Key Arguments

• Arendt affirms a hierarchy where being (the who) transcends doing/producing.
• She cites a maxim distinguishing the judgment appropriate to servants/professionals from that for great people.
• Those who take pride in what they have done become "slaves and prisoners" of their faculties.

Source Quotes

In other words, the idolization of genius harbors the same degradation of the human person as the other tenets prevalent in commercial society. It is an indispensable element of human pride to believe that who somebody is transcends in greatness and importance anything he can do and produce. “Let physicians and confectioners and the servants of the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are.”

It is an indispensable element of human pride to believe that who somebody is transcends in greatness and importance anything he can do and produce. “Let physicians and confectioners and the servants of the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are.” Only the vulgar will condescend to derive their pride from what they have done; they will, by this condescension, become the “slaves and prisoners” of their own faculties and will find out, should anything more be left in them than sheer stupid vanity, that to be one’s own slave and prisoner is no less bitter and perhaps even more shameful than to be the servant of somebody else.

“Let physicians and confectioners and the servants of the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are.” Only the vulgar will condescend to derive their pride from what they have done; they will, by this condescension, become the “slaves and prisoners” of their own faculties and will find out, should anything more be left in them than sheer stupid vanity, that to be one’s own slave and prisoner is no less bitter and perhaps even more shameful than to be the servant of somebody else. It is not the glory but the predicament of the creative genius that in his case the superiority of man to his work seems indeed inverted, so that he, the living creator, finds himself in competition with his creations which he outlives, although they may survive him eventually.

Key Concepts

• It is an indispensable element of human pride to believe that who somebody is transcends in greatness and importance anything he can do and produce.
• “Let physicians and confectioners and the servants of the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are.”
• Only the vulgar will condescend to derive their pride from what they have done; they will, by this condescension, become the “slaves and prisoners” of their own faculties

Context

Section 29; normative assertion about the primacy of ‘who’ over ‘what’ and a moral-psychological critique of pride based on production.