Labor and the human condition

Abstract

In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt suggests that her theorization on the category of labor emerges from the critique of the glorification of activity in Modernity, a glorification validated by Marx's interpretation. While formulating her critique of what she classifies as the victory of the animal laborans over the lives of the homo faber and the man of action, Arendt aims to recover the potentialities of the political in The human condition and engages in a confrontation against the Marxian interpretation of the term. We believe that in the afore mentioned work, since it considers the recovery of the political potentialities, the reflection on the value of labor within the human condition is hampered. In the present text, we seek to mitigate the interpretation that identifies labor as the burden of the human condition by recovering Arendt's writings from the 1930s, when she reflects on the extreme conditions in which even the status of animal laborans was denied to her and the Jewish community in the face of Nazi persecution. To some extent, similar conditions may emerge with the phenomenon of automation, where machines eliminate jobs, replacing humans with machines, and with the current and radical trend towards cybernetization, which substitutes not only human ingenuity but the human mind itself with machines. Beyond a categorical economy that leads to action, in this text, we seek to privilege the relationship between labor, dignity, and the human condition. Through this lens, we highlight the relevance of Arendt's reflections for thinking about what we are doing today.