Hannah Arendt Human Condition Summary

Hanna Arendt (Könisgurg, 1906 - New York, 1975), political philosopher, was a student of Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger. She received her doctorate at 22, University of Heidelberg. Persecuted for being Jewish, escaped the Nazis, going to France in 1933. From there, she was expatriated to the United States in 1941, becoming an American citizen in 1951. She was research director and visiting professor of many prestigious American Universities. Among the books she published, are: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); Human condition (1958); On revolution (1963); Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and On Violence (1970).

"Human Condition", a book of intellectual maturity, is the part of her composition that most matters to the question of work. Throughout

She identifies in the classical Greek period a substantial division between the occupations of thinking and acting, between vita contemplativa and vita activa. The first encompasses religious reflections and theoretical thinking; the second involves the action, the work and the labor. The author describes how these three activities of vita activa were considered, prioritized and reordered through History (Baehr, 2003). She particularly holds on the analysis of how the vita activa has become prioritized after the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the emergence of capitalism. On a deeper level of analysis, Arendt shows how the human condition, source and result of the vita activa, altered with the prevalence of the labor, over the work and the

We consider serious activities only those which provide economic sustenance. We have merged Plato’s “art of making money" to all the arts. People forgot that liberty also resides, as longed by the Greeks, on the freedom of not having to support themselves. We confuse the ability to consume with emancipation. We have come to an era of consumption for everyone, which will necessarily be an era of labor of all.

The era of labor leaves behind the man-made world, a world consisted of permanent things - shelters, comforts - things that are used, not consumed. Indeed, motorization, mechanization, automation, computerization, are able to free humankind from labor. However, it do not transfer the useful energy for leisure, that is, for the enjoyment of life. In the today’s economy, we call pleasure the consumption of futility, not utilities.

Hegel, structuring the dialectic of the master and the slave, came close to the distinction between labor and work. Only the slave produces a work. Although the slave do not consume. What he produces is not his, nor is he who decides what and how to produce. The slave plays animal life, is not humanized. Nor is the master, who merely consumes, humanized. Only being his own master, the slave can be humanized. Arendt seeks to show that the slave made master is condemned to an endless work; he begins to serve another master: the work itself (Rogue,