The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

Published in 1958

The flyleaf in my copy of this book records that I bought this book on 12 October 1974 for the cover price of $3.75. I was taking off a year from college before the start of my senior year in 1975.  I don't recall if I read it before I returned to school the next fall, but I do know that I read Arendt, either this The Human Condition or her Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (or perhaps both). I'd taken a couple of courses in political thought and hadn't done all that well, but the topic drew me in and has never left me. The Human Condition was assigned for a contemporary political thought class that I took the following fall, and then I sat-in on an entire class about Arendt in the fall of 1978 while I was in law school. So, I estimate that I'd read the book at least twice before--and last about 42 years ago. 

But while I don't believe that I've read The Human Condition completely since 1978, Arendt's work and thought stayed with me, fermenting as I've considered it and as I've continued to refine my political thinking. 

With the election of a right-wing authoritarian as president 2016, my mind turned once again to Arendt and to her thought. And with the great pandemic of 2020, I joined the Virtual Reading Group" at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College (remote, of course). I'm now back again exploring works of Arendt that I'd not read before, such as Men in Dark Times and Essays in Understanding: 1930-1964. But Arendt provides more than emergency reading--the value of her insights transcend the "times of troubles" from which so much of it arose. 

When I first read Arendt, I recall the sensation of reading by lightning flashes. So many of her insights remained hidden or obscure to me, but these obstacles were interspaced with flashes of insight that prompted me to press on. Now, after four more decades of reading and learning, I can read her works with a greater appreciation and at least a pretense of comprehension. The Human Condition is a brilliant book. Brilliant not simply in the sense of sharp or engaging, but in the sense that it sheds an intense, revealing light upon politics, labor, work, and the Modern Age. By engaging with this book, one cannot but help but coming to a deeper understanding and engagement with the world. Despite having been written in 1958 (a very different time!), it helps us comprehend our current situation by grounding her analysis within the framework of the human condition (a term she unpacks in the book).

In this book, Arendt lays out some of her most important and enduring ideas. These include three attributes of "the human condition:" natality, mortality, and plurality (which entails a type of equality). In brief, natality refers to the fact that each human person is born into the world. As Arendt notes, this fact gives rise to newness, the initiation of something (someone) unique and therefore underlies the basis of freedom. On the other end of each human life is mortality, that each person will die. We enter and exit. So what do we leave behind? Plurality reflects that we each are born into a human community, of which we are but one among many. Plurality gives rise to political and social life. 

The main emphasis of the book is upon what Arendt labels the vita activa, the Latin phrase that we can understand as the active life. This form of life, with its three components, contrasts with the vita contempletiva, the life of contemplation that developed in late antiquity with Stoicism and Epicureanism and that was adopted Christianity and became the ideal way of life in the world of  Medieval Christianity. But with the rise of the Modern Age, the vita activa took the preferred role, but with an inversion of the classical hierarchy of action, work, and labor. The three modes of life within the vita activa include action, work, and labor, which Arendt identified as going back to ancient Greece and that survived well into the Roman period. For the Greeks of the city-state during the flowering of democracy, action was the most highly valued way of life. Action consists of speech and deeds done in public among one's peers; to wit. politics. Work consists of the making of items that were durable and not for consumption; tools and tables and works of art, for instance. Arendt argues that these items provide a continuing presence to human life that no individual life or consumable good could provide. I venture that these items produced by work are the cultural artifacts of archeologists, the pottery shards and bits of papyrus that allow us to see the physical world of ages past. The third activity in the vita activa is labor. In the ancient Greek world, this was the lowest form of life, mostly addressed by slaves. It represents the necessity of certainty activities and functions that allow the continuation of a human life. However, with the advent of the Modern Age, with the coming of more advanced technologies and new forms of life and production, labor gained a new level of importance. Economic and socio-political thinking came to place the greatest values on consumption and the processes of life and therefore labor became more highly valued. This trend was especially important in the work of Karl Marx (whom Arendt addresses at length in this book and whose importance she recognizes without adopting Marxism). 

The description above is a brief summary of the guiding concepts upon which the remainder of the book rests. What Arendt does with these concepts is quite amazing. For with these fundamental insights, she comes to grips with ideas and events that have created our world. In addition to Marx, Arendt draws deeply upon the classical world and modern thought, often citing Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, in addition to the likes of Kant, Hegel (not much), Nietzsche, Bergson, and Whitehead. (Of note here is the fact that Arendt cites her teacher Heiddegar not at all in this book (perhaps for obvious reasons) and her other teacher--and friend--Karl Jaspers only in two footnotes, both related to Descartes.) To be clear, despite her firm grounding in the Western philosophical tradition, her thought is unique and original in a stunning way. Also, I should note, her mastery of issues outside of philosophy, such as economics and economic history and political and social history are astonishing. But be forewarned: reading her work is often not easy. To fully grasp everything that she wrote in this book, one would need to prove the master of five languages: English, German, French, ancient Greek, and Latin. (Happily, the body of the text is in English with Greek and Latin occasionally interspersed, while the French and German are mostly restricted to footnotes!)

As I look back upon this work that has influenced me so much, I have to address the question of "why?" I came to college very interested in politics (declaring my major upon my first registration). Both of my parents were active in politics, especially my father, although he was not a politician. By the time I went to college, acting as my father's apprentice, I'd already been to two national political conventions, attended meetings with governors and senators, and sat through all manor and level of political meetings. I gained a sense of what ground-level politics consisted of in the United States. In college, my freshman year, I took a survey course on political thought: Plato, Machiavelli, Mill, Marx, and contemporary developments. It was perhaps in this class that I first heard of Arendt. In any event, as I related above, I eventually came to read her on my own before any class requirement. What I discovered was a sense of politics that conferred upon political activity (Arendt's "action") a sense of dignity that one wouldn't intuit from my earlier ground-level experience. Speech and action based on thought, deeds that were worthy of history. The creation of a polity in which one could express oneself and one's insights and have an opportunity to act in concert with others to create something that, while certainly ephemeral, could nevertheless prove worth remembering. For some, politics could prove a calling, a way to be in the world. I never "went into politics" (ran for public office), but I've remained outspoken about political issues, and I've actively supported candidates. And, for a career, I pursued the law, which is the use of speech to attempt to avoid and resolve conflicts and to refine the daily operations of politics have been resolved in some measure (but not completely) by the adoption of laws. Speech and that actions that arise from speech are certainly among the highest and most distinctive human traits, and no one has made this more clear to me than Hannah Arendt. No gift is more valuable to have received in this age of increasing authoritarianism and deception in the public realm than Arendt's guidance about the value of speech and action in the public realm.