Arquivo para March 19th, 2025
Work, action and contemplation
19
Mar
Hannah Arendt considered that labor, work and
action are the three spheres of human life that make up the “vita activa”, a thought that we have placed around Byung-Chul Han’s essay, which Arendt also uses to complement the Vita Contemplativa.
It is not characteristic of modern man to think in this way, and this has put human thought and even scientific and religious thought at a standstill. Narratives arise as a consequence and not as a cause of this, it is through the fragmentation of human activities that the interpretation of reality becomes subject to a limited worldview.
Labor ensures the biological survival of the individual and the species (Arendt, 1995) while work, although it doesn’t individualize man, establishes a relationship with objects and with the transformation of nature, and allows him, and this is important, to demonstrate his craftsmanship and inventiveness (Arendt, 1995), but craftsmanship and inventiveness are not separate from thought, because there man conceives of his relationship with nature as a whole.
It was industrial work that destroyed this idea of the whole between work, labor and action, but noticing that artisanal work already included a contemplative vision, “Perché non parli?” said Michelangelo when completing his work “Moses”, meaning “why not speak?” (photo).
A little noticed detail, but certainly conceived by Michelangelo when he made his work, is the support of his right arm on the tablets of the law, we would say a first biblical codex, since the Torah was a scroll, and if compared to the statue of the Greek thinker, he is resting his head on his right arm, Auguste Rodin made his version around 1880.
Thus, work, labor and action can be united with the idea of contemplation, if we think of it as the conception of a previous thinker and included in the object, in this way we reunite and re-signify work and labor, no longer as an alienated attitude, but as an ontic Being.
Therefore, human work and its labor must be united with the ontological idea of Being, and it also means an act of love for humanity, for the Other and for the one who will use, conceive or just contemplate the action of labor.
Arendt, H. (1995). A condição humana. 7th. ed. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.
