ON THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

DRAFT 1.4: February 20, 2007. 

For the Western Political Science Association.

This is a draft; comments are welcome but please do not cite or circulate without permission.

© 2007 Patchen Markel

자료: ON THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

※ Memo: some undelines and colorings are added by this reader just for individual study. To see the original paper of the author, please refer to the link above.

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Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, published in 1958, has proved to be one of the twentieth century’s most fertile works of political thought, and also one of its most maddening. The book still prompts dismissive anger among some readers, who complain that Arendt is too conservative, or too radical, or too haughty, or too Greek, or too masculine, or too muddled. Many other readers are drawn in, but often enough what hooks them—us—is the itch of perplexity that Arendt’s writing stimulates. This essay is the beginning of an effort to account for, if not to scratch, that itch; to shed some light on the peculiar combination of fascination and puzzlement her book so often provokes. It focuses on what I shall call the “architecture” of The Human Condition, which I hope will suggest both the conceptual structures for which Arendt is famous (for instance, the triadic distinctions among public, private and social, and among labor, work, and action), as well as the structure or arrangement of the book, the written work, which is itself a meaningful joining-together of parts. 

Like some other readers, I shall suggest that the perplexity Arendt’s concepts arouse is not accidental, that it is the symptom of her investment in at least two different understandings of the purpose and operation of her own conceptual apparatus.[2] But my strategy here is not to tease out the distinct strands of intellectual influence that helped produce these understandings, nor do I track the ways in which their fortunes wax and wane over the length of Arendt’s career. Instead, I attend to the relationship between these two different conceptual architectures within a single work. To do this, I read The Human Condition less as a snapshot of Arendt’s “position” at a moment in time than as an extended effort at articulation, in the course of which Arendt’s substantive reflections on the vita activa become intertwined with, and begin to exert pressure upon, her own sense of the work her concepts are performing. My aim is thus neither to place Arendt on a pedestal of infallibility nor to ransack her thought for useful loot, but simply to track the resulting turns and mutations in the architecture of The Human Condition, and to understand their significance. 

The specific perplexity that will serve as my point of departure is nothing new. For decades, readers of The Human Condition have puzzled over the meaning and function of the distinction that organizes the three central chapters of the book—the distinction among “labor,” through which human beings meet the repetitive necessities of life; “work,” through which we produce lasting artifacts; and “action,” through which we appear in our uniqueness to each other in word and deed.[3] On the one hand, Arendt’s insistence on the specificity of these three constituents of the vita activa often makes it seem as though she intends them to be disjunctive categories into which instances of human activity can be sorted; or, even more strongly, that she sees labor, work, and action as properly belonging to separate domains, whose boundaries must be secured for the sake of resurrecting and preserving the fragile experience of action in particular.[4] On the other hand, the resulting insistence on the “autonomy of action” has seemed, even to sympathetic readers, to risk reducing action to a kind of “empty posturing,” purified not only of contamination by necessity and instrumentality, but also of the content that might give it significance: as Hanna Pitkin famously worried, “her way of trying to protect and revive the public succeeds only in making its real value incomprehensible to us.”[5] 

One now-familiar response to this problem has been to interpret Arendt’s distinction among labor, work, and action—not without support from the text—as a distinction among “attitudes,” or “ideal types,” or useful “abstractions,” thereby preserving the analytic force of the distinction while acknowledging the unavoidable, perhaps even welcome overlap of labor, work and action in the “welter of worldly activity.”[6] This has been a fruitful approach; but it does not settle things, for two reasons. First, although these interpretations of Arendt’s distinction are by no means textually baseless, they are—avowedly—textually selective; they require us to set aside those passages in The Human Condition in which Arendt’s drive toward purification seems

