Hannah Arendt investigates the sources of human happiness in her essay entitled Labour, Work, Action, exploring the relation and differences between the three concepts. The text was originally a lecture delivered in 1964.[1] Since the ancient Greeks, the vita contemplativa (life of contemplation) has been considered a superior form of life than the vita activa (life of action). However, both aspects can be found in every person, as distinct but related “faculties” and are also “ways of life.”
No one can “go through life without ever indulging in contemplation, while […] no man can remain in the contemplative state throughout his life.” Contemplation depends on activities. Arendt elaborates: Contemplation “depends upon labour to produce whatever is necessary to keep the human organism alive, it depends upon work to create whatever is needed to house the human body, and it needs action in order to organise the living together of many human beings in such a way that peace, the condition for the quiet of contemplation is assured.” All three activities of labour, work and action are needed for a human being to survive, to be secure and to live among others.
History
One of Arendt’s aims in her article is to consider whether contemplation is in fact superior to action. This order was inherited from the Greeks, where the “philosopher’s way of life […] was found superior to the political way of life of the citizen in the polis.” The ascendance of Christianity continued the tradition of the “abasement of the vita activa.” Even after the Enlightenment, post-enlightenment thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche while “turning upside-down […] philosophic systems or hierarchies of values” had left the conceptual framework intact.
Arendt believes that among labour, work and action, action is the most important. Action for Arendt is the action required for people to live together and hence “relates to the political sphere of human life.” “From the viewpoint of contemplation, the highest activity was not action but work,” she writes. The reason why was because “only if seen in the image of a working activity, could political action be trusted to produce lasting results,” so as to deliver the peace required for contemplation. Hence the success of political action is measured by effective activity in a pragmatic approach, where politics is essentially reduced to work as opposed to the dynamic exchange of views of the citizenry leading to collective decision making and accord. Arendt does not agree with this pragmatic approach, believing that action manifesting itself as speech in communication with others is more important, as we shall see as her ideas are elaborated in the essay. She believes in a participative democracy.
If contemplation is the goal, labour remains the least important of the trio of labour, work and action. However, since modern economic thought drawing from Adam Smith, Locke and Marx, there has been a glorification of labour, though Arendt makes it clear that it is not menial unskilled labour which only knows how to consume but productive labour that is glorified. She lays out this history so as to show how her own ideas on labour, work and action differ from it.
Labour
Arendt distinguishes between labour and work, drawing from John “Locke who speaks of ‘the labour of our body and the work of our hands.’” Labour “corresponds to the biological processes of the body. […] By labouring, men produce the vital necessities that must be fed into the life process of the human body,” she writes. Labour is what produces goods that we consume such as food, which is consumed soon after it has been produced. Some of it is perishable, like food, that if not consumed goes to waste. “Labouring and consuming are but two stages of the ever-recurring cycle of biological life,” she writes. They operate in a circle: we labour to produce these “consumer goods” so that we can consume them in order to survive so as to be able to labour again. The reader should note that by consumer goods, Arendt is referring to goods that are literally consumed such as food and not goods bought by consumers such as handbags or houses which she would consider as a separate class of goods she calls use-objects. This cycle of labour and consumption follows the “circular movement of our bodily functions,” is “endlessly repetitive” and labouring activity does not stop as long as the subject is alive.
Work, in contrast, has an end goal of creating an object, and the activity of work ceases once the production of the object has been completed. According to Arendt, “the actual goal of the revolution in Marx is not merely the emancipation of the labouring or working classes, but the emancipation of man from labour,” to be free from the immediate demands of our physical needs. She believes that such an emancipation does not come through a political equality of the different classes of people but from technology, “to the extent that it is possible at all,” since she does not think that labour can be eliminated since consumption which is part of life is linked to labour.
As already pointed out, consumer goods do not endure and cannot be saved since they are perishable. However man produces more of it than is necessary for his and his own family’s survival. There is an excess. This excess is what makes it possible for some people to “enslave or exploit their fellowmen, thus liberating themselves from life’s burden.” While this exploitation is through force by the ruling class over the working class, it would not be possible if not for the “inherent fertility of human labour itself.”
