"Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition": A conversation with Samantha Rose Hill (Keywords: Violence; Technology; Alienation; Freedom; Democracy)

From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")

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Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958) is her most prescient work, providing readers with a vocabulary to explore the relationship between thought and action, the influence of technology, the rise of the social, the erosion of privacy, political action, identity politics, alienation, and the loss of freedom in modernity. What does it mean to inhabit the earth and create a shared world? When, if ever, is violence politically necessary? Can the democratic principle of freedom survive in the 21st century? This conversation with Arendt scholar Samantha Rose Hill examines the profound impact of Arendt’s book and its relevance in our contemporary era, where our understanding of violence is continually evolving.

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Brad Evans (BE): I’d like to start by asking what it is about Arendt that has so compelled you as a scholar. Why do you believe she is particularly relevant to the world we live in today, especially in relation to The Human Condition and our understanding of violence?

Samantha Rose Hill (SRH): Why The Human Condition? Why aren’t we discussing The Origins of Totalitarianism or even Eichmann in Jerusalem when talking about a century of violence? Arendt begins On Revolution by noting, “This has been a century of wars and revolutions.” Violence is integral to many of her works, but she often addresses it implicitly, embedding it within the broader framework of her arguments about political action, revolution, and the nature of creating a shared world. The Human Condition is, I believe, the most prescient and important of Arendt’s works for understanding the complexities unfolding in the 21st century.

One of the themes she addresses at the beginning of the book is the spectre of technology, which, even in the mid-1950s, she anticipated would radically transform everyday life and ultimately the human condition itself. We are experiencing that transformation today. Arendt discusses many topics that resonate with our contemporary conversations, such as identity, the creation of a waste economy, the collapse of the public sphere, the rise of the social, and the erosion of the distinction between privacy and intimacy. She explores the public dissemination of private life and the ways in which alienation is reshaped by scientific progress and technology. When W.H. Auden reviewed the book for Encounter magazine in 1958, he remarked, “What Arendt manages to achieve in this book is to give us a vocabulary.” She provides us with a language to begin understanding the political phenomena we face today. Arendt is a conceptual thinker, and while none of her concepts are rigid or fixed, she uses them to make important distinctions. Her work addresses concepts such as privacy, public life, labour, work, action, and speech, among others.

BE: I think Arendt had a remarkable sense of what was truly happening in the world, and in the most pressing ways, even at that very moment. She not only understood the present but also had a sense of what was about to unfold. And given that everything she lived through to understand the Holocaust wasn’t just an end point—she could so easily have gotten wrapped up in the optimism. “No. The world is going to become more and more dangerous.” And I think it’s that moment of prescience that she has which really marks this book as a kind of, a moment in history in which we have to, once again, be alert to what’s happening.

This is a book about the loss of freedom in modernity, and Arendt is not hopeful that we will be able to save freedom from the phenomena of modernity that have fundamentally transformed the society we live in

SRH: Absolutely. And just to add two things to that: this book is not optimistic. It begins on what appears to be a romantic note, but when you start to dig into it, you quickly realise that it is not headed in a positive direction. Ultimately, this is a book about the loss of freedom in modernity, and Arendt is not hopeful that we will be able to save freedom from the phenomena of modernity that have fundamentally transformed the society we live in. That’s a very grave argument she’s making. Arendt is so attentive to language—she’s always particular about the words she uses. There’s a lot contained in the title of this book itself. When she says "the human condition", she means “condition” a few different senses. She’s addressing the human condition as it has been understood in the tradition of Western political philosophy, and it’s a conscious break from the tradition of social contract theory—Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke—who argue for an essential human nature, or a kind of nature that takes over in the context of society. Arendt says, “No, I’m going to give you an understanding of the human condition and the fundamental activities that form the condition of ordinary life.” She also uses “condition” to convey that we are conditioned by the world in which we appear. We are shaped by that world, which in turn becomes part of the human condition, which only appear natural.

BE: Is there a particular section or chapter from The Human Condition that has struck you as especially important in terms of your own appreciation of Arendt?

