The Human Condition

“[S]peech is what makes man a political being.”

This brief formulation from the Prologue expresses the importance of speech to Arendt’s argument. Because speech is a part of action, it is important to keep in mind its performative role in actually “doing” something in the world, namely, revealing the individuality of the speaker to others.

“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 process of life by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.”

Arendt offers her first definition of labor in The Human Condition. Labor is the activity that responds to the necessities of biological life, a condition that we share with other animals and organisms. Arendt personifies the subject of labor as the animal laborans.

“Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose morality 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.”

Following her definition of labor, the above passages defines work for Arendt. Work is the creation of unnatural or artificial things by human hands using tools or instruments. For Arendt, its distinction from labor has been largely ignored by the Western intellectual tradition. Work is personified as homo faber.