The Human Condition - by Hannah Arendt

Date read: 2023-09-01
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Key ideas: Published in 1958. "What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.... "What we are doing” is indeed the central theme of this book.... Systematically, therefore, the book is limited to a discussion of labor, work, and action, which forms its three central chapters." (H. Arendt)

NOTES

Vita Activa: labor, work, and action

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

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.

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.

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.

The human condition is not the same as human nature

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. For neither those we discuss here nor those we leave out, like thought and reason, and not even the most meticulous enumeration of them all, constitute essential characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence would no longer be human

The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him.

Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their “nature” is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.

The distinction between labor and work. Freedom from necessity

The distinction between labor and work which I propose is unusual. The phenomenal evidence in its favor is too striking to be ignored, and yet historically [...] there is hardly anything in either the pre-modern tradition of political thought or in the large body of modern labor theories to support it.

Against this scarcity of historical evidence, however, stands one very articulate and obstinate testimony, namely, the simple fact that every European language, ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words for what we have to come to think of as the same activity, and retains them in the face of their persistent synonymous usage.

Thus, Locke’s distinction between working hands and a laboring body is somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Greek distinction between the cheirotechnēs, the craftsman, to whom the German Handwerker corresponds, and those who, like “slaves and tame animals with their bodies minister to the necessities of life,” or in the Greek idiom, tō sōmati ergazesthai, work with their bodies (yet even here, labor and work are already treated as identical, since the word used is not ponein [labor] but ergazesthai [work]).

Only in one respect, which, however, is linguistically the most important one, did ancient and modern usage of the two words as synonyms fail altogether, namely in the formation of a corresponding noun. Here again we find complete unanimity; the word “labor,” understood as a noun, never designates the finished product, the result of laboring, but remains a verbal noun to be classed with the gerund, whereas the product itself is invariably derived from the word for work, even when current usage has followed the actual modern development so closely that the verb form of the word “work” has become rather obsolete.

The reason why this distinction should have been overlooked in ancient times and its significance remained unexplored seems obvious enough. Contempt for laboring, originally arising out of a passionate striving for freedom from necessity and a no less passionate impatience with every effort that left no trace, no monument, no great work worthy of remembrance, spread with the increasing demands of polis life upon the time of the citizens and its insistence on their abstention (skholē) from all but political activities, until it covered everything that demanded an effort....

For more on this, see notes tagged: Freedom from necessity.

The ancients reasoned [about slavery] the other way around

The opinion that labor and work were despised in antiquity because only slaves were engaged in them is a prejudice of modern historians.

The ancients reasoned the other way around and felt it necessary to possess slaves because of the slavish nature of all occupations that served the needs for the maintenance of life.

To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity

To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity, and this enslavement was inherent in the conditions of human life.

Because men were dominated by the necessities of life, they could win their freedom only through the domination of those whom they subjected to necessity by force.

The slave’s degradation was a blow of fate and a fate worse than death, because it carried with it a metamorphosis of man into something akin to a tame animal. A change in a slave’s status, therefore, such as manumission by his master or a change in general political circumstance that elevated certain occupations to public relevance, automatically entailed a change in the slave’s “nature.”

The institution of slavery in antiquity was the attempt to exclude labor from the conditions of man’s life

The institution of slavery in antiquity, though not in later times, was not a device for cheap labor or an instrument of exploitation for profit but rather the attempt to exclude labor from the conditions of man’s life.

What men share with all other forms of animal life was not considered to be human. (This, incidentally, was also the reason for the much misunderstood Greek theory of the nonhuman nature of the slave. Aristotle, who argued this theory so explicitly, and then, on his deathbed, freed his slaves, may not have been so inconsistent as moderns are inclined to think. He denied not the slave’s capacity to be human, but only the use of the word “men” for members of the species man-kind as long as they are totally subject to necessity.)

The contempt for labor in ancient theory and its glorification in modern theory

The contempt for labor in ancient theory and its glorification in modern theory both take their bearing from the subjective attitude or activity of the laborer, mistrusting his painful effort or praising his productivity.

