Essay Database

Vita Activa, Action and Arendt What follows is the basic structure of Hannah Arendt's account of vita activa, as I understand it. Arendt classifies the modes of human activities as "action", "work", "labor", and additionally "speech" which is to be accompanied by action. Each corresponds to the human conditions of "natality," "worldliness," "life itself" and "plurality" respectively. In addition are the "faculties" of freedom, self-disclosure of identity of the actor, fabrication and (re)production. Arendt's …

…our exercise of power to act inside the human world. Likewise, the ability to intervene into nature should be conducted in a mode of work, i.e. it must be exercised for the sake of building up and stabilizing the human world. The collapse of this order of activities and the human/nature boundary is the loss of the conditions for auto-redemption. This collapse is what Arendt later calls the "worldlessness" of the modern world.