Eichmann was genuinely anti-Semitic or not. But Arendt’s view was that whatever the degree of his anti-Semitism, it wasn’t his hatred of the Jews that lay at the ground of his actions. This sounds like a way of excusing Eichmann, which is why Arendt was criticized so heavily. But in fact, it was her way of criticizing the vocabulary we have for understanding what counts as evil.

Eichmann was one of the main managers and facilitators for deporting Jews to the ghettoes and the concentration camps. His task was to solve the logistical problem of making the trains run on time. It is no compliment to say it, but it is true nevertheless, that he was good at his job. He did make the trains run on time, and he took pride in doing so. But think of what it takes to be a person like that. It takes a kind of dispassionate focus and concentration that is almost the opposite of the angry rebel. The passionate heat of rebellion, the burning flame of hatred, is not the proper ground for this kind of bureaucratic ambition. Indeed, the whole deadening mood of bureaucracy, and the technology of bureaucracy, resists analysis in the vocabulary of rebellion.

Eichmann’s evil therefore, Arendt argues, was precisely not of a rebellious but of a banal form. He did what he did not because he believed it was wrong and embraced that wrong, but because it was what everyone around him was doing. Indeed, he even claimed he had a kind of duty to do it, a duty to follow the law of the Führer. This is obviously a perversion of the Kantian notion of duty – which is always to hold oneself to the moral law that one has given to oneself rather than received from another. But it is the positive embrace of this special kind of perversion that Arendt finds so appalling. There is a kind of safety and security in doing what everyone does, because everyone does it, but we all know there is something wrong in it. It is the perverse embrace of this kind of conformity, this kind of banality – finding in it not the kind of conformism that is inadequate to our kind of being but a positive conception of what is good – that Arendt is criticizing as more evil than rebellion itself.

3.3 Technology and Necessity

The technological understanding of being is ruthless in its ambition to transform everything that is into neutral stuff to be optimized and made efficient. But what grounds that ambition is precisely not the desire to rebel against a prior understanding of the good. Instead, the ambition is grounded in the technological understanding that seems to suggest it is a necessary feature of what is that it is to be optimized and made efficient. The apparent necessity of this understanding of the good distinguishes it from prior understandings. This is a subtle point that I cannot go into in sufficient detail here. But you can get a sense for it by noticing the difference between modern science and technology on the one hand and medieval religion on the other.

In the modern world, there is a natural background assumption that science tells us the final truth about the world, and that the technology that flows from it is our application of those truths to make the world better. It is not for nothing that the ambition of physics is to give a “theory of everything,” and that the world of technology is driven by the optimistic thought that as long as we can innovate quickly and efficiently enough the world will improve.^[xi] Kant’s idea that we are now mature beings, and Hegel’s idea that our maturity involves the kind of knowledge that will ultimately complete itself at the end of history, are at play in this self-understanding. The background sense that we are reaching, or at least aiming at, the final and complete understanding of what is, and that when we have it we will finally be able to control and master things completely to make them better, these background intuitions are animated by the mood of certainty and necessity in which science itself thrives. It is not that when we know scientific truths we know necessary truths – the universe might have been different. But science seems like the necessary method for coming to know the truths.

By contrast, consider the medieval understanding. While it is true that medieval European society in general shared a common belief in the creator God as the ground of everything, it also shared a sense that sinful, fallible human beings have no sure method to know God’s will. Not only were the methods they devised fallible – no amount of praying or doing penance or fasting was guaranteed (even in the long course of history) to bring about the desired result.^[xii] There was also no guarantee that these were the right methods in the first place. They didn’t guarantee a result, and there was no guarantee that they could.

The contemporary world has a complacent certainty that if we optimize our lives and make them efficient then we will achieve the proper aim for a human being. Without even thinking about it we assume that if we organize our calendars and make sure we are productive, if we sleep the appropriate number of hours to optimize our productivity, if we get in the appropriate number of hours of “deep work” each day, then we will be living life at its fullest and best. What we don’t recognize is that this was the banal ambition of Eichmann as well. And it is precisely the banality of this ambition – the sense that it is so obviously and necessarily true that it organizes our existence, the sense that since everyone assumes this as an axiom of existence we must accept it as well – that makes it so dangerous.[xiii]

In addition to turning ourselves into optimizable resources, the technological culture aims to do this to us as well. Every understanding of being, of course, governs the norms of a culture. The practices of medieval Christianity, for instance, gathered a set of norms that revealed and drew people to the Christian mode of existence. What is special about the technological understanding of being is that it seems to cut us off from playing any role at all in what those norms are. The necessity with which the norms of optimization and efficiency seem to govern us, the sense that those are the norms that must govern us, means that we allow them to govern us in an especially dangerous way. This is obvious in Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, but it extends to our contemporary situation as well. Let me conclude with a brief discussion of this connection.