It seems that the distinction between labor and work, which our theorists have so obstinately neglected and our languages so stubbornly preserved, indeed becomes merely a difference in degree if the worldly character of the produced thing—its location, function, and length of stay in the world—is not taken into account.

he distinction between a bread, whose “life expectancy” in the world is hardly more than a day, and a table, which may easily survive generations of men, is certainly much more obvious and decisive than the difference between a baker and a carpenter...

. Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all.

It is within this world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our bodies and produced by its laboring, but without stability of their own, these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear in an environment of things that are not consumed but used, and to which, as we use them, we become used and accustomed. As such, they give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men.

What consumer goods are for the life of man, use objects are for his world. From them, consumer goods derive their thing-character; and language, which does not permit the laboring activity to form anything so solid and non-verbal as a noun, hints at the strong probability that we would not even know what a thing is without having before us “the work of our hands.”

The sudden, spectacular rise of labor from the lowest, most despised position to the highest rank began when Locke discovered that labor is the source of all property

The sudden, spectacular rise of labor from the lowest, most despised position to the highest rank, as the most esteemed of all human activities, began when Locke discovered that labor is the source of all property.

It followed its course when Adam Smith asserted that labor was the source of all wealth and found its climax in Marx’s “system of labor,” where labor became the source of all productivity and the expression of the very humanity of man.

Of the three, however, only Marx was interested in labor as such; Locke was concerned with the institution of private property as the root of society and Smith wished to explain and to secure the unhampered progress of a limitless accumulation of wealth.

But all three [...] held that labor was considered to be the supreme world-building capacity of man, and since labor actually is the most natural and least worldly of man’s activities, each of them [...] found himself in the grip of certain genuine contradictions.

It seems to lie in the very nature of this matter that the most obvious solution of these contradictions, or rather the most obvious reason why these great authors should have remained unaware of them is their equation of work with labor, so that labor is endowed by them with certain faculties which only work possesses.

This equation always leads into patent absurdities, though they usually are not so neatly manifest as in the following sentence of Veblen:

"The lasting evidence of productive labor is its material product—commonly some article of consumption,” where the “lasting evidence”

with which he begins, because he needs it for the alleged productivity of labor, is immediately destroyed by the “consumption” of the product with which he ends, forced, as it were, by the factual evidence of the phenomenon itself.

Locke, in order to save labor from its manifest disgrace of producing only “things of short duration,” had to introduce money

Thus Locke, in order to save labor from its manifest disgrace of producing only “things of short duration,” had to introduce money—a “lasting thing which men may keep without spoiling”—a kind of deus ex machina without which the laboring body, in its obedience to the life process, could never have become the origin of anything so permanent and lasting as property, because there are no “durable things” to be kept to survive the activity of the laboring process.

Neither Locke nor Smith is concerned with labor as such

Since neither Locke nor Smith is concerned with labor as such, they can afford to admit certain distinctions which actually would amount to a distinction in principle between labor and work, if it were not for an interpretation that treats of the genuine traits of laboring as merely irrelevant.

Thus, Smith calls “unproductive labor” all activities connected with consumption, as though this were a negligible and accidental trait of something whose true nature was to be productive.

The very contempt with which he describes how “menial tasks and services generally perish in the instant of their performance and seldom leave any trace or value behind them” is much more closely related to premodern opinion on this matter than to its modern glorification...

Locke, although he paid little attention to his own distinction between “the labour of our body and the work of our hands,” had to acknowledge the distinction between things “of short duration” and those “lasting” long enough “that men might keep them without spoiling.”

The difficulty for Smith and Locke was the same; their “products” had to stay long enough in the world of tangible things to become “valuable,” whereby it is immaterial whether value is defined by Locke as something which can be kept and becomes property or by Smith as something which lasts long enough to be exchangeable for something else.

Why Locke and all his successors clung so obstinately to labor as the origin of property, of wealth, of the very humanity of man?

Thus, the question arises why Locke and all his successors, their own insights notwithstanding, clung so obstinately to labor as the origin of property, of wealth, of all values and, finally, of the very humanity of man. Or, to put it another way, what were the experiences inherent in the laboring activity that proved of such great importance to the modern age?

