The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

I first heard of Hannah Arendt through a lecturer who recommended her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil about the trial and subsequent execution of Adolph Eichmann in the 1960s. In this book she introduced the idea that "desk murderers" are simply a system of increasing bureaucracy, that the idea of evil is no more than a substitution of morals.

The Human Condition written before the other book was an exploration into the ramifications of what it is to be human. The book was separated into sections based on The Public and Private Realm, Labour, Work, Action and the Vita Activa (or life of action) which she believed had replaced the homo faber as the mode of the "human condition".

The historical writings on each of these concepts is explored by looking far back to biblical times then onto Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Weber and Nietzsche's interpretations of the conclusions she comes to about each of these concepts. She disagrees for example with Marx's notion that labour is the fundamental of being human, and replaces this with an new idea, drawing on other philosophies to back it up. As well as exploring philosophies she also looks into the ever-expanding realm of technology, especially the birth of astro-physics, in the prologue, she mentions the 1957 Russian launching of the first man-made satellite into orbit (Sputnik I), and how she sees these developments as important in the exploration of the human condition. It was these parts of the book I enjoyed the most, in the last section about the birth of vita activa she explored the scientific world in a way I have never seen copied that was both beautiful and philosophical.

I am unsure what the original of this book looked like, the copy I have was published in 1998, forty years after the original publication. One of the things I found annoying about this version at least was the sheer amount of footnotes used, a lot of the time things were explained in detail in footnotes that would have been better suited to the text itself. As well of this, a lot of footnotes used French and German examples without translations, which irritated me a bit as I speak little French and no German. My recommendation for future editions would be a list of endnotes - as in just references at the back of the book and symbols (asterisks and crosses) being used for the footnotes which go into more detail.

This is also not an easy book to read (it took me a week) but I don't fault it for this. It's very much an academic text, so quite a lot of the time I had to reread sentences to establish a better understanding. Despite this, it is full of in-depth knowledge and well worth a read for anyone interested in philosophy, Marxism or the works of any of the philosophers mentioned above.