I did not see it coming at all, the conclusion of The Human Condition. Though the book argues again and again for the importance of action and the public sphere, it nevertheless ends with the following quote from Cato: “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.” Why?
Arendt’s central line of reasoning in The Human Condition is clear (even though many details are not): What constitutes the essence of humanity, what makes us different from all other living organisms, is our capacity to act as unique individuals and among other unique individuals. Modern society, however, has brought about the domination of our active life by animal laborans and the decline of the public sphere. As a result, Man “is on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come.” The “future of man” is at stake. So what does Arendt suggest we do? Not much, or a lot; depending on your point of view.
Arendt writes: “In this existentially most important aspect, action, too, has become an experience for the privileged few”. She continues: “Thought, finally . . . is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom.” In these “dark times,” the only act of resistance is for every one of us to struggle to continue to think. But what does to think mean? To answer this question, Arendt decided to investigate “the life of the mind” as her next philosophical project.
When I was reading the last paragraph of The Human Condition, I was immediately reminded of Theodore Adorno, one of the founding members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Here’s the famous opening sentence of his book Negative Dialectics: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried.” In other words, it continues to be important to think. Given the similarities in their training, backgrounds and life circumstances, we should not be surprised by common strains in the thinking of Adorno and Arendt.
There is another common theme between the two that I think we must not overlook. Both believed, when they returned to Germany after the war, that it was dangerous to try to forget the past, to move beyond it, too quickly. Adorno wrote: “One wants to break free of the past . . . wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive. National Socialism lives on” and he considers “the survival of National Socialism within (italicized) democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against (italicized) democracy.” Adorno’s concepts of Authoritarian Personality and Collective Narcissism are remarkably similar to Arendt’s description of life in modern mass society pervaded by production and consumption.
When I first started reading The Human Condition, I assumed that the book was Arendt’s attempt to find a counter-measure for Totalitarianism. I wasn’t wrong, but my interpretation was too narrow. Like Adorno, Arendt is also alerting us to the totalitarian tendencies already within democratic societies. She is telling us: “Don’t just look for enemies on the outside; look for them within ourselves also.” For me, this is the most important lesson of The Human Condition.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see that Arendt’s career represented a life-long, continuous effort to achieve an understanding (her favorite word) of the ever-evolving human condition and the challenges it presents. Each of her major publications constituted a step in that life-long process. I admire her dedication and determination.
I have wanted to comment but have had difficulty formulating any reasonable coherent thoughts. I have found this to be a difficult read. It’s densely written. I have described it to my wife as Arendt uses ALL the words in her writing. Weeding through that to the salient points has been challenging.
There has been some wise foretelling of the future we currently live in and it’s clear this has come through reasoned contemplation on her part. Funny when she puts so much focus on action.
Each chapter has meandered about and rarely felt like a connected whole. It’s as if she’s gathered a series of intellectual café debates and put them together in one book. I’m glad I’ve read it but I’m left feeling like I may have missed the point(s).
To me, Arendt painted a vivid picture of our predicament: instead of building long lasting artifacts that create our world and taking pride in their quality and durability, we transitioned to producing things that are literally one step away from being garbage that is slowly filling up and destroying the planet. Current society is obsessed with constantly optimizing the process of creation of products rather than with products of work themselves. This leads to our producing stuff cheaper thereby making us richer in material sense, however this obsession with process and optimization empoverishes us spiritually making it difficult for people to live meaningful lives, making them mere cogs in the capitalistic machine. Arendt seems to see action as our only way out of this absurdity however I am not sure many people would be interested in heeding her advice. The majority of people, despite being anxious and depressed for unclear to them reasons, continue laboring at their meaningless jobs, constantly producing and consuming poor quality stuff thereby sustaining the entire system whose ultimate goal is growth. Social media was supposed to become THE town square for action. Instead, it became the place where people just show themselves endlessly consuming food, clothes, travel, makeup etc etc. In a way, they do reveal themselves to others, but only as consumers. To Arendt action is about starting something new and is closely tied with her concept of natality. If one believes in liberaltarian free will, one could consider Arendt's prescription to treat the societal illness that she so vividly describes. As a determinist, my view on this is that those few people who are prone to action will act even without Arendt's help but the vast majority will not as they are not seeing anything wrong with their lives to begin with.
I’d be curious to know which chapters or sections of The Human Condition you would consider worth reading for understanding Arendt’s core message. Say you were Arendt’s editor and could choose the parts of the book made it into the proposed essay, which sections would you choose?