SRH: It’s my favourite passage in all of Arendt, and it’s the one that made me fall in love with her work twenty years ago when I first encountered it in college. It sets the tone, mood, and framework for the entire book. It’s on page one of the prologue:

“In 1957, an earthborn object made by man was launched into the universe. Where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies. The sun, the moon, and the stars. To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a timespan that, to us mortals bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time, it managed to stay in the skies. It dwelt and moved in proximity of the heavenly bodies, as thought it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company. This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it… It was not pride, or awe, at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which filled the hearts of men who now, when they looked up from the earth toward the skies, could behold a thing of their own making. The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first step towards escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth. And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slip of some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk for one of the Russia’s great scientists. ‘Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever’. Such feelings have been commonplace for some time. They show that men everywhere are by no means slow to catch up and adjust to scientific discoveries, and technical developments. But that, on the contrary, they have out sped them by decades.”

BE: Arendt talks here about the moment when mankind, for the first time, can see the world as a whole—and that’s when we realise we have the power to destroy it. This is a moment of profound realisation. Paul Virilio later picks up on this idea in relation to the question of speed. There’s an ordinariness to violence and how it’s linked to the hyper-acceleration of power and violence in the world. I wonder how this understanding connects to alienation?

SRH: She revisits this idea in the final section of the book on worldly alienation. She cites Kafka, noting that man can discover the Archimedean point, but this also implies a kind of self-destruction, where progress and destruction are intertwined. By the end of the book, when she talks about modern worldly alienation, she has traced a two-fold process: man’s flight away from the world and man’s flight into himself. For her, this process is marked by cruelty and violence, fundamentally rooted in what she calls “material wretchedness”—the cruelty of the increasing number of labouring poor. That is her language. And so, scientific progress has been used to exponentially create more and more labouring poor classes. This ultimately transforms what she refers to as “the life process,” fundamentally restructuring society into what she calls a waste economy. We have not only transformed the world but also the activities and things that are meant to give meaning to our lives into forms of commodity production—endlessly repetitive, replaceable, and lacking durability in the world.

Never have we been more connected than we are today through technology, travel, and trade, and yet never have we been more alienated.

Never have we been more connected than we are today through technology, travel, and trade, and yet never have we been more alienated. It’s about the transformation of the world we create with our hands—the world we make. The institutions, infrastructure, literature, and apparatuses that mediate our everyday life have become part of a constant cycle of waste production. There’s this movement where nothing ever stays; there’s no durability, no stability in a world constantly mediated by technology. We humans appear and disappear. We are born, and we die, and our lives are marked by this linear temporality—nothing can change that. But in a world where nothing lasts, everything becomes constantly replaceable. People desire to escape the earth altogether, to escape the human condition, to try to extend their lifespan. We see this in contemporary political culture. This waste economy is reflected in how labourers are treated today, whether we’re talking about Amazon warehouse workers, the gig economy, or cheap fast fashion.

BE: We usually talk about materiality, but when we consider the material conditions of life, how does this call to violence manifest into a kind of politics of alienation and loneliness? I’m interested in that connection, or if there is a connection, as you see it now, between alienation, loneliness, and violence, from a perspective of feeling impotent to power?

SRH: Absolutely. I’m reminded of where Richard Bernstein began this conversation as well, reflecting on how saturated American society is with violence today. I read somewhere that by the time a person is twenty years old, they’ve seen—it's an egregious number—over a thousand-gun deaths on television. Thinking about the dispossession of the working classes in the United States, I always come back to the fact that we’ve had economic stagnation in this country since 1972. People don’t move anymore. There’s no class mobility. We don’t have a functioning social infrastructure, welfare system, healthcare, or education. We’ve essentially watched all of our public and political institutions be privatised since the 1970s—from the police to education, and so on.

Part of this conversation is not only about what happens when people no longer feel like they have power, but also about what happens when people experience a crisis of meaning.

