ARENDT, HANNAH

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was born in Hannover, Germany on October 14 to a Jewish family of Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany. She studied philosophy at Marburg, Freiberg, and Heidelberg. At Marburg she was a pupil of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), with whom she had an affair, and at Heidelberg she did her doctoral dissertation on love in Saint Augustine with the philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). When Hitler came to power in 1933, Arendt left Germany and for eighteen years was a "stateless person," first in Paris, where she worked with Jewish refugee groups, and then, after the outbreak of war, in the United States. From 1929 to 1937 she was married to Günther Anders (1902–1992), a journalist, philosopher, and essayist. Arendt became an American citizen in 1951 and for the rest of her life lived in New York with her second husband, the historian Heinrich Blücher (1899–1970). She died on December 14.

The Human Condition

Arendt's major work with implications for science and technology was The Human Condition (1958). It is an inquiry into the vita activa, that is, "human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something" (p. 22). Within the vita activa Arendt distinguishes between three fundamental human activities, labor, work and action, each of which corresponds to a different condition of human existence.

Labor includes all the repeated tasks of daily life—growing food, cooking, washing up, cleaning—to which there is no beginning or end. If labor "produces" anything at all, it is something, such as food, that is consumed almost as soon as it is produced. People labor because they are living, embodied beings; thus, life is the condition of labor.

Work is the activity through which people produce durable things—tables, chairs, buildings, but also institutions—that together form the world they inhabit. Humans may use the things of the world made by work and that use may wear those things out, but unlike the food that people consume, this destruction is incidental; it is not an inherent feature of that use. The durability of what work produces means that work has a definite end in the thing made as well as a clear beginning. People work to build a world, and so the world, or "worldliness," is the condition of work.

Action is the capacity to do something new, something that could not have been expected from what has happened before, that reveals who the actor is, and that cannot be undone once it has been accomplished. It derives from the fact of a person's uniqueness as an individual. Action is beginning a boundless unpredictable process of action and reaction. The condition of action is human plurality: a person can labor or work alone as well as with others, but action always requires the presence of others, who, like the actor, are unique human beings. Politics arises out of people acting together, so action constitutes the political realm.

Since the industrial revolution, new technology has transformed work in two ways. First, "automatic" machines and the assembly line transformed work into labor by transforming it into a process without beginning or end, done merely to "earn a living." This means that it is done for the sake of life rather than to build a world. Second, technologies such as nuclear power, synthetic chemicals, and genetic engineering all start new, unprecedented processes that would not exist on earth in the absence of those technologies. Because they are starting something new, the human capacity they make use of must be that of action. In the sphere of human affairs the boundlessness and unpredictability of action can be limited by promising and forgiveness, options that are not available with actions into nature. The inability to limit boundlessness and unpredictability has resulted in uncertainty becoming the defining characteristic of the human situation.

Arendt stresses that humans are "conditioned beings," although the conditions of human existence—the earth, birth and death as well as life, the world and plurality—never condition people absolutely. The earth is the natural environment in which people live, as other animals do, and is characterized by constant cyclical movement: Each new generation replaces the previous one in a process that is indifferent to the uniqueness of individuals.

The world is the condition of human existence that people have made themselves. Biological life is sustained by the earth, but life as a unique, human individual can be lived only in a durable, stable world in which that individual has a place—an identity. The world is always to some extent public in that unlike private thoughts and sensations, it can be perceived by others as well as by oneself. The presence of these others with different perspectives on a world that retains its identity when seen from different locations is what assures the individual of the reality of the world and of themselves (Human Condition, p. 50).

The world is related to action in that action always takes place in the world and is often about the world. Political action attempts to change the world. The deeds and words of action constitute an intangible but still real in-between, the web of human relationships that overlies the tangible objective reality of the world. Because it overlies the world, the forms that can be taken by the web of human relationships must depend on, although they are not determined by, what the world is like. To be a home for men and women during their lives on earth the world "must be a place fit for action and speech" (Human Condition, p. 173).

Implications

Arendt's most important work, The Human Condition, was only part of a lifelong effort to understand what happened to her world during the first half of the twentieth century. For instance, her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), analyzed the political systems of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, with their historical roots in anti-Semitism and imperialism. Totalitarianism, Arendt concluded, required atomized, individualized masses: people who had lost any sense of living in a common world for which they shared responsibility. Totalitarianism made life subject to "inevitable" natural or historical processes and thus destroyed the possibility for human action.

Arendt's most controversial work was a report on the trail of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962). Her conclusion contained the phrase "the banality of evil," which encapsulated her view that the evil done by Eichmann was not a result of base motives, but of his inability to think. The evil resulting from modern technology could also be described as banal. It is not the result of extraordinary actions by people of ill intent, but of unthinking "normal" behaviour, using the technology that has become integral to everyday life in the western world.

In the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1981) Arendt attempted to complement her interpretation of the vita activa with one of the vita contemplativa. This contains an account of thought that has important implications for thought and knowledge in science and for the relationship between science and technology.

In an approach clearly influenced by Arendt, Langdon Winner has suggested that the most important question to ask of technology is, "What kind of world are we making?" (Winner 1986). The clear implication of Arendt's argument is that questions concerning the nature of the world, and therefore of technology, are political questions. They cannot be decided simply by reference to science, or by technical decision procedures, but only through political debate: the exchange of opinions among people who share, but have different perspectives on, a common world. This position continues to animate many discussions of science, technology, and ethics in ways that can be deepened by dialogue with Arendt's thought.

ANNE CHAPMAN

SEE ALSO Anders, Günther;Fascism;Heidegger, Martin;Holocaust;Socialism;Totalitarianism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt, Hannah. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah. (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking.

Arendt, Hannah. (1968). Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Compass Edition with additional text. This collection of essays contains further discussion of some of the concepts relevant to science and technology developed in the human condition.

Arendt, Hannah. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Arendt, Hannah. (1981). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Canovan, Margaret. (1992). Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press. A good general introduction to Arendt's work that emphasizes its origins in her thoughts on totalitarianism.

Young-Bruehl, E. (1982). Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. The main biography of Arendt.

Winner, Langdon. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.