The Human Condition
by Arendt, Hannah (2013)
Abstract
A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its original publication, contains an improved and expanded index and a new introduction by noted Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan which incisively analyzes the book's argument and examines its present relevance. A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the leading social theorists in the United States. Her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy and Love and Saint Augustine are also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Key Passage
It is true that the enormous improvement in our labor tools—the mute robots with which homo faber has come to the help of the animal laborans, as distinguished from the human, speaking instruments (the instrumentum vocale, as the slaves in ancient house- holds were called) whom the man of action had to rule and oppress when he wanted to liberate the animal laborans from its bondage— has made the twofold labor of life, the effort of its sustenance and the pain of giving birth, easier and less painful than it has ever been. This, of course, has not eliminated compulsion from the laboring activity or the condition of being subject to need and necessity from human life. But, in distinction from slave society, where the "curse" of necessity remained a vivid reality because the life of a slave testified daily to the fact that "life is slavery," this condition is no longer fully manifest and its lack of appearance has made it much more difficult to notice and remember. The danger here is obvious. Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. And while it may be true that his strongest impulse toward this liberation comes from his "repugnance to futility," it is also likely that the impulse may grow weaker as this "futility" appears easier, as it requires less effort. For it is still probable that the enormous changes of the industrial revolution behind us and the even greater changes of the atomic revolution before us will remain changes of the world, and not changes in the basic condition of human life on earth. Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects. Their role, no matter how great it may be in the labor of any given civilization, can never attain the fundamental importance of tools for all kinds of work. No work can be produced without tools, and the birth of homo faber and the coming into being of a man-made world of things are actually coeval with the discovery of tools and instruments. (p.121)
Keywords
Arendt, Technology, Modernity, Animal Laborans, Homo FaberThemes
The Human Condition [1958], Arendt CitationsLinks to Reference
- https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=ARBJAgAAQBAJ
- https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ARBJAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=arendt+human+condition&ots=dFeusJMB1E&sig=LfzpGMGtY8xcXijk7XpJao2L9ak
- https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/af46/d95e3728c38a3cccbbf60c58282c94bbf697.pdf
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