The Human Condition

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By Hannah Arendt & Danielle Allen &

Publisher Description

The renowned political thinker and author of The Origins of Totalitarianism examines the troubling consequences of humanity’s increasing power.

A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant today than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind in terms of its ever-expanding capabilities. Her analysis reveals a troubling paradox: that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions.

This new edition contains Margaret Canovan’s 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen. A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition offers a penetrating analysis of a conundrum that has only become more acute in the 21st century.

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78 Reviews

4.0

Mohnish Singh

Created 10 days ago

Cwem

Created about 1 month ago

thisiskatedee

Created about 1 month ago

james🌻

Created 2 months ago

“'The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before. If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualisation of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualisation of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.' 'For a society of labourers, the world of machines has become a substitute for the real world, even though this pseudo world cannot fulfil the most important task of human artifice, which is to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves. In the continuous process of operation, this world of machines is even losing that independent worldly character which the tools and implements and the early machinery of the modern age so eminently possessed. The natural processes on which it feeds increasingly relate it to the biological process itself, so that apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were "shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of a turtle". Seen from the vantage point of this development, technology in fact no longer appears "as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man."' 'Among the things that give the human artifice the stability without which it could never be a reliable home for men are a number of objects which are strictly without any utility whatsoever and which, moreover, because they are unique, are not exchangeable and therefore defy equalisation through a common denominator such as money; if they enter the exchange market, they can only be arbitrarily priced. Moreover, the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not "using" it; on the contrary, it must be removed carefully from the whole context of ordinary use objects to attain its proper place in the world. [...] Because of their outstanding permanence, works of art are the most intensely worldly of all tangible things; their durability is almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes, since they are not subject to the use of living creatures, a use which, indeed, far from actualising their own inherent purpose – as the purpose of a chair is actualised when it is sat upon – can only destroy them. Thus, their durability is of a higher order than that which all things need in order to exist at all; it can attain permanence throughout the ages. In this permanence, the very stability of the human artifice, which, being inhabited and used by mortals, can never be absolute, achieves a representation of its own. Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality, not the immortality of the soul or of life but of something immortal achieved by mortal hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read.' 'The organisation of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws – lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition – is a kind of organised remembrance. It assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men, who outside the polis could attend only the short duration of the performance and therefore needed Homer and "others of his craft" in order to be presented to those who were not there. According to this self-interpretation, the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the "sharing of words and deeds". Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it. [...] The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organisation of the people as it arises out of speaking and acting together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Green colonisation, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly. This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them – like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the labourer or craftsmen prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world – do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being", and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.' // exercising restraint lest I transcribe two-thirds of the whole book. there are so many ideas in this thing that have been so personally revelatory that I may find it useful to try to enumerate them: • the division of the vita activa into labour, work, & action. labour the mere bodily subsistence, the humanly 'metabolism with the universe', the activity that keeps the body ticking over; work the construction of the human artifice, the fabrication of durable artefacts that speak to the immortal continuation of the species; action the individuating, unique speech & deeds of a plurality of people in the public realm – necessarily new, vital, unpredictable, & undertaken with the intention of speaking & acting oneself into esteemed existence (the YAWP). • the diminution of the public realm & the commensurate spreading of the private: the loss of the notion of a shared, common world in relation to which (/around which, like a table) people are situated & with which people, in their individuality, are concerned; the pervasion of the life process on the planet, the political preoccupation only with bodily concerns, with survival, with economic 'maintenance of the household', the nation-state as house, private affairs having subsumed & usurped the public. • reality itself as occurring in a public 'space of appearance': what is as what can be seen & heard – & therefore remembered – by a plurality of individuals. moreover, that this space exists wherever contingent relationships between people occur & is not necessarily bound to any geographic or political region per se. speech as the beginning of life! • the specifically modern reduction of the self to the cartesian ego; the moving inwards of the archemedean point to the individual consciousness, away from the daimon of the publicly-perceived self. the reduction of all certain knowledge to algebraic functions of conscious awareness, thereby reducing all 'natural' objects to the same set of wholly subjective symbols/movements. • the gradual enlargement of the scale of human self-perception (resulting from global industrial expansion/economic connection) effecting a corresponding loss of worldly, 'earth-bound' inhabitance. as people experience 'world-alienation', they lose their sense of terrestrial habitation; the instant traversal of distance, the instant sharing of communication, the instant availability of global transaction, all lends a planetary scale of self-consciousness at the expense of an awareness of one's actual, immediate material conditions. • that, of course, human 'nature' is nothing more than what is permitted to flourish under the set of specific, constructed conditions imposed upon human life, but also that, within these conditions, there necessarily exists natality! in the case of every new human birth, the arrival of a wholly unprecedented, unique, unpredictable capacity for action! natality and plurality as the driving forces of human endeavour, and therefore of the fluctuations in the conditions under which the endeavour continues!”

Steven

Created 2 months ago

About Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt is widely considered one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. The University of Chicago Press also publishes her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and Love and Saint Augustine, as well as The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. Margaret Canovan is an English political theorist who has published widely on Arendt. Her books include The People and Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the author, most recently, of Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.