The Two Paths of Action and Contemplation - Excerpt from Ch. I of "The Human Condition" by Hannah Arendt

By Stephen Alexander Beach

(760 Words)

This post is about a short passage from Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition" in which she talks about two traditional view of man's "activity". One is the vita activa, a life filled with production, work, and political action. The other is the vita contemplativa, a life which leaves the polis behind and seeks the experience of the highest realities, it seeks the ineffable which brings quiet and rest. One of the concepts that I been contemplating is the constant noise of our culture. We live in a society of "total work" where we are either working on producing or providing for a physical need or we are numbing ourselves with entertainment in off hours. I'm reminded of a David Foster Wallace interview from 2003 where he talks about the fear of silence and the constant bombardment of entertainment.

Eternity Versus Immortality

Arendt begins this small section by pointing out that since the time of Socrates there has been carved two paths of concern for men's lives and how they live them. These two paths can be summarized by the path of action and the path of contemplation. It was with Socrates that the Greeks began to realize that there is a higher path than political involvement and action. Here Arendt is going to discuss these two paths by comparing them to notions of "eternity versus immortality". 

Immorality and the "Vita Activa"

By immortality she is referencing the Greek notion of the unending drama of the gods and nature in contrast to the shortness of man's existence in that, his mortality. 1 "The Greeks' concern with immorality grew out of their experience of an immortal nature and immortal gods which together surrounded the individual lives of mortal men. Imbedded in a cosmos where everything was immortal, morality became the hallmark of human existence." Those forces of nature, animals, and deathless gods either could not die or had no individuality which stood out from the everlasting survival of the species. Man, though, as a conscious individual, stands out from his species with a unique individuality that brings the experience and mark of morality. This difference can be expressed in the circular movement of nature, its forces and processes will always remain the same, versus the rectilinear nature of man, who will begin and end as an individual. "This is morality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order." 

If there is an immortality to man, Arendt says, it comes through the survival of what any individual man can produce to live beyond him. "By their capacity for immortal deed, by their ability to leave non-perishable traces behind, men, their individual morality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a 'divine' nature." An old idea being that the man who is most fully human is he who transcends himself by producing that which will survive on through his great words, works, or accomplishments. 2

Eternity and the "Vita Contemplativa" 

And yet there is a higher path which man can take than this mortal-immortality. This is when man begins to not to produce things in order to survive himself, but to enter into the experience of contemplation of the highest truths for its own sake. Socrates is the model for this as he never wrote anything down, as even in writing something about eternity he would be transgressing the practice of it and fall down to the active life of trying to produce something to survive himself. "... no matter how concerned a thinker may be with eternity, the moment he sits down to write his thoughts he ceases to be concerned primarily with eternity and shifts his attention to leaving some trace of them. He has entered into the vita active and chosen its way of permanence and potential immortality." 

To live this higher path is to set oneself apart from the workings of men in the polis and to journey alone into a sort of temporary death, to leave this life and seek to raise the mind to what is eternal. In this process the end most culminate in a state where thought is itself not even a working process but a simple reception. This is to enter into the "now" and to experience the unspeakable which renders words ineffable. "Politically speaking, if to die is the same as 'to cease to be among men,' experience of the eternal is a kind of death, and the only thing that separates it from real death is that it is not final because no living creature can endure it for any length of time." 3

In the final analysis it is only contemplation and eternity that take on importance because all else will pass away. "The fall of the Roman Empire plainly demonstrated that no work of mortal hands can be immortal, and it was accompanied by the rise of the Christian gospel of an everlasting individual life to its position as the exclusive religion of Western mankind. Arendt concludes by mentioning that even the complete obsession with the active life today cannot undue this historical stamp which Christianity made upon the world in this regard. 4

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1 - Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. (Garden City, New York: Double Day, 1959). Pg. 18

2 - 19

3 - 20

4 - 21