Arendt is, indeed, a lot more accessible through her essays, which are more clear and concise. Save the monographs for later, if you feel the urge to further explore her ideas.
To me, last two chapters were most interesting. That being said, I'm not sure you could just proceed to reading those two without reading the previous ones where she slowly builds up her case. My feeling is that if you don't have time or not interested enough to read the entire book based on what you read about it on this substack, you might as well just skip it altogether. Frankly, I don't regret reading this book but had I not read it, it would not be a big deal either. Unlike some other works of philosophy that truly changed my life and the way I think (Spinoza's Ethics for instance), The Human condition, while keeping me engaged while reading it, will probably not impact me much long term.
Kierkegaard is on my list as well :) After reading his poetic biography by Clare Carlisle about a year ago I really got interested in his ideas but never got around to exploring his work deeper. Time is always an issue...
Frankly, I'm not sure since my knowledge of Kierkegaard's philosophy is limited to his biography. I didn't get much sense of rationalism in Kierkegaard's work but, again, my familiarity with his work is superficial at best. Both of them criticized organized religion but Spinoza took a highly rarionalist approach with his geometrically styled Ethics and Theological Political Treatise vs Kierkegaard was largely a Christian existentialist criticizing Christendom for propagating a watered down version of Christianity that lacks the soul so to speak. I'm sure Kierkegaard was familiar with Spinoza's work but he did not go as far as agreeing with Spinoza's metaphysics ( that is fascinating, at least to me!).
From the beginning of this book I became excited to read a new work of philosophy from an author that I had never heard of before. I have for a few years been thinking deeper about all aspects of thought and life due in most part of feeling a need to catch up on all of the reading I missed out on when I was younger and too stubborn to read. This book has scratched an itch that I never would have scratched on my own and I am thankful for that. I specifically enjoyed breaking the human essence into labor, work and action even if it didn't always make a ton of sense to me. The group discussions help relieve some of that confusion and I feel that I can leave this book on the shelf knowing that I have gained a more robust view of the world from it. The last chapter had plenty of existential ideas which should help me tackle the next book on my list "Being and Time".
Over the last ten years or so, I have tried reading The Human Condition several times. Each time I abandoned it after at most a few chapters. This time I felt the same at the beginning. In fact, I did decide to stop reading it somewhere in the middle; but I didn't want to drop out of the read-along, so I kept going. I'm glad I did. Like Lorraine, I really like the chapter on Action. I feel it is innovative, filled with potential, and poetic! Though the next chapter felt somewhat anticlimactic to me, I was caught completely by surprise by the ending, which points to a lot of pathways for me. As a result, I immediately picked up The Life of the Mind and also started reading some of Arendt's essays on politics and history, all of which I find fascinating and important. If a book is measured by how useful it is in helping to open one's mind, I would rate The Human Condition very highly indeed, in spite of all its shortcomings.
Like The Human Condition, it is difficult and requires unyielding concentration. But unlike the former, it does not seem to contain as many detours and digressions. That's my very early impression. In any case, given the conclusion of The Human Condition, I think Arendt had no choice but to investigate the life of the mind. I am looking forward to comparing her study with Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking. As I have been puzzling about this subject in recent years, this book is a must-read.
I really liked the chapter on Action. Her argument on forgiveness and promise as ways of dealing with the inherent permanence of all action in the world felt very generative, and I think doing a secular reading of the message of forgiveness as found in the gospels is philosophically useful, given the continued influence of those ideas in secular society and the political elements of early Christianity itself.
As for the rest of it, I felt like her argument was selective, unintuitive and didn’t pay dividends in terms of clarity or truth. Arendt is clearly very well read and it did introduce me to some other books I plan to read. I expect them to be better than this one too!
I really enjoyed this book – I found a lot of different new tools for examining reality (the archimedes point turning inward, the stories of scientists who seriously discussed the philosophy of science, the shift to treating invention as a process rather than as created artifacts, the underemphasis in the modern world on the vida politica) and feel it's complemented my own perspective.
I particularly liked the (contentious) perspective that Marx actually follows from the tradition of Locke and Smith, rather than breaking from them completely. It's something I'll have to think more about. It also tied in nicely to some of my reading of Byung-Chul Han, who is definitely influenced by this book.
I read the first two chapters of The Human Condition and gave up. I just couldn't tell where Arendt was going with the distinctions she was making, and based on your summaries, it doesn't appear that anything was ever clarified.
I did not see it coming at all, the conclusion of The Human Condition. Though the book argues again and again for the importance of action and the public sphere, it nevertheless ends with the following quote from Cato: “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.” Why?