4. Conclusion

Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism is interesting because it takes what was normally considered evil – acts of torture, degradation, murder – and sees in them not the evil ambition to rebellious activity but a technique for ontological transformation. The absolute evil of the camps is that they aimed to produce human bodies that, although still living, were devoid of the essential human capacity to be involved in any way in bringing it about that they are who they are. It is not just that the freedom of the prisoners was constrained by the demands of a master, as in slavery. It is that the techniques were a means to the end of producing prisoners whose behavior was so completely predictable, controllable, and optimizable that they were effectively “living” like a neutral thing.

What is relevant for our purposes is the fact that there are many techniques other than torture and degradation that work to this end. What, after all, is the goal of targeted advertising or the Facebook algorithm or political gerrymandering – or in general the techniques of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”^[xiv] – if not to generate controlled and predictable behavior in the populations they target? It would be execrable, of course, to assimilate the concentration camps to the abuses of capitalism, not least because the techniques of totalitarianism are so clearly evil in the more recognizable sense. Targeted advertising as a practice may raise important questions about privacy rights, but it is obviously not akin to torture. Still, Zuboff herself claims there is an important connection between her analysis of surveillance capitalism and Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and she is not wrong to do so.

Although Zuboff is correct, I believe, to insist on a relation between totalitarianism and surveillance capitalism, her understanding of that relation depends, in my view, on an unsatisfying analysis of human being and human freedom. For Zuboff, human being consists in the ability to shape the future through the action of one’s will, and freedom is constrained when the will is no longer the sole determiner of a future state of affairs. As she says, “with freedom of will we undertake action that is entirely contingent on our determination to see our project through.”^[xv] The idea that the actions we undertake depend entirely on our determination to undertake them, however, puts us too completely at the ground of our own existence. It is as if Zuboff is taken in by Arendt’s misleading Kantian terminology and therefore accepts the traditional Enlightenment idea that to be human is for one’s behavior to be entirely an expression of one’s spontaneity. The view I argue for, by contrast, finds the locus of significance and determination for our free actions in the complementarity between us and our world, a world whose significance simultaneously governs our action and is grounded in it.^[xvi] This is a complicated and subtle position that I cannot go into in detail here. Its benefit however, in my view, is that it “redeems” a notion of “authentic” human dignity.

The dignity of human being that arises out of this notion of freedom seems to me to be one that is appropriate to the kind of being we are. When we re-read Arendt and Zuboff in the light of this account, their analyses become deeper than either of them realized. Together, they reveal the technological understanding of being (Note: not technological devices, or the tech industry, or technological optimism, but the understanding of what it is to be at all that governs these and so much else in our culture) as the central danger of our epoch.

How to understand what this danger to our dignity is, and through that understanding to ask the question what could save us from it, is the aspiration of my book.

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^[i] It is also distinct from, even while developing out of, the Enlightenment ambition to self-mastery. For the sake of brevity, I will leave out that part of the story here. It is, in any case, a kind of epicycle in the narrative, since on my reading the Enlightenment position is a development of the Christian position, just as the contemporary view is an exacerbation of the Enlightenment one.

^[ii] The Latin word that Augustine uses here is foedus: “foeda erat, et amavi eam” [Confessions II.4; “I was loathsome and I loved it”]. The word is the utmost term of abuse. It means foul, filthy, loathsome, ugly, unseemly, detestable, abominable, and horrible. When referring to the mental or spiritual aspect of a person, it means disgraceful, base, dishonorable, vile, shameful, infamous, foul, etc. (Definitions taken from Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary.) The idea is that the human soul is corrupted, is detestable. Evil [malum] just is wanting to embrace those corrupt and detestable desires that make it up; loving them instead of loving what God wants. As Augustine writes in Book IX, chapter 1:

Who am I? And what kind of being am I? What was there that was not evil [malum] in my actions? Or if not my actions then my words? Or if not my words then my will? But you, Lord, are good and merciful: your right hand encountered the depth of my death; it drained the pit of corruption [corruptio] from the ground of my heart. This was all there was to it: to stop wanting what I wanted and to start wanting what you wanted.

