Summary of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of its original publication, contains Margaret Canovan’s 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781952482885

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition Second Edition

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The three human activities of labor, work, and action are fundamental because each one of them corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

#2

Action is the activity of founding and preserving political bodies. Action is rooted in natality in so far as it requires the ability to begin something new. Action is therefore intimately connected with the human condition of mortality.

#3

The problem of human nature, the question who am I. cannot be answered. We cannot define what human nature is because we are constantly changing and evolving.

#4

Because we are constantly changing and being conditioned by our surroundings, the conditions of human existence - life, natality, mortality, worldliness, and the earth - cannot explain who we are or what we are.

#5

Aristotle distinguished between three kinds of lives men could live in independence and freedom: the political life, the labor life, and the life of enjoyment. The first two were considered to be free because they did not depend on human needs or wants, whereas the latter was not considered free because it was a necessity.

#6

For the ancient Greeks, the highest form of human life was the life of contemplation, which was meant to be free from the necessities of the world.

#7

The traditional notion of truth as something that is inherently given to man is something that has not been changed by the modern break with tradition and the eventual reversal of its hierarchical order in Marx and Nietzsche.

#8

The Greeks believed in immortality, but only if you were a god. Only men had mortality because they had individual lives that were distinguished by their movement, which was linear in a universe with an eternal cycle of life and death.

#9

The task and potential greatness of mortals is to produce things that are worthy of being eternal, so that through them they can find their place in a cosmos where everything except for them will be eternal.

#10

The philosophers’ discovery of the eternal was made possible by their justified doubt of the possibility of achieving immortality in a polis. And as a result, they placed themselves in open opposition to the ancient city-state and its religion, which both supported earthly immortality.