Labor is the prolongation of life, metabolism, and absorption for the sake of existence and vice versa. Labor creates products of consumption, which serve exclusively for human vital needs which are consumed right away and thus do not leave anything long-lasting after them. Arendt sharply contrasts labor and work, and although labor eventually also creates something, the created by labor is different from the created by work. It is not the creation of material welfare regardless of the purposes that they serve. In Arendt’s interpretation, labor is not work in the usual understanding. Labor is the lowest appreciated type of human activity, which strips humans from their humanness, where “a being laboring in complete solitude would not be human but an animal laborans in the word’s most literal significance.” (Arendt 22)
In that chapter, Arendt rose against the European glorification of labor by depreciating it. In that sense, it can be said that this chapter is the core of the book, for which the book in general along with other chapters was written as its explanation. (Arendt 98)Īrendt addressed the third chapter for labor, which can be considered as the strongest both emotionally and intellectually. Laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its “toil and trouble” comes only with the death of this organism. Labor is predefined by the biological need of humans, like any other natural being, Labor is an eternally recurring activity, which reproduces objects of consumption, where “the life process of mankind, and within its frame of reference all things become objects of consumption.”(Arendt 89) For that purpose, she considered the relation of three notions, i.e. Hannah Arendt created an original concept of politics as the highest form of human activity and the highest expression of his freedom. This paper analyzes the aforementioned work based on Arendt’s distinctions.
In her work, Arendt draws distinctions among various known aspects such as labor, work, and action in a different perspective. An example of such an approach can be seen in the work “The Human Condition” (1958) by Hannah Arendt which is a “more controversial way of challenging contemporary truisms.” (Arendt)
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