Work | The Human Condition, Chapter 4
The man-made world of things; homo faber; exchange; poetry
Last night, we had our monthly members-only Zoom call to discuss Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. I’ll be posting a recording, along with some comments, later this week. It was a great discussion, and several of the items we discussed have made their way into this post.
If you want to join future calls, become a paying subscriber. In 2025, I’ll try to host some calls that are friendlier for timezones outside of North America as well; details will be provided once I have them.
Of course, everything else associated with this read-along is free. Here’s the schedule we are following:
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
Note that for the next two weeks, we don’t have assigned readings. I’ve left a gap in the schedule so that people can rest, catch up with the read, and so on.
The man-made world of things, and the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and actions, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of the objects produced for use…The “doing of great deeds and the speaking of great words” will leave no trace, no product that might endure after the moment of action and the spoken word has passed. If the animal laborans needs the help of homo faber to ease his labor and remove his pain, and if mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking men need the help of the homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.
This passage appears near the end of chapter 4, Arendt’s chapter specifically focused on work. This is an illuminating passage that has helped me grasp some of the complexities in Arendt’s thought — and, to be frank, given me a more critical eye toward her initial characterization of the labor/work/action distinction.
Recall that at the beginning of the book, Arendt is concerned with Sputnik, this new piece of technology which seems to usher in a new epoch. The world has changed; we have changed it. So, Arendt says that we should think about what we are doing — that is, turn our philosophical eye toward human activity.
So, Arendt makes a distinction between labor, work, and action. It seems fine enough at the start, but I have struggled to see where various activities fit into the labor/work distinction in particular. This passage at the end of Chapter 4 indicates that the real source of the distinction is durability. Labor produces items that are consumed, that are ‘used up’ quickly. Work creates objects that last. Work, then, is superfluous (we don’t strictly need work to survive) but work allows us to build our world.
The doers of great deeds and the speakers of great words, the Hellenic heroes, need homo faber, man the maker, to preserve what they do and say. The laborer needs the man the maker to ease his labor. We all need homo faber in order to condition a world that then conditions us.
A key concept here is reification, introduced on page 139: “Fabrication, the work of homo faber, consists in reification.” This is the process by which an abstract idea – a schematic, a motif, an image – materialized.
Work, then, is really quite broad. The passage we began with seems to indicate that the work of the historiographer and the poet is a form of work, perhaps because of our use of tools to create reified objects (sometimes we even call them works). If this is Arendt’s categorization, so be it, but I’ll note here that this would be another departure from a traditional conception. The work of a historiographer and a poet would be classified as leisure by many in the Western tradition, not because it is idle but because intellectual activity was not regarded as work. (Notice that Aristotle says we work in order to have leisure, but that leisure consists of doing philosophy and science!)
Art is an interesting example, because art is only truly art when it is removed from the ‘context of ordinary use objects to attain its proper place in the world’ (pg 167). I’ve always found it striking that nearly everyone – across countries, cultures, and class – desires some art on their walls, however small and modest. (The exception appears to be male college students.) It gives stability, Arendt says, ‘without which [the human artifice] could never be a reliable home for men.’ Though among the arts, there are gradations, as poetry is ‘the least worldly’ because it remains closer to thought. Still, this work helps construct a world fit for human use.
Work, just like labor, is necessary, but there seems to be a hierarchy here: labor should be constrained to its minimum (the problem is that labor has overtaken our lives and the public realm), while work should be used toward good ends (and while it does allow for a public realm, and thus human connection, it is only done through the exchange market). All of this is in service of ‘acting and speaking man.’ That brings us to action, to which Arendt turns in Chapter 5.
The first post on action will go live on January 6. Enjoy the holiday break.
From page 154:
"This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen -- like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies--is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning... The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in an unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The "in order to" has become the content of the "for the sake of"; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.
I thought this passage of the chapter in particular was interesting. Her critique of utilitarianism here seems to connect to one of the original questions driving the book which is "to think what we are doing?". In a seemingly endless chain of means that goes into modern product manufacture most people involved in the process probably have no idea to what end their work is contributing. All they may be able to see is whatever is next in the chain of means. Maybe their work serves a great purpose in the end, or maybe it doesn't, but I can see how being so far from the end product could create a feeling of meaninglessness for some and for others a confusion between usefulness and meaningfulness.
The cynical part of me keeps wondering how such an intelligent woman could have written such a confused book. It has good side insights but the main argument is deliberately sort of mindless. I think the problem is that she deliberately excluded the process of contemplation from her book from page 1. Contemplation and explanation are like brother and sister and when she excludes this basic human process she ends up not really explaining anything. She moves to the level of Marx who called the art of Michelangelo nothing but "labor". She herself calls art a "work", like a mass-produced lampshade. Something important has been left out.
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As for labor, I don't think Arendt ever spent a day doing it. In college, when we weren't laboring, we would pass out pamphlets on labor to factory workers who threw them away. When I actually did labor, I was too tired to philosophize or do anything else but find a way to get out. She is writing about something she doesn't know about but feels compelled to discuss.
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As for work there are so many different kinds and they don't have a lot to do with each other, except that some are more permanent than others. What makes for permanence? She doesn't talk about that much but surely the amount of contemplation is a major difference, so why exclude this? Contemplation can translate into historical knowledge, or philosophical insight, or compassion for one's audience, or a hunger for immortality. It is a tiny factor that can be huge. She has cut off the head of her argument by foregoing it.
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Sorry for the polemic but she sounds like one of the materialist writers of 1970s who hurt people badly but are forgotten now. She is so much better than this!