Reading The Human Condition: Part 2 "The Vita Activa"

 

SNG Synopsis (my comments in italics):

I. The Human Condition

1. Vita Activa and the Human Condition

The three fundamental human activities are labor, work, and action, all are fundamental to life on earth. Labor addresses the biological processes necessary to maintain life. Work concerns the "unnaturalness of human existence" that creates the "artificial world of things" and establishes "worldliness." Action is the "only activity that goes on directly between men [plural of Man] without the intermediary of things or matter and corresponds to the human condition of plurality."

All three aspects of the human condition "are somehow related to politics." (Here's one of many places where I wish Arendt had been more specific or elucidated her statement. As I read her book as whole, I come away with the belief that politics--or at least "real" poltics--involves only action. Work and labor don't and shouldn't have a role in politics, at least as Arendt idealizes politics based on Athenian democracy.)

Natality (birth) and mortality (death) are two characteristics of the human condition, along with plurality. Arendt cites Genesis for the image of "male and female he created them." 

A polity (political body) establishes a framework for history as remembrance. 

Labor, work, and action all relate to natality, the fact that there are constant newcomers to the world. And these newcomers represent the start of something new. (Arendt draws on St. Augustine here; he's one of the key influences upon her work.) 

"Since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central activity of political, as opposed to metaphysical, thought. (9) 

Men are "conditioned beings." The things we make condition us as well as the general conditions of human life (e.g., natality, plurality, mortality, equality). 

The "human condition" is not the same as human nature. The most radical change in the human condition would be travel (and life) on another planet. Arendt cites Augustine: "A question have I become to myself." Augustine (and Arendt) contend we can't know our own nature. It's a matter of "who am I?" versus "what am I?" Arendt also seems to doubt that the human condition gives us a complete view of ourselves. She asserts "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." (10) And she notes that we now see ourselves differently than previously because we can now see ourselves from the perspective outside the earth, even as we (then) remained earthbound. 

2. The Term Vita Activa

The tradition of political thought in the West arises from the trial of Socrates and the difference between philosophy and politics. This tradition ends with Marx. Aristotle gives us the bios politikos, Augustine the via negotiosa (or actiosa) as designations of a life devoted to public-political matters. Aristotle sees three paths in life for freedom, all of which exclude labor and work. All three of the "free" paths involve a concern for the "beautiful:" 1) concern for beautiful bodily pleasures, 2) concern for beautiful deeds in the polis, and 3) contemplation of the beautiful eternal entities of philosophy. 

We need action (praxis) to sustain the world of human affairs. Thus, the despot, acting essentially alone, is not free. The world of the city-state populated by political actors--citizen--was last observed by Augustine. (14) After Augustine, politics became involved with necessity. 

All three aspects of the vita activa (labor, work, and action) are "unquiet" in both the Greek and Christian worldviews. The "Truth of Being" (Greek) or of God (Christian) can be appreciated only in stillness. The Greeks make a distinction between physei (existing of themselves; "natural") and nomo (man-made). All exists in the kosmos. Theoria equates with contemplation and is different from thought and reasoning. (How do these distinctions fit with Arendt's ideas about "thinking," especially as she explores this concept in her final work, The Life of the Mind?)

The Greek and Christian emphasis on the value of contemplation relegated the vita activa to an inferior undertaking. Marx and Nietzche reversed this tradition. Arendt refuses to take a position upon the issue of the relative value of the vita contempletiva versus the vita activa or on the issue of truth as revelation versus truth of coming from what Man has made himself. 

3. Eternity vs. Immortality

"Immortality" is "deathless, timeless on earth," the prerogative of the gods. (18) Mortality of the hallmark of the Greeks. See the line of the individual human life against the cycles of nature. Humans produce "works and deeds and words." (19) The aristoi (elites) "prefer immortal fame to moral things. (Heraclitus)." 

Socrates-Plato established the "eternal" as the center of philosophical thought. Arendt, citing the example of Socrates, contends that anyone who writes their thoughts is not concerned with eternity. (She might also have cited Jesus for this proposition. Why not?)

Plato emphasized the difference between concern with immortality as opposed to eternity. Philosophy became associated with death because of its focus on eternity. There is no activity in eternity. After the fall of Rome established the falsehood of claims of immortality. Christianity filled this void with a concern for the eternal and made the vita activa and bios politikos handmaids to the life of contemplation. Even the modern reversal of the labor-work-action triad by Marx and Nietzche was not enough to save the value of striving for immortality, which had once been the driving motive of the vita activa.