Hannah Arendt · Politics
In her great work of philosophy, Arendt asks what human beings actually <em>do</em> - and divides the active life into three: the labor that keeps us alive, the work that builds a lasting world, and the action by which we appear to one another and begin something new.
Most of Western philosophy, from Plato onward, exalted the vita contemplativa - the life of contemplation, the quiet of thought withdrawn from the noise of the world - and looked down on the vita activa, the active life of doing things, as a lower, more troubled existence. In her 1958 masterpiece The Human Condition, Arendt set out to do something almost no philosopher had done: to take the active life seriously on its own terms, and to ask, plainly, what human beings are actually doing when they are busy in the world. Her aim, she said, was simply ‘to think what we are doing’ - a deceptively modest task that opened into a sweeping re-description of human existence.
Arendt’s great move was to refuse to lump all human activity together as ‘work’ or ‘labor’ or ‘behaviour.’ She insisted that the active life contains three fundamentally different activities, each answering to a different condition of human life: labor, which answers to the fact that we are living biological creatures who must eat and reproduce; work, which answers to the fact that we build an artificial world of durable things; and action, which answers to the fact that we live among a plurality of other unique human beings. Confusing these three, she argued, has had disastrous consequences for how the modern world understands itself.
Labor, for Arendt, is the activity tied to the sheer biological necessity of staying alive. It corresponds to what she calls the human condition of life itself. Like the metabolism of the body, labor moves in an endless cycle: it produces nothing that lasts, because its products - food, and the daily upkeep of the body and household - are consumed as quickly as they appear, feeding directly back into the life-process that demanded them. The laborer is never finished, because the needs of the body are never finished; hunger returns, the house must be cleaned again, the harvest must be gathered every year. In this sense labor is governed by necessity, not freedom, and is shared with all other animals - Arendt calls the human being insofar as he labors animal laborans, the laboring animal.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Arendt’s three activities of the vita activa . Explain in your own words the difference between labor (which sustains life), work (which builds a world), and action (which begins something new among others).
Leads to Aristotle.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.