ABSTRACT
Although Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, The Human Condition of 1958, does not refer either to Husserl or Heidegger, her disquisition on
the way in which the “lifeworld” comes into being justies, in my view, our reading of her magnum opus as an ontological overview. We may note in this regard that instead of focusing on the “things themselves”, to cite Husserl’s famous slogan, Arendt emphasizes the existential conditions under which things come into being. In this regard she dierentiates between dierent experiential categories of production as these determine the dierent destinies of the things produced. “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. e human condition of labor is life itself. Work is the activity that corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in and whose morality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an articial world of things, distinctly dierent from all the natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while the world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. e human condition of work is worldliness.”4