Arendt’s central line of reasoning in The Human Condition is clear (even though many details are not): What constitutes the essence of humanity, what makes us different from all other living organisms, is our capacity to act as unique individuals and among other unique individuals. Modern society, however, has brought about the domination of our active life by animal laborans and the decline of the public sphere. As a result, Man “is on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come.” The “future of man” is at stake. So what does Arendt suggest we do? Not much, or a lot; depending on your point of view.
Arendt writes: “In this existentially most important aspect, action, too, has become an experience for the privileged few”. She continues: “Thought, finally . . . is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom.” In these “dark times,” the only act of resistance is for every one of us to struggle to continue to think. But what does to think mean? To answer this question, Arendt decided to investigate “the life of the mind” as her next philosophical project.
When I was reading the last paragraph of The Human Condition, I was immediately reminded of Theodore Adorno, one of the founding members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Here’s the famous opening sentence of his book Negative Dialectics: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried.” In other words, it continues to be important to think. Given the similarities in their training, backgrounds and life circumstances, we should not be surprised by common strains in the thinking of Adorno and Arendt.
There is another common theme between the two that I think we must not overlook. Both believed, when they returned to Germany after the war, that it was dangerous to try to forget the past, to move beyond it, too quickly. Adorno wrote: “One wants to break free of the past . . . wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive. National Socialism lives on” and he considers “the survival of National Socialism within (italicized) democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against (italicized) democracy.” Adorno’s concepts of Authoritarian Personality and Collective Narcissism are remarkably similar to Arendt’s description of life in modern mass society pervaded by production and consumption.
When I first started reading The Human Condition, I assumed that the book was Arendt’s attempt to find a counter-measure for Totalitarianism. I wasn’t wrong, but my interpretation was too narrow. Like Adorno, Arendt is also alerting us to the totalitarian tendencies already within democratic societies. She is telling us: “Don’t just look for enemies on the outside; look for them within ourselves also.” For me, this is the most important lesson of The Human Condition.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see that Arendt’s career represented a life-long, continuous effort to achieve an understanding (her favorite word) of the ever-evolving human condition and the challenges it presents. Each of her major publications constituted a step in that life-long process. I admire her dedication and determination.
I have wanted to comment but have had difficulty formulating any reasonable coherent thoughts. I have found this to be a difficult read. It’s densely written. I have described it to my wife as Arendt uses ALL the words in her writing. Weeding through that to the salient points has been challenging.
There has been some wise foretelling of the future we currently live in and it’s clear this has come through reasoned contemplation on her part. Funny when she puts so much focus on action.
Each chapter has meandered about and rarely felt like a connected whole. It’s as if she’s gathered a series of intellectual café debates and put them together in one book. I’m glad I’ve read it but I’m left feeling like I may have missed the point(s).
To me, Arendt painted a vivid picture of our predicament: instead of building long lasting artifacts that create our world and taking pride in their quality and durability, we transitioned to producing things that are literally one step away from being garbage that is slowly filling up and destroying the planet. Current society is obsessed with constantly optimizing the process of creation of products rather than with products of work themselves. This leads to our producing stuff cheaper thereby making us richer in material sense, however this obsession with process and optimization empoverishes us spiritually making it difficult for people to live meaningful lives, making them mere cogs in the capitalistic machine. Arendt seems to see action as our only way out of this absurdity however I am not sure many people would be interested in heeding her advice. The majority of people, despite being anxious and depressed for unclear to them reasons, continue laboring at their meaningless jobs, constantly producing and consuming poor quality stuff thereby sustaining the entire system whose ultimate goal is growth. Social media was supposed to become THE town square for action. Instead, it became the place where people just show themselves endlessly consuming food, clothes, travel, makeup etc etc. In a way, they do reveal themselves to others, but only as consumers. To Arendt action is about starting something new and is closely tied with her concept of natality. If one believes in liberaltarian free will, one could consider Arendt's prescription to treat the societal illness that she so vividly describes. As a determinist, my view on this is that those few people who are prone to action will act even without Arendt's help but the vast majority will not as they are not seeing anything wrong with their lives to begin with.
I’d be curious to know which chapters or sections of The Human Condition you would consider worth reading for understanding Arendt’s core message. Say you were Arendt’s editor and could choose the parts of the book made it into the proposed essay, which sections would you choose?
Arendt is, indeed, a lot more accessible through her essays, which are more clear and concise. Save the monographs for later, if you feel the urge to further explore her ideas.
