V i t a A c t i v a A N D T H E
HUMAN C O N D I T I O N
With the term vita activa, 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, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and
eventual 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. Within its borders each individual life is
housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend
them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.
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 hu-
man 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)
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The Human Condition
or "to die" and "to cease to be among men" {inter homines esse de-sinere) as synonyms. But in its most elementary form, the human
condition of action is implicit even in Genesis ("Male and female
created He them"), if we understand that this story of man's crea-
tion is distinguished in principle from the one according to which
God originally created Man (adam), "him" and not "them," so that the multitude of human beings becomes the result of multiplication.1 Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious in-
terference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly
reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or es-
sence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or
essence of any other thing. 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.
All three activities and their corresponding conditions are inti-
mately connected with the most general condition of human exist-
ence: birth and death, natality and mortality. 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 pre-
1. In the analysis of postclassical political thought, it is often quite illuminat-
ing to find out which of the two biblical versions of the creation story is cited.
Thus it is highly characteristic of the difference between the teaching of Jesus
of Nazareth and of Paul that Jesus, discussing the relationship between man and
wife, refers to Genesis 1:27: "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female" (Matt. 19:4), whereas Paul on a similar
occasion insists that the woman was created "of the man" and hence "for the man," even though he then somewhat attenuates the dependence: "neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man" (I Cor. 11:8-12).
The difference indicates much more than a different attitude to the role of woman.
For Jesus, faith was closely related to action (cf. § 3 3 below); for Paul, faith was primarily related to salvation. Especially interesting in this respect is Augustine
(De chitate Dei xii. 21), who not only ignores Genesis 1:27 altogether but sees the difference between man and animal in that man was created umtm ac singu-lum, whereas all animals were ordered "to come into being several at once"
(plum simul iussit exsistere). To Augustine, the creation story offers a welcome opportunity to stress the species character of animal life as distinguished from the singularity of human existence.
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The Human Condition
serving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance,
that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also
rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and pre-
serve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant in-
flux of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. How-
ever, of the three, action has the closest connection with the hu-
man 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.
The human condition comprehends more than the conditions
under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned
beings because everything they come in contact with turns imme-
diately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the
vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human ac-
tivities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men
nevertheless constantly condition their human makers. In addition
to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and
partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made
conditions, which, their human origin and their variability not-
withstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural
things. Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship
with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition
of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are
always conditioned beings. Whatever enters the human world of
its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part
of the human condition. The impact of the world's reality upon
human existence is felt and received as a conditioning force. The
objectivity of the world—its object- or thing-character—and the
human condition supplement each other; because human existence
is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things,
and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if
they were not the conditioners of human existence.
To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not the
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The Human Condition
same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and
capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not con-
stitute anything like human nature. For neither those we discuss
here nor those we leave out, like thought and reason, and not even
the most meticulous enumeration of them all, constitute essential
characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them
this existence would no longer be human. The most radical change
in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of
men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer
totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under
man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth
offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought
as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these
hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but
the only statement we could make regarding their "nature" is that
they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is
now self-made to a considerable extent.
The problem of human nature, the Augustinian quaestio mihi
factus sum ("a question have I become for myself), seems un-
answerable in both its individual psychological sense and its gen-
eral philosophical sense. It is highly unlikely that we, who can
know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things sur-
rounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same
for ourselves—this would be like jumping over our own shadows.
Moreover, nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or
essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we
have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and
define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to
speak about a "who" as though it were a "what."2 The perplexity
2. Augustine, who is usually credited with having been the first to raise the
so-called anthropological question in philosophy, knew this quite well. He dis-
tinguishes between the questions of "Who am I?" and "What am I?" the first being directed by man at himself ("And I directed myself at myself and said to
me: You, who are you? And I answered: A man"— tu, quis es? [Confessiones x. 6]) and the second being addressed to God ("What then am I, my God? What is
my nature?"— Quid ergo sum, Deus meus? Quae natura mm? [x. 17]). For in the
"great mystery," the grandeprofundum, which man is (iv. 14), there is "something of man [aliquid hominis] which the spirit of man which is in him itself r i o i
The Human Condition
is that the modes of human cognition applicable to things with
"natural" qualities, including ourselves to the limited extent that
we are specimens of the most highly developed species of organic
life, fail us when we raise the question: And who are we? This is
why attempts to define human nature almost invariably end with
some construction of a deity, that is, with the god of the philoso-
phers, who, since Plato, has revealed himself upon closer inspec-
tion to be a kind of Platonic idea of man. Of course, to demask such
philosophic concepts of the divine as conceptualizations of human
capabilities and qualities is not a demonstration of, "not even an
argument for, the non-existence of God; but the fact that attempts
to define the nature of man lead so easily into an idea which defi-
nitely strikes us as "superhuman" and therefore is identified with
the divine may cast suspicion upon the very concept of "human
nature."
