Experiencing fundamental evil and reflecting on the world's sorrows│Jinwoo Lee

Preface to the 2018 Revised Edition│Daniel Allen
Preface to the Revised Edition│Margaret Canovan

introduction
Chapter 1: The Human Condition
Chapter 2 Public and Private Spheres
Chapter 3 Labor
Chapter 4 Work
Chapter 5 Acts
Chapter 6: Active Life and Modernity

Glossary
Hannah Arendt's Chronology
The Indelible Human Condition is the Earth│Introducing the Revised Edition
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Rethinking the human condition

When Arendt published The Human Condition in 1959, she unleashed something that even she herself had not anticipated.
And even 40 years later, the originality of this book still stands out.
The book is difficult, but what makes it so compelling is the fact that she's doing so many things at once.


Arendt was certainly drawn to participatory democracy.
She was an avid observer of the rise of civic activism, from the American protests against the Vietnam War to the formation of grassroots citizen "parliaments" during the short-lived Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Rejecting the label 'political philosopher', she argues that the mistake made by all political philosophers since Plato has been to ignore the fundamental conditions of politics.
If so, it is not political philosophy.
Indeed, a significant portion of this book does not appear on the surface to be about politics.
Long analyses of labor and work, and of the implications of modern science and economic growth, are more about the background for politics than politics itself.
Even the discussion of action is only partially related to specifically political action.


The most explicit organizing principle of this book lies in its phenomenological analysis of three fundamental forms of activity for the human condition.
Labor that conforms to the biological life of humans as animals, work that conforms to the artificial world of objects that humans build on earth, and actions that conform to our plurality as separate individuals.
Arendt argues that these distinctions have been ignored within an intellectual tradition shaped by philosophical and religious priorities.
But there is much more to this book than just phenomenological analysis.
When she proposes in her introduction that we “think only what we do,” she makes it clear that what she has in mind is not a general analysis of human activity, but “a rethinking of the human condition in light of our most recent experiences and horrors.”


Implications of Automation

Through massive undertakings like nuclear technology, humans are successfully challenging natural limits, and the inaccessibility of modern science to public debate makes it much more difficult to raise political questions.
Human beings, unaware of their own capacities and responsibilities, are not fit to assume powers that could threaten the planet.
This combination also permeates Arendt's early analyses of totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is described as a nihilistic process driven by a contradictory combination of beliefs.


This book is based on a lecture Arendt gave at the University of Chicago in April 1956 at the Charles R.
It was developed from lectures given at the Walgreens Foundation.
These lectures are the outgrowth of a much larger project on “Totalitarian Elements in Marxism.”
After finishing The Origins of Totalitariauism, Arendt embarked on this project.
Her original, large-scale project was to examine which features of Marx's theory contributed to this catastrophe.
When she actually began, her extensive research proved so extensive and full of hidden problems that the Marx book was never written.
But a number of related ideas flowed into The Human Condition.
This is particularly true of the conclusion that Marx fatally misunderstood political action in that he conflated the different human activities that Arendt called work and labor.
Arendt believed that Marx inherited a particular misunderstanding of politics from the great tradition of Western political thought.
They ignored the fact that humans are numerous, that each human being possesses new perspectives and capacities for action, and that unless these political capacities are destroyed, they do not fit neat and predictable models.
One of Arendt's main aims in The Human Condition is to challenge the entire tradition of political philosophy by reclaiming and elucidating these neglected human capacities.

A second major theme intertwined with Arendt's phenomenology of human activity is her account of the rise of the 'workers' society'.
The theme of the 'social' remains one of the most difficult and controversial aspects of this book.
Many readers attacked Arendt's dismissive remarks on social concerns, speculating that she was criticizing the conformist materialism of modern society while promoting a life of heroic action.
But reading it this way misses the complex aspects of the book.
Because another central theme of this book is the danger of actions that initiate new processes beyond the actor's control.


The greatest threat to the human world in recent centuries has been economic modernization, which has destroyed all stability and set everything in motion.
Unlike Marx, who considered this change to be part of an inevitable historical process, Arendt traces it to the unintended effects of accidental human actions.
By the time Arendt reflected on the implications of automation, the processes of production and consumption had gone far beyond satisfying natural needs.
The various activities, methods, and consumer goods involved were all very artificial.
But she points out that this modern artificiality is very different from the stable, global artifacts that earlier civilizations inhabited.
She says:
“It is as if we are forcibly destroying the boundary that protects and separates the world, a structure made by human hands, from nature in its dual sense—a biological process taking place at the center of the world and a cyclical natural process surrounding the world—and thus relinquishing the stability of the world, which is always threatened, to nature” (p. 208).
She argues that the price we pay is the wholesale destruction of the world and the growing tendency to think of ourselves in terms of our consumer desires, as economic concerns become the focus of public attention and common policy.
She says that 'thoughtlessness' is "one of the most striking characteristics of our time."
Her goal in thinking out loud was clearly to provoke thinking in others.

In the midst of controversy

If Arendt's aim was to provoke thought and discussion, she certainly succeeded.
Like many of her works, The Human Condition was the subject of fierce controversy.
Few works of modern political theory have received such mixed reviews, considered by some to be a work of genius and by others deemed unworthy of refutation.
Political controversy surrounding the book also spread rapidly.
Arendt's discussions of 'animal laborans' and her analysis of social concerns made her unpopular even with most of the left.
But her account of the act offered a message of hope and encouragement to other radicals, including some civil rights activists and those behind the Iron Curtain.
During the student movement of the 1960s, The Human Condition was treated as a textbook on participatory democracy.


Although the importance of this book has been widely acknowledged in recent years, when Arendt's thought has attracted significant attention, its significance remains a matter of debate.
Because of this intertwined complexity, the book offers many possibilities for reading.
Aristotelians, phenomenologists, Habermasians, postmodernists, feminists, and many others have drawn inspiration from various strands of this rich tapestry.
Forty years since its publication is not enough to assess the book's enduring significance.
If we were to extract one central theme from such a complex book, it would undoubtedly be a reminder of the vital importance of politics and a proper understanding of our political capacities and the risks and opportunities they present.

The most encouraging message in The Human Condition is its reminder of the miracle of human birth and beginning.
In contrast to Heidegger, who emphasizes our mortality, Arendt argues that faith and hope in human history arise from the fact that new people are continually being born into the world.
Future readers will find in this book food for thought and room for discussion.
In this extraordinary book, we will pick up and develop different threads and themes.


Whenever you put something you wrote out into the world and it becomes public, it's clear that everyone is free to do with it as they see fit.
It has to be like that again.
I have no complaints about this.
You must never try to control what you have thought independently.
You should rather learn from what other people do with that idea. (p. 66)