Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning

You begin the task; you complete the task. You begin the task; you complete the task. For Arendt, this is a description not of work but of labor. In terms of freedom and meaning, labor is the lowest tier of human activity; unfortunately, it’s also the tier to which most other kinds of human activity are being reduced.

The accelerating cycles of labor and consumption are replacing free human action with instrumentalization, and meaning with productivity…

Arendt offers this analysis in her prescient 1958 book, The Human Condition, which provides an account of what Arendt calls the vita activa, the life of activity.

Arendt contrasts the vita activa with the vita contemplativa, the life of contemplation.

She tells us that, while traditionally the vita contemplativa was deemed superior to the vita activa, modernity has reversed this judgment: the life of action is now deemed superior to the life of contemplation.

Better thinking is no longer a goal in itself. Instead, we ask: what is all this thinking actually for? What will greater understanding allow us to practically do?

As Arendt puts it:

Perhaps the most momentous of the spiritual consequences of the discoveries of the modern age […] has been the reversal of the hierarchical order between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa.

Arendt thinks we need both the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, and is not interested in placing one above the other.

What does concern her is not only modernity’s total rejection of the vita contemplativa, but also its dangerous conception of the vita activa, a conception that drains meaning from both our working and non-working lives.

To shed light here, Arendt distinguishes between three elements that she thinks make for a complete, rounded vita activa: labor, work, and action.

Labor keeps us alive

Labor for Arendt consists of what we must do, along with all other animals, simply to meet our biological needs. Gathering resources, consuming resources: labor resembles the cyclical patterns of nature, patterns we are in some sense enslaved by. We eat, but soon become hungry again. Farmers reap their harvest, and must replow their fields.

Exercise, personal hygiene, domestic chores — the efforts of labor must be perpetually renewed because they are canceled out by consumption. While these cycles can be pleasurable, they ultimately lack meaning because they are governed by the necessity of merely subsisting. In this respect, all living beings are indistinguishable from one another: we must labor to stay alive.

Work reshapes the world

Work is the next tier in Arendt’s vita activa, and it consists in the production of artifacts. If labor operates according to nature’s neverending circular patterns, then work is something that disrupts this pattern. We produce a tool, a book, or an institution that escapes nature’s impositions and stands outside its cycles: we create something lasting.

Work for Arendt involves not the repetitive tasks of labor, but goal-directed strategy, calculation, and planning for the future. Time becomes linear, rather than circular.

We don’t just sustain ourselves in the world, we reshape the world: we build infrastructure, we create art, we produce something new and abiding and useful for our fellow humans that changes their experience in some permanent way. Work is thus teleological and world-building — it has a purpose beyond consumption.

Action announces who we are

Action is the highest tier in Arendt’s vita activa, and the most difficult to concisely capture. Essentially, action is how we disclose to the world who, rather than what, we are. Inherently political, action consists in the stories and narratives we communicate to our fellow citizens, without goal-directedness or calculation.

Action is the freest and highest expression of the vita activa, Arendt thinks, because it transcends both the cyclical nature of labor and the means-end, instrumental calculation of work.

We don’t just subsist in the world, and we don’t merely shape it through artifacts: through action we announce who we are. By inserting something “original and unanticipated” into the public sphere, we meaningfully distinguish ourselves from others. It is through the result of action that the world is not just shaped, but changed: action brings meaning to human life.

Work is degrading into labor, and action is degrading into work

While labor, work, and action all have a distinct part to play in a rounded vita activa, Arendt’s concern is that modernity blurs the lines between them: the higher tiers are being invaded from below.

In many respects, for example, work has been reduced to labor. We increasingly produce artifacts designed not to stand the test of time, but to serve the next business cycle.

Our efforts create nothing new or lasting or useful: we perform the same tasks again and again to sustain the market’s insatiable need for more gadgets, clothes, trinkets, information, entertainment — all produced to be consumed and thrown away.

As Arendt puts it in The Human Condition:

The endlessness of the laboring process is guaranteed by the ever-recurrent needs of consumption; the endlessness of production can be assured only if its products lose their use character and become more and more objects of consumption, or if, to put it another way, the rate of use is so tremendously accelerated that the objective difference between use and consumption, between the relative durability of use objects and the swift coming and going of consumer goods, dwindles to insignificance.

Work has regressed to circular time. Advertising prays on our natural vulnerabilities. Rather than produce artifacts that matter, we create products to be consumed like food. We work to stay alive.

While work is being reduced to labor, Arendt also warns that action is being reduced to work-like practice. Rather than spontaneously disclose our true selves, our activities are increasingly calculated, goal-directed, and guided by efficiency: individual human beings have fragmented into data points.

But Arendt thinks if we want our lives to be meaningful we need to create space for original action, not just calculation.

Unfortunately, our modern conception of the vita activa de-emphasizes the activities with the highest scope for meaning, and elevates those with the lowest.

We are thus on course to become stuck in accelerating cycles of labor and consumption. We will become exhausted cogs in a punishing machine with nowhere else to go. Free action will be replaced by instrumentalization. Meaning will be replaced by productivity…

So, what can we do?

The full depth and nuance of Arendt’s provocative critique in The Human Condition cannot be captured in this short overview. But perhaps we might ask ourselves: what is the balance between labor, work, and action in our lives today?

Do we have space to truly, meaningfully disclose ourselves to our fellow citizens? Do we produce work that lasts and matters? Or are we caught up in the perpetual cycles of labor and consumption, and trapped by the efficiency of means-end calculation?

If we feel Arendt is on to something, we might wonder what the solutions are. Unfortunately they are not straightforward.

Arendt thinks we must somehow cease glorifying labor and return it to its true place at the bottom of the vita activa hierarchy. We must unblur the lines between labor and work, and between work and action. Rather than dread mortality, keeping ourselves from death with perpetual subsistence, we should focus more on natality and the lasting creations we might birth.

Most importantly, we must reimagine politics and society in such a way that they are released from the dominion of short-term, means-end calculation, and provide scope for human beings to disclose not what they are, but who they are…

What do you make of Arendt’s analysis?

Since Arendt’s time, some might argue the machine she warned us about has only accelerated. For example, contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests we now willingly exploit ourselves in the name of greater productivity and optimal performance. But what do you think?

• Does Arendt’s distinction between labor, work, and action provide a useful lens for critiquing modern patterns of human activity?
• Is Arendt right to place labor at the bottom of the vita activa?
• Or is she too quick to dismiss the meaning that might be acquired from mindfully partaking in cycles that mirror those of nature?

Learn more about Arendt’s critique and related philosophy

If you’re interested in learning more about her philosophy, you might like my reading list of Hannah Arendt’s best books. You might also enjoy the following related articles:

• Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society: Our Only Imperative is to Achieve
• Elizabeth Anderson on the Tyranny of Being Employed
• John Rawls: How a ‘Veil of Ignorance’ Can Help Us Build a Just Society
• Hannah Arendt On Standing Up to the Banality of Evil
• Political Philosophy: the Best 14 Books to Read

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