Historically, political theorists from the seventeenth century onward were confronted with a hitherto unheard-of process of growing wealth, growing property, growing acquisition.

In the attempt to account for this steady growth, their attention was naturally drawn to the phenomenon of a progressing process itself, so that [...] the concept of process became the very key term of the new age as well as the sciences, historical and natural, developed by it

From its beginning, this process, because of its apparent endlessness, was understood as a natural process and more specifically in the image of the life process itself.

Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of wilful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.

The right to the pursuit of this happiness is indeed as undeniable as the right to life But it has nothing in common with good fortune

The “happiness of the greatest number,” into which we have generalized and vulgarized the felicity with which earthly life has always been blessed, conceptualized into an “ideal” the fundamental reality of a laboring humanity. The right to the pursuit of this happiness is indeed as undeniable as the right to life; it is even identical with it.

But it has nothing in common with good fortune, which is rare and never lasts and cannot be pursued, because fortune depends on luck and what chance gives and takes, although most people in their “pursuit of happiness” run after good fortune and make themselves unhappy even when it befalls them, because they want to keep and enjoy luck as though it were an inexhaustible abundance of “good things.”

There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance—poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death—ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.

The privacy of property and wealth

At first glance it must seem strange indeed that a theory which so conclusively ended in the abolition of all property should have taken its departure from the theoretical establishment of private property.

This strangeness, however, is somewhat mitigated if we remember the sharply polemical aspect of the modern age’s concern with property, whose rights were asserted explicitly against the common realm and against the state.

Since no political theory prior to socialism and communism had proposed to establish an entirely propertyless society, and no government prior to the twentieth century had shown serious inclinations to expropriate its citizens, the content of the new theory could not possibly be prompted by the need to protect property rights against possible intrusion of government administration....

What the modern age so heatedly defended was never property as such but the unhampered pursuit of more property or of appropriation; as against all organs that stood for the “dead” permanence of a common world, it fought its battles in the name of life, the life of society.

Locke and private property

Locke could neither remain satisfied with the traditional explanation of labor, according to which it is the natural and inevitable consequence of poverty and never a means of its abolition, nor with the traditional explanation of the origin of property through acquisition, conquest, or an original division of the common world*.

* - No doubt, “before 1690 no one understood that a man had a natural right to property created by his labour; after 1690 the idea came to be an axiom of social science” (Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea [1951], p. 156).

The concept of labor and property was even mutually exclusive, whereas labor and poverty (ponos and penia, Arbeit and Armut) belonged together in the sense that the activity corresponding to the status of poverty was laboring.

Plato, therefore, who held that laboring slaves were “bad” because they were not masters of the animal part within them, said almost the same about the status of poverty. The poor man is “not master of himself” (penēs ōn kai heautou mē kratōn [Seventh Letter 351A]).

None of the classical writers ever thought of labor as a possible source of wealth. According to Cicero—and he probably only sums up contemporary opinion—property comes about either through ancient conquest or victory or legal division (aut vetere occupatione aut victoria aut lege [De officiis i. 21]).

Also see Franz Oppenheimer's The State where he argues that the origin of the State is in conquest and subjection.

What he [Locke] actually was concerned with was appropriation and what he had to find was a world-appropriating activity whose privacy at the same time must be beyond doubt and dispute...

Locke founded private property on the most privately owned thing there is, “the property [of man] in his own person,” that is, in his own body.

“The labour of our body and the work of our hands” become one and the same, because both are the “means” to “appropriate” what “God ... hath given ... to men in common.”

And these means, body and hands and mouth, are the natural appropriators because they do not “belong to mankind in common” but are given to each man for his private use.

Just as Marx had to introduce a natural force, the “labor power” of the body, to account for labor’s productivity and a progressing process of growing wealth, Locke, albeit less explicitly, had to trace property to a natural origin of appropriation in order to force open those stable, worldly boundaries that “enclose” each person’s privately owned share of the world “from the common.”..

See notes for Locke's Second Treatise of Government: OF THE PROPERTY

The development of the modern age and the rise of society, where the most private of all human activities, laboring, has become public and been permitted to establish its own common realm, may make it doubtful whether the very existence of property as a privately held place within the world can withstand the relentless process of growing wealth.

