On Arendt
• Labor, Work, Action

References for Theme: Labor, Work, Action

• Arendt, Hannah
• "Labor, Work, Action" (1987)

  (p.29) Active life, in other words, is not only what most men are engaged in but even what no man can escape altogether. For it is in the nature of the human condition that contemplation remains dependent upon all sorts of activities --it depends upon labor to produce whatever is necessary to keep the human organism alive, it depends upon work to create whatever is needed to house the human body, and it needs action in order to organize the living together of many human beings in such a way that peace, the condition for the quiet of contemplation is assured. ...

• "Labor, Work, Action" (1987)

  (p.30) When I enumerated the chief human activities: Labor-Work-Action, it was obvious that action occupied the highest position. Insofar as action relates to the political sphere of human life, this estimation agrees with the pre-philosophic, pre-Platonic current opinion of Greek polis life. The introduction of contemplation as the highest point of the hierarchy had the result that this order was in fact rearranged,  though not always in explicit theory. (Lip service to the old hierarchy was frequently paid when it had already been reversed in the actual teaching of the philosophers.) Seen from the viewpoint of contemplation, the highest activity was...

• "Labor, Work, Action" (1987)

  (p.31) [...] the first thing of which you might have become aware by now is my distinction between labor and work which probably sounded somewhat unusual to you. I draw it from a rather casual remark in Locke who speaks of "the labor of our body and the work of our hands." (Laborers, in Aristotelic language, are those who "with their bodies administer to the needs of life.") The phenomeual evidence in favor of this distinction is too striking to be ignored, and yet it is  a fact that, apart from a few scattered remarks and important testimony of social and institutional...

• "Labor, Work, Action" (1987)

  (p.32) Unlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things and objects, laboring always moves in the same circle prescribed by the living organism, and the end of its toil and trouble comes only with the end, i.e., the death of the individual organism.

• "Labor, Work, Action" (1987)

  (p.34) The blessing of life as a  whole, inherent in labor, can never be found in work and should not be mistaken for the inevitably brief spell of joy that follows accomplishment and attends achievement.

• "Labor, Work, Action" (1987)