The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.1
I am traveling to the Alps with a friend for a hut-to-hut hike of several days. On the ICE to Munich we talk to a man who, during the Covid pandemic, looked back on his life as a director of TV commercials and decided he wanted to leave behind more than television ads. He started writing a children’s book and wrote a bestseller that can now be found in many classrooms for 10- to 12-year-olds in the Netherlands.
We spend several days hiking in the Dachstein Mountains, climbing the rocky, limestone summits, enjoying the idyllic alpine meadows and views over the valleys. It's good to be away from work, computer screens and AI. We've also brought a book to read and discuss while walking: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Written in 1958, but maybe even more relevant today than when it came out.
On our first day in the mountains we meet a young couple who have just come down from a via ferrata. Halfway through, they had been caught in a thunderstorm. For an hour they were stuck in thick fog and violent wind, unable to move forward or back. He had not seen the bad weather coming and had not realised how difficult the route would be. When we ask whether this had been good for their relationship, his girlfriend just smiles and says: “I’m about to push him off the cliff.”
Arendt distinguishes three human activities: labour, work and action. Labour is everything needed to keep life going. It is cyclical: what is done today has to be done again tomorrow. Think of eating and drinking, caring for ourselves and others, doing the dishes and brushing our teeth, but also earning the money we need to live.
Through work, humans make a lasting world of buildings, objects, works of art and books. This is man as a creating being, homo faber, leaving something behind in the world that outlives him.
The commercial director’s children’s book seems a good example. He has made something lasting that may remain in Dutch classrooms for many years. But perhaps the meaning of his story lies not only in what he made. The decisive moment came earlier, when he broke with the course his life had taken and started something without knowing where it would lead.
For Arendt, though, the most important human activity is action. We act among other people. By speaking and acting we show who we are and can begin something new. Because others act too, we never fully control what follows. We begin a story, but have no control over its consequences and where it ends.
You choose a mountain route and end up in a thunderstorm and an hour of existential terror. That hour becomes a story the young couple will probably tell many times, provided they have not pushed each other off the mountain first.
During our first attempt to climb the Grosser Donnerkogel we meet a Kosovar student. She has come alone from Vienna to see the Dachstein glacier. She is not impressed by the last glittering strip of ice just under the summit. “You should go to Albania,” she says. “That’s where the really wild mountains are.” Wearing simple trainers, she sprints up the mountain. It is already almost five o’clock, and the next day she has to be back in Vienna for work.
Arendt writes about the courage to act:
The hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities [...] The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own.2
A hero or heroine does not need heroic qualities. Courage already begins with leaving the shelter of private life and appearing among others. With getting on a train, going into the mountains and not knowing exactly what you will find there. For Arendt, this is the human miracle. We can interrupt automatic processes and begin something that does not necessarily follow from what came before. For humans, this miracle is not exceptional. It's our ordinary life and it happens again and again when we act.
On the train home I try to imagine what Arendt would have thought of AI. AI automates repetitive labour and helps us work faster. It can write texts, produce images and develop software. Maybe it will free us from the necessities of labour and perhaps make it easier to start a children’s book, a company or a work of art.
For Arendt, human action also requires us to keep thinking for ourselves, making judgements and taking responsibility for what we bring into the world. She saw a danger precisely when our technical capabilities and our thinking grow apart. In the prologue to The Human Condition, she writes:
If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.3
Arendt was probably thinking of technologies such as the atomic bomb. I found myself thinking first of killer drones, but then also, more generally, of systems that, once activated, can observe, select and respond on their own. And how that would make us "helpless slaves" and thoughtless creatures at the mercy of AI.
The difficult questions ahead of us are about what we put into the world with thinking machines, and whether we will still be able to interrupt their automatic processes. We need to maintain the ability to think and judge for ourselves, even when we could leave that to a machine. Otherwise, we risk losing the freedom that runs through Arendt’s book: to break with what came before and begin a story of our own.