But it is true, nevertheless, that the very privacy of one’s holdings, that is, their complete independence “from the common,” could not be better guaranteed than by the transformation of property into appropriation or by an interpretation of the “enclosure from the common” which sees it as the result, the “product,” of bodily activity. In this aspect, the body becomes indeed the quintessence of all property because it is the only thing one could not share even if one wanted to.

Nothing, in fact, is less common and less communicable, and therefore more securely shielded against the visibility and audibility of the public realm, than what goes on within the confines of the body, its pleasures and its pains, its laboring and consuming.

Nothing, by the same token, ejects one more radically from the world than exclusive concentration upon the body’s life, a concentration forced upon man in slavery or in the extremity of unbearable pain.

Whoever wishes, for whatever reason, to make human existence entirely “private,” independent of the world and aware only of its own being alive, must rest his arguments on these experiences; and since the relentless drudgery of slave labor is not “natural” but man-made and in contradiction to the natural fertility of the animal laborans, whose strength is not exhausted and whose time is not consumed when it has reproduced his own life, the “natural” experience underlying the Stoic as well as the Epicurean independence of the world is not labor or slavery but pain.

Absence of pain. Hedonism

The happiness achieved in isolation from the world and enjoyed within the confines of one’s own private existence can never be anything but the famous “absence of pain,” a definition on which all variations of consistent sensualism must agree.

Hedonism, the doctrine that only bodily sensations are real, is but the most radical form of a non-political, totally private way of life, the true fulfilment of Epicurus’ lathe biōsas kai mē politeuesthai (“live in hiding and do not care about the world”).

Normally, absence of pain is no more than the bodily condition for experiencing the world; only if the body is not irritated and, through irritation, thrown back upon itself, can our bodily senses function normally, receive what is given to them.

Absence of pain is usually “felt” only in the short intermediate stage between pain and non-pain, and the sensation which corresponds to the sensualists’ concept of happiness is release from pain rather than its absence. The intensity of this sensation is beyond doubt; it is, indeed, matched only by the sensation of pain itself. The mental effort required by philosophies which for various reasons wish to “liberate” man from the world is always an act of imagination in which the mere absence of pain is experienced and actualized into a feeling of being released from it.

Life becomes a burden to man because of his innate “repugnance to futility”

The fact that slavery and banishment into the household was, by and large, the social condition of all laborers prior to the modern age is primarily due to the human condition itself; life, which for all other animal species is the very essence of their being, becomes a burden to man because of his innate “repugnance to futility.” (Veblen)

This burden is all the heavier since none of the so-called “loftier desires” has the same urgency, is actually forced upon man by necessity, as the elementary needs of life. Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself...

The burden of biological life, weighing down and consuming the specifically human life-span between birth and death, can be eliminated only by the use of servants, and the chief function of ancient slaves was rather to carry the burden of consumption in the household than to produce for society at large.

For more on this, see notes tagged: Escaping pain .

Slave labor

The reason why slave labor could play such an enormous role in ancient societies and why its wastefulness and unproductivity were not discovered is that the ancient city-state was primarily a “consumption center,” unlike medieval cities which were chiefly production centers.

The price for the elimination of life’s burden from the shoulders of all citizens was enormous and by no means consisted only in the violent injustice of forcing one part of humanity into the darkness of pain and necessity. Since this darkness is natural, inherent in the human condition—only the act of violence, when one group of men tries to rid itself of the shackles binding all of us to pain and necessity, is man-made—the price for absolute freedom from necessity is, in a sense, life itself, or rather the substitution of vicarious life for real life.

This "act of violance" by a group of people "to rid itself of the shackles binding all of us to pain and necessity," Franz Oppenheimer argued in his The State, was the genesys of the State. "The state," he said, "can have originated in no other way than through conquest and subjugation." Also, see Albert Nock's Our Enemy, the State: The State originated in conquest and confiscation.

The perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor would deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality

On its most elementary level the “toil and trouble” of obtaining and the pleasures of “incorporating” the necessities of life are so closely bound together in the biological life cycle, whose recurrent rhythm conditions human life in its unique and unilinear movement, that the perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor would not only rob biological life of its most natural pleasures but deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality.

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life.

Chateaubriand contemplated this idea in 1835: Imagine labour condemned to idleness by reason of the multiplication and variety of new machines.

Labor tools and freedom

It is true that the enormous improvement in our labor tools—the mute robots with which homo faber has come to the help of the animal laborans, as distinguished from the human, speaking instruments (the instrumentum vocale, as the slaves in ancient households were called) whom the man of action had to rule and oppress when he wanted to liberate the animal laborans from its bondage—has made the twofold labor of life, the effort of its sustenance and the pain of giving birth, easier and less painful than it has ever been.

This, of course, has not eliminated compulsion from the laboring activity or the condition of being subject to need and necessity from human life.

But, in distinction from slave society, where the “curse” of necessity remained a vivid reality because the life of a slave testified daily to the fact that “life is slavery,” this condition is no longer fully manifest and its lack of appearance has made it much more difficult to notice and remember.

The danger here is obvious. Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

Chateaubriand wrote:
Thus freedom is only preserved by effort, because effort produces strength: remove the curse pronounced against the sons of Adam: 'Insudore vultus tui, vesceris pane: in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread' and they will die in slavery.

Tools and instruments ease pain, they do not change the necessity itself

Tools and instruments ease pain and effort and thereby change the modes in which the urgent necessity inherent in labor once was manifest to all. They do not change the necessity itself; they only serve to hide it from our senses.

Something similar is true of labor’s products, which do not become more durable through abundance....

The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans.

We live in a laborers’ society because only laboring, with its inherent fertility, is likely to bring about abundance; and we have changed work into laboring, broken it up into its minute particles until it has lent itself to division where the common denominator of the simplest performance is reached in order to eliminate from the path of human labor power—which is part of nature and perhaps even the most powerful of all natural forces—the obstacle of the “unnatural” and purely worldly stability of the human artifice.

Consumers’ society is a society of laborers

It is frequently said that we live in a consumers’ society, and since, as we saw, labor and consumption are but two stages of the same process, imposed upon man by the necessity of life, this is only another way of saying that we live in a society of laborers.

This society did not come about through the emancipation of the laboring classes but by the emancipation of the laboring activity itself, which preceded by centuries the political emancipation of laborers.

The point is not that for the first time in history laborers were admitted and given equal rights in the public realm, but that we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of “making a living”; such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly.

Very good point!

The only exception society is willing to grant is the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only “worker” left in a laboring society...

The emancipation of labor and the concomitant emancipation of the laboring classes from oppression and exploitation certainly meant progress in the direction of non-violence. It is much less certain that it was also progress in the direction of freedom..

It was the arts of violence, the arts of war, piracy, and ultimately absolute rule, which brought the defeated into the services of the victors and thereby held necessity in abeyance for the longer period of recorded history.

Again, this "arts of violence" which "brought the defeated into the services of the victors" was the origin of the State. "The state can have originated in no other way" (Oppenheimer).

What already happened once in our history, in the centuries of the declining Roman Empire, may be happening again

What already happened once in our history, in the centuries of the declining Roman Empire, may be happening again. Even then, labor became an occupation of the free classes, “only to bring to them the obligations of the servile classes.” *

* Wallon shows brilliantly how the late Stoic generalization that all men are slaves rested on the development of the Roman Empire, where the old freedom was gradually abolished by the imperial government, so that eventually nobody was free and everybody had his master.

The turning point is when first Caligula and then Trajan consented to being called dominus, a word formerly used only for the master of the household. The so-called slave morality of late antiquity and its assumption that no real difference existed between the life of a slave and that of a free man had a very realistic background. Now the slave could indeed tell his master: Nobody is free, everybody has a master.

Indeed! Just compare how much freedom we had a few decades ago and how much we have now, and you will see the trend similar to what happened in the Roman Empire. "The old freedom" has been "gradually abolished."

The spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption

The hope that inspired Marx and the best men of the various workers’ movements—that free time eventually will emancipate men from necessity and make the animal laborans productive—rests on the illusion of a mechanistic philosophy which assumes that labor power, like any other energy, can never be lost, so that if it is not spent and exhausted in the drudgery of life it will automatically nourish other, “higher,” activities.

The guiding model of this hope in Marx was doubtless the Athens of Pericles which, in the future, with the help of the vastly increased productivity of human labor, would need no slaves to sustain itself but would become a reality for all.

A hundred years after Marx we know the fallacy of this reasoning; the spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites.

That these appetites become more sophisticated, so that consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities but, on the contrary, mainly concentrates on the superfluities of life, does not change the character of this society, but harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.

Today, we have a "digital consumer"! People can now "consume" content, TV, media, etc.

The durability of the world

The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labor of our bodies—homo faber who makes and literally “works upon” as distinguished from the animal laborans which labors and “mixes with”—fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.

The “mixes with” expression reffers to what John Locke said in Second Treatise of Government:
The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

They are mostly, but not exclusively, objects for use and they possess the durability Locke needed for the establishment of property, the “value” Adam Smith needed for the exchange market, and they bear testimony to productivity, which Marx believed to be the test of human nature...

Moreover, while usage is bound to use up these objects, this end is not their destiny in the same way as destruction is the inherent end of all things for consumption. What usage wears out is durability.

It is this durability which gives the things of the world their relative independence from men who produced and use them, their “objectivity” which makes them withstand, “stand against” and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users

Plato’s famous argument against Protagoras

It is quite obvious that the Greeks dreaded this devaluation of world and nature with its inherent anthropocentrism—the “absurd” opinion that man is the highest being and that everything else is subject to the exigencies of human life (Aristotle)—no less than they despised the sheer vulgarity of all consistent utilitarianism.

To what extent they were aware of the consequences of seeing in homo faber the highest human possibility is perhaps best illustrated by Plato’s famous argument against Protagoras and his apparently self-evident statement that “man is the measure of all use things (chrēmata), of the existence of those that are, and of the non-existence of those that are not.

The point of the matter is that Plato saw immediately that if one makes man the measure of all things for use, it is man the user and instrumentalizer, and not man the speaker and doer or man the thinker, to whom the world is being related. And since it is in the nature of man the user and instrumentalizer to look upon everything as means to an end—upon every tree as potential wood—this must eventually mean that man becomes the measure not only of things whose existence depends upon him but of literally everything there is....

Plato knew quite well that the possibilities of producing use objects and of treating all things of nature as potential use objects are as limitless as the wants and talents of human beings. If one permits the standards of homo faber to rule the finished world as they must necessarily rule the coming into being of this world, then homo faber will eventually help himself to everything and consider everything that is as a mere means for himself. He will judge every thing as though it belonged to the class of chrēmata, of use objects, so that, to follow Plato’s own example, the wind will no longer be understood in its own right as a natural force but will be considered exclusively in accordance with human needs for warmth or refreshment—which, of course, means that the wind as something objectively given has been eliminated from human experience.

It is because of these consequences that Plato, who at the end of his life recalls once more in the Laws the saying of Protagoras, replies with an almost paradoxical formula: not man—who because of his wants and talents wishes to use everything and therefore ends by depriving all things of their intrinsic worth—but “the god is the measure [even] of mere use objects.

Slave labor vs free labor

The chief difference between slave labor and modern, free labor is not that the laborer possesses personal freedom—freedom of movement, economic activity, and personal inviolability—but that he is admitted to the political realm and fully emancipated as a citizen.

The turning point in the history of labor came with the abolition of property qualifications for the right to vote.

In contrast to ancient slave emancipations, where as a rule the slave ceased to be a laborer when he ceased to be a slave, and where, therefore, slavery remained the social condition of laboring no matter how many slaves were emancipated, the modern emancipation of labor was intended to elevate the laboring activity itself, and this was achieved long before the laborer as a person was granted personal and civil rights.

