1. At the conclusion of my analysis of the Origins of
Totalitarianism I argued that Arendt viewed totalitarianism not as some
historical accident but an event whose conditions of possibility had been
promoted by the specific dynamics of bourgeois modernity. As I argued
previously, this does not mean that totalitarianism can be identified with
modernity nor, even stronger, that it is the essence of modernity. Rather, it
is simply the darkest potential of this society. Arendt believed that in
totalitarianism she had unveiled the political question of this historical
moment and a phenomenon of general and continuing relevance for the future of
modernity. In The Human Condition (1958) she explores the lifeworld and
dominant activities of modern society in order to illuminate its underpinning
categorical and value framework. Her analysis of the atomisation of the masses
had hinted at a link between pervasive social loneliness and the activity of
labouring: the dominant activity of modernity. Returning to this theme, she
argued this isolation leads to the growing conformism of a society of
labourers. This is because isolation suppresses the internal dialogue of
thinking that is modeled on the public world and its inter-subjective
interchange of opinions. This has made thoughtlessness one of the outstanding
characteristics of the age. This was the most controversial proposition of her
analysis of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann did not appear to Arendt as a monster
despite the fact that he had performed a pivotal role in the annihilation of
millions. He was rather a person who, according to Arendt, simply lacked the
capacity to think. She thought all his motivations were thoroughly banal. However, Arendt turned out to be quite
wrong about Eichmann. Subsequent evidence has shown that the he was not simply
the dour and faceless bureaucrat simply doing his duty that he attempted to portray
during his trial in Jerusalem but a convinced racist who committed his crimes
out of absolute conviction.
The aim of The Human Condition is not to provide a
philosophy of history as a process of decline or other “answers” but to
"think what we are doing" in precisely the way that she believed
Eichmann had failed (HC5). Arendt substantiates this link between the character
of mass society and the activity of labour by examining the historical
transformation of the most general human activities and their traditional
hierarchy. For Arendt, this general phenomenology of human activities was to
serve as a crucial prelude to a new science of politics. That Arendt was
interested in a new science of politics must be rightly understood. Katznelson
has located her in a tradition of post-war American thinkers interested in
saving Enlightenment for liberal democracy that he calls the political studies
Enlightenment group that included Polyani, Dahl, Lasswell and Lippman. As we
have already seen, Arendt tries to combine macro-historical analysis of key
dynamics with systematic propositions about political parties and, inside both,
explanations of variations in the choices and actions of historical actors. Her
idea was that only by being more aware of all dimensions of the human
condition could political philosophy overcome the blinked vision that had
blinded it to the crisis of its own categories in the face of the political
disasters of the 20th century. Traditional political philosophy had tended to
homogenise the full range of human experience into the categories of only type
of human activity. Thus Marxism, for example, is a philosophy of
"labour" and liberalism of "work" both leading to an impoverished
understanding of the true nature of politics.
2. The Human Condition was initially part of a planned
critique of Marx. In the ideological context of the Cold War with many
intellectuals of the left still having strong sympathies for the Communist
regime, Arendt was keen to challenge what she considered to be an uncritical
reception of Marx. The substance of this critique was that Marx’s thought was
the best expression of the deepest tendencies of modernity. He accepted the
deepest presuppositions of the age and therefore is unable to provide a
sufficiently critical distance and understanding of its most threatening
potentials.
3.The Human Condition is the most explicitly
philosophical and abstract of Arendt's major works. In it she examines the most
general elements of the "human condition"-- its constant experiences,
activities and spaces. A genuine political philosophy must take into account
the full range of fundamental human activities and spaces. Arendt's inspiration
here undoubtedly comes from Heidegger. This influence is rather complicated but
a few words will allow you to see the basic links. The phenomenological
response to the crisis of metaphysics was to argue that philosophy had
neglected the fundamental embeddedness of humans in a pre-existing everyday
world. Phenomenology had confined investigation to appearances. Heidegger
appropriated and revised this method in his famous 1927 work Sein und Zeit. One of his fundamental
insights was that the true relationship between the self and the world was not
that of detached subject and object but an indissoluble linkage between human
awareness and the environing world. This emphasis promised a shift of attention
away from the artificially constructed objects of natural science to the more
fundamental and encompassing stratum of experience typical of everyday life.
