The Human Condition

“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 process of life by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.”

Arendt offers her first definition of labor in The Human Condition. Labor is the activity that responds to the necessities of biological life, a condition that we share with other animals and organisms. Arendt personifies the subject of labor as the animal laborans.

“Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose morality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.”

Following her definition of labor, the above passages defines work for Arendt. Work is the creation of unnatural or artificial things by human hands using tools or instruments. For Arendt, its distinction from labor has been largely ignored by the Western intellectual tradition. Work is personified as homo faber.

“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. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition […] of all political life.”

Arendt defines her notion of action in this passage. Labor involves the metabolism between the human being and nature; work the use of material ultimately derived from nature for the fabrication of things (i.e., wood or stone). Only action is an intra-human or intra-subjective activity. This is what makes it eminently political.

“The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer.”

Arendt’s reflections on the so-called Space Age, inaugurated by the launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviets, are a part of her conception of the modern age and its determination by the Archimedean point of knowledge that brought human understanding to the standpoint of the universe. She suggests that space travel might finally untether human beings from the earth-bound conditions that have hitherto shaped our existence.

“The vita activa, human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of man-made things which it never leaves or altogether transcends. Things and men form the environment for each of man’s activities, which would be pointless without such location; yet this environment, the world into which we are born, would not exist without the human activity which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things; which take care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic.”

This passage underscores the important reciprocity between work, action, and the world for Arendt. While labor concerns only animal processes, work and action are specifically human activities that help to build a permanent world beyond our natural environment. Human life is therefore constantly caught up in a set of relationships with artificial things and other people. Labor, by contrast, does not do this.

“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.”

Arendt provides yet another formulation of the distinct role of action in the human condition. The important point is that action entails plurality, that is, other people like us who witness and potentially remember our words and deeds. This interdependence is a key feature of human life that distinguishes us from other animals.

“The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen.”

Arendt offers a good encapsulation of her concept of society or the social. In short, the emergence of the social disturbs the configuration between the public and private realms that defined antiquity. Labor, formerly confined to the private sphere of the household, enters the public sphere and forever changes the function of the public as the space of appearance.

“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.”

According to Arendt, the trade-off for the rise of the social is the enrichment of the private sphere as the domain of introspection and intimacy. However, she claims that this is an inadequate substitute for the previous role of the public in connecting us to others through action. The reality of a common space of appearance is lost.

“Although the distinction between private and public coincides with the opposition of necessity and freedom, of futility and permanence, and, finally, of shame and honor, it is by no means true that only the necessary, the futile, and the shameful have their proper place in the private realm. The most elementary meaning of the two realms indicates that there are things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all. If we look at these things, regardless of where we find them in any given civilization, we shall see that each human activity points to its proper location in the world.”

This passage from the concluding chapter of Part 2 sums up Arendt’s analysis of the public and private spheres. What is most important about these two concepts, she says, is the idea that human activities have a specific location in the world. The vita activa is therefore inseparable from the notion of space, which in turn involves the capacity for appearance and concealment.

“With the rise of political theory, the philosophers overruled even these distinctions, which had at least distinguished between activities, by opposing contemplation to all kinds of activity alike. With them, every political activity was leveled to the rank of necessity, which henceforth became the common denominator of all articulations within the vita activa. Nor can we reasonably expect any help from Christian political thought, which accepted the philosophers’ distinction, refined it, and, religion being for the many and philosophy only for the few, gave it general validity, binding for all men.”

Arendt provides her conception of the relationship between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. The philosophers in question are primarily Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who together cast a long shadow over the Western philosophical tradition, including Christianity. By privileging the vita contemplativa over all facets of the vita activa, Arendt argues that subsequent political theory has obscured a key aspect of the human condition.

“The very reason for the elevation of labor in the modern age was its ‘productivity,’ and the seemingly blasphemous notion of Marx that labor (and not God) created man or that labor (and not reason) distinguished man from other animals was only the most radical and consistent formulation of something upon which the whole modern age was agreed.”

Arendt links the modern age with the ascendance of labor over the other aspects of the vita activa (i.e., work and action). She claims that this involves a false conception of the human being as animal laborans, that is, a laboring animal defined by its capacity for production. The negative implications of this construal of the human condition are a key theme of Parts 3 and 6.

“The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things.”

Arendt links her understanding of reality to the functions of work and action. Work makes the intangible tangible; this is its capacity for reification that saves human life from the relentless flux of nature. Similarly, action before a plural community retains the deeds and words of individuals who would otherwise be forgotten.

