recommends in his preachings is action, and the only human capac-
ity he stresses is the capacity "to perform miracles."
However that may be, the modern age continued to operate un-
der the assumption that life, and not the world, is the highest good
of man; in its boldest and most radical revisions and criticisms of
traditional beliefs and concepts, it never even thought of challeng-
ing this fundamental reversal which Christianity had brought into
reasons: it helps to fight the temptations of otiosity; it helps the monasteries to
fulfil their duty of charity toward the poor; and it is favorable to contemplation
because it does not engage the mind unduly like other occupations, for instance,
the buying and selling of goods. For the role of labor in the monasteries, compare
Etienne Delaruelle, "Le travail dans les regies monastiques occidentales du 4e au 9e siecle," Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. XLI, No. 1 (1948).
Apart from these formal considerations, it is quite characteristic that the Solitaires de Port-Royal, looking for some instrument of really effective punishment,
thought immediately of labor (see Lucien Febre, "Travail: Evolution d'un mot et d'une idee," Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. XLI, No. 1 [1948]).
84. Aquinas Summa theologka ii. 2. 182. 1, 2. In his insistence on the absolute superiority of the vita contemplativa, Thomas shows a characteristic difference from Augustine, who recommends the inquisitio, out inventio veritatis: ut in ea
quisque proficiat—"inquisition or discovery of truth so that somebody may profit from it" {De civitate Dei xix. 19). But this difference is hardly more than the difference between a Christian thinker formed by Greek, and another by Roman,
philosophy.
85. The Gospels are concerned with the evil of earthly possessions, not with
the praise of labor or laborers (see esp. Matt. 6:19-32, 19:21-24; Mark 4:19;
Luke 6:20-34, 18:22-25; Acts 4: 32-35).
r s i s i
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
the dying ancient world. No matter how articulate and how con-
scious the thinkers of modernity were in their attacks on tradition,
the priority of life over everything else had acquired for them the
status of a "self-evident truth," and as such it has survived even in
our present world, which has begun already to leave the whole
modern age behind and to substitute for a laboring society the so-
ciety of jobholders. But while it is quite conceivable that the devel-
opment following upon the discovery of the Archimedean point
would have taken an altogether different direction if it had taken
place seventeen hundred years earlier, when not life but the world
was still the highest good of man, it by no means follows that we
still live in a Christian world. For what matters today is not the
immortality of life, but that life is the highest good. And while this
assumption certainly is Christian in origin, it constitutes no more
than an important attending circumstance for the Christian faith.
Moreover, even if we disregard the details of Christian dogma and
consider only the general mood of Christianity, which resides in
the importance of faith, it is obvious that nothing could be more
detrimental to this spirit than the spirit of distrust and suspicion of
the modern age. Surely, Cartesian doubt has proved its efficiency
nowhere more disastrously and irretrievably than in the realm of
religious belief, where it was introduced by Pascal and Kierke-
gaard, the two greatest religious thinkers of modernity. (For what
undermined the Christian faith was not the atheism of the eight-
eenth century or the materialism of the nineteenth—their argu-
ments are frequently vulgar and, for the most part, easily refutable
by traditional theology—but rather the doubting concern with sal-
vation of genuinely religious men, in whose eyes the traditional
Christian content and promise had become "absurd.")
Just as we do not know what would have happened if the Archi-
medean point had been discovered before the rise of Christianity,
we are in no position to ascertain what the destiny of Christianity
would have been if the great awakening of the Renaissance had not
been interrupted by this event. Before Galileo, all paths still
seemed to be open. If we think back to Leonardo, we may well
imagine that a technical revolution would have overtaken the de-
velopment of humanity in any case. This might well have led to
flight, the realization of one of the oldest and most persistent
[ m ]
The Human Condition
dreams of man, but it hardly would have led into the universe; it
might well have brought about the unification of the earth, but it
hardly would have brought about the transformation of matter into
energy and the adventure into the microscopic universe. The only
thing we can be sure of is that the coincidence of the reversal of
doing and contemplating with the earlier reversal of life and world
became the point of departure for the whole modern development.