^[iii] See Augustine, Confessions Book II, chapter 4:

Yet I was willing to steal, and steal I did, although I was not compelled by any lack, unless it were the lack of a sense of justice or a distaste for what was right and a greedy love of doing wrong. For of what I stole I already had plenty, and much better at that, and I had no wish to enjoy the things I coveted by stealing, but only to enjoy the theft itself and the sin. … I was loathsome [foedus] and I loved it. I loved my own perdition and my own faults [defectus], not the things for which I committed wrong, but the wrong [defectus] itself. My soul was detestable [turpis] and broke away from your safe keeping to seek its own destruction, looking for no profit in disgrace but only for disgrace [dedecus] itself.

There is a whole family of words here – foedus, defectus, turpis, dedecus – that aims to point out the corruption [corruptio] of the human soul. To be evil [malus] is actively to embrace that corruption, as Augustine did when he stole the pears for no reason other than that he knew it was the wrong thing to do. In this way, rebellion is at the core of the Christian understanding of evil.

One particularly interesting interpretation of the Christian phenomenon of rebellion, for me, is found in Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov. Ivan’s plan to “return the ticket” at age thirty – to commit suicide in other words – is recognized immediately by his brother Alyosha as a particularly cogent form of rebellion. (See Part II, Book V, Chapter IV of The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter which is titled “Rebellion.”) This is rebellion not just in Augustine’s sense of actively embracing one’s corrupt will on an occasion to perform a sinful act, but in a deeper sense that verges on the ontological. Ivan interprets himself as the kind of being who is essentially capable of standing apart from the world to pass judgment on its moral corruption. In the terminology of John McDowell, Ivan thinks of himself as capable of achieving a “sideways-on” perspective on the world. (See Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 34 et. passim.) It is not for nothing that Ivan remains aloof from all connection with others.

As I read Dostoevsky, Ivan’s form of rebellion grows out of his fascination with the Western philosophical tradition. Since Plato, this tradition has emphasized that genuine reality – the things that “are more” [μᾶλλον ὄντα (mallon onta)], as Plato says in the cave allegory of Republic VII (515d2) – is beyond the finite world, and that we are most ourselves when we learn to inhabit that transcendent realm. Karl Jaspers and Charles Taylor both trace the origin of this embrace of transcendence to the dawning of what Jaspers calls the “Axial Age.” (See Karl Jaspers The Origin and Goal of History, trans. M. Bullock (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1953). Originally published as Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (München: Piper Verlag, 1949. For Taylor’s discussion of the Axial Age, see his 2009 book A Secular Age (full reference in note 20.)) Both Jaspers and Taylor see the Axial move to the transcendent as a kind of Hegelian moment of progress at the origin of our history. By contrast for Dostoevsky, as I read him,our salvation consists precisely in our embracing the sense in which we are essentially the kind of being who is incapable of achieving such a transcendent stance. Rather, our salvation consists in inhabiting the connections we already have with others here in the finite world well.

For Dostoevsky, the way to do this is to cultivate the skills for living in the mood of “active love.” Dostoevsky’s discussion of “active love” in The Brothers Karamazov is clearly an interpretation of the Christian mood of ἀγάπη [agapē] love, which is so central to the Pauline interpretation of Christianity.(See, for instance, the discussion of ἀγάπη [agapē] at 1 Corinthians 13, one of many passages from the New Testament that Strong and Englishman identify as definitional.) What interests me about Dostoevsky’s approach, however, is not the question whether ἀγάπη [agapē] is the “more excellent” way (1 Corinthians 12.31) in which to manifest our connection with others, but the prior point that we are essentially finite beings who already exist in, and are always thrown into, some connection or another with the others in our world. I am interested, in other words, in the fact that Dostoevsky’s interpretation of Christianity places our salvation precisely in the embrace of our finitude. This might seem a surprising interpretation of Christianity, but it is one of the things I find most moving about Dostoevsky. Surprisingly, it puts him in connection with Melville, who (I have argued) resists the move of the Axial Age by defending a kind of polytheism.