On the other hand, the conditions of human existence—life it-
self, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth-
can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who
we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolute-
ly. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction
from the sciences—anthropology, psychology, biology, etc.—
which also concern themselves with man. But today we may al-
most say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that,
though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth's
conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern nat-
ural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and
treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that
is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly,
outside the earth.
knoweth not. But Thou, Lord, who has made him [fecisti mm] knowest every-
thing of him [eius omnia]" (x. 5). Thus, the most familiar of these phrases which I quoted in the text, the quaestw mihi factus sum, is a question raised in the presence of God, "in whose eyes I have become a question for myself" (x. 33). In brief, the answer to the question "Who am I?" is simply: "You are a man—
whatever that may be"; and the answer to the question "What am I?" can be given only by God who made man. The question about the nature of man is no
less a theological question than the question about the jnature of God; both can
be settled only within the framework of a divinely revealed answer.
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The Human Condition
T H E T E R M V i t a A c t i v a
The term vita activa is loaded and overloaded with tradition. It is
as old as (but not older than) our tradition of political thought.
And this tradition, far from comprehending and conceptualizing
all the political experiences of Western mankind, grew out of a
specific historical constellation: the trial of Socrates and the con-
flict between the philosopher and the polls. It eliminated many ex-
periences of an earlier past that were irrelevant to its immediate
political purposes and proceeded until its end, in the work of Karl
Marx, in a highly selective manner. The term itself, in medieval
philosophy the standard translation of the Aristotelian bios politi-
kos, already occurs in Augustine, where, as vita negotiosa or actuosa, it still reflects its original meaning: a life devoted to public-political
matters.3
Aristotle distinguished three ways of life (b'xo'i) which men
might choose in freedom, that is, in full independence of the neces-
sities of life and the relationships they originated. This prerequisite
of freedom ruled out all ways of life chiefly devoted to keeping
one's self alive—not only labor, which was the way of life of the
slave, who was coerced by the necessity to stay alive and by the
rule of his master, but also the working life of the free craftsman
and the acquisitive life of the merchant. In short, it excluded every-
body who involuntarily or voluntarily, for his whole life or tem-
porarily, had lost the free disposition of his movements and ac-
tivities.4 The remaining three ways of life have in common that
3. See Augustine De civitate Dei xix. 2, 19.
4. William L. Westermann ("Between Slavery and Freedom," American
Historical Review, Vol. L (.1945]) holds that the "statement of Aristotle . . . that craftsmen live in a condition of limited slavery meant that the artisan, when he
made a work contract, disposed of two of the four elements of his free status
[viz., of freedom of economic activity and right of unrestricted movement], but
by his own volition and for a temporary period"; evidence quoted by Wester-
mann shows that freedom was then understood to consist of "status, personal in-
violability, freedom of economic activity, right of unrestricted movement," and slavery consequently "was the lack of these four attributes." Aristotle, in his enumeration of "ways of life" in the Nicomachean Ethics (i. 5) and the Eudemim Ethics (1215a35 ff.), does not even mention a craftsman's way of life; to him it
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The Human Condition
they were concerned with the "beautiful," that is, with things
neither necessary nor merely useful: the life of enjoying bodily
pleasures in which the beautiful, as it is given, is consumed;
the life devoted to the matters of the polls, in which excellence pro-
duces beautiful deeds; and the life of the philosopher devoted to
inquiry into, and contemplation of, things eternal, whose ever-
lasting beauty can neither be brought about through the producing
interference of man nor be changed through his consumption of
them.5
The chief difference between the Aristotelian and the later me-
dieval use of the term is that the bios folitikos denoted explicitly
only the realm of human affairs, stressing the action, praxis, needed
to establish and sustain it. Neither labor nor work was considered
to possess sufficient dignity to constitute a bios at all, an autono-
mous and authentically human way of life; since they served and
produced what was necessary and useful, they could not be free, in-
dependent of human needs and wants.6 That the political way of
life escaped this verdict is due to the Greek understanding of polls
life, which to them denoted a very special and freely chosen form
of political organization and by no means just any form of action
necessary to keep men together in an orderly fashion. Not that
the Greeks or Aristotle were ignorant of the fact that human life
always demands some form of political organization and that rul-
ing over subjects might constitute a distinct way of life; but the
despot's way of life, because it was "merely" a necessity, could
not be considered free and had no relationship with the bios
polltikos.'1
is obvious that a bcmausos is not free (cf. Politics 1337b5). He mentions, however,
"the life of money-making" and rejects it because it too is "undertaken under compulsion" (Nic. Eth, 1096a5). That the criterion is freedom is stressed in the Eudemian Ethics: he enumerates only those lives that are chosen ep' exousian.
