The Human Condition

"Ah, yes. The Human Condition . In German she titled it Activa oder Vom t ätigen Leben , which translated means the Life of Action . I read The Human Condition as a study of protecting spaces of freedom that are necessary for human action in the world. She writes about these tripartite distinctions between private, social, public and between labor, work and action. She discusses worldly alienation in the modern age. She’s thinking about the different activities we engage in on a daily basis and the different realms of life we’re constantly navigating and the activities that correspond with those realms. “ The Human Condition began as a study of the totalitarianian elements in Marx” I think we’re experiencing something analogous right now, this collapse between the private, social and public spheres in our quarantine conditions. Everything is taking on a new colour. But when we see the boundaries between private, social and public collapsing, when we see the politicization of private life, for Arendt that’s a red flag that totalitarianism is emerging. The Human Condition began as a study of the totalitarianian elements in Marx . She read Marx very seriously. He influenced her thinking in a number of ways, but she also disagreed with him profoundly. Her chapter on “Labor” begins, “In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized.” Arendt disagrees with Marx’s elevation of labor as the fundamental activity of the human condition. If our fundamental quality is our ability to labor, and Marx wants to liberate man from labor, then what will we do with a society of laborers who do not have to labor? As Arendt puts it, she did not share Marx’s great faith in capitalism. Yes, the opposite, in the sense that Arendt reads Marx’s elevation of labor as a break in the tradition of western political thought. I think it’s also a great work to read right now, to think about world-building and plurality. Her understanding of plurality is the idea that men and not man inhabit the earth and make the world in common. We live together with one another. No, Arendt always turns away from universal claims. She always upholds the particular over the universal. She is a conceptual thinker. She’s wrestling with these terms in order to begin to understand the contemporary moment that she’s writing about. Something that happens with the emergence of totalitarianism for her, and part of her turn against philosophy, was the idea that the concepts and categories, the banisters we hold onto in our thinking to help us understand the world, are no longer relevant. We need new language; we need new concepts to understand the world today. But that doesn’t mean we can just get rid of the old concepts like ‘authority’, ‘freedom’ ‘justice’, or ‘the good life’ . We have to think with them; but we also can’t just rely upon them as frameworks for understanding. Yes. The way that you frame it reminds me of her metaphor for Walter Benjamin’s methodology in her introductory essay to the edited volume of his work she compiled, Illuminations. It is of a pearl diver and the need to go diving through the wreckage of the past to reclaim what can be saved. She doesn’t argue that we should do away with the past. And she doesn’t favour drawing analogies with the past in order to understand the current situation, but we also, in some sense, carry those gems with us, those conceptual ideas like ‘the good’ and we have to rethink them as a traditional problem of metaphysics . We have to engage with and think about these questions anew. We can’t just reflexively rely upon them in our thinking."