Where "The Human Condition" lives
Hannah Arendt's 65-year-old analysis still hits
So far this year, I’ve read two books: one a sweeping epic that just takes you for a ride, and the other a book that demands you to engage with it or else quickly get lost. The first was Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the consequential convergence of a French girl and a German boy’s lives during WWII. I was 10 years late to this party, but far later to the second one: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, a dense and deeply philosophical/political meditation on modern man’s behavior that was originally published in 1958.
When I scrolled through the running list of books I want to read and saw it, I was really confused at first—when or why had I added a tome published the year my father was born about the way humanity has organized itself around labor, work, and action? Then I remembered my wildly existential essay on AI and humanity’s desire to transcend itself inspired by Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine. Ah, yes. O’Gieblyn references Arendt a lot in her writing, and both seem pretty damn interested in the Archimedean point—an objective, third-person view of all things that is in some respects impossible to achieve. A concept I find very interesting. Also, The Human Condition is hailed as a very influential work with insights that still resonate to this day. Makes sense I’d write it down, but was I ready to read it? Only one way to find out.
Well. I can’t apply a scholarly lens to this book, so I won’t try. However, I took pictures of several passages that I found interesting as I read—which as I’m typing occurs to me as pretty silly behavior—and what I can do is relay some of them here to talk about why they stood out. For starters:
“The moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’ sake. When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness…[it] can exist only when it is not perceived, not even by its author; whoever sees himself performing a good work is no longer good…”
This sounds like it’s talking about doing good deeds in the world, and it is, but if you latch onto some of the word choices (“character,” “author”) like I do, you could be forgiven for interpreting it also as a view of tangible work output—like, say, an article, an essay, a book. Either way, I agree there’s something to the idea that to some extent a “good work” loses its essence—the thing that makes it good in the first place—when it surfaces into the public sphere. It’s kind of impossible for that not to happen, really, because once something created becomes perceived by one person, even the person responsible for the creation, it’s warped into a metaphor.
What does that mean? Basically, that a book isn’t really a book. It’s a bunch of pages bound together that have ink printed on them. And the ink is organized in a way that lends itself to a coherent narrative we can consume. And actually, the pages are paper derived from wood that came out of a tree. And actually, a tree is just one of the names we’ve given to those things that rise out of the ground with rough exteriors that can get really big and block the sun and sometimes bear fruit and give off a pretty peaceful vibe. You know. Trees!
Speaking of trees, Arendt has something to say about them as a representation of nature that draws a distinct line between that which appears by itself and that which comes into being as a result of human effort:
“Unlike the products of human hands, which must be realized step by step and for which the fabrication process is entirely distinct from the existence of the fabricated thing itself, the natural thing’s existence is not separate but is somehow identical with the process through which it comes into being: the seed contains and, in a certain sense, already is the tree, and the tree stops being if the process of growth through which it came into existence stops. If we see these processes against the background of human purposes, which have a willed beginning and a definite end, they assume the character of automatism.”
Hmm. If you’re like me, things get a bit fuzzy when Arendt assigns the natural process of a tree’s growth to a likeness with automatism, but maybe that’s because we associate “automatic” behavior mostly with machines—which are tools built by humans. What starts out as a clear delineation between natural and man-made objects then becomes two spaces blended together, and through a later assertion that “from the standpoint of labor, tools strengthen and multiply human strength almost to the point of replacing it,” as humans all of a sudden we find ourselves propelled to greater heights by augmentative, often automated tools which arise from natural resources that…also behave in “automated” ways. How circular. And as it relates to replacing human strength, a sentiment eerily applicable to our society’s current preoccupation with artificial intelligence. AI is coming for our jobs! Just as every other man-made machine before it.
So where is the individual in all this? In short, I’m not sure. I found Arendt to be mostly concerned with humanity overall—what its collective strength can achieve, how its actions both influence and are a product of global political movements, etc. Any zoom to the level of one human turns out to be a comment on what humans are as a whole—which is probably appropriate for a work about The Human Condition. Here’s a bit on the idea of uniqueness, as an example:
“The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a ‘character’ in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us.”
Objects, works, even people—in Arendt’s view, seemingly everything fades into a generalization divorced from its actual essence with any attempt to capture or define it. And not just people in a snapshot of time, but indeed their whole lives. “That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with a beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end,” she writes. Is it a bit of a bummer to consider that each of our own rich experiences in life is A) impossible to capture authentically and B) as inconsequential as a tree’s existence (significantly less so, actually, if we’re talking linear time) in the grand scheme of things? Yeah, maybe. Not everyone’s going to get the biopic or biography treatment that says otherwise. And yet, this is where the individual human condition lives, a fact that’s true for all: as a small part of a whole that itself can be considered as a small part of a larger whole on an infinite scale of non-originality. This is something to wrangle with on an intellectual level if we so choose, as Arendt does, or basically ignore as a waste of time and made up entirely, with equal validity. The choice is ours.
Anyway, I think I need a beach read next.
Thanks Victor. Credit to you for your diverse and interesting reading list, and of course for sharing your perspectives, questions and thoughts so clearly and honestly.
I also struggle with this point a bit…admittedly I didn’t read the book (and probably won’t) so I have no context. I guess for me the question is one of desire or motivation. If the work output is done for the purpose (sole or partial) of “wanting” or desiring something else - praise, notoriety, money, ego, whatever - then I can somewhat understand her point.
There is an expression in Zen (of course there is, Mike) that Zen meditation (what’s called Zazen) is “good for nothing.” I understand that this means that we engage in the practice for its own sake and see it as an end in and of itself. Said different, the practice is not working towards something, it is something itself. Said more simply, the practice is the practice. This way we see the practice, or in Arendt’s case perhaps, the work output, as its own end, rather than as a way of achieving something else.
Not sure. But I am now reflecting my own desire to comment here ;)
Keep the essays coming!
Oh, German philosophy! I wonder what word Arendt used when she translated this book into German. Depends on what she means by “good” of course, but isn’t the goal of a work output (a book, a painting, a movie etc.) to start a conversation with a person who reads//sees it and interprets it? This is where the life of an art work begins, no?