The Frailty of action. Forgiving and Promising: The Redemption of Action through the potentialities of Action itself in Arendt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1972, at a conference on her work organized by the Toronto Society for the Study of Social and Political Thought, to which Hannah Arendt was invited not only as the guest of honor but also, as it was her own wish, to participate, she said that “the main flaw and mistake of The Human Condition” [1958] was to “still look at what is called in the traditions the vita activa from the viewpoint of the vita contemplativa, without ever saying anything real about the vita contemplativa”. The main flaw, then, of her inquiry into the vita activa was to have in a way accepted that thinking is contemplative – though the lines of Cato which she quoted at the very end of that book (“Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself”) already pointed to the fundamental experience of the thinking ego, “an experience of sheer activity”, she now insists, “unimpeded by any physical or bodily obstacles”. Arendt’s analysis of the vita activa in The Human Condition can be described, and was characterized by Jacques Taminiaux, in 1992, in La fille de Thrace et le penseur professionnel, as a replica to the Heideggerian “reappropriation” of the Greeks during the phase of the genesis of his “fundamental ontology”, and, to be more precise, in the lectures he delivered at Marburg, in 1924-1925, on the Sophist Interpretation Platonischer Dialoge (Sophistes)to which she, entirely fascinated, attended (Arendt was then 18 years old and Heidegger 35). This replica was written basically in function of a non-Heideggerian criterion – the excellence of the bios politikos. Heidegger, as you all certainly know and remember, is not once quoted in The Human Condition, and according to Taminiaux if he is not cited or mentioned at all, it is because Arendt does
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.102 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".