For some discussion of Melville in this regard, see chapter 6 of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining (New York: Free Press, 2011). For a direct discussion of Melville in relation to the Axial Age, see my “Saving the Sacred from the Axial Revolution,” with Hubert Dreyfus in Inquiry, 54, no. 2 (2011), pp. 195-203. I am currently pursuing the interpretation of Melville more deeply in a paper tentatively entitled “The Whale, or How Melville and Heidegger Think the Same,” forthcoming in Dean Moyar (ed.), Melville’s Moby-Dick: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature).

It is worth mentioning that Camus seems clearly to be referencing Ivan’s rebellion when he talks about the “revolt of the flesh” that happens when one reaches the age of thirty. [See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Justin O’Brien (tr.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 13-14. Translation originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Originally published in France as Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Librairie Gallimard, 1942.]. But Camus turns Ivan’s position on its head, suggesting that the only possibility for happiness in a life consists precisely in rebellion, and that our most fundamental kind of rebellion consists in not committing suicide but instead in willfully embracing the utter absurdity of existence. We are all like Sisyphus, according to Camus, condemned to an absurd existence of one meaningless act repeated endlessly after the other. Our only possible agency consists in our decision to embrace such an existence. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus concludes. [123].

I am deeply moved by Camus’ interpretation of existence but find it inadequate. For one possible response, see my “Waking up to the Gift of Aliveness,” in New York Times, Dec. 25, 2017.

^[iv] As far as I can tell, the etymology of the word is somewhat more complicated than I have let on here. But the complications are irrelevant for my point.

^[v] The essays Arendt wrote for the New Yorker in 1963 were collected and published as a set later that year under the title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann fits together in interesting ways with the main thread of her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt put the finishing touches on the totalitarianism book after her reconciliation with, and extensive philosophical discussion with, her teacher Heidegger, beginning in February of 1950. This is precisely when Heidegger was developing the interpretation of technology, and the technological understanding of being, that he presents in “The Question Concerning Technology,” and related essays. For these reasons and others, I argue in the book that the “absolute evil” that Arendt finds in Eichmann’s “banality” is tied together in both personal and philosophical ways with the “supreme danger” that Heidegger finds in the technological understanding of being as “standing reserve.” We misunderstand both if we fail to emphasize the connection between them. Together, they are a clue to the historical ontology of the present that I present in The Proper Dignity of Human Being. What neither Heidegger nor Arendt could see, however, is the ways in which this understanding of being, and the supreme danger it manifests, expresses itself not merely in totalitarianism per se, but in a wide range of social and political aspects of the contemporary, developed West. In this context I draw on the important recent work of Shoshana Zuboff in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

^[vi] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitariasm, p. 438. It’s worth pointing out, as Arendt herself does not, that to interpret Pavlov’s experiments in this way is already to have a particular understanding of what it is to be an animal. On this understanding, an animal is properly characterized in terms of its fit with the environment in which it lives. To be an animal, for instance, is to be (among other things) drawn by available food when hungry (all else being equal). Presumably, the relevant saliences for the animal within the environment are set by its evolutionary history, so there is a kind of teleo-functionalism at work in this story. But there is also a Gibsonian interpretation of the locus of significance. We might say, following the evolutionary psychologist J. J. Gibson, that the environment is a tissue of “affordances” for the animal – of significant, meaningful offerings whose significance lies in the complementarity of the animal and the environment but not in either one alone. (See J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).) One early version of this interpretation of animals can be found in Heidegger’s 1929/30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. To be an animal, according to Heidegger, is to “bound to” and “captivated by” its environment: an animal is “a quite specific openness for a circumscribed range of possible disinhibition” (p. 258/375). I take this to mean first that the environment “binds” the animal in the Gibsonian sense that the animal-environment complement holds significance, that the animal is an openness to a range of possibilities and the environment is a manifestation of those possibilities. Beyond this, however, the environment also “captivates” the animal, in the sense that the range of possibilities it can have is closely circumscribed, and the animal is not a being essentially involved in updating that range except in the evolutionary sense. This is in contrast with human beings. In Heidegger’s terminology, the animal is “world-poor,” [weltarm] while human beings are “world-forming” [weltbildend]. Arendt can say that Pavlov’s dog is a perverted animal, therefore, because it has been fit into the environment in a perverse way, in a way that is outside the limit of the “circumscribed range” of possibilities that currently identify it as the animal that it is.