Thus Heidegger begins with a phenomenological study of everyday life. He wants
to privilege the human world revealed to phenomenology over the
"reconstructed world” of scientific observation. He dismisses epistemological
problems as a product of the artificial separation of subject and object. In
everyday life we already find ourselves amidst a world of pre-existing objects
and relations. Just as Kant had tried to designate the categories according to
which the world is seen scientifically (as caused, limited), Heidegger proposed
to do the same thing for this more primal everyday world by formulating the
categories of a fundamental ontology (care, anxiety, fallenness). This ontology
would investigate not the nature of being, as the substructure of the cosmos
but of the being of man in the world, the fundamental and complex ways in which
Dasein already finds itself thrown
into a contingent, historical and inter-subjective cultural world. It seems
that Arendt's key categories like labor, work and action are existentials in a similar way. By
articulating the human condition
she hopes to illuminate what it means to be in the world. Of course, we have
already confronted Arendt’s employment of such concepts, for example, in her
analysis of loneliness. Such a concept would be rejected by standard social
science as too vague, in need of operational definition and not necessarily
affirmed by subjects themselves who may not feel themselves lonely. However,
loneliness in Arendt’s sense does not require this sort of empirical
verification. Her whole point is that many individuals within mass society
possess neither the learning nor the personal reflexivity to compare their
current state with that of previous historical times or alternative
possibilities. They may not feel lonely or not have the language to describe
this generalised sense of lack. Nevertheless, to the phenomenological observer
they are lonely people. Clearly Arendt believed that such a phenomenological
analysis of the full scope of the
human condition provided her with a comprehensive backdrop against which
to rethink our political vocabulary. Of course, the problem with this approach
is that it heavily privileges the standpoint of the observer without
independent verification.
4.
Before recapitulating the main elements of Arendt' s analysis of the “human
condition”, we need to understand what sort of status she attributes to this
concept. Arendt makes it clear that the "human condition" is not
"human nature". In the Prologue to the book she concedes that with
the exploration of space the modern age has now given way to the modern world.
This epochal shift presents the real possibility of humans choosing to abandon
the conditions of earthboundedness that had previously been the natural habitus for humans. In fact, Arendt
speculates that the space project is itself the expression of a strong desire
on the part of secular man to escape the
human condition, which had previously limited humans to life on
earth (HC1). The conditions in which humans choose to live in the future may be
drastically different from any that they have encountered before. Even so, we
could hardly deny the “humanity" of the inhabitants of this new man
created environment (HC10). Human beings have the capacity to radically reshape
not only the conditions of their self-created human artifice but also their
very own nature. This makes it virtually impossible to say what "human
nature" is. We are not entitled to assume that humans have a nature or
essence in the same way as other things. Arendt agrees with Marx in arguing
that human nature is not instinctually fixed as is the nature of animals.
Everything that is typically understood as essential to our humanity is not an
innate attribute but a creation of our membership within a specific community
and the decisions that it makes. For Arendt, the unique capacity of human
beings to initiate and adapt is compounded by an epistemological difficulty
suppressed in the concept of human nature. She maintains the question of
"human nature" is a theological one. To know "human nature"
requires a God's eye view, we would have to know the end of the human story. As
such a privileged and finalist view is clearly inaccessible, the question of
human nature remains insoluble (HC10).
5.
However, the shift from the question of human nature which remains
"insoluble" to the question of the "human condition" does
not allow us resolve the question of human essence or nature, so to speak,
indirectly by exhaustively specifying all the conditions which explain the
essence of man. On this point Arendt is very clear. Elaboration of the
"human condition" is not another way of describing what man is, nor
is it, for her, an untranscendable "iron cage", circumscribing the
ultimate limits of humanity. On the contrary, Arendt is at pains to underline
that the conditions of human existence can neither explain what we are, nor can
they condition us absolutely. The most essential thing about humans is their
unpredictability and capacity for initiation. Arendt is attracted to the notion
of the "human condition" because it challenges the mastery phantasies
of totalitarian modernity. She underlines that we are all subject to conditions
and that conditionedness is inescapable. Human affairs consist of a web of human
relationships. While the history of humanity can be told as a story that
results from the unpredictable complexity of this web, humanity is not the
author of the story. We might call this the defining substance of Arendt's
humanism. Although we act, we are not unequivocally the authors of the eventual
outcome (HC185). Humanism is here understood as a belief that humans create
their own human environment but that this creative activity is characterised by
both its conditionedness and its essential unpredictability. Humans do not
create like god ex nilo, they are
neither omnipotent nor omniscient: her book is an attempt to delineate these
conditions and their limits. While she wants to emphasize that human nature is
radically open and cannot be identified with any definable human nature, this
open-ended-ness does not mean that we cannot know anything about ourselves. Her
vision of the human condition
also implies normative judgments as to what human capacities and conditions are
particularly significant and most fully human. What is the basis of Arendt's
prescriptive account of the human
condition? Her answer is cautious and pragmatic. The openness of her
vision precludes an essentialist definition of human nature. By shifting to a
discussion of the human condition
she wants to treat the relatively constant experiences of life (life, death,
mortality, plurality, worldliness) their activities and spaces, in a way that
both makes sense of the everyday experience of her readers but to also make use
of the whole panorama of historical experiences. There are possibilities that
modern individuals may not be aware are open to them. Reasoned inference from
history and experience allows us to reconstruct the conditions that frame our
existence. They constitute what it is to be a human being without defining it
exhaustively in an unalterable sense. Historically, we know of human nature
only in so far as it has appeared. Recent history has demonstrated that
projects to transform this nature are not beyond totalitarian arrogance.
