The Role of the Arts in Hannah Arendt’s Boundary Spaces

Hannah Arendt opens the Prologue of The Human Condition with the suggestion that the (post)modern era hails a new (and potentially dangerous) development in human consciousness, a burgeoning desire to rebel from the human condition. [1] As Arendt develops her ideas, she traces divergent trajectories of interwoven concepts that include multiple definitions of the role and context of art. Art seems significant in its unwieldy ineffability; she returns to it repeatedly, from different angles, even dedicating a full chapter to the quandary of its placement in the vita activa. While not at the center of Arendt’s exegesis or her gyrating theses, art demands a place in the inquiry throughout the work. Its role remains elusive as she traverses the space between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the tripartite division of the vita activa into labor, work, and action, and the transformation of the political realm of antiquity into the social realm of modernity. Art seems to suggest itself as representing both full engagement of and rebellion against the human condition, one of the few activities that revels in the space between. 

In a historical orbit that crosses 2500 years and multiple languages, definitions of central terms tend to take on new intonations and implications as frames of reference and cultural values change around them. In an exploration of the role of art across this time frame, it is helpful to understand the historical trajectory of these ideas before exploring their significance. Conceptually, there are several original Greek terms at play, transforming across their history of translation and retranslation. Arendt herself spends quite a bit of time on these lexical distinctions. 

Arendt’s primary exploration of the concepts and values inherited from the ancient Greeks pulls from Plato and Aristotle, with occasional references to presocratic thinkers, historians, and politicians. She uses the Latin for vita contemplativa and vita activa as she develops her theses, but she traces the concepts to earlier phenomena in Greek antiquity. She identifies Aristotle’s categories of ways of life as an early separation of modes of being in the world that will continue to evolve across the Western canon. These definitions, the result of early attempts by Plato and Aristotle to categorize aspects of the Western mind’s emerging rationality, have considerable significance for understanding the role and transformation of the arts in society.  English translations of art words, specifically, often occlude distinctions between art and craft, artisan and technician, and the concepts of making, fabricating, generating, and creating. The ancient Greeks, too, found their corollary terms challenging, but often settled their meaning in different places than their modern insinuations. 

In Arendt’s exploration of labor, work, and action, terms she defines anew as she attempts to differentiate between discrete ways of being that emerged in the ancient Greek relationships between private and public spaces, she establishes the foundations of what will come to be understood as the vita activa. She defines these three categories as follows:

“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…

“Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings…

“Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world…” (7).

In summary, the three activities of the vita activa offer a hierarchical approach to engaging the fullness of the human spirit, moving towards an apotheosis of human plurality and thus permanence through action: “Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history” (8-9). The overarching concept of “making” exists across these distinctions, but with nuanced and sometimes contrasting intentions. Labor is fleeting, and painful. Work is reifying, and solitary. Action is always unfinished, an engagement with a phenomenal field of independent others, “the only place where men could show who they really and interchangeably were” (41).

At first glance, the arts seem to live in the “work” category. The ancient Greek word τέχνη (often translated as either “craft” or “art” in various English editions of the works of Plato and Aristotle) encompasses several other terms that Arendt frequently calls upon as she explores the vita activa. Τέχναι is the umbrella term that might be most appropriately translated in the general sense as activities of “making,” but its usage in antiquity is somewhat varied. Plato differentiates τέχνη into two or three subcategories, depending on the dialogue. In the Timaeus, we see a distinction between natural τέχναι (such as farming, which belongs to Arendt’s category of labor), and productive τέχναι, or ποίησις (a term Arendt references frequently, and which is often translated as “making” or “producing,” sometimes “creating,” and includes examples of activities which generally belong to the category of work). In the Sophist, Plato adds a third category: μιμητική, or imitation. [2] 

In contemporary discourse, certain roles within the ancient category of ποίησις are often referenced with respect to the visual arts, μιμητική holds the theatrical arts, and musicians and poets seem to occupy an elusive space between the two. However, in ancient Greece, the terms  τέχνη and ποίησις encompassed much more than our current definitions do, raising questions about what art actually was in this ancient context. We encounter concepts in Plato such as the art of agriculture, the art of earning money, the art of navigation, the art of medicine, and the art of city crafting, and in Aristotle, the art of war, the art of speech or rhetoric, and the art of politics. 