^[vii] To hear this correctly, we must understand “spontaneity” not in the restricted way that Kant does – as activity of the soul [Gemüt] that is simultaneously free from external determination and free to self-legislate – but in a more general sense. We might begin, for instance, with Heidegger’s idea that Dasein (his name for us) is in each case mine. “We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed,” Heidegger writes in Being and Time. “The being of any such entity is in each case mine.” [BT, p. 67/41] When Arendt says that human activity is grounded in spontaneity, I believe we must understand her to be saying that a central characteristic of being human is that your activity amounts to your taking a stand on what it is to be you. Moreover, the stand we take on ourselves is such that it is intrinsically capable of updating the boundary of the existential possibilities into which we are fit. This is what Heidegger means when he describes human beings as “world-forming” [weltbildend]. (See note 25.)To be stripped of this kind of generalized spontaneity is to be formed as something non-human altogether.

^[viii] The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 438.

^[ix] One indication of this is that there was no “end” towards which they were being used except their own extermination.

^[x] This is from a draft of a long letter to the political theorist Eric Voegelin, a letter that Arendt never sent. Voegelin had initiated a correspondence several weeks earlier on March 16^th, after Arendt’s publisher sent him an advance copy of Origins of Totalitarianism. The letter that Arendt did eventually send to Voegelin, on April 22^nd, was shorter than the original draft, but also somewhat less incisive and interesting. The entire correspondence including the unsent draft, some of which is in German, is introduced, translated, edited, and published by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells in History and Theory, October 2012, vol. 51, pp. 364-380. The passage quoted is on p. 377.

^[xi] See, for instance, “Why a dawn of technological optimism is breaking,” in The Economist, Jan. 16, 2021. Technological pessimism, in this use, is the concern that we are not innovating quickly enough to make the relevant improvements to the world. The 2010s were a pessimistic age, according to the article, because “the pace of innovation underwhelmed many people.” But that pessimism is giving way to “hope.” The pace of innovation is increasing and that is a sign, according to this way of thinking, that things will be better soon. The background assumption in the tech world, in other words, is that innovation = improvement. The only question is whether we are optimistic or pessimistic about the rate of innovation.

This background assumption is obviously not shared by everyone in the culture. There are modern-day Luddites and tech-resisters of all sorts. I do not associate myself with them. But it’s relevant to my claim that they play such a marginal role in the culture. The idea that technological innovation is in its nature a good, that the tech industry is saving the world – or at least that it is the proper mechanism by means of which the world could be saved – is so widely agreed upon by businesses, economists, and the tech industry itself as to be unquestioned and almost unquestionable. To be clear, what they agree upon is not that technology could never be put to bad uses – of course it can. What they agree upon instead is the conditional claim that if we are to be saved from our condition then technology is the instrument of our salvation. The point I am making is that this conditional claim already involves an interpretation of what our condition is, and of what would count as our salvation from it, that has at its core the danger we confront. It thinks of us, after all, as a resource to be optimized and made efficient. To optimize us, on this account, is to increase various measurable properties on average in the population, properties like disease-resistance, life-span, average income, and so on. These are not bad things to do, of course. But the analysis of our condition that sees these as the central problems we confront has missed something crucial about what we need as the kind of being we are. We need to be involved in becoming the kind of being we are. The implicit presupposition that we are the being whose fitness is to be optimized in the most efficient way, forecloses this possibility.

^[xii] There was, of course, pressure against this idea in practices like the selling of indulgences. That custom, among many others in the 15^th and 16^th century Church, suggested that the right kind of activity on our part could guarantee, or at least increase the possibility of, salvation. (For discussion see, among many other texts, Diarmid McCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking, 2004) and Kevin Madigan, Medieval Christianity: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).) As I read it, this is already a proto-technological move in the direction of the desire for complete self-mastery and self-control. Luther was not wrong to find in this desire something that counteracts the original Christian understanding of the self as essentially dependent on God. Whether the best account of this dependence in the Christian context is properly found in Augustine’s doctrine of grace, which is where Luther found it, is a matter for theologists and historians of Christianity. What interests me is the idea that the Reformation was led by the strong sense, during that period, that the desire for complete self-control and self-mastery could be understood only as a kind of rebellion and was thus to be resisted.