Only when the vita activa had lost its point of reference in the vita
cmtemplativa could it become active life in the full sense of the
word; and only because this active life remained bound to life as
its only point of reference could life as such, the laboring metabo-
lism of man with nature, become active and unfold its entire fer-
tility.
45
T H E V I C T O R Y OF T H E A n i m a l L a b o r arts
The victory of the animal laborans would never have been complete
had not the process of secularization, the modern loss of faith in-
evitably arising from Cartesian doubt, deprived individual life of
its immortality, or at least of the certainty of immortality. Individ-
ual life again became mortal, as mortal as it had been in antiquity,
and the world was even less stable, less permanent, and hence less
to be relied upon than it had been during the Christian era. Modern
man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown
back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that
the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that
it was real. And in so far as he was to assume that it was real in the
uncritical and apparently unbothered optimism of a steadily pro-
gressing science, he had removed himself from the earth to a much
more distant point than any Christian otherworldliness had ever
removed him. Whatever the word "secular" is meant to signify in
current usage, historically it cannot possibly be equated with
worldliness; modern man at any rate did not gain this world when
he lost the other world, and he did not gain life, strictly speaking,
either; he was thrust back upon it, thrown into the closed inward-
ness of introspection, where the highest he could experience were
the empty processes of reckoning of the mind, its play with itself.
The only contents left were appetites and desires, the senseless
r n o ]
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
urges of his body which he mistook for passion and which he
deemed to be "unreasonable" because he found he could not "rea-
son," that is, not reckon with them. The only thing that could now
be potentially immortal, as immortal as the body politic in antiq-
uity and as individual life during the Middle Ages, was life itself,
that is, the possibly everlasting life process of the species man-
kind.
We saw before that in the rise of society it was ultimately the
life of the species which asserted itself. Theoretically, the turning
point from the earlier modern age's insistence on the "egoistic"
life of the individual to its later emphasis on "social" life and
"socialized man" (Marx) came when Marx transformed the
cruder notion of classical economy—that all men, in so far as they
act at all, act for reasons of self-interest—into forces of interest
which inform, move, and direct the classes of society, and through
their conflicts direct society as a whole. Socialized mankind is that
state of society where only one interest rules, and the subject of
this interest is either classes or man-kind, but neither man nor men.
The point is that now even the last trace of action in what men
were doing, the motive implied in self-interest, disappeared. What
was left was a "natural force," the force of the life process itself,
to which all men and all human activities were equally submitted
("the thought process itself is a natural process")S6 and whose only
aim, if it had an aim at all, was survival of the animal species man.
None of the higher capacities of man was any longer necessary to
connect individual life with the life of the species; individual life
became part of the life process, and to labor, to assure the con-
tinuity of one's own life and the life of his family, was all that was
needed. What was not needed, not necessitated by life's metabo-
lism with nature, was either superfluous or could be justified only
in terms of a peculiarity of human as distinguished from other
animal life—so that Milton was considered to have written his
Paradise Lost for the same reasons and out of similar urges that
compel the silkworm to produce silk.
If we compare the modern world with that of the past, the loss ot
human experience involved in this development is extraordinarily
striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which
86. In a letter Marx wrote to Kugelmann in July, 1868.
[ 321 ]
The Human Condition
has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself,
when it became "reckoning with consequences," became a func-
tion of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are
found to fulfil these functions much better than we ever could.
Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms
of making and fabricating, only that making, because of its world-
liness and inherent indifference to life, was now regarded as but
another form of laboring, a more complicated but not a more
mysterious function of the life process.
Meanwhile, we have proved ingenious enough to find ways to
ease the toil and trouble of living to the point where an elimination
of laboring from the range of human activities can no longer be
regarded as Utopian. For even now, laboring is too lofty, too am-
bitious a word for what we are doing, or think we are doing, in the
world we have come to live in. The last stage of the laboring so-
ciety, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer
automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been
submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only
active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to
speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed
pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, "tranquil-
ized," functional type of behavior. The trouble with modern the-
ories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could
become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualiza-
tion of certain obvious trends in modern society. It is quite con-
ceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprece-
dented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the
deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.
