Code Doesn’t Speak for Itself

This summer I re-read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and it made me look differently at something I have been fascinated by for years: Stoicism as a philosophy of life. Especially the idea that it makes little sense to worry about things you have no control over, such as what other people think of you, whether you stay healthy, or your success in life. What you do have influence over is the judgment you form about those things. Whether it is bad to have less money, for example, depends on how much value you place on financial wealth. For a Stoic, freedom therefore lies to a large extent in not being dependent on external circumstances.

This modern, individualistic interpretation has also been hugely popular in the tech world for years. The strategy is simple: become so good at what you do that employers simply cannot ignore you. And if there is politics or trouble at work, use Stoicism to make sure that this cannot get to you either. Let your code speak for itself and make yourself as independent as possible from the organization you work for.

In The Human Condition, Arendt puts a big question mark next to this idea of freedom. For her, freedom and sovereignty are not the same thing. To be sovereign means to be master of yourself and of what happens. Freedom, by contrast, arises when we act among other people whom we do not control. You bring something into the world, an idea, a statement, an initiative, or a piece of code, but from that moment on you no longer fully control what happens to it. Other people respond to it, understand it differently from how you intended it, resist it, or build on it. Arendt calls this the web of human relationships. We can begin something, but we can never fully determine where it ends.

That lack of control is part of freedom. If I could fully determine how other people respond to my actions, then those people would not be free themselves. Freedom can only exist in a world where people do not fully control one another and can get in the way of each other’s plans.

Arendt is therefore critical of the idea that you can move freedom entirely inward, as she argues the Stoics and Epicureans do:

“Just as Epicureanism rests on the illusion of happiness when one is roasted alive in the Phaleric Bull, Stoicism rests on the illusion of freedom when one is enslaved. Both illusions testify to the psychological power of imagination, but this power can exert itself only as long as the reality of the world and the living, where one is and appears to be either happy or unhappy, either free or slave, are eliminated to such an extent that they are not even admitted as spectators to the spectacle of self-delusion.”

You may be able to convince yourself that you are free while you are a slave, but only by keeping the reality in which you live out of view. Freedom then becomes something that exists only in your head.

That also puts my own attraction to Stoicism in a different light. The idea that you need little recognition, should not care too much about what others think, and should focus mainly on what you can influence can also become a way of withdrawing. The independence and sovereignty I was pursuing now seem to be an illusion.

I recognize this in the ideal of engineers who let their code speak for itself. Who do not want to get involved in politics and assume that a good technical argument will eventually win on its own. But code does not speak for itself. People speak about code. People decide what gets built, which problem matters, and what ultimately counts as success. Anyone who tries to withdraw from that messy human reality may protect their inner calm, but also withdraws from the space in which they can actually act.

Not everything outside our control is therefore something we should try to become independent of. It is precisely by acting in a world we do not control, among people who may respond differently from how we hope or expect, that we can be free.

The Stoic desire for sovereignty tries to protect our freedom from the unpredictability of other people. Arendt turns it around: without that unpredictability, our freedom would not exist.