The Human Condition
How action, amongst the three fundamental human activities, generates new beginnings, faith, and hope.
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”
(Source: The Human Condition, p. 247, conclusion of Chapter V “On Action”)
The Anthropocene as a fundamentally new age in which humans live, under new conditions they themselves have created, generates a task for humans to think what they are doing.
This is the central theme of Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition. What she proposes is
a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This [reconsideration] is, obviously, a matter of thought, and [yet] thoughtlessness — the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty — seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time.
(Prologue, p. 5, my glosses and emphasis)
“What we are doing” refers to human activities, the vita activa, as opposed to theoria or the vita contemplativa, contemplation. Arendt does not intend to reflect on thinking itself. (For that see The Life of the Mind.) Rather, she will reconsider the three activities of labor, work, and action (political action). Of the three, it is action that is at the heart of the concluding paragraph of Chapter V “On Action,” which is the quote we are reconsidering today.
The miracle that saves the world… is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted.
Action is “ontologically rooted” in natality, that is, the birth of new humans coming into the world.
Labor, Work, and Action
At the very beginning of the book (Human Condition, Prologue, p. 7-9), Arendt defines labor, work, and action as universal human activities — the three components of the vita activa — and indicates in what way each is fundamental, “because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.”
“Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body… The human condition of labor is life itself.” (We have to labor to feed ourselves and to maintain the life of the species.)
“Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence… Work provides an “artificial” world of things… within which each individual life is housed and which will outlast and transcend us. The human condition of work is worldliness.”
“Action corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. This plurality is specifically the condition of all political life.”
Life on earth has been given to humans beings in such a way that we labor to maintain biological life itself, we work to create an artificial world — meaning not fake but artfully-produced — conditioning us thus to be worldly beings, and we engage in action and speech as a plurality of unique humans. The way we are “all the same” as human is that nobody is ever the same as anyone else.
Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable... Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
(Source: p. 8)
Natality
These three basic conditions under which humans exist on earth — life itself, worldliness, plurality — are intimately connected with our “most general condition”: human birth and death, natality and mortality. We are born, we live, and we die.
Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history.
The great words and deeds of humans who act in the world can be remembered and told after their life is over by historians, as history, who are able to reveal full meaning in story (see Ch. 5, sections 25-27). In Greek fashion, this memory, this story, becomes a sort of immortality (see Ch. 1, section 3).
Action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality:
the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.
(Source: Human Condition, Prologue, p. 9)
Faith and Hope
By virtue of being born, then, humans have a capacity for action that allows them to begin anew, which is also the political activity par excellence.
Only the full experience of this capacity, undertaken uniquely by each human person in the context of human plurality, bestows faith and hope upon the world.
It [the miracle] is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence.
Perhaps the “most glorious and most succinct expression” of saving faith and hope, as bestowed via human natality and action, may be found, Arendt judges, in the words the Gospels use to announce the glad tidings: “A child has been born unto us.”
