action, contributing formative elements and ideals to Western politics and culture that continue on in our political language.107 Chapter 2 will examine these three different instances of political action. Presently, however, I want to provide a general account of what Arendt understood this political version of athanatizein to involve.
Politics and the Human Condition
What does it mean to be a narrative—to live a life as a story? If humans are “whos” and not “whats,” they can therefore never be given labels, never meaningfully be placed in conceptual boxes. They are too interesting, too dynamic. Unlike the animals, who remain members of species that revolve eternally in the cycle of the cosmos, humans are “‘the mortals,’” according to Arendt, “the only mortal things there are … individual life, a bios with a recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life … [and] is distinguished from other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movements of biological life.”108 The only way of coming to terms with the “whoness” of a human being is by learning their story, which always transcends any definition that we use to try to capture them with.
Any narrative must have a setting. When we read a novel, we take the setting as simply given: the setting is the condition of the novel. Human life is narrative because it enters a setting that is simply given: just like the stories we tell that derive from it, human experience can describe the setting—the human condition—but it cannot ever get beyond that condition, for we are not gods who live eternally but beings whose existence unfolds in time as a story. As we have seen, Arendt’s claim about the narrative character of human existence grows out of her understanding of the conditioned nature of human beings. To say that humans are essentially conditioned beings means that they are creatures who have limits, and that these limits are essential to what and who they are. Humans can never get beyond them, just like they cannot jump over their own shadows. What we can do is articulate those limits, try to take their measure, and attempt to understand how they structure and condition our experience. Human life is conditioned by such existential structures as temporality, mortality, embodiment, scarcity, language, natality, plurality, earth-boundedness, historicality, and even its own technology.109 These are not objective facts, in the conventional sense. They are conditions of our consciousness, and we can only understand them by understanding how they structure our consciousness. There is, so to speak, no transcendental subject of knowledge. Even when Arendt moves farthest away from the human condition in her account of the thinking activity, this activity is still “conditioned,” in this case by what Heidegger had called “temporality,” and what Arendt calls the “gap between past and future.”
In The Human Condition, Arendt proposed to pursue these questions by first making a number of distinctions between the various types of activities humans perform in their worldly conditions. It will be necessary to bracket for the moment the question of the vita contemplativa, where many other activities are performed outside our worldly conditions. In Chapter 3, when we turn to examine the philosophical way of life, thinking and contemplating will be of primary importance, but even in the context of worldliness it is not really possible to escape the relevance of the activities of the mind. For Arendt insists that the life stories humans construct out of the events of their lives would be impossible without the ability to reflect about the meaning of those events with the activity of thought, thus recognizing that Heidegger was at least half right: humans are both mortal and natal, both acting and thinking beings.
Arendt begins her discussion of the worldly activities in the prologue to The Human Condition with the at first blush strange proposal: “What I propose … is very simple: to think what we are doing.”110 This, of course, implies a rather odd proposition: that we somehow do not know what we are doing. Arendt immediately begins making a series distinctions between various human activities. She argues that there are three fundamental conditions to which human beings, as conditioned beings, are subject: the natural necessity of the life process, the worldly human artifice, and the condition of plurality. Corresponding to each of these conditions are, respectively, the three essential human activities: labor, work, and action.111
Labor is the activity humans perform in order to survive the driving necessity of natural metabolism. “[Labor] 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.… The human condition of labor is life itself.”112 Unlike the other activities, labor is cyclical and endless, like nature itself, making it the activity we share with animals, and thus when humans exist as laboring beings she calls them animal laborans.113 “Of all human activities,” she writes, “only labor … is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.”114
Work, on the other hand, establishes a “bulwark” against natural necessity. It creates a space for humans to escape labor by providing “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.”115 At the most abstract level, Arendt distinguishes work by the fact that it has a definite beginning and ending, and this ending is always characterized by a finished product. As the only human activity that employs the teleological means/end category, it thus involves a form of specialized knowledge that can be taught and reproduced.116 As an “artificial” teleological activity, its process always involves doing violence to what is naturally given in order to bring about a worldly space to block out natural necessity.
Finally, action “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.”117 Labor and work find their significance and meaning in the activity of action, which redeems these activities from futility by producing stories that give them meaning.118 Action is able to accomplish this as a result of several unique qualities it possesses. In its purest sense, action is the human capacity to begin a new process or chain of events within the human world.119 It is by far the rarest of the human activities—vanishingly rare, in fact. In contrast to work, action is ateleological, an activity that is not done in order to produce something beyond it, but is instead an end in itself.120 Each action is sui generis: it always has a meaning that is completely distinct from any act that has come before it.121 Each action discloses the “who” rather than the “what” of the actor.122 This is because each human being is unique and unlike any other that has come before. The stories created by the deeds of actors disclose this unique “whoness.” By its nature, action produces and establishes relationships among humans, and this results in a “web of human relations.”123 As a result of these qualities, action inevitably is boundless and unpredictable: each course of action undertaken will impact the other individuals in the web of relationships, eventually coming to have a meaning far exceeding anything the actor could have imagined or foreseen.124 Arendt therefore argues that action has a process character: while we are bound to the natural world through labor by the processes of natural necessity, through action we begin new processes in the web of human relations.125 Arendt asserts that the “web of human relations” established by action exists as a kind of overgrowth on the worldly human artifice: together the two constitute what she calls the “common world.” Arendt claims that the objective world produced by work gives stability to the web of human relations—which by nature is ephemeral and unstable—and allows the deeds done by actors to have lasting significance and, potentially, immortality.126
