A Little Hannah Arendt For Labor Day

 "With the term vita active, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities:  labor, work, and action.  They are 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, who's spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventually decay are bound to the vital necessities  produced and fed into the life process by labor.  The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle.  Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings.  Wthin its borders each imdividual life is housed, which this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all.  The human condition of work is wordliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.  While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition - not only the conditio sine qua non, but the  conditio per quam -  of all political life.  Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words "to live" and "to be among men" (inter homines esse) or "to die" and "to cease to be among men" (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms."

Later, she elaborates on the distinction between labor and work.

"THE LABOUR OF OUR BODY AND THE WORK OF OUR HANDS"

"The distinction btween labor and work which I propose is unusual.  The phenomenal evidence in its favor is too striking to be ignored, and yet historically it is a fact that apart from a few scattered remarks, which moreover were never developed even in the theories of their authors, there's is hardly anything in either the pre-modern tradition of political thought or in the large boy of modern labor theories to support it.  Against this scarcity of historical evidence, however, stands one very articulate and obstinate testimony, namel, the simple fact that every European language, ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated word for what we have to come to think of as the same activity, and rtains them in the face of their persistent synonymous usage."

"Thus Locke's distinction between working hands and a labouring body is somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Gree distinction between the cheirotechnēs, the craftsman, to whom the German Handwerker corresponds, and those who, like "slaves and tame animals with their bodies minister to the necessities of life," . . .

I thought I would find an easy passage from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition that would clearly distinguish between work and labor on this Labor Day.  But I forgot that Arendt makes my blog posts seem like extremely shallow tweets. But it seemed to be a fitting thought exercise for Labor Day.