The Human Condition

In this chapter, Arendt continues her philosophical discussion of the “who,” or agent of speech and action. Despite the clear visibility of the latter in the public realm, Arendt claims that there is also an intangibility to human agency. We struggle, she says, to name “who” a unique someone is, falling back instead on a description of “what” properties or qualities an agent shares with others. This tension between the “who” and the “what” of action and speech, the subjective and objective poles of our existence, is the focus of Chapter 25.

On the one hand, Arendt recognizes that speech and action occur between human beings on the objective plane of the world; these activities are “about” something concrete in reality. On the other hand, there is also a less tangible, subjective in-between “which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another” (183). Arendt calls this other reality the “web of human relationships” (183) with which all speech and action interweave. Though more fleeting than the material objectivity of the world, this background context of intersubjective meaning constituted by speech and action is no less “real.”

Arendt argues that the necessary entanglement of speech and action with a pre-existing web of meaning tends to confound our efforts. Speech and action are free, unique beginnings, but they take place within a horizon defined by other wills and intentions that may oppose their fulfillment. However, Arendt says that it is this very interconnection of all human speech and action that makes possible their preservation and transmission through stories.

Narratives reveal the agent of speech and action in a kind of secondary or derivative manner. The subject of a story is not the author or producer of words and deeds herself, but an actor or “hero” who merely imitates the ungraspable “who” behind the plot in question. According to Arendt, this narrative function is an important root of history and art, media which attempt to preserve and communicate something of the intangibility of past speech and action.

Chapter 26 begins with a reflection on the difference between action and fabrication. Unlike work, which Arendt claims is best executed in isolation, speech and action require the presence of others and the web of relationships that they have generated. This dependence of action on others has been wrongly obscured by the notion of what Arendt calls “the strong man” (190) or independent leader. A leader or ruler may initiate an action, she insists, but its fulfillment necessitates the help of others: his or her subjects.

Arendt then goes on to outline the frailty of human action. The obverse of action, she argues, is suffering. Though always a new beginning, every action is also an intervention into an existing human context that triggers reactions from others. To do, then, is to suffer and to experience the actions of others in response to our own. This interconnection of all human action is its boundlessness. Much of political life involves attempts to curb the boundlessness of action through limitations like law and property, although there is never any guarantee that these endeavors will be entirely successful.

In addition to boundlessness, Arendt’s second feature of action is its unpredictability. Returning to themes from the preceding chapter, Arendt stresses that the open-ended character of action conceals its result from its agent. Only the storyteller, who can look back on a completed series of actions, is capable of perceiving and weaving together the story initiated by the agent.

For Arendt, the boundlessness and unpredictability of action are what make human affairs inherently fragile. No agent can act with full knowledge of the outcomes of her actions; this is only available to us after the fact in the form of narration by another. The implication is that this extreme spontaneity is what makes action truly free.

In this chapter, Arendt expands upon many of the central themes of The Human Condition by analyzing the ancient Greek conception of action. Her argument begins with an examination of the Greek notion of eudaimonia, usually translated as “human flourishing” or, less accurately, “happiness.” The Greeks only considered someone to have lived a life of eudaimonia after their death, when the story of their life was complete. Arendt focuses on the example of Achilles, who recognized that his remembrance as a man of “immortal fame” was dependent upon an early death. In his case, life is summed up in a single deed, “so that the story of the act comes to its end together with the life itself” (194). This is the only way to overcome the boundlessness and unpredictability of human action; one assures eudaimonia through noteworthy action at the same time as she seals her death.

Even Achilles was reliant upon Homer, the “author” of the Iliad, to narrate and transmit his story to subsequent generations in the form of an epic poem. For Arendt, this model of heroic action made permanent through its audience provided the primary function of the ancient Greek city-state or polis. Political legislation, she argues, was little more than the architect of the public space in which immortalizing actions could take place and be witnessed. The polis is therefore “organized remembrance” that “assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men” (198).

This chapter links Arendt’s conceptions of speech and action within the public sphere to the notion of power. Power, she says, “is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence” (200).

For Arendt, power is defined by the notion of potential (she notes the ancient precedents of the word, dynamis in Greek and potentia in Latin). Though the three concepts may seem similar, Arendt is careful to distinguish power from force (or violence) and strength. The latter two terms denote “an unchangeable, measurable, and reliable entity” (200). The implication is that force and strength are physical properties or phenomena that apply to things, while power “can only be actualized but never fully materialized” (200).

Power cultivates the boundless, open-ended space for the possibility of speech and action; its only condition is plurality, or that humans live together. By contrast, force is the tool of the tyrant used against his subjects, while strength is an attribute of an aggregate of individuals that Arendt associates with the rule of the mob. In both of these cases, plurality is suppressed in favor of false unanimity.  

Arendt stresses that the potentiality of power needs to be actualized to maintain a political community and keep it from declining into a state of impotence. She compares the actuality of power to Aristotle’s notion of energeia, a perpetual and unqualified energy that has no definite end and leaves no finished product behind. Power is therefore completely opposed to the purposive, means-ends character of work, a proposition that will be taken up in detail the next chapter.

