The Human Condition

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1958

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Vita Contemplativa

Vita contemplativa is Latin for “the contemplative life,” a concept that is most famously articulated in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The Greek term for contemplation is theoria, from which we derive the English word “theory.” Arendt associates the vita contemplativa with the philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. She claims that each of these figures, despite their differences, emphasized the priority of the contemplation of eternal, abstract truths over the vita activa. This was in direct contrast to the “pre-philosophic” (196) context of the ancient Greek polis or city-state. As its contraposition with the vita activa implies, contemplation is understood by the Western philosophical tradition as a solitary, introspective activity that avoids the distractions of worldly and political affairs. While Arendt’s focus in The Human Condition is overwhelmingly on the vita activa, the relation of the latter to the vita contemplativa is a persistent theme.

Vita Activa

Vita activa is Latin for “the active life,” It is typically understood in contrast to the vita contemplativa. The vita activa is the central, overriding theme of The Human Condition. Arendt divides the vita activa into three human functions or forms of activity: labor, work, and action (which also encompasses speech).

Labor refers to the activities necessary to the maintenance of the human being as a living, biological species or animal. Work signifies the particularly human capacity for the construction of a world of useful, durable things from natural materials. Lastly, action (and speech) denotes our capacity for communication with one another as members of a plural community made up of equal, but unique, individuals. Each of these facets of the vita activa is intimately related to different components of the human condition. As such, the vita activa is an important determinant of human existence.

One of Arendt’s main theses in The Human Condition is that labor has come to dominate the modern world. Our consumer society, she claims, is simply the result of the gradual elevation of the processes that concern the “growth, metabolism, and eventual decay” (7) of the human body. These are the conditions of life that we share with other animals; hence Arendt’s use of the term animal laborans (“laboring animal”) in this context. Arendt has a complex philosophical and historical explanation for how this came about, and this provides the core of the book in Parts 3 through 5. However, her overall argument is that the other modalities of the vita activa, work and action, have atrophied as a result of the supremacy of labor over human existence.

Public and Private Realms in Society

Arendt’s distinction between the public and private realms parallels her examination of both the vita contemplativa and, more importantly, the vita activa.

The public is defined by two features: publicity and worldliness. The former signifies the ability of a phenomenon, especially a human being, to appear, “to be seen and heard by everybody” (50). Worldliness refers to neither the earth nor nature per se, but a common space for work and action. Work fabricates the durable things that populate our world, while plurality, the simultaneous presence of equal but fundamentally different individuals, is the condition of action.

While the public sphere is interwoven with work and action, the private realm is closely connected to labor. In the ancient Greek polis, the historical starting-point for Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition, the private sphere was defined by the family or household. This was the location of labor: non-citizen women and slaves performed the activities necessary to the continued biological life of the human species. Accordingly, the public sphere was the location of freedom, the exercise of action by male citizens, while the private realm was the space of necessity that made such freedom possible.

Though the ancient Greek configuration of the public and the private relied on a fundamental inequality between the performers of the different aspects of the vita activa, Arendt claims that this form of political community at least gave space to the separate functions of labor, work, and action. This is not the case, she argues, for later peoples. After the Greco-Roman era, Arendt argues that, in Western Europe at least, communities were increasingly dominated by a third element: the social or society. This refers to the publicization of labor, its entrance onto the public sphere. As a result, work and action have been slowly eclipsed and left without an adequate location. While this development has its clear advantages (we no longer deny women citizenship or utilize slave labor), Arendt argues that the rise of society has created unresolved issues and tensions for human beings.

The Modern Age

Though referred to throughout The Human Condition, Arendt’s understanding of the modern age appears in most detail in Part 6 of the book. The modern age is the consequence of several events in the pre-modern era, the most important of which is the discovery of the telescope by Galileo and its subsequent implications for science, philosophy and general human culture.

For Arendt, the fundamental feature of the modern age is world alienation. Following the advances in science begun in the 17th century, human beings lost their previous perspective on the world. We were no longer confined to the earth but could now investigate from the standpoint of the universe as a whole. Nevertheless, Arendt stresses that we remained earth-bound creatures. This disjunction between the theoretical standpoint of modern knowledge and the enduring conditions of our existence precipitated a kind of homelessness or alienation from the world.

While this scientific context and its ramifications dominate Part 6, there are other key features of Arendt’s understanding of the modern age that emerge in The Human Condition. One is the so-called rise of the social, by which the economic imperatives invade the public sphere and increasingly subordinate human life to the demands of labor and consumption. Although frequently critical of Marx, Arendt readily acknowledges the hollowness of capitalist accumulation and its exploitation of the human species. The standards of modern happiness and prosperity that govern our society reflect labor and stifle the possibility of any other sources of meaning for our lives.

The central guiding theme in Arendt’s diverse thoughts on the modern age is thus the loss of a common world or public space that could unite human beings and provide them with a shared horizon of meaning that transcends human mortality. Arendt’s thematic use of the modern world thus serves as a tool for critical social and political commentary.