Dianna Taylor
Arendt’s analysis of labor in chapters thirteen, “Labor and Life,” and fourteen, “Labor and Fertility,” of The Human Condition provides an entry point for considering how she conceives of the concept of life. Together, labor, work, and action constitute for Arendt the vita activa: three “fundamental human activities . . . that [correspond] to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.”1 Arendt identifies labor as corresponding “to the biological process of the human body”; she also contends, more fundamentally, that “the human condition of labor is life itself.”2
While Arendt’s assertion suggests that she conceives of life in purely biological terms, this is not the case. In “Labor and Life,” Arendt distinguishes between two forms of life, zōē and bios. Zōē refers to natural life, the cyclical processes of nature and the human body characterized by endless production and consumption. Appearing only fleetingly within the human-produced artifice of durable things (which Arendt refers to as “the world,” and to which the activity of work corresponds), that which gets produced and consumed in natural life ultimately “returns into the over-all, gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition.”3 The cyclical natural processes of zōē are maintained and reproduced in the private realm by means of the activity of labor. Bios refers to human life, which spans the identifiable period between birth and death both collectively (human history) and individually (a single “lifetime”). For Arendt, in other words, “events which ultimately can be told as a story” or which “establish a biography” define bios.4 “Unique, distinct” human lives emerge and are recreated within the public realm through the activity of action. 5 In sum, zōē refers to life; bios to a life.
A hallmark of Arendt’s work is her insistence on the importance of maintaining the integrity of and distinction between, respectively, the three activities of the vita activa, the private realm of labor and the public realm of action, and zōē and bios. Her analysis of the vulnerability of this integrity and deterioration of these distinctions within the modern West illustrates the destructive effects of both developments.
A breakdown of the distinction between the private and the public realms and, hence, between labor and action is apparent in the modern privileging of the activity of labor and the resulting incursion by the private realm into the public. In “Labor and Fertility,” Arendt argues that economic theorists such as John Locke and Adam Smith valorized labor as the highest human capacity because they identified within zōē’s cyclical and endless processes (process itself being a novel concept at the time) the possibility of continual wealth production. Appealing to the “fertility” of life—the perpetual processes of production and consumption that characterize zōē—Locke and Smith conceived of wealth production as itself a natural process. “The crudest superstition of the modern age—that money begets money—as well as its sharpest political insight—that power generates power,” Arendt writes, “owes its plausibility to the underlying metaphor of the natural fertility of life.”6
The realization of Locke’s and Smith’s perspectives within the context of Karl Marx’s work reveals their troubling implications. Marx takes the valorization of labor to a new level by recognizing it alone as a truly human activity, therefore conceiving of humanity solely in the biological terms of species being, and asserting zōē at the expense of bios. This narrow view clears the way for the private realm’s encroachment into the public and the subsequent diminishment of the latter, the combination of which Arendt refers to as “the social.” Encroachment here needs to be understood in terms of a reduced need for speech and action, the two activities that, when engaged collectively, create and sustain the public; this reduced need in turn diminishes conditions for their possibility. Arendt describes speech as the “actualization of the human condition of plurality,” where plurality entails “living as a distinct and unique being among equals.”7 It is by way of speech, then, that human beings distinguish themselves from one another. Private, laboring, species beings are not, and need not be, distinct; for them, “signs and sounds to communicate immediate, identical needs and wants” are perfectly adequate.8 Action, on the other hand, is the actualization of the human condition of natality, which Arendt refers to as a kind of “second birth.”9 Our first, biological birth brings a new human being into the world, and Arendt argues that the capacity for spontaneity, to create something new, that is, to act and not merely react, characterizes what it means to be human. “The fact that man is capable of action,” she writes, “means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.”10 Arendt conceives of human freedom specifically in terms of the “principle of beginning” that is inherent in natality: “Freedom was created when man was created but not before.”11 Free action, for her, is characteristically spontaneous and, hence, as noted earlier, unexpected and unpredictable; it “must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other.” While motives and goals are not irrelevant to freedom, neither are its “determining factors.”12
By inhibiting and potentially eliminating the need, and hence the conditions, for the possibility of human distinctiveness, Marx threatens not merely to subjugate bios to zōē, but to reduce the former to the latter. He effectively creates a situation in which the only distinction that matters is that among things—specifically “the abundance or scarcity of the goods to be fed into [a] process.”13 As Arendt sees it, Marx thus poses a threat not only to human plurality but also to natality, spontaneity, and freedom.
Arendt’s concerns about the subjugation of zōē to bios and her trepidation about the reduction of the latter to the former are sometimes attributed to the valorization on her part of the public realm and action at the expense of the private realm and labor. Yet Arendt emphasizes the significance of the private, labor, and zōē when, for example, she identifies fertility as “the force of life,” and contends that whatever disrupts zōē’s cyclical processes of production and consumption (such as “poverty and misery,” for example) “ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.”14 She does not, therefore, seek simply to reverse the stances of Locke, Smith, and Marx. Rather, as noted earlier, Arendt endeavors to maintain traditional distinctions between private and public or between labor and action, and to resist the reduction of bios to zōē or human life to natural life. Her analysis of the totalitarianism illustrates why this endeavor is not merely theoretical in nature.