But there are other more serious danger signs that man may be
willing and, indeed, is on the point of developing into that animal
species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come. If, in
concluding, we return once more to the discovery of the Archime-
dean point and apply it, as Kafka warned us not to do, to man him-
self and to what he is doing on this earth, it at once becomes mani-
fest that all his activities, watched from a sufficiently removed
vantage point in the universe, would appear not as activities of any
kind but as processes, so that, as a scientist recently put it, modern
motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in
[ 322 ]
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of
steel. For the watcher from the universe, this mutation would be no
more or less mysterious than the mutation which now goes on
before our eyes in those small living organisms which we fought
with antibiotics and which mysteriously have developed new
strains to resist us. How deep-rooted this usage of the Archime-
dean point against ourselves is can be seen in the very metaphors
which dominate scientific thought today. The reason why scien-
tists can tell us about the "life" in the atom—where apparently
every particle is "free" to behave as it wants and the laws ruling
these movements are the same statistical laws which, according to
the social scientists, rule human behavior and make the multitude
behave as it must, no matter how "free" the individual particle
may appear to be in its choices—the reason, in other words, why
the behavior of the infinitely small particle is not only similar in
pattern to the planetary system as it appears to us but resembles the
life and behavior patterns in human society is, of course, that we
look and live in this society as though we were as far removed
from our own human existence as we are from the infinitely small
and the immensely large which, even if they could be perceived by
the finest instruments, are too far away from us to be experienced.
Needless to say, this does not mean that modern man has lost his
capacities or is on the point of losing them. No matter what sociol-
ogy, psychology, and anthropology will tell us about the "social
animal," men persist in making, fabricating, and building, although
these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the
artist, so that the concomitant experiences of worldliness escape
more and more the range of ordinary human experience.87
Similarly, the capacity for action, at least in the sense of the
releasing of processes, is still with us, although it has become the
exclusive prerogative of the scientists, who have enlarged the
87. This inherent worldliness of the artist is of course not changed if a "non-
objective art" replaces the representation of things; to mistake this "non-objectivity" for subjectivity, where the artist feels called upon to "express himself,"
his subjective feelings, is the mark of charlatans, not of artists. The artist, whether painter or sculptor or poet or musician, produces worldly objects, and his reification has nothing in common with the highly questionable and, at any rate, wholly
unartistic practice of expression. Expressionist art, but not abstract art, is a contradiction in terms.
[ 323 ]
The Human Condition
realm of human affairs to the point of extinguishing the time-
honored protective dividing line between nature and the human
world. In view of such achievements, performed for centuries in
the unseen quiet of the laboratories, it seems only proper that their
deeds should eventually have turned out to have greater news
value, to be of greater political significance, than the administrative
and diplomatic doings of most so-called statesmen. It certainly is
not without irony that those whom public opinion has persistently
held to be the least practical and the least political members of
society should have turned out to be the only ones left who still
know how to act and how to act in concert. For their early organi-
zations, which they founded in the seventeenth century for the
conquest of nature and in which they developed their own moral
standards and their own code of honor, have not only survived all
vicissitudes of the modern age, but they have become one of the
most potent power-generating groups in all history. But the action
of the scientists, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the
universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the
revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce
stories and become historical, which together form the very source
from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human ex-
istence. In this existentially most important aspect, action, too, has
become an experience for the privileged few, and these few who
still know what it means to act may well be even fewer than the
artists, their experience even rarer than the genuine experience of
and love for the world.
Thought, finally—which we, following the premodern as well
as the modern tradition, omitted from our reconsideration of the
vita activa—is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men
live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately, and
contrary to what is currently assumed about the proverbial ivory-
tower independence of thinkers, no other human capacity is so
vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of
tyranny than it is to think. As a living experience, thought has al-
ways been assumed, perhaps wrongly, to be known only to the
few. It may not be presumptuous to believe that these few have
not become fewer in our time. This may be irrelevant, or of re-
stricted relevance, for the future of the world; it is not irrelevant
[ 524 ]
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
for the future of man. For if no other test but the experience of
being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity were
to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa., it might
well be that thinking as such would surpass them all. Whoever has
any experience in this matter will know how right Cato was when
he said: Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum agent, numquam
minus solum esse quam cum solus esset—"Never is he more active
than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is
by himself."