strongest, as when, early in the book, in a passage to which I shall return, she declares that “each human activity points to its proper location in the world” (73).[7] So even if we prefer to follow Arendt’s later suggestion that one human activity can be “overlaid” or “overgrown” with another (183), we must nevertheless also ask how these two versions of her central distinction are related to each other: is their coexistence merely a symptom of Arendt’s confusion, or can we learn anything from the specific ways in which they appear and interact in the text of The Human Condition? Second, these formulations make Arendt’s distinction more supple by narrowing its scope: they tell us that she means to separate labor, work, and action as attitudes or as concepts, and they distinguish this sort of separation from the literal segregation of activities, agents, or spaces. Yet I doubt Arendt would accept such a sharp dissociation of the conceptual and phenomenal registers. So we might ask instead whether the work performed by Arendt’s distinctions is always and only the work of separation, of establishing and enforcing impassable boundaries between spaces, whether those spaces are conceptual, social, or both at once. 

In this essay I pursue these two questions together. By focusing on a few crucial parts of The Human Condition, including some of its textual and conceptual joints, I hope to make at least a preliminary case for the following hypothesis: In the early chapters of The Human Condition, certainly through the chapter on “Labor,” Arendt’s distinctions do, indeed, seem to be meant primarily to do the work of separation, to guard against the transgression of boundaries; as the book proceeds, however—and especially over the course of the critical chapter on “Work,” in which the fraught intertwining of the substance of her thought and its method is tightest and most consequential—this first architecture, which we might call “territorial,” is partially displaced by another, which we might call “relational.” This displacement introduces a discontinuity within what is usually taken to be a single tripartite distinction among labor, work, and action: action is not to work as work is to labor. If, at the first juncture, Arendt responds to the threat of territorial transgression by building a wall, at the second juncture Arendt also responds to a somewhat different threat, the threat of the impoverishment of relationships among concepts or phenomena; and she does so by investigating the lines of connection and interdependence that tie spaces together.

2.

If there is anything like a “standard reading” of The Human Condition, it is safe to say that it is built around the theme of separation. The point of the book, we all know, is to divide things that have been blurred together inappropriately, to recover a lost sense of the differences among labor, work, and action, and, especially, to summon us to defend the possibility of action against the threats posed by the dominance, and invasiveness, of animal laborans and homo faber—a defense that is, at the same time, a defense of the separation between the public and private realms against its modern erosion. There is a reason that this general picture of The Human Condition has had so much power: it’s right. One would have to work hard to miss the territorial impulse in the text, and especially in its punchy, programmatic opening chapters, which are meant to color our reading of the rest of the book, and do. So to provide a counterweight to, as well as a point of departure for, the effort at complication I shall later undertake, I want to begin by recalling three of the places at which the territorial architecture of The Human Condition

is most clearly visible.

Arendt begins the first and shortest chapter of the The Human Condition with a summary statement of the meaning of the terms “labor,” “work,” and “action”; then, after an important account of the meaning the term “condition” and the difference between the human condition and human nature, she devotes a section to “the term vita activa.” That term had been Arendt’s original title for the book—it would be restored to the German-language version—and so Arendt’s discussion of her departure from the traditional use of “vita activa” quickly becomes a larger statement of aims. “Vita activa,” Arendt observes, was the conventional medieval rendering of Aristotle’s term “bios politikos”; but the two terms reflected substantially different experiences of, and perspectives on, human activity: whereas Aristotle’s “bios politikos” was specifically a life of politics and action, the medieval “vita activa” could refer to “all kinds of active engagement in the things of this world”—not because “work and labor had risen in the hierarchy of human activities,” but because all human activity, including action, had come to be regarded “from the viewpoint of the absolute quiet of contemplation” (13–15). That transformation had two pernicious and interrelated consequences: it made human activity seem inferior, valuable only insofar as it could “serve the needs and wants of contemplation” (16); and it “blurred the distinctions and articulations within the vita activa itself,” since from the point of view of contemplation, labor, work, and action are more or less interchangeable instances of unquiet subservience to “the necessities of earthly life” (14–16). Arendt’s twofold aim, then, is to contest the “hierarchical order” implied in the distinction between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, and to recover the “distinctions and articulations” that have been obscured by the “enormous weight of contemplation in the traditional hierarchy” (17).

