The Human Condition

Author: arendt-hannah
Year: 1958
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/arendt_1958-the-human-condition.md

Summary

Arendt articulates a fundamental phenomenology of human activity through three categories—labor, work, and action—each corresponding to a basic condition of human existence: life itself (labor), worldliness (work), and plurality (action). She argues that the modern age has collapsed these distinctions, elevating labor (biological necessity) to the highest human activity while forgetting action (the political capacity to begin something new). The result is a "society of laborers" absorbed in production and consumption, incapable of taking responsibility for the tremendous powers unleashed by modern science and technology. Arendt contrasts her emphasis on natality (the capacity to begin) with Heidegger's emphasis on mortality, positioning action as the "miracle-working faculty" that makes politics possible.

Key Claims

• The vita activa comprises three fundamental activities: Labor corresponds to the biological process of the human body (the human condition of labor is life itself). Work corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, providing an artificial world of things (the human condition of work is worldliness). Action corresponds to human plurality, the fact that men, not Man, live on earth (the human condition of action is plurality).

• Labor vs. Work distinction: Labor is cyclical, biological, tied to consumption and reproduction—the "metabolism with nature." Labor leaves nothing behind; its products are consumed almost as quickly as produced. Work creates durable objects that constitute a human world meant to outlast individual lives. Modern society has collapsed work into labor—objects become disposable, consumed rather than used.

• Action is the exclusively political activity: "Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it, and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others." Action occurs directly between humans without intermediary of things; it corresponds to human plurality (we are all the same—human—yet distinct).

• The rise of "the social": A hybrid realm neither private (household) nor public (polis). The social emerged when household/economic activities entered the public realm. "Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance." Society is the "public organization of the life process itself"—a society of laborers where conformism replaces action.

• Natality as the central political category: Unlike Heidegger's emphasis on mortality, Arendt emphasizes natality (birth, beginning). "With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world." Action is the "miracle-working faculty" because each new person can begin something unprecedented. "It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before."

• The Archimedean point problem: Modern science achieved an "earth-alienation"—viewing earth from outside. "We have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point." This gives tremendous power but creates a gap between knowledge (mathematical symbols) and speech/thought (political meaning). "The trouble concerns the fact that the 'truths' of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought."

• Property vs. Wealth: Property (stable, worldly location) was converted into fluid wealth (capital) through expropriation (Reformation). "Modern property lost its worldly character and was located in the person himself, that is, in what an individual could lose only along with his life." This destroyed the stable world and set in motion endless production/consumption.

• The public realm requires durability: The polis was the sphere of freedom, appearance, and immortal deeds. The household was the sphere of necessity. "Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible." Modernity has collapsed this distinction—the "social" is household concerns made public.

• The modern age: victory of animal laborans: "What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse." Automation will liberate humans from labor, but in a society that knows no higher activity, this liberation is self-defeating.

• Action's boundlessness and unpredictability: "Action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes." Action reveals the agent but its consequences are boundless and unpredictable. "The full meaning [of a story] can reveal itself only when it has ended."

Connections

Concepts: vita-activa, natality, plurality, the-social, world-alienation, earth-alienation, animal-laborans, homo-faber, everyday-life, consumerism, spectacle, dwelling. (Mentioned without pages yet: labor, work, action, public-realm, private-realm, immortality — see log.md.)

Authors: arendt-hannah, heidegger-martin, marx-karl. (Mentioned without pages yet: Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Galileo, Descartes, Adam Smith, John Locke — see log.md.)

Debates: Simmel's Hypertrophy of Objective Culture vs. Arendt's World Alienation · everyday-vs-iconic-architecture, formal-vs-material-utopianism, genius-vs-bureaucracy

Related source notes: lefebvre-1971-everyday-life-modern-world, lefebvre-1991-critique-of-everyday-life, debord-2021-society-of-the-spectacle, felski-2000-invention-of-everyday-life, heidegger-building-dwelling-thinking. (Mentioned without a page yet: Marx, Capital — see log.md.)

Direct Quotes

"With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man." (p. 7)

"Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself." (p. 7)

"Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an 'artificial' world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings." (p. 7)

"Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." (p. 7)

"Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live." (p. 8)

"With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world. . . It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected." (Introduction by Canovan, p. vii; reiterated throughout)

"Action is the one miracle-working faculty of man." (p. 246)

"Natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought." (p. 9)

"What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse." (Prologue)

"Thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of 'truths' which have become trivial and empty—seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time." (Prologue)

"The rise of the social coincided historically with the transformation of the private care for private property into a public concern." (p. 38)

"Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public." (p. 46)

"The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society." (Prologue)

"We have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point." (p. 259)

"The trouble concerns the fact that the 'truths' of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought." (Prologue)

"Action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes." (p. 190)

"The full meaning [of a story] can reveal itself only when it has ended." (p. 193)

"To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time." (p. 52)

"Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible." (p. 55)

"The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised." (p. 57)

"Laboring and consuming follow each other so closely that they almost constitute one and the same movement." (p. 100)

"The specific work quality of intellectual work is no less due to the 'work of our hands' than any other kind of work." (p. 90)

Open Questions

• How does Arendt's distinction between labor and work apply to digital/immaterial production? Does software code constitute "work" (durable world) or "labor" (consumed in use)?

• What is the relationship between Arendt's "social" and Foucault's biopolitics? Both concern the administration of biological life, but Arendt is more pessimistic about this colonization of the political.

• Can action exist in institutionalized forms, or is action necessarily spontaneous and unpredictable? What about legislation, which Arendt classifies as "making" rather than action?

• How does Arendt's critique of Marx's reduction of action to labor relate to contemporary discussions of immaterial labor and affective labor?

• What would an architecture of action (vs. architecture of labor/work) look like? Does architecture belong to work (fabrication) or can it enable action?