[ W ]
The present study owes its origin to a series of lectures, deliv-
ered under the auspices of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation in
April, 1956, at the University of Chicago, under the title, "Vita
Activa." In the initial stages of this work, which goes back to the
early fifties, I was given a grant by the Simon Guggenheim Me-
morial Foundation, and in the last stage I was greatly helped by a
grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In the fall of 1953, the
Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism of Princeton University of-
fered me the opportunity to present some of my ideas in a series of
lectures under the title "Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political
Thought." I am still grateful for the patience and encouragement
with which these first attempts were received and for the lively
exchange of ideas with writers from here and abroad for which the
Seminar, unique in this respect, provides a sounding board.
Rose Feitelson, who has helped me ever since I began to publish
in this country, was again of great assistance in the preparation of
manuscript and index. If I had to be grateful for what she has done
over a period of twelve years, I would be altogether helpless.
HANNAH ARENDT
[ 327 }
Publisher's Note:
In preparation of this second edition, we have corrected sev-
eral minor typographical errors. The observant reader may no-
tice, however, that the Greek letter chi has been transliterated as
kb in some instances and as the more standard ch in others. We
have chosen to let stand instances of the former, probably a Ger-
manism.
This second edition includes a completely new and expanded
index, which replaces that of the first edition.
Abraham, 243-44
tion, 190; reification of, 95, 187; as
absolutes, 270
revealing itself fully only to the story-
abstract art, 323n
teller, 191-92; revelatory character
Achilles, 25, 193-94
of, 178-80. 187; society as exclud-
action, 175-247; the agent as disclosed
ing, 40-41; and speech, 26, 177n.l,
in, 175-81; archein,"m, 189, 222-
178-81; stories resulting from, 97;
23, 224; in Aristotle's bios politikos,
strength of, 188-89, 233; as super-
12-13, 25; behavior as replacing, 41,
structure, 33; as taking initiative,
45; and being together, 23; and
177; threefold frustration of, 220;
birth, 178; as boundless, 190-91; ca-
traditional substitution of making
pacity for as still with us, 323-24;
for, 220-30; understood as fabricat-
contemplation opposed to in tradi-
ing, 322: unpredictability of, 144,
tional thought, 14-17, 85; and con-
191-92, 233, 237, 243-47; in vitaac-
templation reversed in modern age,
tiva, 7, 205, 301; in web of relation-
289-94; courage as required for,
ships, 184; and work in Greek politi-
186; as creating its own remem-
cal philosophy, 301-2. See also deeds;
brance, 207-8; defined, 7; doing and
vita activa
suffering as two sides of same coin,
admiration, public, 56-57
190; as exclusive prerogative of man,
Agamemnon, 190
22-23; fabrication distinguished
agent, the: as disclosed in speech and ac-
from, 188, 192; futility of, 173, 197;
tion, 175-81; stories revealing, 184
greatness as criterion of, 205; Greek
agere, 189
and Latin verbs for "act," 189; his-
aging, 51 n.43
tory as a story of, 185; in homo fiiber's
agora, the, 160
redemption, 236; as idleness for ani-
agriculture: Hesiod on, 83n.8; as liberal
mal laborans and homofaber, 208; in-
art, 91, 91n.24; tilling of the soil,
terests as concern of, 182; irrevers-
138
ibility of, 233, 236-43; in Jesus'
alienation: earth alienation, 264-65;
preaching, 318; in life philosophies,
Marxian self-alienation, 89n.21, 162,
313n; location of human activities,
210, 254; world alienation, 6, 209,
73-78; as miracle working, 246—17,
248-57,301,307,310
247n; natality and mortality as con-
alteritas, 176
nected with, 8-9; people distinguish-
American Revolution, 228
ing themselves by, 176; Plato as sepa-
analytical geometry, 266-67
rating from thought, 223-27;
Anders, Giinther, 150n
plurality as condition of, 7, 8; plural-
animal laborans: abundance as ideal of,
ity as source of calamities of, 220;