The Human Condition

Arendt suggests that “[f]abrication, the work of homo faber, consists in reification” (139). The term “reification” derives from the Latin word for “thing,” res, so that to reify something is to make it into a thing of permanence or durability. Arendt claims that all work or fabrication involves violence insofar as it entails the removal of its material from nature. A tree must die to provide wood, and iron and stone must be wrested from the bosom of earth. For Arendt, this aspect of work makes homo faber “a destroyer of nature” (139) in the image of God. Unlike labor, work is a source of power for the human being that raises it above the condition of other organisms.

Arendt goes on to further define work as “performed under the guidance of a model in accordance with which the object is constructed” (140). All work has a specific end or aim that precedes its execution: the creation of an object that satisfies an already determined function. For example, the idea of a chair precedes the existence of the particular chair to be fabricated by a given craftsperson; it will also survive the destruction and decay of that chair after its use. Arendt compares this independence of the general model from its individual instantiation to the Platonic doctrine of the Forms. This is another point of contrast with the fleeting products of labor.

Arendt concludes by emphasizing the peculiarly independent nature of work. The animal laborans is always subject to the necessities of life, while the person of action has to rely on others for the fulfillment of her goals. Only the worker is “master of himself and his doings” (144): Everything an individual can make can be destroyed, then re-made again.

This is the first of two chapters on tools or instruments, a topic introduced in Chapter 16. Arendt defines the work of homo faber with the use of tools, but it is also clearly the case that instruments, especially modern machines, have been increasingly employed in the processes of labor since the Industrial Revolution. Her aim in Chapters 20 and 21 is to distinguish the instrumentality of labor (via machines) from that of work (via tools).

Arendt believes that the mechanization of labor is about “the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers” (146). The ever more sophisticated developments of the instruments of labor under capitalism is therefore about the subjection of the human body to the coordination and repetition enforced by machines. This is entirely separate from the notion of the tool used by homo faber: “Even the most refined tool remains a servant, unable to guide or to replace the hand. Even the most primitive machine guides the body’s labor and eventually replaces it altogether” (147).

According to Arendt, modern technological advancement imitates the powers of nature. The steam engine mimics an existing natural process, the relationship between heat and water, while electricity and nuclear power unleashed new, previously hidden physical forces. The result of the increasing mechanization and automation of labor is thus a “channeling of natural forces into the human world” (150).

For Arendt, this is just another way in which labor has encroached upon a previously independent domain, in this case the sphere of work: “[W]e have come to design products that still fulfil certain ‘basic functions’ but whose shape will be primarily determined by the operation of the machine” (152). In other words, the specifically human quality of work—the free and purposive construction of worldly objects with the aid of tools—becomes ever more subservient to the demands of labor set by the standard of technological efficiency.

This is the second of two chapters devoted to instrumentality. To this point in The Human Condition, Arendt has generally praised the work of homo faber at the expense of the labor of animal laborans. Her argument shifts in Chapter 21 with her analysis of some of the consequences of the standpoint of homo faber.

The problem, in short, is that the means-ends structure of work initiates a kind of infinite regress. In work, one uses a tool, the hammer, and this material, wood, as means to the fulfillment of an end, the construction of a chair. This is what Arendt calls the “in order to” (154) of work. The fabrication of the chair, upon its completion, is no longer an end. Instead, it serves as a means to a further end, its use: to serve as a seat for someone. Yet, even the use has limited duration, and the chair will eventually find another purpose, for instance, as recycled wood. According to Arendt, the philosophical expression of homo faber, utilitarianism, claims that everything is means for some further use without ever being able to specify the final “use of use.” This is the problem of meaning, or what she calls the “for the sake of” (154).

The only way out of “the dilemma of meaninglessness” (155) posed by utilitarianism is to move from the standard of the objective use of things to their subjective significance for the human being. Arendt links this to the philosophy of Kant and his famous dictum that the human being alone is an end-in-itself. This has its ancient precedent in the thought of Protagoras, who argued that “man is the measure of the use of all things” (157). However, as Plato recognized against Protagoras, this anthropocentric view has the implication of undermining the independent objectivity of the world. It is “man the user and instrumentalizer, and not man the speaker and doer or man the thinker” (158) that becomes the standard of everything that exists. Arendt thereby suggests that the work of homo faber has its limitations, and that the distinct roles of action and the vita contemplativa also need to be considered.

Chapter 22 provides an economic and historical discussion of the transition in the status of homo faber that Arendt takes as the condition for the later establishment of a society of laborers oriented strictly around consumption.

Arendt focuses on the role of the market as the central stage of the public sphere. For some ancient societies, like the Athenians, the market (agora) was a political domain from which work and labor were both entirely absent. Other societies, however, admitted the products of work into the visible, public realm, a trend that Arendt also connects to the emergence of commercial society in medieval and early modern Europe. Importantly, she stresses that not simply consumption, but also production, appears in the exchange market of homo faber (160).

This change in the state of homo faber is significant for Arendt. The mastery of true craftsmanship, she maintains, can only take place in private in a solitary communion between the fabricator and the “idea” (161) of what one makes. With the incursion of the commercial market into the public sphere, it is no longer workers but “owners of commodities and exchange values” (162) that encounter one another. According to Arendt, this new appearance of homo faber in the public market inaugurates the reduction of all objects, whether for use or consumption, to the universal standard of exchange value. Arendt argues that what makes value possible is its public character, the fact that everything is relative to everything else as it appears within the exchange market. She concludes by linking this development back to the closing theme of Chapter 21: the Protagorean principle of homo faber as the measure of all things (166). Instrumentality reigns supreme.

This final chapter of Part 4 has two primary functions: First, to reflect on art as a special form of fabrication; and second, to offer some summary reflections on the relationship between labor, work, and action.

Art, Arendt argues, is unique among the products of human fabrication because it has absolutely no use. A painting does not have a definite function or purpose like a chair or table. Art is, as the saying goes, for its own sake. Art is thus “the most intensely worldly of all tangible things” (167); it endures in the world like no other kind of human activity and approaches a kind of immortality created by mortal hands (168). She then identifies art with the reification of thought, which is otherwise fleeting and impermanent. Thought must be written down, recorded or painted if it is to have any durability in the world.

The connection between thought and art then prompts Arendt to focus on other mental operations. Art corresponds to thought, while the utilitarian standpoint of homo faber corresponds to cognition. Like the fabricator, cognition produces definite aims and results, such as in scientific research. Logic, on the other hand, mirrors labor as the eternal and inflexible parameters of mental processing, the necessary laws of the mind which we cannot transcend any more than our nature as biological organisms (171-72).

As this threefold parallel between the mind and activity suggests, Arendt closes the chapter by insisting on the interdependence and reciprocity of labor, work, and action. Each aspect of the vita activa requires and reinforces the other. With her remark that neither the necessity of biological life nor the instrumentality of use and fabrication is the measure of all things, she transitions to analysis of action in Part 5.