The Human Condition

The Human Condition, written by Hannah Arendt and originally published in 1958, is a work of political and philosophical nonfiction. Arendt, a German-American philosopher and political theorist, divides the central theme of the book, vita activa, into three distinct functions: labor, work, and action. Her analyses of these three concepts form the philosophical core of the book. The rest of the book is historical in approach.

Part 1 serves as an introduction to Arendt’s argument. She provides preliminary definitions of labor, work, and action, and she clarifies her notion of the human condition as the prevailing, but by no means absolute, features of our existence. Her examples of the conditions of human existence include natality (birth), mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth. Each of these is intimately related to one of the modalities of the vita activa.

Philosophers typically understand vita activa in opposition to the contemplative life, or vita contemplative, framing the latter as the highest activity of humanity. By focusing on the vita activa, Arendt is reconstructing a neglected aspect of human life

Using the example of the ancient Greek city-state in Part 2, Arendt examines the public and private spheres. In a city-state, the private realm was in the household and concerned tasks of biological necessity for the human species. Conversely, the public sphere was the space to exercise political freedom between equal citizens. The arrival of the social domain disturbed the between public and private, and labor entered the public sphere. Then, labor activities to grew in prominence, and politics were forever changed. This is what separates the modern world from antiquity.

As detailed in Part 3, Labor deals with the tasks that sustain our existence as animals, or animal laborans (laboring animal). Labor is also what society elevates to prominence. Arendt criticizes a handful of influential contemporary political philosophers—John Locke, Adam Smith and Karl Marx—for misunderstanding labor and society. Society concerns the human being as a laborer and consumer and ignores the other aspects of the vita activa.

Part 4 focuses on the notion of work, which deals with the human condition of worldliness. "Worldliness" refers to the “world of things” created by human hands through work, like the building of chairs, beds, and buildings. Arendt uses the Latin phrase homo faber (human being the maker) in contrast to labor’s animal laborans. For Arendt, without this distinction, humanity is reduced to animals tethered to the biological processes that merely sustain life (labor) without building a world (work).

Part 5 examines action. The condition of action is plurality, the fact that human beings are equal and yet distinct individuals. For Arendt, action encompasses both acts or deeds and speech. Like an act, speech reveals the specificity of its agent to others. Action is what makes us human, even more so than work.

Unlike modern society, the ancient Greek polis (using slave labor) allowed for a public sphere of pure action distinct from the demands of labor and work. An ancient Greek citizen presented himself through remarkable words and deeds to a plural community. Even for ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, however, the radical spontaneity of true action could arouse suspicion. Action is boundless, unpredictable and irreversible for Arendt; as such, it will always exceed attempts at rational control or predictability. The modern world buries each of us under the relentless cycle of production and consumption that values conformity above all else.

Part 6, the book’s final segment, explores modern thought and the Archimedean point of knowledge, a once hypothetical scientific ideal that imagined the world as viewed from a cosmic, outside perspective. Arendt claims that Galileo’s discovery of the telescope proves that science requires the intervention of a human-made instrument to attain the objective knowledge of the universe. The result is a divorce between the mind and the world, or thinking and being, a phenomenon that Arendt calls “world alienation” and “earth alienation.”

After tracing the spiritual repercussions of the Archimedean point using philosophy from Rene Descartes, Arendt considers how it affected the vita activa. Arendt claims that the ascendance of the animal laborans defines our present condition. Work, action, and the vita contemplativa have suffered as a result. Arendt is pessimistic about the status of the modern human condition, but she concludes the book with a few hopeful comments about the power of thinking to overcome our predicament.