Just finished Hannah Arendt book,
“The Human condition”
She spent the book working out a couple of aspects of
the human condition… work, labor, and action…
and she mentions a fourth thing, contemplation…
I would like to venture a guess and say that of those 4 things,
(I have redefined 3 of those things as being work, consumption, production)
and the fourth, which is contemplation…
now let me tell you about my wife… she is always thinking, as I do,
but the nature of our thinking is quite different… she is always thinking
of the things that need to get done, around the house, chores, outside
the house stuff…
her engagement with thinking is about what needs to be done…
and my thinking, my engagement with contemplation has nothing to
do with what needs to get done, for frankly, I don’t care…
if the house is cleaned or the garbage is taken out…
but my wife, oh, my wife is always thinking about these things…
here we are, engaged in the same thing, thinking, but to two different
ends… I will sit at the kitchen table staring at the wall for hours,
thinking about what it means to be human… at no point will
I engaged with thinking about some action that needs to be done…
So when I think about what we ought to do, I am thinking about
what can we be or what our possibilities of being human actually means…
my wife, what chores ought to be done…
So, we are engaged in the same activity to different ends…
now most people engage with thinking like my wife does,
what needs to be done? Who is going to pick up little Jonny after school?
and how many of us engaged in thinking in terms of what it means to
be human? Few, very few…and I would argue that thinking about
what it means to be human is far more important than thinking about
what chores need to be done today? And my wife would disagree…
and how would we know which one of us is right? and as importantly,
why, why is one right over the other?
What is the value of contemplation over thinking about chores?
Kropotkin
