Dignity in Human Activities and Organizing as Conditioning Dignity

Arendt speaks of human nature in terms of human conditioning. Everything we do and encounter turns into the conditions of our existence. She sees life, the world, and plurality as essential conditions, not for human existence, but for life to be human, as it is given on earth. See Table 2.2 for an overview of activities corresponding to human conditions and dignity.

From a process perspective, the activities are distinct. Labor, corresponding to the eternal repetition of natural processes, has neither a beginning nor an end. Work has both. Action has a definite beginning, but no definite end.

Happiness is an aspect of labor just as health is an aspect of life:

There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance—poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body merciTable 2.2 Dignity related to labor, work and action

lessly and barrenly to death—ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive. (HC, p. 108)

Action starts processes which can go on forever. It has two remedies for its unboundedness of unpredictability and uncontrollability, and its irreversibility: by giving and holding to promises, we offer stability, and by forgiving, we can break chains of revenge which otherwise are chains of reactions. Arendt calls action our “miracle-working faculty” because it is the “infinite improbability, which occurs regularly” (HC, 246).

While we show what we can do in making, we show who we are in speech and action. This is who, sounding through any mask we may use, is distinctly unique and identifiable, but undefinable. It cannot become an object of cognitive knowledge; rather, it results in stories that can be told. Action has to insert itself into the already existing web of human relationships with its many conflicting wills and intentions, and it often fails to achieve its purpose. We are all actors and sufferers, but neither the authors nor producers of real-life stories.

This inherent tragedy has led to attempts to bestow dignity upon action by looking at the process as “a whole.” Plato invented an agent pulling the strings behind the backs of acting men, and Arendt saw this tendency in all modern process conceptions of history, viewing events and actions as part of “wholes,” as processes or “development” towards some end (doom or paradise) or infinity (of progress). As mere functions in a pro?cess, actors are robbed of dignity; instead, dignity and agency are superstitiously bestowed to abstractions or concepts as “mankind as one,” “the invisible hand,” “the world spirit,” “class interest” and the like. Instead of an attentive facing-up to experience, they are fictional stories, and their source is not experience, but mental perplexity. Arendt finds Kant’s belief in infinite progress inconsistent with his own ideas on the dignity of man:

[T]he very idea of progress—if it is more than a change in circumstances and an improvement of the world—contradicts Kant’s notion of man’s dignity. It is against human dignity to believe in progress. (LKPP, p. 77)