The Human Condition

‘What are we doing?’ The conditions of mankind are something that we rarely theorise. It is very fashionable to study the compression of space and time, self and identity, mobility and migration, production and consumption, modernity and post-modernity, language and meaning. But very few philosophers or political theorists take the time to observe and analyse what it means to be human. To understand the life of both ‘man’ and ‘men’ is the task Hannah Arendt set herself in The Human Condition.

Arendt (1906-1975) is probably best known for her writings on totalitarianism (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) and her highly objective and unsentimental reporting of the trial of a leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann. When the Human Condition was published in 1958, she described it as a ‘reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point our newest experiences and our most recent fears.’ Her subject was not her contemporaries but inhabitants of the Modern Age – the period from the enlightenment to the First World War. She argued that events during her lifetime such as the use of the atomic bomb and space exploration were giving rise to a new imagination.

As well as a significant impact on social thought, the book has had a limited but nevertheless important impact on writers on architecture and urbanism. For example, the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton says that he never recovered after reading Arendt in the 1960s. Her categories inspired his anthology Labour, Work and Architecture.

The interest of many urban writers is motivated by Arendt’s belief in the polis as a space of human action. ‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis’. These famous words expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere: ‘It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly’ . The space of appearance – the arena in which man is active and conscious of his actions among men - inspired the theorist-historian George Baird. Richard Sennett, too, is much taken by Arendt’s polis as a form of urban life in which speech is open and full, seeing it as a way to engage with the modern fear of exposure in cities. He highlights her idea of natality: one’s birth is not one’s fate, but rather natality is the birth of will to make oneself over again as an adult.

What Arendt provides is a method for looking at life, or the totality of human existence, which deals with both humanity and the man-made world (human artifice) and how they interact. She writes; ‘The reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of the authors.’

At a time when there is considerable confusion over - not to mention a blurring of boundaries between - the concepts of public and private, Arendt’s work is especially useful. She describes the significance of man as a public being and the distinction between what we do privately to survive (labour); what we do collectively as a result of the fact that we live in close proximity to each other and therefore interact in the general running of our day to day lives (work); and, what we do collectively as a matter of choice - as an act of democratic participation (action).

The Human Condition is Arendt’s encouragement to look again at the concept of public life from first principles. Man is, by his very nature, a social being, but ‘the public’ is a feature of society that is not naturally reproduced, but is reliant on autonomous individuals who choose to exercise their judgment about the progress of society. She describes historically the importance of the ‘potentialities of action; that are generated by urbanisation, by men living close to one another. Talking about the public realm she says that unless ‘it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them’, it lacks a raison d’etre. She continues; ‘without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes.’

In this single paragraph she manages to capture the relationship between the public realm - as a political entity and the public realm as a physical thing - and their interdependence. Her insight is particularly useful in our age where what passes for public life is not really public at all according to Arendt’s definition.

Today, institutions such as government sponsored agencies, local authorities and even central government itself are substituted for the public. Public pools, libraries and public events are generally government organised or institutionally directed activities designed to create a sense of our social obligations and responsibilities. The issue of ‘public’ and ‘private’ is often emptied of any real content and reduced to the administrative question of ‘who pays’. Our culture has become enveloped by proceduralism, risk aversion and superficial accountability. As a result our understanding of public life is often reduced to little more than the management of liability, an all embracing insurance policy that often prevents us from acting in the public realm rather than facilitating it.

Arendt does not talk specifically about buildings and places, but she does address themes which those of us who do, have a great difficulty dealing with. The question of how we as individuals and society are conditioned by the world we have already made – is at the heart of all contemporary discussions about planning and place-making. ‘Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into conditions of their existence.’