How exactly does the relationship between the potentiality and actuality of power, dynamis and energeia, correspond to speech and action? Arendt refers to action as the pure performance of great deeds irrespective of past motivations or future outcomes. Authentic speech and action are singular and unique, a character that makes words and deeds extraordinary and worthy of remembrance. The potentiality of power is thus what sustains the actuality of action in the space of appearance that is the public sphere.

Arendt seems to associate the proper “trust in power” (204) between a public and its leaders with a particular historical moment, the Athens of Pericles. This period, she says, exhibits a “supreme confidence” (205) in a kind of ideal balance between great deeds, their preservation, and the creation of power required for further action in the future. The loss of this equilibrium in later epochs, including our own, is a source of major concern for Arendt.

Having outlined her conceptions of action and speech in Chapters 24 to 28, in this chapter, Arendt shifts to an explicit contrast between the former and the other modes of the vita activa, labor and work. Though dependent upon both, Arendt insists that “the conviction that the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization” (208) is also opposed to the animal laborans and homo faber.

As the title of the chapter suggests, Arendt’s focus is on distinguishing between action and work. She returns to Chapter 22 through a comparison between the public character of speech and action with that of the exchange market. The people who meet in a market, she says, “are primarily not persons but producers of products, and what they show there is never themselves […] but their products” (209). Arendt believes this ascension of products over people in the public sphere undermines the possibility of common sense, understood as the shared perception of reality achieved by a plurality of individuals.

Arendt then moves to what she frames as an important critical response to a commercial society ruled by the exchange market, the notion of artistic genius. She argues that the ideal of creative individuality represented by a genius has appropriated the distinctness and uniqueness of action and speech. The result is a kind of apotheosis of homo faber: the work of art is always greater than the artist. Just as in the exchange market, then, it is the product of work that overrules the producer. For Arendt, this idea represents just another form of the displacement of the immediate actuality of speech and action from the public realm.

Chapter 30 picks up the thread of Chapter 29 by contrasting action, work and labor in more detail. Although work does not establish a realm in which “men qua men can appear” (212), it at least possesses a derivative public character through its intimate connection to the world of things made through fabrication. Work, Arendt concludes, is therefore “unpolitical” but not “antipolitical” (212). The latter designation instead captures the nature of labor.

According to Arendt, in laboring “man is neither together with the world nor with other people, but alone with his body, facing the naked necessity to keep himself alive” (212). Even when, as frequently happens, human beings labor together in gangs or groups, the activity dissolves the unique individuality of each participant into “sameness.” The implication is that even collective labor lacks the essential character of plurality for Arendt; the “equality of unequals who stand in need of being ‘equalized’ in certain respects and for certain purposes” (215). The intractable homogeneity of labor described here helps to explain Arendt’s linkage between labor and mass society in Part 3.

After differentiating labor from action and work, Arendt offers a digression on the political history of the labor movement. If labor is inherently antipolitical, how is it that the labor movement has been responsible for so many of the major political upheavals of the modern era? Arendt answers this question by distinguishing between the role of societal organizations like trade unions and political parties and the actual emancipation of laborers from oppression. The former struggled for “the incorporation [of the working class] into modern society” (216), while the latter represents the sudden appearance of a new group in the public sphere not yet absorbed into the social realm. In other words, the labor movement constitutes laborers without society, while working class unions and political parties have agitated for their synthesis.

This concept leads Arendt to a conclusion: “[W]hen the labor movement appeared on the public scene, it was the only organization in which men acted and spoke qua men—and not qua members of society” (219). For all of her critical reflections on labor, especially her running polemic with Marx throughout Part 3, Arendt seems to suggest that the modern labor movement has most authentically replicated the structure of speech and action that she typically situates with ancient Greece. However, she is also clear that this initially revolutionary character of labor has been expended by virtue of its absorption into society.

Chapter 31 returns to a theme first introduced in Chapter 2: the revolt against the traditional political structure of the ancient Greek polis by philosophy after the execution of Socrates, and the corresponding denigration of the vita activa in the work of Plato and Aristotle. In her own terms, Arendt situates this development in the substitution of action for making (or work) into politics.

According to Arendt, opposition to action arises from its three specific features “the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors” (220). Against this eminently precarious mode of the vita activa, Arendt argues that much of Western philosophy has tried to import the model of fabrication, the work of “one man, isolated from all others […] master of his doings from beginning to end” (220), into the political sphere. Just as the individual craftsman completely controls the means and end of his process of fabrication, so too does a ruler dissociate political power from the chaos of action, choosing instead to delegate the actual execution of his orders to others.  

This elimination of the uncertainties of human action and plurality from politics is most evident in anti-democratic arguments, of which Plato is a most famous representative. Arendt offers a lengthy interpretation of Plato’s political philosophy designed to show that he inaugurates a rupture between two previously synonymous forms of action: archein and prattein (“beginning” and “achieving”). According to Arendt, Plato argues that archein is the function of a ruler (archon, or rule), which is entirely distinct from action (prattein); A ruler does not act but tells others how to act through the coercive power of the state or law.