Even as early as the Socratic school, as Arendt points out, the activities of lawmaking and city-building were legitimate political activities because men “act like craftsmen,” with tangible products and a recognizable end. It is not yet action (πρᾶξῐς), but making (ποίησις), “which [the Socratics] prefer because of its greater reliability” (195). Aristotle is the first to push against the primacy of ποίησις in favor of πρᾶξῐς, while both Plato and Aristotle grapple continuously with the role of contemplation in both of these categories.

Meanwhile, Aristotle picks up the mantle of Plato’s machinations around generation and immanence, applying Plato’s questions to the realm of human freedom, and identifying three ways of life in which freedom is possible. Arendt identifies the βίος πολιτικός as an Aristotelian concept later translated as the vita activa, a concept which reflects “a life devoted to public-political matters” (12). This is contrasted with the vita contemplativa (or, βίος θεωρητικός), and the life of pleasure (βίος ἀπολαυστικός) [3], which Arendt largely ignores in this work. Interestingly, as she points out, engagement in the various greek τέχναι does not factor at all into the three ways of life associated with freedom. The τέχναι, modern arts included, lack a fundamental freedom that they acquired in later eras, “since they served and produced what was necessarily useful” (13). “To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity, and this enslavement was inherent in the conditions of human life” (83-84).

There appear to be two terms that might apply to the role that we understand as belonging to the modern artisan, and both are often translated into English as “artisan.” Δημιουργός seems to have applied to anyone involved in the productive τέχναι, sometimes with the added intonation of a creative practice worthy of the gods. (In this type of usage, the gods are understood as the δημιουργοί of the world, and humans are imitating their creative prowess as they engage in the productive acts of the vita activa.) Βάναυσος, on the other hand, is a more derogatory term that referenced various servile arts, often including many components of Arendt’s “work” category, as well as engagement with what we now consider to be the fields of visual and architectural arts (81). Arendt tells us that “the Greeks in their classical period declared the whole field of the arts and crafts, where men work with instruments and do something not for its own sake but in order to produce something else, to be banausic, a term perhaps best translate by ‘philistine,’ implying vulgarity of thinking and acting in terms of expediency” (156-157). She emphasizes this in stark contrast with the modern approach to art, suggesting that “the vehemence of this contempt will never cease to startle us if we realize that the great masters of Greek sculpture and architecture were by no means excepted from the verdict” (157).

To emphasize the cultural derision of the artisans of Greek antiquity, Arendt offers an anecdote of Aristotle imagining a future world in which artisanal work (such as weaving or lyre-playing) can exist without the worker, whereas slaves will always be necessary, as “instruments of living” (122). Here we find a distinction between labor and work, but still with slaves and artisans in a similar non-political category. Labor and work remain wholly separated from the political realm of action. 

This distinction becomes blurred, however, when we begin to consider the role of the poets. Their type of making, belonging to Aristotle’s subcategory of imitation, has unique potential to powerfully impact the political realm. Sections of Arendt’s exegesis that reference the poets represent some of the most vibrant contradictions in her entire work, suggesting that we continue to be as unsure of where to place this type of active engagement as the Greeks were. In an exploration of the role of remembrance and history-making as contributing to human permanence, Arendt tells us that while “Homer was not only a shining example of the poet’s political function, and therefore the ‘educator of all Hellas,’ the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence” (197). This sentence seems to contain both a celebration and an indictment of the poets. They are simultaneously a critical element in maintaining human permanence, and also somehow not enough. On Homer’s poems, as she tells us later, “the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse” (205). The poets are both actively contributing to human immortality, and untouchable in the actual vagaries of history. 

Pericles, too, wades into these murky waters, contrasting the dynamic nature  of the polis with the craftsmanship of the poets. On Pericles, Arendt summarizes,  “the art of politics teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant…Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement” (206). Yet, the remembrance we gain through imitation is, in early Greek history, the province of the poets. 

