The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

First Published: 1958

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work:

In The Human Condition, philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt argues that the vita activa, or “active life,” is the fundamental condition of human existence. In the book’s first chapter, Arendt lays out the three fundamental categories of the vita activa: labor, work, and action. These categories also make up the main topics of the book.

The first category, labor, refers to the activities that sustain biological life or that are analogous to the sustaining of biological life. Producing food and shelter can be considered the most basic kind of laboring. Laboring is the naturalness of the human condition, and it includes everything humans do for the sake of consumption. The second category, work, refers to all the things that humans do to transform their world and to make it into an artificial realm. People work, in her scheme, when they fabricate and design things. Work, therefore, is the unnaturalness or artificiality of the human condition. The final category, action, describes activities among people. Arendt tends to identify action most often with political activities, but things people do that involve communication and relations may be thought of as action as well.

Arendt takes the phrase vita activa from the traditional distinction between “the active life” and the “contemplative life,” or the vita contemplativa. In Western intellectual history, “the active” has been considered inferior to “the contemplative.” Arendt traces this ranking of the contemplative over the active to the downfall of political life in late antiquity. In The Human Condition, she counters this tradition by considering the active to be equal in worth to the contemplative.

One idea that runs through the work is the distinction between the public realm and the private realm. Arendt devotes her second chapter to this distinction. Looking back at the Greek city-state, or polis, Arendt observes that freedom to act (or “action”) took place in the political or public realm and that the necessities of life (or “labor”) took place in the private realm of the household. Historical changes in the relationships between action and labor have been connected to changes in the relationship between the public and the private. In particular, the rise of the social in human life, through the creation of mass civilizations, has tended to move property from the private realm of the household to the public realm of society.

In the third chapter, on labor, Arendt critiques philosopher Karl Marx, although she still has high regard for his thought. Her central criticism is that Marx had confused labor and work, that is, he confused activities necessary for sustaining existence and activities that transform the world, respectively. Marx saw all human efforts as reflections of homo faber, or “man the maker.” After the work of Marx and the British economist Adam Smith, labor rose from the lowest-ranked position among human activities to the highest, because labor was now considered the source of all productivity. With the rise of labor, modern societies became laboring societies—or consumer societies, characterized by enormous natural fertility (through productivity). This fertility downplays labor as something driven by necessity.

Arendt identifies durability as the basic characteristic of work, the subject of chapter 4. Labor is for producing consumables, and work is for making lasting objects, for making things out of thoughts. Craftspersons and artists work. They also create exchange markets to share the products of their work. Action, examined in chapter 5, is closely related to speech, because speech makes relationships among people possible. Through acting and speaking, or communicating, people reveal who they are. Therefore, action is a matter of appearance: When people act they become apparent to each other. Historically, when groups of people, such as workers, become politically active, they literally appear in the public realm. A frustration with speaking and acting has often led people to substitute work, or making, for acting, seeing communities as objects to be fashioned. While this is a clear tendency in modern societies, Arendt sees it also in ancient thought, particularly in Plato’s desire to create a well-made political state.

In a final, difficult chapter, Arendt meditates on the meaning of the vita activa for the modern age. She sees modernity as the consequence of the discoveries of Renaissance thinker Galileo Galilei, which moved humanity from the objective center of a finite cosmos, and of the thought of philosopher René Descartes, who raised subjective consciousness to fundamental reality by identifying the capacity for doubt as the only certainty. With this, the vita activa not only became superior to the vita contemplativa but also drove the latter out of existence—no longer was there a truth to behold through contemplation. Instead, the human condition became an endless process. Makers, too, were defeated by laborers, as object creation gave way to the process of production.

Arendt’s writing sometimes gives the impression that she is thinking as she writes, and it often has the quality of a meditation on a subject instead of a systematic exposition. This can make her more difficult works, such as The Human Condition, frustrating for some readers, because her insights seem to get in the way of her arguments. Those looking for practical suggestions on how to improve or endure the human condition might find relatively few suggestions in these pages. Arendt’s philosophical work does not try to offer solutions to problems. However, as a discussion of life as a set of activities, Arendt reminds readers that humans are always doing different kinds of things.

Telling stories or trying to convince people to act in some way are different than making a table or bookcase, for example. Painting a picture or landscaping a yard are different than working to get food and to secure shelter. These activities, furthermore, might overlap: Humans plant vegetable gardens simply to create, but they also plant vegetable gardens to ensure they have food. These activities remain distinct, however, and Arendt gives us some thoughts on the nature of these activities.

Arendt, in one particularly insightful passage of political philosophy, argues that Marx, and the classical economists who had influenced him, had confused producing the means of existence (labor) and the making of things (work), thereby reducing all producers to a single common level. Arendt then argues that this confusion could be the basis of modern consumer society, given that this single common level depends on seeing everything produced as an item of consumption. Arendt also makes an intriguing case for the confusion of work and action by political thinkers from Plato to modern social planners. If a human community is not an object to be designed according to a set of blueprints, but instead is the result of the interrelationships of actors, then all models of “the good society” might be fundamentally misconceived.

Bibliography

Canovan, Margaret. Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. 1992. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. The author, a noted Arendt scholar, argues that Arendt’s thought has been largely misunderstood, in part because she was writing to clarify her own thoughts, rather than to communicate ideas. Chapter 4 is devoted to The Human Condition.

Fry, Karin. Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum, 2009. A comprehensive introduction to Arendt’s thought. Chapter 2 examines The Human Condition and Arendt’s philosophical ideas.

Moruzzi, Norma Claire. Speaking Through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Uses psychoanalytic feminist theory to interpret Arendt’s opposition between the social and the political, as presented and examined in several works, including The Human Condition.

Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. 1994. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 2001. The author identifies four major concepts underlying Arendt’s political philosophy: modernity, action, judgment, and citizenship. Although all of these concepts may be found in The Human Condition, chapter 2, on action, is the most important for those looking to better understand the ideas behind The Human Condition.

Villa, Dana. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A handbook to Arendt’s political and philosophical thinking. Chapter 13, by Frederick M. Dolan, is devoted to “Arendt on Philosophy and Politics” and deals with The Human Condition and related works.

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. This work, originally published in 1982, remains one of the best biographies of Arendt. An excellent introduction to her life and thought for general readers.