they structure our consciousness. There is, so to speak, no transcendental subject of knowledge. Even when Arendt moves farthest away from the human condition in her account of the thinking activity, this activity is still “conditioned,” in this case by what Heidegger had called “temporality,” and what Arendt calls the “gap between past and future.”
In The Human Condition, Arendt proposed to pursue these questions by first making a number of distinctions between the various types of activities humans perform in their worldly conditions. It will be necessary to bracket for the moment the question of the vita contemplativa, where many other activities are performed outside our worldly conditions. In Chapter 3, when we turn to examine the philosophical way of life, thinking and contemplating will be of primary importance, but even in the context of worldliness it is not really possible to escape the relevance of the activities of the mind. For Arendt insists that the life stories humans construct out of the events of their lives would be impossible without the ability to reflect about the meaning of those events with the activity of thought, thus recognizing that Heidegger was at least half right: humans are both mortal and natal, both acting and thinking beings.
Arendt begins her discussion of the worldly activities in the prologue to The Human Condition with the at first blush strange proposal: “What I propose … is very simple: to think what we are doing.”110 This, of course, implies a rather odd proposition: that we somehow do not know what we are doing. Arendt immediately begins making a series distinctions between various human activities. She argues that there are three fundamental conditions to which human beings, as conditioned beings, are subject: the natural necessity of the life process, the worldly human artifice, and the condition of plurality. Corresponding to each of these conditions are, respectively, the three essential human activities: labor, work, and action.111
Labor is the activity humans perform in order to survive the driving necessity of natural metabolism. “[Labor] 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.… The human condition of labor is life itself.”112 Unlike the other activities, labor is cyclical and endless, like nature itself, making it the activity we share with animals, and thus when humans exist as laboring beings she calls them animal laborans.113 “Of all human activities,” she writes, “only labor … is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.”114
Work, on the other hand, establishes a “bulwark” against natural necessity. It creates a space for humans to escape labor by providing “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.”115 At the most abstract level, Arendt distinguishes work by the fact that it has a definite beginning and ending, and this ending is always characterized by a finished product. As the only human activity that employs the teleological means/end category, it thus involves a form of specialized knowledge that can be taught and reproduced.116 As an “artificial” teleological activity, its process always involves doing violence to what is naturally given in order to bring about a worldly space to block out natural necessity.
Finally, action “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.”117 Labor and work find their significance and meaning in the activity of action, which redeems these activities from futility by producing stories that give them meaning.118 Action is able to accomplish this as a result of several unique qualities it possesses. In its purest sense, action is the human capacity to begin a new process or chain of events within the human world.119 It is by far the rarest of the human activities—vanishingly rare, in fact. In contrast to work, action is ateleological, an activity that is not done in order to produce something beyond it, but is instead an end in itself.120 Each action is sui generis: it always has a meaning that is completely distinct from any act that has come before it.121 Each action discloses the “who” rather than the “what” of the actor.122 This is because each human being is unique and unlike any other that has come before. The stories created by the deeds of actors disclose this unique “whoness.” By its nature, action produces and establishes relationships among humans, and this results in a “web of human relations.”123 As a result of these qualities, action inevitably is boundless and unpredictable: each course of action undertaken will impact the other individuals in the web of relationships, eventually coming to have a meaning far exceeding anything the actor could have imagined or foreseen.124 Arendt therefore argues that action has a process character: while we are bound to the natural world through labor by the processes of natural necessity, through action we begin new processes in the web of human relations.125 Arendt asserts that the “web of human relations” established by action exists as a kind of overgrowth on the worldly human artifice: together the two constitute what she calls the “common world.” Arendt claims that the objective world produced by work gives stability to the web of human relations—which by nature is ephemeral and unstable—and allows the deeds done by actors to have lasting significance and, potentially, immortality.126
Arendt argues that action is essentially conditioned by speech, claiming that without speech action would be meaningless. They are like two sides of a coin: action creates new realities, and speech discloses those new realities.127 She writes that action “is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word.”128 Readers often find this fundamental association of speech and action odd, since clearly labor and work can involve the use of speech. What Arendt appears to mean by this is that action is the activity humans possess to create stories, and thus meaning. Storytelling would be inconceivable without speech, while the products of work and the abundance of labor seem not necessarily so.129 Arendt refers to them as essentially speechless because, in her view, while work and labor may use speech in contingent circumstances, each could be performed without speech and would still maintain its same essential character.130 These distinctions should not be interpreted too literally, however, as if there is necessarily a strict dichotomy between instances of work and action: there is no reason the same act may not be both a moment of work and a moment of action. The distinction between the two activities does not occur at a logical level, but instead at an essential and ontological level. To take a relatively recent example, the invention the personal computer, for instance, demonstrates characteristics of both work and action.
The only other activity that Arendt believes is essentially conditioned by speech is thought, which she argues takes place in the “two-in-one” dialogue of the thinking ego, and which we use to frame and make sense of the events of our life stories.131 Arendt recognized this essential relation of thought and action to speech as far back as her first manuscript in 1954, which confronted the question of the relation of thought and action, saying that to partake in thought and action “meant to be aware of being human in an articulate, specific sense. Action without speech was violence; since it could not disclose its meaning in words, it remained senseless and meaningless. Thought, on the other hand, [could be so little conceived as proceeding without] speech that one single word, logos, was used for both ‘word’ and ‘thought or argument.’”132 Arendt, in other words, came to believe that human freedom and the capacity for speech—whether expressed in the context of the philosophical freedom of thought or in the performance of great actions in the human world—were so essentially related that it was literally impossible to comprehend one without the other.
Excursus: The Concept of Non-Sovereign Agency
This essential relationship between human