As the Western historical journey approaches the medieval era, Arendt suggests that the vita activa and the vita contemplativa  diverge, with the vita contemplativa remaining the only truly free way of life (14). Truth is now to be found only in human stillness (15), and remembrance, once the province of poets and historians, centers itself in the eternal changelessness of the contemplative realm. In this new, Christian-era vita contemplativa, “the primacy of contemplation over activity rests on the conviction that no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth the physical kosmos, which swings in itself in changeless eternity without any interference or assistance from outside, from man or god. This eternity discloses itself to mortal eyes only when all human movements and activities are at perfect rest” (15).

The role of generation, of bringing something into being (a fundamental component of the early expressions of what has come to be known as “the arts”),  loses its hold on the political sphere in the medieval era. After the fall of Rome and the rise of the Christian gospel, Arendt tells us that the cultural shifts “succeeded so well in making the vita activa and the bios politikos the handmaidens of contemplation that not even the rise of the secular in the modern age and the concomitant reversal of the traditional hierarchy between action and contemplation sufficed to save from oblivion the striving for immortality which originally had been the spring and center of the vita activa” (21). Nonetheless, while the human engagement in eternity settles squarely into the vita contemplativa and the political sphere transforms into a space of transaction, the role of artists is once again caught in spaces between. 

Again, the artisans land in the space of “work,” as craft guilds spring up to accommodate these social transitions and transform the inherited systems of antiquity. Arendt suggests that “the hallmark of these non-political communities [of later antiquity] was that their public place, the agora, was not a meeting place of citizens, but a marketplace where craftsmen could show and exchange their products. … What characterized these marketplaces, and later characterized the medieval cities’ trade and craft districts, was that the display of goods for sale was accompanied by a display of their production” (160). 

The role of thinking, a critical aspect of creating artisanal goods and the original hallmark of the vita contemplativa which supported human engagement with the eternal, unchanging divine, also seems to be a critical element of the process of bringing a work of art or craft into being in the medieval era, setting the stage for a break with traditional implications of τέχνη. And moving towards the modern era, process reigns, as the certainty of past cosmologies is upended with Galileo’s telescope and Descartes’ skepticism. 

The modern world discovers intimacy and inner subjectivity (69), ushering in a displacement of the political sphere by a vapid and self-aggrandizing social sphere. In a discussion of Rousseau, we return to the increasing sense of rebellion with which Arendt opened her Preface: “The modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life, was born in this rebellion of the heart” (39). She suggests that this new radical subjectivism excludes humans from the realm of action, turning them inward and away from true political engagement. Public art is one casualty of this transition: “the astonishing flowering of poetry and music from the middle of the eighteenth century until almost the last third of the nineteenth, accompanied by the rise of the novel, the only entirely social art form, coincided with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture, is sufficient testimony to a close relationship between the social and the intimate” (39).

Meanwhile, labor (now disembodied) returns to subsume all aspects of the vita activa, taking on unprecedented dominance in Western history. Work disappears in the automation and specialization of the modern era, and the arts are distanced from the vita activa and the body politic, themselves turning inward, drowning in introspection. We now encounter the phenomenon of creative genius, which Arendt posits as not existing in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: “[the living creative genius] finds himself in competition with his creations which he outlives, although they may survive him eventually” (211). The art and the artist are at odds, the artist subservient to the product she has produced, while her individual human essence is lost in the process that guided her work towards completion.

“The modern age’s obsession with the unique signature of each artist, its unprecedented sensitivity to style, shows a preoccupation with those features by which the artist transcends his skill and workmanship in a way similar to the way each person’s uniqueness transcends the sum total of his qualities. Because of this transcendence, which indeed distinguishes the great work of art from all other products of human hands, the phenomenon of the creative genius seemed like the highest legitimation for the conviction of homo faber that a man’s products may be more and essentially greater than himself” (210).

There is a new pain in the artist’s self-recognition as “the son of his work” (212), and artists began to push against this development in the postmodern era: “It is only with the beginning of our [twentieth] century that great artists in surprising unanimity have protested against being called ‘geniuses’  and have insisted on craftsmanship, competence, and the close relationships between art and handicraft” (210). Arendt suggests that idolization of genius is its own form of degradation (211), and that artists now are reacting to the rise of a laboring society that doesn’t value creativity (210).