5. For the opposition of the beautiful to the necessary and the useful see foli-
«Vsl333a3Off., 1332b32.
6. For the opposition of the free to the necessary and the useful see ibid.
1332b2.
7. See ibid. 1277b8 for the distinction between despotic rule and politics. For the argument that the life of the despot is not equal to the life of a free man because the former is concerned with "necessary dungs," see ibid. 1325a24.
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The Human Condition
With the disappearance of the ancient city-state—Augustine
seems to have been the last to know at least what it once meant
to be a citizen—the term vita activa lost its specifically political
meaning and denoted all kinds of active engagement in the things of
this world. To be sure, it does not follow that work and labor had
risen in the hierarchy of human activities and were now equal in
dignity with a life devoted to politics.8 It was, rather, the other
way round: action was now also reckoned among the necessities
of earthly life, so that contemplation (the bios theoutikos, trans-
lated into the vita contemplativa) was left as the only truly free way
of life.9
However, the enormous superiority of contemplation over ac-
tivity of any kind, action not excluded, is not Christian in origin.
We find it in Plato's political philosophy, where the whole Utopian
reorganization of polis life is not only directed by the superior in-
sight of the philosopher but has no aim other than to make possible
the philosopher's way of life. Aristotle's very articulation of the
different ways of life, in whose order the life of pleasure plays a
minor role, is clearly guided by the ideal of contemplation (theoria).
To the ancient freedom from the necessities of life and from com-
pulsion by others, the philosophers added freedom and surcease
from political activity (skhole),10 so that the later Christian claim
to be free from entanglement in worldly affairs, from all the busi-
8. On the widespread opinion that the modem estimate of labor is Christian
in origin, see below, § 44.
9. See Aquinas Summa theologica ii. 2. 179, esp. art. 2, where the vita activa arises out of the necessitas vitae praesentis, and Expositio in Psalmos 4S.3, where the body politic is assigned the task of finding all that is necessary for life: in dvitate oportet invenire omnia necessaria ad vitam.
10. The Greek word skhole, like the Latin otium, means primarily freedom from political activity and not simply leisure time, although both words are also used
to indicate freedom from labor and life's necessities. In any event, they always
indicate a condition free from worries and cares. An excellent description of the
everyday life of an ordinary Athenian citizen, who enjoys full freedom from
labor and work, can be found in Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Anchor ed.; 1956), pp. 334—36; it will convince everybody how time-consuming political activity was under the conditions of the city-state. One can easily guess how
full of worry this ordinary political life was if one remembers that Athenian law
did not permit remaining neutral and punished those who did not want to take
sides in factional strife with loss of citizenship.
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The Human Condition
ness of this world, was preceded by and originated in the philo-
sophic apolitia of late antiquity. What had been demanded only
by the few was now considered to be a right of all.
The term vita activa, comprehending all human activities and de-
fined from the viewpoint of the absolute quiet of contemplation,
therefore corresponds more closely to the Greek askholk ("un-
quiet"), with which Aristotle designated all activity, than to the
Greek bios politikos. As early as Aristotle the distinction between
quiet and unquiet, between an almost breathless abstention from
external physical movement and activity of every kind, is more
decisive than the distinction between the political and the theoreti-
cal way of life, because it can eventually be found within each of
the three ways of life. It is like the distinction between war and
peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every
kind of activity, even the processes of mere thought, must cul-
minate in the absolute quiet of contemplation.11 Every movement,
the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reason-
ing, must cease before truth. Truth, be it the ancient truth of Being
or the Christian truth of the living God, can reveal itself only in
complete human stillness.12
Traditionally and up to the beginning of the modern age, the
term vita activa never lost its negative connotation of "un-quiet,"
nec-otium, a-skholia. As such it remained intimately related to the
even more fundamental Greek distinction between things that are
by themselves whatever they are and things which owe their exist-
ence to man, between things that are physei and things that are
nomo. The primacy of contemplation over activity rests on the con-
viction that no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth
the physical kosmos, which swings in itself in changeless eternity
without any interference or assistance from outside, from man or
god. This eternity discloses itself to mortal eyes only when all
human movements and activities are at perfect rest. Compared
with this attitude of quiet, all distinctions and articulations within
11. See Aristotle Politics 1333a3O—33. Aquinas defines contemplation as quies ab exterioribus motibus {Summa theologica ii. 2. 179. 1).
12. Aquinas stresses the stillness of the soul and recommends the vita activa
because it exhausts and therefore "quietens interior passions" and prepares for contemplation (Summa theologica