Citizenship and Civic Life

Hannah Arendt

b. 1906, Hannover, Germany

d. 1975, NY

Biography

Studied under Martin Heidegger (with whom she had a brief affair) and Karl Jaspers

Active in Jewish opposition to the Nazis

Fled to France in 1933

Lived in France till 1941;

escaped internment camp, then fled to US.

NY circle of intellectuals, writers

First woman to attain full professor of politics at Princeton;

Also taught at University of Chicago, Wesleyan, New School of Social Research

Scholarly Works:

Her dissertation was on the concept of love in the work of St. Augustine

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

The Human Condition (1958)

Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

On Revolution (1963)

The Life of the Mind (posthumously 1978)

Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982)

Essays: Between Past and Future

Men in Dark Times

Crises of the Republic

For a brief discussion of her major works/theoretical contributions see: Hannah Arendt in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Human Condition

What is the distinction between labor, work, and action? Define each.

Labor – what’s necessary to keep oneself alive

What slaves are compelled to do

“Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself (570).”

Work – the creation of material things; what craftsmen and artisans do

“Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. …The human condition of work is worldliness.”

Action – the speech and deeds of people in public affairs freely chosen

“Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life (570).”

“Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live (570).”

In other words, to be human is to be unique AND to be in the company of others who are unique.

Yet we are also CONDITIONED beings (571)

“Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediate assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. Whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition. The impact of the world’s reality upon human existence is felt and received as a conditioning force. The objectivity of the world—its object- or thing-character—and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence (571).”

What does this mean?

What would Arendt think about the “state of nature” as imagined by Hobbes or Locke?

“To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not the same as human nature…(571).

“Nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things. If we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what’ (571).

VITA ACTIVA 

Contrasts with vita contemplative

the theoretical life; what philosophers do; the contemplation (theoria) of the eternal

Which Greeks often venerated; saw as highest human activity

Arendt declares POLITICS as the most human activity

The VITA ACTIVA as the kind of activity we should all aim to achieve

Where/when was the vita activa most evident in the real world?

In the polis, the Greek city-state;

in Greek: bios politicos; a life devoted to public-political matters (472)

The vita activa is made possible for the citizen

through the labor of the slave and the work of the craftsman

Most desirable way of life:

Greek Bios theoretikos/Latin vita contempliva