To me, last two chapters were most interesting. That being said, I'm not sure you could just proceed to reading those two without reading the previous ones where she slowly builds up her case. My feeling is that if you don't have time or not interested enough to read the entire book based on what you read about it on this substack, you might as well just skip it altogether. Frankly, I don't regret reading this book but had I not read it, it would not be a big deal either. Unlike some other works of philosophy that truly changed my life and the way I think (Spinoza's Ethics for instance), The Human condition, while keeping me engaged while reading it, will probably not impact me much long term.
Valeriy, I have not read Spinoza before. Now you are making me curious. Another philosopher I really want to study is Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard is on my list as well :) After reading his poetic biography by Clare Carlisle about a year ago I really got interested in his ideas but never got around to exploring his work deeper. Time is always an issue...
If I remember correctly, Kierkegaard was heavily influenced by Spinoza.
Frankly, I'm not sure since my knowledge of Kierkegaard's philosophy is limited to his biography. I didn't get much sense of rationalism in Kierkegaard's work but, again, my familiarity with his work is superficial at best. Both of them criticized organized religion but Spinoza took a highly rarionalist approach with his geometrically styled Ethics and Theological Political Treatise vs Kierkegaard was largely a Christian existentialist criticizing Christendom for propagating a watered down version of Christianity that lacks the soul so to speak. I'm sure Kierkegaard was familiar with Spinoza's work but he did not go as far as agreeing with Spinoza's metaphysics ( that is fascinating, at least to me!).
Sounds right. I might have been thinking of Wittgenstein and got them mixed up. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
From the beginning of this book I became excited to read a new work of philosophy from an author that I had never heard of before. I have for a few years been thinking deeper about all aspects of thought and life due in most part of feeling a need to catch up on all of the reading I missed out on when I was younger and too stubborn to read. This book has scratched an itch that I never would have scratched on my own and I am thankful for that. I specifically enjoyed breaking the human essence into labor, work and action even if it didn't always make a ton of sense to me. The group discussions help relieve some of that confusion and I feel that I can leave this book on the shelf knowing that I have gained a more robust view of the world from it. The last chapter had plenty of existential ideas which should help me tackle the next book on my list "Being and Time".
Over the last ten years or so, I have tried reading The Human Condition several times. Each time I abandoned it after at most a few chapters. This time I felt the same at the beginning. In fact, I did decide to stop reading it somewhere in the middle; but I didn't want to drop out of the read-along, so I kept going. I'm glad I did. Like Lorraine, I really like the chapter on Action. I feel it is innovative, filled with potential, and poetic! Though the next chapter felt somewhat anticlimactic to me, I was caught completely by surprise by the ending, which points to a lot of pathways for me. As a result, I immediately picked up The Life of the Mind and also started reading some of Arendt's essays on politics and history, all of which I find fascinating and important. If a book is measured by how useful it is in helping to open one's mind, I would rate The Human Condition very highly indeed, in spite of all its shortcomings.
How is the Life of the Mind?
Like The Human Condition, it is difficult and requires unyielding concentration. But unlike the former, it does not seem to contain as many detours and digressions. That's my very early impression. In any case, given the conclusion of The Human Condition, I think Arendt had no choice but to investigate the life of the mind. I am looking forward to comparing her study with Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking. As I have been puzzling about this subject in recent years, this book is a must-read.
I really liked the chapter on Action. Her argument on forgiveness and promise as ways of dealing with the inherent permanence of all action in the world felt very generative, and I think doing a secular reading of the message of forgiveness as found in the gospels is philosophically useful, given the continued influence of those ideas in secular society and the political elements of early Christianity itself.
As for the rest of it, I felt like her argument was selective, unintuitive and didn’t pay dividends in terms of clarity or truth. Arendt is clearly very well read and it did introduce me to some other books I plan to read. I expect them to be better than this one too!
I really enjoyed this book – I found a lot of different new tools for examining reality (the archimedes point turning inward, the stories of scientists who seriously discussed the philosophy of science, the shift to treating invention as a process rather than as created artifacts, the underemphasis in the modern world on the vida politica) and feel it's complemented my own perspective.
I particularly liked the (contentious) perspective that Marx actually follows from the tradition of Locke and Smith, rather than breaking from them completely. It's something I'll have to think more about. It also tied in nicely to some of my reading of Byung-Chul Han, who is definitely influenced by this book.
I read the first two chapters of The Human Condition and gave up. I just couldn't tell where Arendt was going with the distinctions she was making, and based on your summaries, it doesn't appear that anything was ever clarified.