Labor | The Human Condition, Chapter 3

Labor vs work; mass culture; Karl Marx; changeless, deathless repetition

A key distinction in The Human Condition – so key, in fact, that it is made on the first page of chapter 1 – is the three-fold distinction between labor, work, and action. Today’s chapter is an exploration of the first of these: labor, “the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body.” This is the activity we engage in in order to continue life, though this continuation is ultimately cyclical. As Arendt puts in §13, ‘Labor and Life:’

Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until eventually dead matter, the result of small, single, cyclical, life processes, returns into the over-all gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition

We’ll discuss Arendt’s theory of labor this week as part of our read-along of The Human Condition. Here is the schedule for the read-along:

• November 25: Chapter 1: The Human Condition

• December 2: Chapter 2: The Public and The Private Realm

• December 9: Chapter 3: Labor

• December 15: Members-Only Zoom Call (8PM Eastern)

• December 16: Chapter 4: Work

• December 23: Reading Week

• December 30: Reading Week

• January 6: Chapter 5: Action (§24-29)

• January 13: Chapter 5: Action (§30-34)

• January 19: Members-Only Zoom Call (8PM Eastern)

• January 20: Chapter 6 The Vita Activa and The Modern Age (§35-40)

• January 27: Chapter 6 The Vita Activa and The Modern Age (§41-45)

• February 3: Final Thoughts

Nearly everything related to these read-alongs is free; I feel very strongly about making this project available to everyone. But on occasion, I’ll send out extra essays inspired by the reading, and of course we have our members-only Zoom calls in December and January.

If you want to take part in those members-only Zoom calls, all you have to do is become a paying subscriber. You’ll also be supporting my work here on Commonplace Philosophy and over on my YouTube channel.

Arendt is one of the first thinkers – maybe the first – to make a distinction between labor and work, at least in her peculiar way. The history of philosophy has many distinctions between types of labor (here using ‘labor’ more generally than Arendt would):

• The ancient distinction between the liberal and the servile arts. The liberal arts were ends in themselves, while the servile arts served some further ends, we might say. But there was also a feeling of judgment, of evaluation, in this distinction; clearly it was better to pursue the liberal arts than the servile art; the servile arts were ‘unbecoming a full-fledged citizen,’ Arendt says. This included much of what she would call labor — the activity necessary for the continuation of life.

• The more modern distinction between skilled and unskilled labor. This distinction persists to this day, though Arendt does not think much of it. All labor is skilled, she says, and I do not think this is mere political posturing. There is surely some skill involved in all of the so-called unskilled jobs we can think of. (Arendt also believes that by endorsing this distinction, one has already abandoned the distinction between labor and work ‘in favor of labor.’)

• The seemingly fundamental distinction between intellectual and manual work. Arendt notes that this distinction does not play any role in classical political economy or in Marx’s work — I take this note to be a quick argument against the theoretical utility of the distinction. This distinction would also be closely related to the skilled/unskilled distinction, though clearly much manual work involves skill.

None of these distinctions, Arendt believes, serve as suitable substitutes for the more basic distinction between labor and work, a distinction she believes is mirrored in etymology (pgs 79-81). Labor has as its condition life itself, and so much of Chapter 3 is devoted to life, while work has as its condition worldliness. We’ll turn to work and worldliness next week.

Hercules and Atlas

Arendt believes she has identified a contradiction in Marx, the sort of contradiction that shouldn’t be found even in a second-rate writer; this contradiction could cut to the core of Marx’s thought, if Arendt is correct. I admit that I’m unsure here.

Marx defines humanity in terms of labor. Man is animal laborens. Yet, the culmination of Marx’s vision is not in a world free from class, but in a world free from labor. Arendt puts it this way: in Marx, “we are left with the rather distressing alternative between productive slavery and unproductive freedom.”

I am not sure this holds as a criticism of Marx per se. If Marx’s scientific vision were correct, the result of a labor-free world is in some sense inevitable; this is how history progresses, and history is said to obey certain laws. So Marx may shrug and say that animal laborens is in some sense destined to create a world in some major way unsuitable for itself, as we will free ourselves from necessity. We could even come up with a more artful Hegelian gloss for all of this.

Arendt’s view is something a it different: that labor is something we cannot free ourselves from, as it is the activity of continuing life itself, and that we can reconceptualize those other activities, specifically work, in a way more fit for human purpose. Perhaps labor can be radically diminished – we don’t spend our days tilling fields, broadly speaking – and we will have substantial time for work and action. Work, then, could be oriented toward building a better world given the sort of creatures we are. Though perhaps Arendt would be resistant to my essentialist language here, given her early comments about human nature.

The Gardener

This passage, near the end of the chapter (primarily on page 134), is particularly illuminating:

The rather uncomfortable truth of the matter is that the triumph of the modern world has achieved over necessity is due to the emancipation of labor, that is, to the fact that the animal laborans was permitted to occupy the public realm; and yet, as long as the animal laborans remains in possession of it, there can be no true public realm, but only private activities displayed in the open. The outcome is what is euphemistically called mass culture, and its deep-rooted trouble is a universal unhappiness, due on one side to the troubled balance between laboring and consumption and, on the other, to the persistent demands of the animal laborans to obtain a happiness which can be achieved only where life’s processes of exhaustion and regeneration, of pain and release from pain, strike a perfect balanace. The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.

I am still reconstructing the argument in my mind, but I believe that this passage gives us the key to understanding Arendt’s critique. The focus of her criticism is mass culture and the society which produces it; this mass culture is unable to properly nourish human beings; the result is a deep unhappiness and dissatisfaction; at root, the problem is that we conceive of ourselves as only laboring creatures (perhaps as opposed to working and acting creatures), and yet we are running out of labor. The critique of Marx, then, is particularly relevant — Arendt accepts the conclusion but, unlike Marx, does not think it is a desirable outcome.

I want to revisit, again, the topic of private property, as it played a core role in the difficult middle passages of Chapter 3, and I suspect that Arendt is at least partly thinking of private property when she speaks of ‘private activities displayed in public.’