“[U]nlike working, whose end has come when the object has finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism.”

An important and recurring theme throughout The Human Condition is the contraposition of labor and work in terms of their different temporalities: labor is cyclical, like all processes of nature, while work is linear, that is, with a definite limit.

“The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”

Arendt pulls back from her running criticisms of labor to clarify its central role in the human condition. A life without labor is a contradiction in terms for her. If human labor is finally superseded by developments such as automation, Arendt suggests that the changes to the human condition might not be unequivocally positive.

“Without taking things out of nature’s hands and consuming them, and without defending himself against the natural processes of growth and decay, the animal laborans could never survive. But without being at home in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast to life, this life would never be human.”

Arendt reiterates that labor concerns the animal or natural functions of the human being, while work (along with action) is what makes the human condition distinctly human. The connection between worldliness and belonging is also an important theme in Part 6.

“The hallmark of these non-political communities was that their public place, the agora, was not a meeting place of citizens, but a market place where craftsmen could show and exchange their products. […] What characterized these market places, and later characterized the medieval cities’ trade and craft districts, was that the display of goods for sale was accompanied by a display of their production.”

Arendt offers some important remarks about changes to the public realm following the dissolution of the ancient city-state. The exchange market is indeed a public space, but one in which human beings do not appear as human beings; instead, they are functions of their work and its products. This indicates an impoverishment of the public sphere once speech and action have receded from it.

“Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those will come after them. If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood.”

The above passage provides an important definition of plurality, the key condition of authentic speech and action for Arendt. Action takes place between equal human beings who are nevertheless different by virtue of their unique individuality; action is what allows this individuality to appear to all. A running theme throughout The Human Condition is that plurality has been stifled by the modern age.

“Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. Action and speech need the surrounding presence of others no less than fabrication needs the surrounding presence of nature for its material, and of a world in which to place the finished product. Fabrication is surrounded by and in constant contact with the world: action and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men.”

Arendt articulates the distinction between work and action. As its necessary condition in plurality indicates, action requires other people for its fulfillment. Work, by contrast, can be performed in isolation, it needs only material for its accomplishment. Speech and action may disclose individuals, but they are always implicated in a web of relations and meanings with others.

“The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state and its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.”

Arendt tells us throughout The Human Condition that action is the proper correlate of politics. This passage offers one of her clearest explanations of this point. A political community is the organized, non-physical space in which speech and action can appear to others. It is therefore reducible to neither of: a territory, a set of laws, nor a political ruler.

“Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence.”

This formulation captures Arendt’s specific notion of power laid out in Chapter 28. The power of a political community consists in its capacity to sustain speech and action. Economic, military and legislative considerations are all secondary to this overriding condition of politics. This is what distinguishes Arendt from traditional political theory.

“The only character of the world by which to gauge its reality is its being common to us all, and common sense occupies such a high rank in the hierarchy of political qualities because it is the one sense that fits into reality as a whole our five strictly individual senses and the strictly particular data they receive.”

Arendt provides a clear articulation of her conception of common sense. The plurality of individuals that witness action in a public sphere require common sense in order to see and hear the same reality. This is an indispensable feature of the togetherness of the public realm for Arendt. It is threatened by the alienated and overly introspective character of modern life.

“The Greeks measured [human affairs] against the ever-presence or eternal recurrence of all natural things, and the chief Greek concern was to measure up to and become worthy of an immortality which surrounds men but which mortals do not possess.”

This quote elaborates on Arendt’s understanding of immortality, a theme introduced in Chapter 3. It is the immortality of speech and action that Arendt sees as the great accomplishment of the ancient Greeks. The words and deeds of individuals were preserved by a public in such a way that the mortality of human life was overcome. Her chief example of this phenomenon is Achilles.

“While the strength of the production process is entirely absorbed in and exhausted by the end product, the strength of the action process is never exhausted in a single deed but, on the contrary, can grow while its consequences multiply; what endures in the realm of human affairs are these processes, and their endurance is as unlimited, as independent of the perishability of material and the mortality of men as the endurance of humanity itself. The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end.”

This passage offers another important formulation of the distinct character of action for Arendt. Action is essentially infinite: it is a radically spontaneous, open-ended process subject to innumerable reactions and interpretations by others. This endurance of speech and action surpasses even that of the tangible, material objects produced by work. Remembrance of action is what survives in a true political community.