Hannah Arendt Essay

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Theorizing the entirety of human experience is a huge and complex endeavor, but the political theorist Hanna Arendt does so through discussing the way humans interact with the world in three major categories: labor, work, and action. Within Arendt’s theory, labor as a term refers to way humans interact within the world through the labor of their bodies. The term work refers to the way humans utilize the craftsmanship of their hands and its resulting impact on the world. Finally, action refers to way humans utilize speech and person to person interaction especially within a political context. According Hanna Arendt, human action and an action based society as opposed to one centered around labor or work, should be prioritized as the most worthwhile …show more content…
According to Hanna Arendt, the process of labor is close to the natural life of animals because its purpose is to sustain biological life. Arendt asserts that “[l]abor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor”(7). Arendt categorizes labor as an important aspect of human existence because it serves to keep people alive, but other organisms shared this drive as well. In this manner, labor allows humans to sustain themselves, but the goal of sustaining life is shared by other natural beings and is not a district human …show more content…
She states that “[t]he endlessness of the labor process is guaranteed by the ever-recurrent need of consumption (Arendt 125). Human labor correlates with the natural cyclical process of temporary production and almost automatic consumption in order to maintain the process itself. The only difference between human labor and the labor of animals is the creature the production labor is meant
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