Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition is an unusual and entirely original contribution to political philosophy. It is distinguished, in particular, by the diagnostic approach to politics it pursues. The book can serve as an illustration of characteristic features of this type of political thinking.
The title of the work deserves our attention in this context since it may easily mislead us. Arendt does not, in fact, assume that there is a single and fixed “human condition” which determines how we can, do, and should act politically. She holds, rather, that the human condition changes over time; that it is historically specific and profoundly variable. It is because of her adherence to this view that Arendt avoids talk of “human nature” – a term which is usually taken to identify a determinate human essence from which we can deduce both how humans act and how they should act. For Arendt there is, in fact, no human nature in this particular sense. There are only the varied conditions in which we find ourselves. The conditions of life in “the modern age” which are the predominant concern of her book thus differ for her profoundly from those of previous eras – such as, in particular, the condition of life and politics in classical Greece at the time of Socrates. While she often refers back to the classical period, she does not believe that we can or should try to re-enact it. Her reference is meant, instead, to highlight the radically distinct character of our modern situation.
Arendt’s begins The Human Condition not with a general reflection on what that condition might be. The first sentence of her book reads: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man launched into the universe.” The book begins, thus, with a reference to a particular, contingent, and recent event, a singular historical fact: Russia’s 1957 launch of the first extra-terrestrial satellite (“Sputnik”) one year before the publication of Arendt’s book. To grasp the implications of that beginning, contrast it to the first sentence of Hobbes’ De Cive which says: “The faculties of human nature may be reduced unto for kinds.” Hobbes starts in this way with a general and dogmatic assertion about “human nature” from which he proceeds to derive the supposedly universal “conditions of society or of human peace “ as “fundamental laws of nature.” (De Cive, chapter 1) Equally striking is the contrast between Arendt’s first sentence and that of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia which asserts dogmatically that human beings are bearers of rights with which the state may not interfere. Where Arendt begins thus with a reference to a simple empirical fact, Nozick starts off from a large-scale and unargued normative claim. The contrast between Arendt on the one side and Hobbes and Nozick on the other, provides in this way a vivid illustration of the difference between diagnostic and non-diagnostic approaches to political philosophy. Where the one proceeds “inductively” from the particular to philosophical reflection, the other starts deductively from general, high-level claims about human nature or human rights and seeks to derive from them conclusions about politics. Where the one begins with a current contingent event, the other advances from supposedly timeless truths.
The Soviet authorities had launched Sputnik to signal the technical and military prowess of Russia. The event sent shockwaves through America’s political establishment and led to vast new investment in education, science, technology, and military preparedness. But this is not Arendt’s concern. She does not see herself as a political commentator. Her goal is, rather, to reflect philosophically on the event. She is concerned thus with the way the extra-terrestrial satellite changes how we see ourselves, our relation to the earth, and to the other living things on it. Quoting a contemporary comment that Sputnik signals a first step “toward escape from man’s imprisonment to the earth” she contraposes to this the fear that it might lead to a “fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living things under the sky.” The earth has until now been “the quintessence of the human condition.” Cutting that link or seeing it in a new way will thus transform that condition. An escape from the earth would mean that we cut our last tie that makes us “belong among the children of nature.” The future man who makes his appearance in this way seems to be possessed by “a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift, from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange … for something he has made himself.” But is this how we want to turn? What will we lose of the human condition as it now is? Our question has to be “whether we wish to use our new scientific and technological knowledge in this direction,” Arendt concludes, “and this question … is a political question of the first order.”
There are other signs of profound changes in the human condition to which Arendt proceeds at this point to draw our attention. The truths of the modern scientific world view, she writes, can only be demonstrated in mathematical terms and established through technological means, they “no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.” This means ultimately that we can no longer understand the world in human terms and will need artificial machines to do our thinking for us. And that, she concludes, is surely a matter of political significance. Another disturbing fact is the advent of automation which may liberate us from “the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.” While this development may be attractive, our problem is that the modern age has created a society in which human beings are measured entirely by their labor. “We are confronted, in consequence, with “the prospect of a society of laborers without labor… Surely nothing could be worse.”
Sixty-five years after the publication of The Human Condition the world looks somewhat different from the way Arendt describes it. She has no sense that extra-terrestrial life is a far way off and exists even today mostly only in the wild imaginings of Elon Musk and the writers of science fiction. Arendt has as yet no inkling of the digital media and how they have begun to transform all aspects of human interaction. She pays no attention to the growth of the human population and the shifts in global population patterns. She knows nothing of the devastations of the environment and their political bearing. She is unaware of a decline of Western power and the rise of other centers of global influence. A diagnostic view of our own time will, no doubt, look different from hers. This is to be expected because the diagnostic perspective is always limited and constrained by the place of the diagnostician.
What is surely of major interest in Arendt’s book is the way it illustrates the diagnostic approach to politics. This is how Arendt describes her own, diagnostic agenda: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears…. What I propose therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”