As we venture towards the postmodern era, which Arendt was straddling and which we now are fully immersed in, art is less accessible, but perhaps more transcendent. In this dangerous new landscape, in which we insist upon rebelling against the human condition (implication: against our own guaranteed existence as a species), it may be that our engagement in the transcendence offered through art offers us a way forward as we grapple with the loss of the public sphere. While Arendt does not state this explicitly, she returns to the arts over and over again as she identifies the most profound complexities of these broader cultural transformations, raising questions as to whether there is something we need to understand in the space between process and product. For her, this is a space that the arts traverse with blatant uncategorizability. 

In the arts, we continue to negotiate the spaces between creation and reification, being and becoming, natality, mortality, and eternity. Remembrance, once the province of homo faber, has lost its clarity in a world turned inward. Its original role, Arendt tells us, is to help us engage eternity in ways that our unique existence doesn’t have immediate access to: “Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage” (90-91). 

In the eras of modernity and postmodernity, we seem to be dwelling more in that most immaterial stage, having lost the stability of the vita activa. Perhaps we are again seeking an elusive divine, even less accessible in the human world after having turned our attention toward inward subjectivity: “Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god–not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths” (22).

The risk, here, is the loss of our fundamental humanness, only truly expressible in the realm of action, and missing its integrity in the new social realm. Arendt warns us of the dangers of this reorganization:

“In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things–into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfilment and which makes it, indeed, as the Greeks held, the mother of all arts, the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been” (95).

She defines the polis as a space of  “organized remembrance” (198), “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly” (198-99). The loss of the polis  also represents a loss of identity. Reification, once the province of “work,” takes on new urgency in this vacuum. 

Reification, through artistic practice, finds its beginnings in the process of thinking, an activity once isolated in the vita contemplativa. “Thought is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency, as exchange transforms the naked greed of desire and usage transforms the desperate longing of needs–until they are all fit to enter the world and to be transformed into things, to become reified. In each instance, a human capacity which by its very nature is world-open and communicative transcends and releases into the world a passionate intensity from its imprisonment within the self” (168). Arendt applies this specifically to the arts with a reference to a poem by Rilke: “In the case of art works, reification is more than mere transformation; it is transfiguration, a veritable metamorphosis in which it is as though the course of nature which wills that all fire burn to ashes is reverted and even dust can burst into flames.” (168)

These references, poetic in themselves, push us towards a re-engagement with Plato’s eidetic landscape of the mind, with the eternal forms of being that the early Greeks sought through engagement in the realm of action. A term we don’t encounter much in Arendt’s work, but that is almost always at the center of modern and postmodern discussions of art, is “aesthetics.” Despite the term’s conspicuous absence in the text, the realm of aesthetics (Plato’s “beautiful” and “good”) seems to adopt renewed importance in the application of the arts in a new and unwieldy era. The beautiful once belonged to the vita contemplativa, but now seems to have its greatest expression in the lingering work space of the arts. Art, while often considered “useless” in a laboring society, still holds space for the beautiful. 

As we attempt to define the role of the arts in the modern and postmodern eras, it seems that we are once again required to consider the space between knowing and doing, to bridge the gap that the ancients thrust upon us:  “...the division between knowing and doing, so alien to the realm of action, whose validity and meaningfulness are destroyed the moment thought and action part company, is an everyday experience in fabrication, whose processes obviously fall into two parts: first, perceiving the image or shape (eidos) of the product-to-be, and then organizing the means and starting the execution” (225).

Perhaps, in the postmodern era, the losses we have experienced in the ascendancy of labor can be remedied through the boundary-crossing implications of contemporary artistic practice. Arendt compares the two with attention towards the beautiful, something inherently missing in the modern approach to labor and accompanying automation: “For although the durability of ordinary things is but a feeble reflection of the permanence of which the most worldly of all things, works of art, are capable, something of this quality–which to Plato was divine because it approaches immortality–is inherent in every thing as a thing, and it is precisely this quality or the lack of it that shines forth in its shape and makes it beautiful or ugly” (172). Arendt likens this to the action-oriented concept of “appearing publicly and being seen” (173).

The artist, too, occupies a unique place in the modern society of laborers: Arendt identifies the danger that the arts will be devalued through this social reorganization, but notes that it doesn’t seem to have happened yet: “No matter what sociology, psychology, and anthropology will tell us about ‘the social animal,’ men persist in making, fabricating, and building, although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist, so that the concomitant experiences of worldliness escape more and more the range of ordinary human experience” (323). 