The defeat of Homo Faber and the principle of happiness

[A]mong the outstanding characteristics of the modern age from its beginning to our own time we find the typical attitudes of homo faber:

his instrumentalization of the world, his confidence in tools and in the productivity of the maker of artificial objects; his trust in the all-comprehensive range of the means-end category, his conviction that every issue can be solved and every human motivation reduced to the principle of utility; his sovereignty, which regards everything given as material and thinks of the whole of nature as of “an immense fabric from which we can cut out whatever we want to resew it however we like”*; his equation of intelligence with ingenuity, that is, his contempt for all thought which cannot be considered to be “the first step... for the fabrication of artificial objects, particularly of tools to make tools, and to vary their fabrication indefinitely”; finally, his matter-of-course identification of fabrication with action.

* Henri Bergson, Évolution créatrice (1948), p. 157. An analysis of Bergson’s position in modern philosophy would lead us too far afield. But his insistence on the priority of homo faber over homo sapiens and on fabrication as the source of human intelligence, as well as his emphatic opposition of life to intelligence, is very suggestive. Bergson’s philosophy could easily be read like a case study of how the modern age’s earlier conviction of the relative superiority of making over thinking was then superseded and annihilated by its more recent conviction of an absolute superiority of life over everything else...

What needs explanation is not the modern esteem of homo faber but the fact that this esteem was so quickly followed by the elevation of laboring to the highest position in the hierarchical order of the vita activa...

The elevation of laboring was preceded by certain deviations and variations from the traditional mentality of homo faber which were highly characteristic of the modern age and which, indeed, arose almost automatically from the very nature of the events that ushered it in. What changed the mentality of homo faber was the central position of the concept of process in modernity...

Nothing perhaps indicates clearer the ultimate failure of homo faber to assert himself than the rapidity with which the principle of utility, the very quintessence of his world view, was found wanting and was superseded by the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

Also see Isabelle Paterson's The God of the Machine "The greatest good of the greatest number" is a vicious phrase

When this happened it was manifest that the conviction of the age that man can know only what he makes himself—which seemingly was so eminently propitious to a full victory of homo faber—would be overruled and eventually destroyed by the even more modern principle of process, whose concepts and categories are altogether alien to the needs and ideals of homo faber.

For the principle of utility, though its point of reference is clearly man, who uses matter to produce things, still presupposes a world of use objects by which man is surrounded and in which he moves.

The rise of the Cartesian doubt

Modern philosophy began with Descartes’ de omnibus dubitandum est, with doubt, but with doubt not as an inherent control of the human mind to guard against deceptions of thought and illusions of sense, not as skepticism against the morals and prejudices of men and times, not even as a critical method in scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation. Cartesian doubt is much more far-reaching in scope and too fundamental in intent to be determined by such concrete contents...

Descartes was the first to conceptualize this modern doubting, which after him became the self-evident, inaudible motor which has moved all thought, the invisible axis around which all thinking has been centered. Just as from Plato and Aristotle to the modern age conceptual philosophy, in its greatest and most authentic representatives, had been the articulation of wonder, so modern philosophy since Descartes has consisted in the articulations and ramifications of doubting.

Cartesian doubt, in its radical and universal significance, was originally the response to a new reality, a reality no less real for its being restricted for centuries to the small and politically insignificant circle of scholars and learned men.

The philosophers understood at once that Galileo’s discoveries implied no mere challenge to the testimony of the senses and that it was no longer reason, as in Aristarchus and Copernicus, that had “committed such a rape on their senses,” in which case men indeed would have needed only to choose between their faculties and to let innate reason become “the mistress of their credulity.”

It was not reason but a man-made instrument, the telescope, which actually changed the physical world view; it was not contemplation, observation, and speculation which led to the new knowledge, but the active stepping in of homo faber, of making and fabricating.

In other words, man had been deceived so long as he trusted that reality and truth would reveal themselves to his senses and to his reason if only he remained true to what he saw with the eyes of body and mind...

If the human eye can betray man to the extent that so many generations of men were deceived into believing that the sun turns around the earth, then the metaphor of the eyes of the mind cannot possibly hold any longer; it was based, albeit implicitly and even when it was used in opposition to the senses, on an ultimate trust in bodily vision.