This idea mirrors the model of household organization in which a patriarch does not perform the necessary labor of the family, but orders others (i.e., slaves and women) to do so based on his supposed practical or managerial knowledge. In the ideal of a philosopher-king outlined by Plato in the Republic, the best form of political rule becomes explicitly associated with abstract theoretical knowledge: “Here indeed, he who knows does not have to do and he who does needs no thought or knowledge” (223). The analogous roles of the Platonic doctrine of ideas and the pre-existent model that guides the process of fabrication is reiterated: “In the Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standards; he ‘makes’ his City as the sculptor makes a statue” (227). Arendt links the violence inherent to fabrication to our modern comfort with the understanding of politics as a instrumental process in which end justifies the means.  

For Arendt, the key result of this historical and philosophical trajectory is that politics is no longer the unpredictable affair of a plurality of actors on the common plane of a public sphere, but a single, iron formula of supposedly rational rule imposed upon the ruled through coercive and often violent means.

The process character of action mentioned in the title of Chapter 32 refers to what Arendt considers to be the radical unpredictability and open-endedness of authentic action. Unlike work, which reaches a definite conclusion when its purpose has been accomplished, action is continuous in a manner entirely absent from the execution of work; its repercussions are literally “without end” (233).

As in preceding chapters, Arendt stresses the difficulty of bearing “the burden of irreversibility and unpredictability” (233) that attends action. In her view, we have developed several responses to this challenge. One has been to channel the process character of action into nature, to “make” nature by bringing forth natural processes that would have otherwise lain dormant without human intervention (i.e., atomic energy and weaponry). A second approach has been to take refuge in non-acting and bow to necessity, a tendency that Arendt associates with the Stoic philosophical tradition. A third reaction, building on the themes of Chapter 31, has been to dissociate freedom from action and situate it instead in the notion of political sovereignty or rule, “the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership” (234). For Arendt, the problem with this last solution is that it denies the very condition of action, human plurality, in favor of a false sense of unity and control.

Instead of rejecting the inherent unpredictability and irreversibility of action, as Arendt believes much of Western political theory to have done, she will spend the remaining chapters of Part 5 defending these features of the vita activa.

This chapter introduces two key complements to action that Arendt takes as crucial alleviations of its fragile, open-ended character. The first is forgiveness, which mitigates the irreversibility of action. The second is promising, which remedies unpredictability. Chapter 33 looks at the former, Chapter 34 the latter.

Without forgiveness, Arendt claims that each of us would “be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (237). In other words, the only way to overcome the ongoing, infinite process of an action is to annul the what of a deed for the sake of the who that did it. This contrasts with the notion of vengeance, a reaction to an action that simply furthers and multiplies its consequences. Because the full implications of an action can never be disclosed to an agent, forgiveness requires the intervention of another, and therefore intimately connects with plurality. This is yet a further distinction between the realm of action and the more individual, private spheres of both labor and work.

Arendt identifies Jesus of Nazareth as “the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs” (238), although she is clear that the significance of Christ is not dependent upon a religious perspective. Indeed, Arendt departs from Christianity by associating forgiveness not with love but respect. Love ruptures the dual “the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others” (242) and hence undercuts the condition of plurality that she connects to forgiveness. The importance of forgiveness for human life, especially the public realm of politics, is accordingly much greater than we typically suppose.

Chapter 34, the final chapter of Arendt’s analysis of action in Part 5 of The Human Condition, picks up on the theme of promises introduced in the previous chapter. Just as forgiveness counteracts the irreversibility of action, the capacity for making promises remedies its unpredictability.

Promises mitigate two specific features of the unpredictability of action: “the basic unreliability of men who can never guarantee today who they will be tomorrow” and “the impossibility of foretelling the consequences of an act within a community of equals where everybody has the same capacity to act” (244). Promises provide the possibility of stability within the inherently unstable, open-ended arena of human action. They allow us “to dispose of the future as though it were the present” (245), that is, to project ourselves beyond the immediacy of the now into a later state of affairs for which we will be responsible. Arendt calls this “enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective” (245) nothing short of miraculous.    

Unlike forgiveness, Arendt argues that promises are deeply interwoven into the Western political tradition. The notion of making and keeping a contract, for instance, is a major feature of Roman law and serves as the central analogy for the formation of states in early modern political theory. Though critical of political sovereignty in the previous chapter, here, Arendt suggests that the notion has “a certain limited reality” (245) when properly applied to pluralistic community. Promises serve as a force that keeps the members of a body politic together through a common, sustained purpose.

Along with forgiveness, promises imbue the radical spontaneity of action, an unparalleled capacity for beginning that Arendt says is “ontologically rooted” in natality, with the possibility of human faith in one another and hope for the future, “two essential characteristics of human existence” (247).