Although Arendt clearly doubts their long-term viability, it is not impossible
that such a project might succeed. Arendt therefore cannot offer an
incontrovertible foundation for her account of the human condition but only the accuracy of her historical
reconstruction, the plausibility of her narrative and the appeal of her vision.
In a real sense she believes that this is the only way to face the task that
modernity has imposed upon us. If human autonomy and freedom is taken
seriously, we cannot fall back on some pre-established conception of our limits
and possibilities.
6.
In reconstructing the human condition,
Arendt confines her analysis to what she calls the vita activa and postpones consideration of the vita contemplativa to a later work (The Life of the Mind --of which only the first two volumes were
completed before her death) on the grounds that the latter activity of
thinking, at least in the way that Arendt understands it, is confined to an
elite while the former activities which she will divide into labour, work and
action are general human capacities which all humans participate in to varying
degrees. Arendt takes over the basic categorical framework from later classical
civilisation where contemplation was viewed as the highest activity. This value
hierarchy had itself been superimposed on classical society after the decline
of the polis and political life. Both Plato and Aristotle considered theoria the highest activity because
theoretical contemplation was not only free but its objects--the physical order
and lawfulness of the physical cosmos-- were considered eternal and therefore
more beautiful and truthful than the transitory concerns of the subluna sphere. Surrounded by an
immortal world of nature and their own Gods, the Greeks put a high value on
eternality. The quest for immortality in word and action became for their
public life the only way to combat the seeming futility of mortal human life.
One of Arendt's most important contentions is that although modernity no longer
understood the meaning of contemplation (this was because in the wake of modern
skepticism and the insight that observation was not an unproblematic means of
disclosing being, it no longer understood truth as a passive beholding beyond
thought and speech the way in which the tradition had understood contemplation)
and had completely inverted the classical hierarchy of activities in raising
labour to the pre-eminent position, it shared with the tradition the assumption
that the same central human preoccupation must govern all activities in the
sense of establishing a principle which orders the others (HC17). As we have
seen, it is one of Arendt main contentions that in doing so modernity and its
political philosophers had imposed crippling limitations on its understanding
of human existence and political life.
7. Within this all-encompassing classical hierarchy of human
activities constructed by philosophy (in which contemplation stood at the
pinnacle), the more ancient hierarchy of the vita activa based on the lifeworld of the polis was still
preserved. Arendt proposes to take over the general order of this hierarchy in
her own articulation of the activities of the human condition. To appreciate why Arendt returns to the
ancients and wants to base her own hierarchy of human activities on those of
Pre-Socratic Greek society, it is again worthwhile to mention Heidegger. He
believed that historical changes had largely obscured the fundamental
ontological categories of being. These, however, remained evident in the original
European languages, especially early Greek. Arendt appears to adopt a similar
strategy in exploring Greek and Latin authors for interpretative clues in
discerning the original meaning of certain political concepts, which, for her,
express a deeper, more authentic insight into the human condition. As with the ancients, labour is located at
the bottom of the hierarchy because it is bound to the vital necessities of the
life process. At the level of biological life and its survival the human
species is an undifferentiated and uniform. The qualities of labour typically
mirror this in its monotony, drudgery and repetition. Labour is that necessary
moment of the metabolic exchange with nature. Life can only be sustained if
that which has been used up in consumption is constantly renewed. Labour is the
perpetual activity of renewal that maintains the circular processes of life.