[xiii] In the 1950s, Heidegger’s idea that the current age understands everything that is to be merely Bestand, a resource standing there waiting to be optimized, was radical and surprising. Nowadays, however, the intense ambition to improve and optimize ourselves is not only recognized as pervasive, it is often analyzed as a kind of sickness or disease of the culture. Consider, for instance, this recent account:

We are living in an age of ambient unwellness. You need only look at how many products are out there promising to make you better. ­Nootropics to enhance your cognition, supplements for your bones and your skin and every one of your organs. Microdosing to enhance your creativity; therapy, of course, for your traumas. New and better sleep regimens. Unearthly powders and goos to replace all the actual food in your diet. Everything invites you to optimize yourself. The entire self, body and mind, isn’t just the thing you are: It’s a kind of machinery, something to be fine-tuned and set to work. The dream of a fully frictionless existence, a world of highly efficient cyborgs. Because if you’re not perfectly productive, if you let up for even a moment, you must be sick: The forces of decay will swallow you whole.

This passage occurs in a review of two recent books. The first is Tao Lin’s novel Leave Society, which describes itself as a “story about life and art at the end of history,” but which the reviewer interprets as being about “a man who wants to be well in a world that’s making him sick.” (These descriptions are not necessarily in conflict with one another, of course.) The other is Ross Douthat’s memoir about his struggle with chronic illness called The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. (For the review, see Sam Kriss, “It’s not all in your head,” in First Things, December 2021.)

The reviewer finds in both novels an indication that the inadequacy or alienation or sickness that is characteristic of the modern world may not be properly explained by medical or biological accounts so much as by a kind of sickness in the world. So far this is at least proximate to the ontological account that I develop in the book. But the sickness that Kriss finds in the world is socio-political rather than ontological. “I worry that we might be passing over,” he writes, “the notion that the values and structures and injustices of our society are bad for us.” (For context, Kriss is up front about the fact that he is writing from the political perspective of the socialist left.) I am not against the idea that our socio-political norms are unhealthy; indeed, it seems to me obviously true. There are of course structural mechanisms of injustice at the core of our society, and of course we need to address them. But I don’t think this is the deepest level of explanation for the danger that confronts us, any more than the Judeo-Christian explanation is. Lying at the ground of each is a background understanding of what we are as human beings, and of what the world is too, that governs us with a kind of necessity that we need to get out from under. The proper dignity of human being begins with a question about the apparent necessity of our governing conception of ourselves.

^[xiv] See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Hatchette Book Group, 2019).

^[xv] Surveillance Capitalism, p. 331. My italics.

^[xvi] The careful reader will notice a similarity between this claim, and one I made earlier in my discussion of animals. (See the discussion of the claim that Pavlov’s dog is a perverse animal.) In both cases I find, following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and in sympathy with many in the modern philosophical movement of embodiment such as Alva Noë, Evan Thompson, and others, that there is an essential complementarity between animal and environment. The locus of significance for the animal’s action is situated in the animal-environment union, rather than in the animal or the environment understood on its own. What is distinctive about human beings, however, is that we are involved in updating the significance that is held in this union. In the Heideggerean terminology of note 25, although we are “bound” to the environment like animals, we are not “captivated” by it. Early Heidegger describes this difference by saying that we are “world-forming” [weltbildend], but I think this terminology leads us dangerously close to the Kantian idea, or in a different form the Sartrean idea, that we are the ground of our own existence. In my view, the role we play in updating the significance of an understanding of being lies not in the spontaneous act of our free human will, but in the openness or receptivity we can develop to hitherto hidden significances in the world. Part of the goal of the book is to spell out what this openness amounts to, and the dignity that it manifests. The position is complicated enough, I’m afraid, that I cannot do it justice here. What I can do, however, is to emphasize that both the Enlightenment view that finds our freedom in our spontaneity, and even more so the technological understanding that finds our freedom in the application of that spontaneity to the primary end of optimization and efficiency, cover up this understanding of human dignity.