News from nowhere

Homo faber

Nothing produced by humankind can last forever. Still, according to Hannah Arendt, human products may be divided into two categories, distinguishable by their durability.

In the first category are what Arendt calls consumer goods, by which she means those things vital to keeping our bodies alive. The archetypal consumer good in this sense is bread, which is created through labour, and immediately consumed to sustain human life. Both Locke and Marx – normally at opposing ends of the political spectrum – see labour as akin to enslavement. For unlike other human activities, we labour out of what Locke called the “necessity of subsisting”, – an animal which labours.