FROM ACTION TO CONDITION

human conditioning and modern alienation in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt establishes as a central issue the question what are we doing? She does not propose an answer, but a reconsideration of the human condition itself from the point of view of the modern experience. The work has a “double flight”: from earth to space and from the world to the human being. The diagnosis that, with the disappearance of the public space, the political sphere has become weak, indicates by the author that a new sphere has emerged, that of the social. Political activity started to be considered an activity like any other, that is, it started to have the status of a mere activity focused on necessity and on the maintenance of human life itself, and the activity of labor took its position. In this sense, the human being starts to be seen as an animal laborans, an individual who works to guarantee self-survival, and whose relation to his primary condition is increasingly reaffirmed as a biological process, that is, he turns exclusively to his survival and to the consumption of his body's desires. This figure becomes the paradigm of the modern era. Consequently, the private domain expands itself and there is an exacerbation of that domain in the public sphere. The prognosis, therefore, is that we live in a workers’ society, given that at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century the values were subverted, letting the activity of work define the human being as a human being.