Beginning a Story of One's Own

“The life span of man running towards 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 man, though they must die, are not born to die but in order to begin.”

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 246

I am travelling to the Alps with a friend for a hut-to-hut hike. On the ICE to Munich we get talking 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 supermarket 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. His third book is now in the shops.

We spend several days hiking in the Dachstein Mountains, through and sometimes over the mountains. It is good to be away from work, screens and AI. We have also brought a book to read and discuss while walking: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Written in 1958, but difficult to read now without thinking about AI.

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, she 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. As homo faber, we can leave something behind in the world that outlives us.

The commercial director’s children’s book seems a good example. He has made something lasting that may remain in 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.

You choose a mountain route and end up in a thunderstorm and an hour of 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 in the shadow of the summit. “You should go to Albania,” she says. “That’s where the really wild mountains are.”

Wearing 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 what a hero originally meant in Homer:

“The hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities; the word ‘hero’ originally, that is, in Homer, was no more than a name given to each free man who participated in the Trojan enterprise […] The connotation of courage 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 […] courage and even boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one’s self.”

The Human Condition, p. 186

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 alone 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 happens again and again when we act.

On the train home I try to imagine what Arendt would have thought of AI. AI can automate repetitive labour and help us work faster. It can write texts, produce images and develop software. Perhaps it can free us, at least partly, from necessary labour and make it easier to start a children’s book, a company or a work of art.

But for Arendt, action is more than the ability to begin something new. 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 introduction 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 should 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.”

The Human Condition, p. 3

Arendt was probably thinking of technologies such as the atomic bomb. I found myself thinking of killer drones, and more generally of systems that, once activated, can observe, select and respond on their own. The hardest question is not only what we put into the world with these machines, but whether we will still be able to interrupt these automatic processes and act freely. Because that ability of starting something new was, for Arendt, the human miracle.