Arendt died in New York in 1975, her book The Life of the Mind, the sequel to which she saw as a part of the same project as The Human Condition, still unfinished. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, Archiv Barbara Niggl RadloffĪlthough she held several visiting positions at universities both in the US and globally, Arendt resisted the temptation to take on a tenured role in a university preferring the freedom of combining writing, teaching, politics and other work.

She published The Human Condition in 1958.Īrendt in 1958, the year The Human Condition was published. In New York, Arendt continued to write and teach, eventually settling and becoming a US citizen.

She was briefly imprisoned in 1941, after which Arendt fled France, this time to New York. In Paris, she worked for several Jewish refugee organisations until the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, she fled-first to Prague, and then to Paris. And Arendt, who was herself Jewish, realised that a future in Germany was increasingly unviable. Her thesis, completed in 1926, was on the concept of love in the work of the philosopher Saint Augustine.īy this time, Anti-Semitism was on the rise in Germany. Arendt then wrote her PhD in Heidelberg under the supervision of the philosopher Karl Jaspers. After studying at the University of Marburg with Martin Heidegger, she briefly enrolled in classes with Edmund Husserl, the founder of the movement in philosophy called phenomenology, a rich philosophical tradition that explores the textures and structures of human experience. She studied with some of the most significant philosophers working in Germany during the first half of the 20th century. Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany in 1906. Arendt was not only a political theorist and a philosopher, but she was also an educator and an activist who engaged actively in politics. And this dual commitment to both thinking and doing was reflected in her own life. In her book The Human Condition, Arendt contrasts the vita contemplativa, or “the contemplative life”, and the vita activa, or the “active life.” For Arendt, human life involves both contemplation and activity.

So in this piece, we’ll be looking at the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose exploration of the vita activa, or “the active life”, is a useful way to start getting a handle on the role that work plays in human life. But when we try to think a bit more deeply, or a bit more systematically, it becomes harder to figure out. What is work? And how can we think better about work? Like many other things, we more or less know what work is when we don’t think about it too hard.

Arendt the human condition