Part of this conversation is not only about what happens when people no longer feel like they have power, but also about what happens when people experience a crisis of meaning. I think this is something Arendt really understood. She recognised the importance of talking about where people derive their meaning from. One of the things she highlights in The Human Condition is that with the transformation of society away from the family, and with the death of God—those traditional institutions that once gave people meaning—a society of labourers emerged where people were expected to find meaning through work. But what happens when you live in a society where there are no jobs, or where labour is not rewarding but punishing? What about the idea that work is supposed to give people meaning in their lives?

We are experiencing a grave existential crisis in this country, which is manifesting in various forms of violence. When I revisited Arendt’s 1968 lecture on violence and power, I was struck by one of her responses in the Q&A session. She talked about how the political party system in the United States is largely to blame for the powerlessness people feel. The democratic birthright to political action and self-government, she argued, has been outsourced to the party system, which has become a machine that alienates voters. She explicitly said that this will eventually lead to a kind of Machiavellian tumult and violence that will disrupt society. I think we’re witnessing that today, as we watch both the Democratic and Republican parties collapse before our eyes—and have been for the past several years.

BE: If we think of the contemporary left (if you can even call it that anymore), it’s plagued by two issues: a crisis of imagination and a crisis of action. These two questions are central to The Human Condition. How do we deal with the crisis of thinking and the crisis of action? I’m wondering how you feel that reads, again, now in the contemporary moment?

SRH: One of the premises of this book, which she lays out at the end of the prologue, is probably one of her most cited quotations: “This book is about nothing more than to stop and think what we are doing.” Philosophically, part of what she’s doing is addressing the ancient distinction between vita activa and vita contemplativa—the life of action and the life of the mind. She is trying to elevate them to an equal platform, as it were, suggesting that both are necessary to one another. For Arendt, all thinking stems from experience in the world, and we must think about what it is we are doing. But to engage in thinking, we have to stop acting. We must retreat to create the space and time to reflect in solitude on our actions. This, I think, ties back to the question of judgment when we’re talking about Arendt.

The loss of imagination, which I agree is a significant political problem in our contemporary era, has been an issue for a long time. There are different ways to approach this question through The Human Condition. One aspect is the fabrication of reality. If all thinking moves from experience, and all experience today is mediated by technology in some way, then the fundamental activity of thinking itself has changed in the 21st century. Our thinking has become a reified object. The distance necessary to engage in Arendt’s critical reflection is hardly possible unless one completely separates themselves from the technological devices that control almost every aspect of our daily lives.

We need to consider how technology has transformed not just the ways we think and how this has been historically understood, but also how we ourselves have become objects in the process—even in our thinking. I often return to Adorno’s beautiful sentence at the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment, where he describes thinking as threadbare, suggesting there’s no substantial content left in it. This is part of the issue.

How do we think about a new political imaginary that is connected to, yet distinct from, technology?

So, how do we think about a new political imaginary that is connected to, yet distinct from, technology? This is one of the questions I’ve explored in my research on loneliness. Studies show that the more time a person spends on social media, the more likely they are to feel lonely, anxious, and depressed. Paradoxically, spending time on social media is also associated with a higher likelihood of participating in real-world political actions. These phenomena are unfolding concurrently. Technology could potentially expand the political imaginary and lead to new forms of political action that might drive change, but it is also deeply tied to the alienation people feel in our contemporary world.

Finally, Arendt emphasises—and I believe it cannot be emphasised enough— the need to be together in person. We must be together in the same space. Simply being together through technology poses problems for subjectivity. There is much more to say on this, but I’ll leave it here.

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Samantha Rose Hill is the author of two books: Hannah Arendt (2021, Reaktion Books) ‎and What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (co-edited with Genese Grill, ‎‎2023, Liveright). She regularly contributes to publications including Los Angeles Review of ‎Books, Contemporary Political Theory and The South Atlantic Quarterly. She is currently ‎writing a book on loneliness.

Brad Evans is a Professor of Political Violence and Aesthetics at the University of Bath, UK. He is the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence, and the online educational ‘Histories of Violence’ project. Brad has published twenty books and edited collections, many of which address international affairs and theorizations of violence.

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From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")

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