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.The human condition of work is worldliness.”115 At the most abstract level, Arendt distinguishes work by the fact that it has a definite beginning and ending, and this ending is always characterized by a finished product.As the only human activity that employs the teleological means/end category, it thus involves a form of specialized knowledge that can be taught and reproduced.116 As an “artificial” teleological activity, its process always involves doing violence to what is naturally given in order to bring about a worldly space to block out natural necessity.Finally, action “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.”117 Labor and work find their significance and meaning in the activity of action, which redeems these activities from futility by producing stories that give them meaning.118 Action is able to accomplish this as a result of several unique qualities it possesses.In its purest sense, action is the human capacity to begin a new process or chain of events within the human world.119 It is by far the rarest of the human activities—vanishingly rare, in fact.In contrast to work, action is ateleological, an activity that is not done in order to produce something beyond it, but is instead an end in itself.120 Each action is sui generis: it always has a meaning that is completely distinct from any act that has come before it.121 Each action discloses the “who” rather than the “what” of the actor.122 This is because each human being is unique and unlike any other that has come before.The stories created by the deeds of actors disclose this unique “whoness.” By its nature, action produces and establishes relationships among humans, and this results in a “web of human relations.”123 As a result of these qualities, action inevitably is boundless and unpredictable: each course of action undertaken will impact the other individuals in the web of relationships, eventually coming to have a meaning far exceeding anything the actor could have imagined or foreseen.124 Arendt therefore argues that action has a process character: while we are bound to the natural world through labor by the processes of natural necessity, through action we begin new processes in the web of human relations.125 Arendt asserts that the “web of human relations” established by action exists as a kind of overgrowth on the worldly human artifice: together the two constitute what she calls the “common world.” Arendt claims that the objective world produced by work gives stability to the web of human relations—which by nature is ephemeral and unstable—and allows the deeds done by actors to have lasting significance and, potentially, immortality.126Arendt argues that action is essentially conditioned by speech, claiming that without speech action would be meaningless.They are like two sides of a coin: action creates new realities, and speech discloses those new realities.127 She writes that action “is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word.”128 Readers often find this fundamental association of speech and action odd, since clearly labor and work can involve the use of speech.What Arendt appears to mean by this is that action is the activity humans possess to create stories, and thus meaning.Storytelling would be inconceivable without speech, while the products of work and the abundance of labor seem not necessarily so [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]