The Human Condition

This chapter provides a short clarification of the difference between labor, work, and action. Labor, Arendt begins, has a fundamentally subjective character opposed to the objective status of the world (93-94). Labor yields consumable goods quickly swallowed up by human beings as essential components of their life process, while work creates objects of tangible use that continue to populate the world. This is the thing-like aspect of the world referred to in the chapter title, the permanent “familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men” (94). A world, Arendt argues, is impossible without the durability of things and their significance produced by work. This cannot be achieved by labor.

Additionally, Arendt argues that speech and action “are even less durable and more futile than what we produce for consumption” (95). The preservation of speech and action relies upon the threefold operation of collective seeing, hearing and remembering in the public sphere. This witnessing function of the public transforms fleeting deeds and ideas into things with an enduring nature. Arendt writes: “The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced” (95-96). For Arendt, this “world-building” process by which the transitory becomes permanent is what rescues the human being from the animalistic cycle of labor. This is the true power of the public sphere and homo faber.

Chapter 13 expands upon the fundamentally ephemeral quality that Arendt imputes to the life process of labor. Labor, she says, concerns itself not with the worldliness of things but with the eternal, recurrent cycle of nature. Nature does not even know birth and death, which are human notions of linear finitude that require reference to the permanence of the world (96-97). Similarly, the processes of growth and decay kept at bay by the necessity of labor are only comprehensible within a human horizon that interrupts the “endlessly repetitive” (98) operations of nature. Everything that is distinct and valuable about human life may rely upon labor, but it cannot be reduced to it.

It is therefore the very finitude of human life that makes us distinct from the rest of nature: “The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, it is that it is always full of events which can ultimately be told as a story, establish a biography” (97). Such narration is the result of speech and action, which arrives from the seeing, hearing and remembering possible in the public sphere. Paradoxically, it is the fact that individual human beings are born and die that gives our existence any permanence. This way of rendering durable the specificity of human existence is completely covered over Marx’s one-sided emphasis on labor, which is Arendt’s main foil in Part 3.

This chapter continues Arendt’s reflections on the historical and philosophical roots of the concept of labor. She analyzes the “sudden, spectacular rise of labor from the lowest, most despised position to the highest rank” (101) through the work of Locke, Smith and Marx. What unites these otherwise disparate thinkers is the view that “labor was considered to be the supreme world-building capacity of man” (101).

For Arendt, this narrow focus on labor as the essential human vita activa ignores her distinction between labor and work. Labor is not worldly for Arendt; rather, it is the most natural, and therefore, unworldly of human activities because it consists in the unending process of the maintenance and reproduction of the human being as an animal. Consumption of the products of labor is, in Locke’s terms, “of short duration” (104), the exact opposite of the permanent, human-made world of work and action.

While critical of the inability of Locke, Smith, and Marx to conceive of the distinct human activity of work, Arendt does credit them with successfully linking labor to fertility; “The living organism is not exhausted when it has provided for its own reproduction, and its “surplus” lies in its potential multiplication” (108). The fecundity of labor as a given feature of our relationship to nature indicates something of the blessedness of life that human beings enjoy on this earth, a condition violated by the extremes of wealth and poverty. This association of labor with a blessing, as opposed to a curse, goes against the grain of the Greco-Roman conception of labor that Arendt discusses elsewhere in the book.

Chapter 15 picks up some of the central themes of Chapter 14, while also referring to the discussion of property in Chapter 8.

Arendt begins by discussing the famous theory of property provided by Locke in his Second Treatise on Government. According to Locke, the labor of the body is the natural means of each individual for appropriating private property from the common ownership of the earth by all humankind. This leads to an excursus on the privacy/worldlessness of sensations, particularly pain, as a analogue to the privacy of the labor of the human body (112-15). Despite its modern injection into the public sphere, Arendt argues that labor is fundamentally the private concern of each human body.

Arendt then returns to Locke, suggesting that his reference to “the common” in his theory of property indicates that it is still intimately connected to the notion of a shared world, and does not strictly concern the private sphere (115-16). However, the situation changes when privacy is linked not to property per se, but to the accumulation of wealth. Unlike property, which is situated within a common space, wealth requires the separate intervention of the social to secure its continuous growth, even after an individual human being dies.

Arendt concludes with a quick discussion of so-called modern process philosophies, like those of Nietzsche and Bergson, which jettison Marx’s focus on labor in their theorizations of the recurring, vital character of the life process. Her last remark in the chapter reiterates the “strict and even cruel privacy” (117) of labor that she believes Marx’s conception of the human being as animal laborans ignored.

This chapter recapitulates important aspects of Arendt’s entire argument in Part 3, while also introducing a key distinction between the tools or instruments of work and the division of labor. This will prove crucial for her discussion of consumption in Chapter 17 and opens the way to her treatment of work in Part 4.

Arendt begins with a consideration of the dual blessedness, burden, and necessity of preserving humanity through labor. This belongs to the natural cycle of pleasure, pain, and effort that makes up the human condition. So, while Arendt is critical of reducing the human condition to animal laborans in the manner of Locke, Smith and Marx, she also acknowledges that labor is an important aspect of our lives as natural organisms.

The conditions of labor, she goes on, have been vastly improved by the use of tools. However, for Arendt, tools belong to the sphere of work and not to labor: “No work can be produced without tools and the birth of homo faber and the coming into being of a man-made world of things are actually coeval with the discovery of tools and instruments” (121). In contrast to the temporary consumables that drive the continuation of humanity’s life through labor, tools are used to create permanent objects with a definite function. For Arendt, then, objects of human work—everything from tables and chairs to art—have a fundamentally different character than the stuff of labor.  

Finally, Arendt moves on to the concept of the division of labor. For Marx, the division of labor according to different social classes is an essential component of understanding the structure of production in a given society. Arendt takes a somewhat different view. Although the division of labor requires the organizational capacities of the political sphere, its effect is to generalize the basic conditions of labor by creating a homogeneous, undifferentiated “collective labor force” (124). The result is that every aspect of human activity becomes geared toward consumption, the correlate of labor. The ceaseless, anonymous production of perishable items increasingly invades the once-separate sphere of work. This is the birth of a consumer society.

This concluding chapter of Part 3 ties together the various polemical threads of Arendt’s argument. While the creation of “a society of laborers” has meant an extension of political freedom to working people and a reduction in violence-controlled slavery and patriarchy, Arendt is nevertheless critical of the fact that “we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities down to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance” (126). The latest manifestation of the construal of labor as the highest of human activities is a mass, or consumer, society.

Arendt argues that the mark of consumer society is that “no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption” (133). Everything becomes for the sake of fast and easy consumption, a life that Arendt believes to constitute a false form of happiness. The consumer society of the animal laborans undermines both the durability of useful things created by work and the possibility of an authentic public sphere determined by genuinely non-private interests. The very meaning of our existence, she claims, depends upon the fashioning of a “specifically human life” (134) that overcomes, and does not submit to, the endless, cyclical production of nature that Arendt clearly takes as analogous to consumption. Even Marx, who dreamed of the emancipation of the working class from labor, failed to see that his utopia amounted to a simple extension of consumption via increased leisure time.

Arendt’s subsequent analyses of work and action in Parts 4 and 5 are designed to underscore the insufficiency of labor as the sole standard of the human vita activa.