The Human Condition: Second Edition

Kindle Highlights

To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence

The stature of the Homeric Achilles can be understood only if one sees him as “the doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words.”

Work is that which we do out of creative effort, to build the things—whether physical or cultural—that shape our world and establish our social connections with others.

Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it,1 and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.

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.

Labor is that which we undertake out of biological necessity; that which we do, in other words, to feed ourselves. It also encompasses sexual reproduction and the energies devoted to child-rearing.

Finally, action identifies the effort we make together as political creatures, struggling in conditions of pluralistic diversity, to come to collective decisions about our polity’s course of action.

To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature.

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.

As it happens, science itself can show us that Arendt was right to predict that an increasing reliance on mathematical language would yield a decline in political engagement. In recent years, data reveal that an education emphasizing science correlates with the depoliticization of those so educated.

the human condition of action is implicit even in Genesis (“Male and female created He them”), if we understand that this story of man’s creation is distinguished in principle from the one according to which God originally created Man (adam), “him” and not “them,” so that the multitude of human beings becomes the result of multiplication.

to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis, of home and family life, where the household head ruled with uncontested, despotic powers, or of life in the barbarian empires of Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the organization of the household.

The profound misunderstanding expressed in the Latin translation of “political” as “social” is perhaps nowhere clearer than in a discussion in which Thomas Aquinas compares the nature of household rule with political rule: the head of the household, he finds, has some similarity to the head of the kingdom, but, he adds, his power is not so “perfect” as that of the king.

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.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded 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. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

In the analysis of postclassical political thought, it is often quite illuminating to find out which of the two biblical versions of the creation story is cited. Thus it is highly characteristic of the difference between the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and of Paul that Jesus, discussing the relationship between man and wife, refers to Genesis 1:27: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matt. 19:4), whereas Paul on a similar occasion insists that the woman was created “of the man” and hence “for the man,” even though he then somewhat attenuates the dependence: “neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without

man” (I Cor. 11:8–12). The difference indicates much more than a different attitude to the role of woman. For Jesus, faith was closely related to action (cf. § 33 below); for Paul, faith was primarily related to salvation. Especially interesting in this respect is Augustine (De civitate Dei xii. 21), who not only ignores Genesis 1:27 altogether but sees the difference between man and animal in that man was created unum ac singulum, whereas all animals were ordered “to come into being several at once” (plura simul iussit exsistere). To Augustine, the creation story offers a welcome opportunity to stress the species character of animal life as distinguished from the singularity of human existence.

The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things—works and deeds and words19—which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves. By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave nonperishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a “divine” nature. The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best (aristeuein, a verb for which there is no equivalent in any other language) and who “prefer immortal fame to mortal things,” are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals.