The Human Condition, Chapter 1

Work, labor, and action; the vita activa; Sputnik

Today is a very exciting day: we’re starting our read-along of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.

As many newcomers are joining us for this read-along, I’ve received a lot of questions about structure, how one participates, etc. So, here’s a brief description of how we do things on Commonplace Philosophy. Below, you’ll find a schedule for the read-along. That’s the pace of the reading (typically, a chapter per week). On the assigned day, I send out a post to everyone with my thoughts — the discussion about the book then goes on in the comments. My hope is that people will have lively debates! So, all you really need to do to participate is i) keep up with the readings, ii) read my short post every Monday, and iii) share your thoughts in the comments.

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

• 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

• 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 begins The Human Condition in a strange way: a discussion of the launch of Sputnik 1. This launch seems to portend a shift in the human condition — “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever,” she quotes a Russian scientist as declaring. She is concerned with future man, a man perhaps envisioned in some works of science fiction (which she notes has been ignored by commentators).

The world is changing, and human beings will change with it (and, we should add, will change it). We will continue to cut ourselves off from nature, introducing artificiality into our environment at an increasing clip. We will automate work (or, rather, labor — but more on that later) in a way that could devastate us, especially if we conceive of ourselves primarily as laborers. So, Arendt says, we should take some time to think about what we are doing.

Aristotle believed that the highest form of human activity was thinking (or contemplation). At some point, an inversion took place in Western thought, perhaps through Marx and Nietzsche; action had a new prominence and esteem. Arendt does not take the vita contemplativa to be a higher form of life than the vita activa. She does believe that in the history of Western thought, we have glossed over important distinctions within the vita activa; this chapter introduces that important distinction: labor, work, and action.

Tömmel and D’Entreves describe the distinction this way:

Labor is the activity which is tied to the human condition of life, work the activity which is tied to the condition of worldliness, and action the activity tied to the condition of plurality. For Arendt each activity is autonomous, in the sense of having its own distinctive principles and of being judged by different criteria. Labor is judged by its ability to sustain human life, to cater to our biological needs of consumption and reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain a world fit for human use, and action is judged by its ability to disclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the world, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.

This distinction between work and labor, in particular, is not a common one; later in the book, Arendt will defend the theoretical utility of the distinction, so we don’t have to think about that for now — we’ll discuss it later. (I’m not totally clear on how the distinction is really drawn, admittedly.)

All of this, though, is in service of a broader point about humanity. Notice that Arendt has been speaking of the human condition. She has avoided talking about human nature.

Human nature is presumably a fixed set of facts about all human beings. Wondering about human nature is of course quite an old way of spending one’s time. Arendt alludes to Augustine’s Confessions when she speaks of the ‘Augustinian quaestio mihi factus sum’ — that is, the fact that Augustine’s own person has become a question, or a puzzle, for himself.¹ The question of human nature, Arendt thinks, is unanswerable both in the individual psychological sense and in the general philosophical sense. (‘This would be like jumping over our own shadows.’)

The human condition is a more tractable problem. ‘The impact of the world’s reality upon human existence is felt and received as a conditioning force,’ Arendt says, and this gives us a sense of what is meant by the human condition. It is the facts of the world which condition – that is, affect – our lives. (Though as Arendt notes, ‘the conditions of human existence – life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth–can never “explain” what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely.’)

Human nature, presumably, is fixed. The human condition is not fixed. The facts of the world change. We change them. When we work, we create artificial things in the world, creating a condition of wordliness, and this creates a new environment for us. If we were to build a city on Mars, we would find ourselves in a totally artificial habitat; that would be a radically different conditioning force for those in that city; it would be a conditioning force that we brought on ourselves.

The human condition is in fact transient and permeable. The end of this chapter takes on the distinction between eternity and immortality. Eternity is a sort of timelessness; immortality is a matter of enduring forever in time. With the collapse of the Roman Empire – something which inhabitants might have thought of as standing a good chance of being immortal (as a civilization) – showed, things of this world tend not to last. How the world conditions us, then, changes.

As a culture, we opted for a preference toward eternity, and thus contemplation (which is an experience of eternal things), because we saw that immortality was a false promise. The rise of Christianity surely played a role here. But as Arendt remarks, even when the cultural conditions which brought about our attitudes toward the vita activa as a handmaiden to the vita contemplativa shifted, our hierarchical view of the two remained in place. So the vita activa was ignored as a matter of study; this book, and this read-along, aims to change that.

1. Two interesting points of contact here. First, Arendt’s dissertation was on Augustine and love. Second, Heidegger speaks of Dasein as a Being for whom that Being is an issue. Heidegger was Arendt’s teacher and, for a time, romantic partner.