The modern threat to human spontaneity and freedom came to fruition in the camps where, Arendt argues, human plurality could be destroyed: “unique, distinct” human beings were reduced to “superfluous human material,” “whos” to mere “whats,”15 the human perspective to “the viewpoint of the life of the species.”16 Such destruction is necessary in order for a totalitarian regime to fulfill its fundamental objective that, according to Arendt, is the promotion of its ideology at any cost; whatever impedes such promotion must be eradicated. Insofar as plurality and the spontaneity of human freedom facilitate critical analysis, questioning, resistance, and counteraction, they pose the greatest possible impediments. Totalitarian regimes thus deploy terror, which reduces prisoners to mere bundles of reactions, thereby allowing totalitarian ideology to freely proliferate. “By pressing men against each other,” Arendt writes, “total terror destroys the space between them. . . . It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.”17 Totalitarian terror thus aims to destroy plurality and totally reduce bios to zōē. Within “a perfect totalitarian government . . . all men have become One Man.”18
This total reduction, Arendt argues, is possible only within the camps, because it is only there that terror has free rein. As she describes it, the total, radical reduction of bios to zōē in turn creates a context within which it is possible to undermine the very concept of life itself. “The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps,” Arendt asserts, “lies in the fact that inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror enforces oblivion.”19 The camps produced “living corpses.” As mere bundles of reactions, camp inmates were completely superfluous, possessing none of the distinguishing characteristics associated with bios. At the same time, insofar as there is nothing natural about the state in which they exist, they cannot be said to reflect zōē. Inmates were neither dead nor alive; they were treated not as if they were dead, but rather as if they had never existed.20
The unintelligibility of death in the camps underscores this negation of life. Normally, Arendt explains, death cultivates plurality by marking not merely the eradication of, as Judith Butler puts it, “something living,” but rather the end of an individual human life. For Butler, as for Arendt, in other words, recognition of death “is a presupposition for the life that matters.”21 In the camps, where it was “impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive,” death was merely “anonymous” and therefore unrecognized. The anonymity and unrecognizability that effectively deprive inmates of their own deaths reflect, and in turn reinforce, the negation of their lives. Rather than marking the end of a meaningful existence, as that which “set[s] a seal” on nonexistence, death, like life, is for all intents and purposes rendered a meaningless concept.22
In “Education After Auschwitz,” Theodor Adorno argues that conditions within Germany twenty-five years after the fall of Nazism were essentially the same as those from which it had emer ged. “The societal pressure still bears down,” Adorno writes, “although the danger remains invisible nowadays.”23 The Human Condition reaches a similar conclusion about conditions within not merely a single state but, more broadly, a modern West characterized by the ascendance of the social realm. The Human Condition’s concluding chapter, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” as well as Arendt’s essay, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” both illustrate that within the postwar West, life continues to be valorized in ways that continue to (re)produce troubling, potentially harmful effects.
It is neither zōē nor bios that is being valorized, however, but rather “extra-terrestrial” life, or life that transcends not only the human-created world and human experience but the earth itself. In “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” Arendt refers to the eternal life promised by Christianity. The focus of “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” is the transformation that life on earth undergoes once not religious faith, but scientific innovation enables human beings to leave the earth.24 Both otherworldly forms of life, Arendt argues, reflect the human desire to occupy the perspective of the Archimedean point—a purely objective, unencumbered, God’s-eye position. This desire reflects a characteristic of totalitarianism to which Arendt refers in her essay “Understanding and Politics” as “stringent logicality”—reason that has been completely instrumentalized and directed toward merely theoretical, decontextualized, and means-end problem solving.25 Severed from reality in this way, reason ceases to be properly human. Just as the reduction of bios to zōē eliminates the need for speech and language, so does the non-worldliness of stringent logicality. Yet rather than mute, bodily signs and symbols, communication, which would ordinarily reflect and assert human plurality, in this instance is reduced to “meaningless formalism and mathematical signs.”26
The unhinging from human experience reflected in the desire to—and conviction that human beings are in fact able to—occupy the Archimedean point thus emulates in deeply disturbing ways the negation of plurality, and hence of humanity, that occurred in the camps: neither natural life nor human life, zōē nor bios, the Archimedean point objectifies and dehumanizes not only the world but also the human life within and the experience of that life. “The action of the scientists” to whom the Archimedean point beckons, Arendt writes,
since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence.27
As with Adorno, we can thus identify within Arendt’s work an appeal to our critical as well as our creative capacities as human beings. It is only through cultivating both that we can navigate our existence in ways that neither reduce human experience to the undifferentiated life of the species nor render it a mere object unrecognizable as fully human.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 96.
4 Ibid., 97.
5 Ibid., 7.
6 Ibid., 105.
7 Ibid., 178.
8 Ibid., 175–76.
9 Ibid., 176.
10 Ibid., 178.
11 Ibid.
12 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 150.
13 Ibid., 108.
14 Ibid., 109.
15 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1973), 443.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 466.
18 Ibid., 467.
19 Ibid., 443.
20 Ibid., 445.
21 Judith Butler, Frames of War (New York: Verso, 2010), 15.
22 Arendt, Origins, 452.
23 Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 192.
24 Arendt opens The Human Condition with a discussion of the launching of Sputnik; she also discusses space exploration in Chapter IV, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age.”
25 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 317.
26 Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” in Between Past and Future, 274.
27 Arendt, Human Condition, 324.