“Since labour corresponds to the condition of life itself, it partakes not only in life’s toil and trouble but also in the sheer bliss with which we can experience our being alive,” writes Arendt. Arendt believes that in our nature as “living creatures,” labour is how we “remain and swing contentedly in nature’s prescribed cycle.” This is a cycle of toil and rest, labour and consumption and she sees this cycle as a “happy and purposeless regularity.” Though it does not leave behind something permanent, it is a real source of happiness, one “more real, less futile than any other form of happiness,” she contends. This happiness comes from the abundance of nature, and the “quiet confidence” that one who labours has done his part. She alludes to how such a person propagates the cycle of life through reproduction and in that way “remains a part of nature” even after death. “The blessing of labour is that effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself,” giving rise to a lasting happiness which comes from the cycle of “painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration.” This differs from the “inevitably brief spell of joy that follows the accomplishment and […] achievement” of work.
However, if the cycle of labour is disturbed, where exhaustion is followed not by regeneration but “wretchedness,” or a life where no toil is needed such that boredom replaces exhaustion, or if necessity overwhelms a person leading to no corresponding regeneration but only toil, then the “elemental happiness that comes from being alive” is ruined. All human activities have an “element of labouring” to the extent that they can become routine jobs. Even though it may feel burdensome because it is exhausting, the repetitiveness of labour is precisely “what provides that minimum of animal contentment”. In contrast, even though work might provide “great and meaningful” joy, this joy is rare and cannot last. Hence, it cannot substitute for the less volatile and more lasting joy that derives from labour. Such a joy also helps us bear sorrow.
Work
Arendt shifts her attention now to work. Work “fabricates” the things that make up our world, not consumer goods but “use-objects,” she explains. They are more durable than perishable consumer goods and give the world “stability and solidity,” which is needed to house an “unstable and mortal” humanity. Using such objects can use up the object but this using up or destruction of the object is not the “goal” of the object created by work. The examples Arendt gives us is how bread, a consumer good, is meant to be consumed while a chair is far more durable, though it too will ultimately decay and be used up. “Destruction, though unavoidable, is incidental to use but inherent in consumption,” marking the distinction between the use objects created by work compared to consumer goods created by labour. The durability of use objects gives such things an “independence from men who produced and use them,” an objectivity that causes them to endure our “needs and wants.” Such an endurance then becomes part of our identity, for instance, the house we live in or the chair that is our chair.
“Against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the man-made artifice, not the indifference of nature,” she writes. It is this man-made artifice that forms a world that separates us from nature. Arendt introduces the term homo faber, the human being who fabricates, by transforming the “matter” of nature such as trees, iron ore or stone into a product. A tree is killed to provide the raw material of wood which then goes into a product like a chair, transforming matter into material into product. In the process of work, we destroy nature through violence by using our strength in contrast to labour where we are still “servants” to nature, i.e. our natural needs. “Homo faber becomes lord and master of nature herself insofar as he violates and partly destroys what was given to him,” writes Arendt.
In labour, labouring and consumption are closely linked such that they are just two parts of the same process. For work, “fabrication and usage are two altogether different processes.” Fabrication is finished when the product is finished and it need not be repeated, for e.g. a person building his own house. Repetition happens for a craftsman or in my example, a construction worker and that repetition is the “element of labour inherent in his work.” Arendt makes a distinction between repetition and multiplication. While the craftsman may feel his work to be repetitive, it is not really a repetition since the number of things in the world are multiplied, while repetition “follows the recurrent cycle of life” where products are consumed and hence need to be produced again soon for the next round of consumption. There is a “definite beginning and a predictable end point” for fabrication while labour is cyclical with only “pauses, intervals between exhaustion and regeneration.”
According to Arendt, “no use object is so urgently needed in the life process that its maker cannot survive and afford its destruction.” This is another difference between the products of labour and work. We cannot survive without food for more than a few weeks, while people can remain homeless for decades.
