hannah arendt the human condition sparknotes

By grouping human functions under broad labels, such as “labor” and “work,” it is possible to build any number of plausible, if ultimately vacuous, descriptive schemes. Verbal identities do not necessarily point to identities in the world. This kind of reasoning is used lightly in parlor games and nonsense poetry, rather more seriously at literary cocktail parties, and far too solemnly in the new university paper-back illiteracy. Arendt’s way of treating the word “process” as if it had a single, unambiguous meaning-as though the “process” of changing one’s mind and the “process” of turning water into ice are instances of a single phenomenon. But to lump together the diversity of approaches, techniques, and kinds of concept formation in scientific inquiry with the whole of modern technology and the machine civilization is unworthy of a treatise which surely intends to be sophisticated. Arendt’s usage is immediately recognizable. The name “science” is so often used today, in politics, advertising, and the public fantasies of the mass media, to represent a mysterious activity inspiring fear, reverence, or reproach, that Dr. In any case they are meant to explain events. Arendt, in the familiar Hegelian fashion, treats them interchangeably.

Arendt’s thesis is built around a trilogy of terms: “Labor,” “Work,” and “Action.” It is hard to know as the argument proceeds whether these are meant to be historical stages in man’s development or logical categories, for Dr. In the manner of Spengler, the rationalization of a prejudice is elevated into a theory of history, and the prejudice itself becomes a principle of action.ĭr. But beneath this show of erudition and borrowed pomp there is a fragile, commonplace thesis: essentially it is another version of the classic apology for an elite. The Human Condition is thus supported by a formidable apparatus.

Rather like a party whip, she attempts to keep them in line with her argument, and when they don’t agree she remonstrates with them.

These authorities man her front lines a host of lesser worthies are marshaled in a thousand footnotes. Arendt enlists Marx, the Church Fathers, Plato, Aristotle, Locke, the Bible, and Adam Smith in the service of her plan. It offers itself as a work of radically original insight, at the same time that it follows established authorities whose traditional phrases provide the comforting security of the familiar.ĭr. Arendt calls “man’s condition.” It promises to illuminate “politics, aesthetics, economics, history, the growth of psychology and the social sciences” as well as man’s probable fate. Why should so many critics look upon this book as brilliant rather than presumptuous? It has a grandiose intention: to diagnose what Dr.

Hannah arendt the human condition sparknotes