If Being and Appearance part company forever, and this—as Marx once remarked—is indeed the basic assumption of all modern science, then there is nothing left to be taken upon faith; everything must be doubted.

It was as though Democritus’ early prediction that a victory of the mind over the senses could end only in the mind’s defeat had come true, except that now the reading of an instrument seemed to have won a victory over both the mind and the senses.*

* Democritus, after having stated that “in reality there is no white, or black, or bitter, or sweet,” added: “Poor mind, from the senses you take your arguments, and then want to defeat them? Your victory is your defeat” (Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [4th ed., 1922], frag. B125).

Cartesian doubt did not simply doubt that human understanding may not be open to every truth or that human vision may not be able to see everything, but that intelligibility to human understanding does not at all constitute a demonstration of truth, just as visibility did not at all constitute proof of reality...

The poignancy of Descartes’ doubt is fully realized only if one understands that the new discoveries dealt an even more disastrous blow to human confidence in the world and in the universe than is indicated by a clear-cut separation of being and appearance.

What was lost in the modern age, of course, was not the capacity for truth or reality or faith nor the concomitant inevitable acceptance of the testimony of the senses and of reason, but the certainty that formerly went with it.

In religion it was not belief in salvation or a hereafter that was immediately lost, but the certitudo salutis [the certainty of salvation]—and this happened in all Protestant countries where the downfall of the Catholic Church had eliminated the last tradition-bound institution which, wherever its authority remained unchallenged, stood between the impact of modernity and the masses of believers.

Just as the immediate consequence of this loss of certainty was a new zeal for making good in this life as though it were only an overlong period of probation, so the loss of certainty of truth ended in a new, entirely unprecedented zeal for truthfulness—as though man could afford to be a liar only so long as he was certain of the unchallengeable existence of truth and objective reality, which surely would survive and defeat all his lies.

The victory of the Animal Laborans

The victory of the animal laborans would never have been complete had not the process of secularization, the modern loss of faith inevitably arising from Cartesian doubt, deprived individual life of its immortality, or at least of the certainty of immortality.

Individual life again became mortal, as mortal as it had been in antiquity, and the world was even less stable, less permanent, and hence less to be relied upon than it had been during the Christian era.

Dostoevsky wrote extensively on this topic. See Demons and The Brothers Karamazov: Надо всего только разрушить в человечестве идею о Боге

Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real.

And in so far as he was to assume that it was real in the uncritical and apparently unbothered optimism of a steadily progressing science, he had removed himself from the earth to a much more distant point than any Christian otherworldliness had ever removed him.

Whatever the word “secular” is meant to signify in current usage, historically it cannot possibly be equated with worldliness; modern man at any rate did not gain this world when he lost the other world, and he did not gain life, strictly speaking, either; he was thrust back upon it, thrown into the closed inwardness of introspection, where the highest he could experience were the empty processes of reckoning of the mind, its play with itself.

The only contents left were appetites and desires, the senseless urges of his body which he mistook for passion and which he deemed to be “unreasonable” because he found he could not “reason,” that is, not reckon with them.

If we compare the modern world with that of the past

If we compare the modern world with that of the past, the loss or human experience involved in this development is extraordinarily striking.

It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfil these functions much better than we ever could.

Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms of making and fabricating, only that making, because of its worldliness and inherent indifference to life, was now regarded as but another form of laboring, a more complicated but not a more mysterious function of the life process...

But there are other more serious danger signs that man may be willing and, indeed, is on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come.

Looking at the circus that the world has become and the clowns "running" this circus, you can't help but agree with Arendt's point: "the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he [man] imagines he has come"

It is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think

Unfortunately, and contrary to what is currently assumed about the proverbial ivory-tower independence of thinkers, no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

As a living experience, thought has always been assumed, perhaps wrongly, to be known only to the few. It may not be presumptuous to believe that these few have not become fewer in our time.

and even fewer in ours

This may be irrelevant, or of restricted relevance, for the future of the world; it is not irrelevant for the future of man.

For if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity were to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa, it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all.

Whoever has any experience in this matter will know how right Cato was when he said:

Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset—“Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.”