Tangentially, Arendt points out the difference between tools and machines. Tools used in labour “lighten the burden and mechanise the labour of the labourer” and are anthropocentric as they are developed around the rhythm of the human body, where “body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement.” Tools are the use-things of labour where they are developed through work, surviving the labouring process itself, unlike the products of labour which are consumed. When machines came onto the scene, it is the “machine’s movements that enforces the movements of the body, while in a more advanced state, it replaces it altogether.” She writes: “even the most refined tool remains a servant unable to guide or to replace the hand; even the most primitive machine guides and ideally replaces the body’s labour.”
Utilitarianism
At this point in the essay, Arendt transits to an interesting point about utility and how things become instrumental in fabrication. The process of fabrication has an end, an objective which then justifies the means to achieve that end. “The end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree, and the table justifies destroying the wood,” she observes. The end product drives the plans and organisation of the required inputs and these inputs are “judged […] in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end product.” In addition, the end product as a use-object is not an end in itself since it becomes a means for something else. “In a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration; they are transformed into means for some further ends,” creating an “unending chain of means and ends,” notes Arendt.
A way out of this unending chain is to posit the user of things, man, as the ultimate end of an otherwise unending chain of ends and means. Immanuel Kant did this by positing “that man is an end in himself and should never be used as a means to pursue other ends.” Arendt suggests that the reason why Kant thought this way is because he wants to prevent utilitarianism from “ruling the relations between man and man instead of the relationship between men and things.” However, in elevating man into the position of the ultimate end, “all other ‘ends’ are relegated to mere means,” denying things their own intrinsic value-in-themselves. By adopting utilitarianism as the “ultimate standards for the world,” homo faber will be undermined since “he will be left with meaninglessness in the midst of usefulness.” She points out the paradox of utilitarianism as a philosophy – utilitarianism fails to justify itself through the concept of utility. She cites GE Lessing: “And what, if you please, is the use of use?”
Instead of man being the ultimate end, Arendt thinks that there is only one type of object that is not subject to the unending chain of means and ends. That object is art, “the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce.” Art is removed from the context of use. She gives an example of a piece of furniture, that when recognised as a masterpiece, is removed from use and preserved in a museum. “The inherent purpose of a work of art […] is to attain permanence.” Thought is what initiated the process leading to the creation of such “thought-things.” Thought is made concrete, reified, through “writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc.” “The same workmanship” produces art and also less durable things.
Action
Linking work to action, Arendt writes: “The man-made world of things becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and deeds, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of consumer-goods and the sheer utility of use objects.” Arendt does not define home in this essay, but I understand her intention of using that word not to mean a structure or building to merely live in but a place where one can be safe, comfortable, can grow, develop and flourish in, pretty much the ordinary sense of how people understand the term ‘home.’ She writes about a place that is stable, enduring and can be a safe harbour against the constant changes and movements of our lives. She thinks that for human beings to have such a home, it needs to be more than what usage things can provide, be it satisfying our necessities with consumer goods, or the utility of use objects. We need to go beyond utility, and we go beyond the world of things through our speech and actions. She distinguishes between the ‘human world’ and the ‘world of things.’ To have a human world, to participate in the human world, we do so through our speech and actions.
We are able to identify things by how they differ from other things, which makes things other and individual. “However, only man can express otherness and individuality,” writes Arendt. Human beings are able to communicate not just how they feel, for e.g. if they are hungry or afraid but are able to communicate their own uniqueness. Arendt believes that that ability is part of our nature and is not something forced on us by our needs like labour or by our desires like the products of work. We communicate our uniqueness to other human beings through word and deed, which Arendt collectively terms action. “To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin […] or to set something into motion,” she writes, deriving these notions from their Greek and Latin language roots.
Arendt explains how action is linked with speech: “Speechless action […] does not exist; […] without speech, action loses the actor. […] The doer of deeds is possible only to the extent that he is at the same time the speaker of words, who identifies himself as the actor and announces what he is doing, what he has done, or what he intends to do.” She cites Dante Alighieri: “For in every action which is primarily intended by the doer […] is the disclosure of his own image.” Our actions are a reflection of who we are and our speech tells others about it, that it is us that is carrying out the actions.
