Key Arguments

• Arendt reads the rapid replacement of utility by the happiness principle as 'the ultimate failure of to assert himself.'
• The conviction that we know only what we make was overruled by the 'even more modern principle of process,' whose categories oppose homo faber’s.
• When products are valued 'for [their] production of something else,' values become secondary and collapse in a world without primary ends.

Source Quotes

Nothing perhaps indicates clearer the ultimate failure of to assert himself than the rapidity with which the principle of utility, the very quintessence of his world view, was found wanting and was superseded by the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” When this happened it was manifest that the conviction of the age that man can know only what he makes himself—which seemingly was so eminently propitious to a full victory of —would be overruled and eventually destroyed by the even more modern principle of process, whose concepts and categories are altogether alien to the needs and ideals of For the principle of utility, though its point of reference is clearly man, who uses matter to produce things, still presupposes a world of use objects by which man is surrounded and in which he moves. If this relationship between man and world is no longer secure, if worldly things are no longer primarily considered in their usefulness but as more or less incidental results of the production process which brought them into being, so that the end product of the production process is no longer a true end and the produced thing is valued not for the sake of its predetermined usage but “for its production of something else,” then, obviously, the objection can be “raised that . . . its value is secondary only, and a world that contains no primary values can contain no secondary ones either.”

When this happened it was manifest that the conviction of the age that man can know only what he makes himself—which seemingly was so eminently propitious to a full victory of —would be overruled and eventually destroyed by the even more modern principle of process, whose concepts and categories are altogether alien to the needs and ideals of For the principle of utility, though its point of reference is clearly man, who uses matter to produce things, still presupposes a world of use objects by which man is surrounded and in which he moves. If this relationship between man and world is no longer secure, if worldly things are no longer primarily considered in their usefulness but as more or less incidental results of the production process which brought them into being, so that the end product of the production process is no longer a true end and the produced thing is valued not for the sake of its predetermined usage but “for its production of something else,” then, obviously, the objection can be “raised that . . . its value is secondary only, and a world that contains no primary values can contain no secondary ones either.” This radical loss of values within the restricted frame of reference of himself occurs almost automatically as soon as he defines himself not as the maker of objects and the builder of the human artifice who incidentally invents tools, but considers himself primarily a toolmaker and “particularly [a maker] of tools to make tools” who only incidentally also produces things.

No other capacity, moreover, stood to lose as much through modern world alienation and the elevation of introspection into an omnipotent device to conquer nature as those faculties which are primarily directed toward the building of the world and the production of worldly things. Nothing perhaps indicates clearer the ultimate failure of to assert himself than the rapidity with which the principle of utility, the very quintessence of his world view, was found wanting and was superseded by the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” When this happened it was manifest that the conviction of the age that man can know only what he makes himself—which seemingly was so eminently propitious to a full victory of —would be overruled and eventually destroyed by the even more modern principle of process, whose concepts and categories are altogether alien to the needs and ideals of For the principle of utility, though its point of reference is clearly man, who uses matter to produce things, still presupposes a world of use objects by which man is surrounded and in which he moves.

Key Concepts

• would be overruled and eventually destroyed by the even more modern principle of process, whose concepts and categories are altogether alien to the needs and ideals of
• the produced thing is valued not for the sake of its predetermined usage but “for its production of something else,” then, obviously, the objection can be “raised that . . . its value is secondary only, and a world that contains no primary values can contain no secondary ones either.”
• Nothing perhaps indicates clearer the ultimate failure of to assert himself than the rapidity with which the principle of utility, the very quintessence of his world view, was found wanting and was superseded by the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

Context

Section 43 (lines 5980–6131); charts the move from utility to happiness as a symptom of process overruling homo faber.