In the second chapter of The Human Condition, “The Public and the Private Realm,” Arendt deepens her story, attending in more detail to the shifting institutional and practical matrices that lie behind the changes in vocabulary she has already mentioned. Just as the rendering of bios politikos as vita activa reflected an effacement of the specificity of politics and action, so too did the translation of zôon politikon by animal socialis (23); and this linguistic confusion of the political and the social serves as the point of departure for Arendt’s extended discussion of the “decisive division between the public and the private realms” and the erosion of this division in modernity (28). For the Greeks, the experience of the significance of politics and of action was rooted in the separation of the household, a space devoted to fulfilling the necessities of life and

governed by “the strictest inequality,” from the polis, a setting for free interaction among equals (32). The modern “rise of the social,” by contrast, names a constellation of developments—including the growth of large-scale markets and the commodification of labor; the corresponding preoccupation of nation-states with economic imperatives; and the growth of a spirit of conformism that helps reduce human activity to scientifically predictable and administratively tractable “behavior”—which, taken together, have broken down the old distinction between public and private, giving rise to a “new realm,” in which the labor and the life process, once confined to the household, have become the focus of (what can no longer properly be called) public concern (45).[8] Arendt’s emphasis on the expansive, transgressive qualities of the social realm, which she says has an “irresistible tendency to grow, to devour the older realms of the political and the private” (45), underscores her own role as a drawer of boundaries, recovering the language we will need if we are to separate what has been run together, or even to comprehend and name our loss. And what needs to be kept within appropriate boundaries is not just the social, but, ultimately, the three fundamental activities of labor, work, and action

themselves: as Arendt concludes in the final section of the second chapter, in a passage

that joins her discussion of public and private to the material that follow it:  “The most elementary meaning of the two realms [of public and private] indicates that there are

things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all. If we look at these things, regardless of where we find them in any given civilization, we shall see that each human activity points to its proper location in the world. This is true for the chief activities of the vita activa, labor, work, and action . . . ” (73, emphasis added).

The recovery of the distinguishing features of the basic human activities thus begins in earnest in the third chapter of The Human Condition, on “Labor,” in which Arendt introduces, defends, and explores the consequences of what she admits—or, perhaps, boasts—is a highly unorthodox distinction between “labor” and “work.” Labor, Arendt had already indicated, “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” (7). Its rhythm is repetitive, bound to the cycles of biological life; it is therefore not linear but processual, and it produces no lasting object as its result. (Importantly, this processual character, and the fact that it “leaves nothing behind” [87], are features that labor will later turn out to share with action.) Work, by contrast, breaks out of the cyclical time of

labor: it is the activity through which human beings fabricate a world of durable objects, and its orientation toward a “finished product” is reflected in the dual use of the word “work”—but not “labor”—to refer both to the activity of making and the thing made (80). This distinction between labor and work was “overlooked in ancient times” (81), and neither the modern political economists nor, especially, Marx do any better than their predecessors. Instead, Arendt claims, Marx’s thought represents an unstable mixture of three elements: the modern elevation of the vita activa over the vita contemplativa, to which it had traditionally been subordinated (85); the persistence of the old tendency to flatten out the differences among labor, work, and action, such that labor becomes the paradigm of (newly revalued) activity in general (87); and the persistence of the ancient contempt for labor, reflected in Marx’s optimism (though not only his) about the capacity of technology to emancipate humanity from labor itself (104, 130–31). The result is tragic: “in all stages of his work,” Arendt says, Marx “defines man as an animal laborans

and then leads him into a society in which this greatest and most human power is no longer necessary” (105). The lack of an appropriate separation among labor and work thus contributes to what Arendt had called, in the Prologue, the “prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them” (5). 

(continued)