Living with others entail a web of human relationships. The individual agents within this web have their own wills and intentions which conflict with one another’s. This means that our actions may not achieve its purpose, giving rise to an unpredictability. Hence, “although everybody starts his own story, […] nobody is the author or producer of it,” writes Arendt. The outcomes may differ from the intent of our purpose but how the story unfolds tells us not the desired meaning of our lives but its “actual meaning.” The story is not one made only by us since others also contribute to the course of events. Because of this web of relationships, the consequences of each action have “boundless” repercussions. Because it is unpredictable how things would turn out, there is a “frailty and unreliability of human affairs.”
Our actions are also irreversible; we are unable to undo what has been done. Arendt suggests that while our actions are irreversible and unpredictable, we can remedy these defects respectively through forgiveness and keeping our promises. “Forgiving relates to the past and serves to undo its deeds, while binding oneself through promises serves to set up in the ocean of future uncertainty islands of security.” Forgiveness helps us recover from our bad actions while promise-keeping helps relationships continue and endure. These remedies also make possible new actions because otherwise, we would be trapped and defined by our previous actions, where one bad deed would hound us for the entirety of our lives. The ability to start something through our actions is what freedom is about. “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world – which […] is only another way of saying that with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth,” concludes Arendt.
Conclusion
My takeaway is that all three components of labour, work and action are part of our lives. Labour is our baseline where we satisfy our basic needs, which gives our lives a supporting undercurrent of simple contentment. This contentment makes it possible for us to pursue longer term goals which we work towards, producing durable artifacts. Work can give us greater joy and meaning than labour; however, this joy is short-lived. Moreover, to live among other people, we need more than labour and work. We also need action, where we begin doing acts, where we speak together. Our actions reflect who we are, e.g. if we kill, we are killers; if we love, we are lovers. Because other people have differing intentions from us, it can cause our actions to lead to consequences contrary to our intent, making the outcomes of our actions unpredictable. Once we have spoken or acted, we cannot undo these acts of speech and actions, making them irreversible. To overcome this irreversibility, we need forgiveness and to overcome unpredictability, we need to keep our promises. This then allows us to keep beginning new actions, which is a freedom we would otherwise not have.
Returning to the initial dichotomy that Arendt poses, between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, she points out that no person can only contemplate and have no actions, and vice versa. In fact, I think actions are manifestations of thoughts, especially the way she understood action, to include speech and acts such as writing and acting (on a stage) in addition to deeds (such as fighting). The clearest example of actions as manifestations of thought would be writing and speech. Writing and speech are reifications of our thoughts, where we make concrete what was previously only in our minds. The written word endures for some time. It certainly outlasts the cycles of labour and consumption so it is akin to work though I think Arendt had in mind concrete products like houses when she referred to work. So when she talks about labour and work, she is referring to products, consumer products in the case of labour and use objects in the case of work. When she wants to refer to intangible or intellectual outputs, I take it she will call those action, such as dance, acting (on stage), fighting, flirting, courting, sexual intercourse, playing sports, writing, singing, composing and playing music, painting etc. A possible extension of Arendt’s distinctions can be how some or all of these acts can be labour or work, if we allow the actor to be objectivised, for e.g. if one considers a prostitute as a consumer-object to be made use of instead of as a human being. Once done, they are dismissed until the next time, the same way one is done with eating until the next mealtime comes around, the same way Arendt considers labour. In the case of action becoming work, if one paints not art but simply commodity pictures where the identity of the painter has no bearing since he is simply reproducing canvases for instance of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. These paintings will last for some time the same way use-objects of work do. But as Arendt had noted, the identity of the actor is of no consequence, hence it is not what she would call action.
Returning to action, specifically writing, some writing is meant to last forever, for e.g. literature and philosophy. Such acts of writing and speech clearly first need to be in the realm of thoughts and ideas before being committed to paper since otherwise, they might be badly written. However, spontaneous speech may be eloquent and brilliant, though this ability does not happen in nihilo. It takes years for one to gain the knowledge, experience of life and the practice of speaking to be able to do so fluently and intelligently.
[1] Essay from Amor Mundi, Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. James W. Bernauer, S.J., Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (1987). Chronology from The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr, Penguin Books (2000), p. 167.
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