This means that labour and consumption are the two sides of the cyclical
process that is life. As Arendt puts it, ‘The human condition of labor is life itself’ (HC7). If labour is
bound to the necessities of life and a natural cycle, work, for Arendt,
corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence. You will remember that
Arendt views the totalitarian project as an attempt to reduce man to beast. It
follows that she conceives humanity as especially concentrated in those
capacities that elevate us above a mere natural condition. Work achieves this
by creating an artificial world of things, which are both distinct from natural
surroundings and provides a durable home (one that is meant to outlast its
creators) and even objectivity. This includes not just functional buildings but
also decorative things like art. She maintains that the inherent purpose of art
is ‘to attain permanence throughout the ages’ (LWA178). For Arendt, as we have
already seen with her discussion of human rights and mass homelessness in
modernity, the human need to be at home in the world is very important. This is
why Arendt calls the human condition
of work: worldliness (HC7). Work is vital in the construction of a stable and
homely human environment. As she says, “without a world between man and nature,
there would be only eternal movement and no objectivity”. The world suspends
those processes of constant flux that characterise both external nature and our
internal biology. Work saves the animal
laborans from immediacy and cyclicality. But as we will immediately see, it
also preserves the products of action that without the durability of work would
lose their reality and disappear as a result of their intangibility and
fleetingness. However, Arendt also
makes it very clear that work is circumscribed by a utilitarian logic of means
and end that makes it predictable and completely saturates the process of
fabrication. The world of work is rendered dead to any meaningfulness beyond
itself and does not fully realise human potential. However, this deficit is
made good by the highest activity of the vita
activa: action. Action is in the world but not of the world. This activity
is the direct interaction of humans without the mediation of things and is
construed by Arendt as corresponding to the
human condition of plurality. Plurality signifies the fact that the
world is inhabited not by man but men in their irreducible diversity. She holds
the condition of plurality to be the essence of political life. However this is
an aspect too often overlooked, ignored or dismissed by the tradition of
political theory. Action as political participation was the pinnacle of the
classical vita activa. The political
life of the polis was considered to be the only adequate existence of a free
man. Arendt endorses this view in asserting that only in this realm are humans
able to full realise their inherent capacities for speech and reason and demonstrate
their distinctiveness and have it recognised by a public audience of equals.
This is also the realm in which equals strive to out do each other in a
competition for recognition and glory. For this reason she appreciates the high
value the ancients put on praxis. This category of action has no end outside of
itself: the mutual interaction and struggle of citizens in the pursuit of
immortal glory was an end in itself. But such action is also unpredictable
insofar as its impact on the world cannot be contained or reversed. Action is
always frustrating in a way that cannot be avoided by reducing its to making or
techne. The only way to limit the
consequences of this unpredictability is the human institutions of promising
and forgiveness. Promising corresponds to the existence of human freedom in
conditions of non-sovereignty. While they are unable to expunge the
irreversible consequences of action, the actor contains it by pledging to
specific projects and constraints and making subjective amends for wrongs done.
Thus keeping promises and individual identity are interrelated insofar as the
act of promising also forges the bounds of stability.
8.
Arendt identifies the human creative capacity with the human condition of
natality. Human beings come into the world as a new beginning, unique and
unrepeatable. They possess an immanent spontaneity that means their future
action is always unpredictable. One of her favourite lines was from Augustine
that she employed as early as the concluding lines of the Origins of Totalitarianism. They signify the rebirth of historical
hope in the very culmination of her story of the darkest historical night of
the holocaust, "that a new beginning be made man was created".
Natality is a pre-political potential for creation that can only be brought to
fruition in action. While birth individuates biologically, it does not realise
this existentially. To be fully realised, the potential uniqueness of birth
must be actualised through a "second birth" where singularity assumes
shape in action. Natality therefore invokes the essentially undetermined
character of humanity. Natality is the gift of a natural freedom but it does
not make humanity free. The fact that our gift is always exposed to conditions
we do not control, means that it remains in Benjamin’s sense a “weak messianic
force” for which there is neither certainty nor inevitability, but only hope.
The fragility of this hope makes natality the very opposite of sovereignty.
Only the conditions that allow human creativity to take flight can bolster
hope. Becoming free means acting
with others and the fullest expression of freedom is action within a public
context. For Arendt human political creativity is the messianic ingredient of
democratic politics. This in turn can only flower with a restoration of the
political understanding of the concept of freedom. For her, freedom is not one
amongst the many problems of politics but the very reason why men live together
at all.
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