As we begin to traverse the boundary spaces of the reification of product and the transcendence of process, art emerges to ferry us across. Arendt dedicates a full chapter to this possibility, titled “The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art.” It is here that the fabricated objects of art are separated from “use objects”: “Moreover, the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not ‘using’ it; on the contrary, it must be removed carefully from the whole context of ordinary use objects to attain its proper place in the world. By the same token, it must be removed from the exigencies and wants of daily life, with which it has less contact than any other thing” (167). Art stands apart from all other forms of making, hinting at a past that has transcended and confounded cultural shifts in other areas of living and working: “Even if the historical origin of art were of an exclusively religious or mythological character, the fact is that art has survived gloriously its severance from religion, magic, and myth” (167). Art, she tells us, has “outstanding permanence” (167).

“In this permanence, the very stability of the human artifice, which, being inhabited and used by mortals, can never be absolute, achieves a representation of its own. Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. It is as though worldly stability has become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality, not the immortality of the soul or of life but of something immortal achieved by mortal hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read” (167-168).

Perhaps art is homo faber having transcended himself, now prepared to provide a critical service in reintroducing the modern world to values lost with the public sphere of action: We need “the help of the artists, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all” (173). Art is our insurance policy against losing ourselves in the “utilitarian instrumentalism” that has taken over our cultural consciousness: “In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech, for activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by which the world itself and all things in it are produced” (173-174). 

We are reminded here of certain ancient arts encompassed in τέχνη, that “it was precisely these occupations–healing, flute-playing, play-acting–which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man” (207).These activities “possess an enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance” (208).  In the modern era, after the vita activa split with the vita contemplativa, the concept of process was introduced into making (301). Art has a unique relationship with process, reflecting back to earlier antiquity when Greek contemplation was an inherent element of fabrication. The craftsman was guided by the eidos, the model, of the work-to-be, bringing it into a new kind of being, traversing the space between eternity and the human world: “work makes perishable and spoils the excellence of what remained eternal so long as it was the object of mere contemplation” (303).

As Arendt begins to wrap up her conclusions, she reminds us of the power that the beautiful and the eternal held for so much of Western history: “If one reads medieval sources on the joys and delights of contemplation, it is as though the philosophers wanted to make sure that homo faber would heed the call and let his arms drop, finally realizing that his greatest desire, the desire for permanence and immortality, cannot be fulfilled by his doings, but only when he realizes that the beautiful and eternal cannot be made” (303). Nonetheless, there is an intangibility expressed more clearly through the arts than through other objects or pathways of reification and remembrance, an intangibility that has new presence in the tumultuous uncertainty of the modern era. In her earlier discussion of the permanence of works of art, she suggests that “the process of acting and speaking can leave behind no such results and end products. But for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common. We call this reality the ‘web’ of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality” (183). As she concludes her warnings to us, it seems that the artists are left with great responsibility to guard against the loss of the public sphere: “...action, too, has become an experience for the privileged few, and these few who still know what it means to act may well be even fewer than the artists, their experience even rarer than the genuine experience of and love for the world” (324).

Arendt may be pushing us towards a new understanding of process, and using the boundary space of the arts to help elucidate its role in the world-to-come: “processes, therefore, and not ideas, the models and shapes of the things to be, become the guide for making and fabricating activities of homo faber in the modern age” (300). Then again, as she told us in the beginning, “good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go, leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.” (76) As humans begin to rebel against the world itself, working to extract themselves from the human condition and achieve a new kind of secular immortality, perhaps the arts are poised to show us the way. 

Work Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Notes

[1]: While Arendt’s work is placed at the threshold of the postmodern era, the term had not yet come into being at the time of her writing. I use the term “postmodern” to refer to the era that follows the modern era, which she references repeatedly as an undefined future. 

[2]: I rely on John Sallis in Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus for assistance with the etymology of the Greek words referenced here. Sallis also suggests that “all these τέχναι are directed to bringing something into being, whether it be a living thing, an implement, or an imitation.” (p. 16, Indiana University Press, 1999.) 

[3]: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b.

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Copyright 2023, Melinda Russial