Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a provocative treatise on what it means to be human. Her study investigates the vita activa (the activities of human life)—labor, work, and action—in order to think about the distinction between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa (life of the mind). Modernity for Arendt meant a loss of the world. Arendt makes a distinction within the vita activa between public and private life, which rests upon Aristotle’s claim that man is z?on politikon—a political animal. The loss of the world and worldly alienation in modernity is caused by private economic interests winning out over the public realm of speech and action, and man as a laboring animal triumphing over man as a political animal, endangering both the polity and the condition of humanness.
In this class we will consider Arendt’s central claims in the context of our own time, in which the distinction between private and public is being progressively erased. Arendt’s insistence that we must ‘stop and think what we are doing’ only becomes timelier in an era of technological bombardment, and the sense of worldly alienation that so many feel in the face of neoliberal life. We will read the entirety of The Human Condition, and consider the relationships between scientific advancement, earthliness, and worldliness as we explore the realms of labor, work, and action. Along the way, we will confront foundational questions regarding the forms of action of which humankind is capable: are there essential characteristics of human life today? In what ways do science and technology both facilitate and undermine the possibilities of human life? Can love be political? Can we find a home in the world? And what would it mean to do so?