I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Today, let’s think about the vita contemplativa vs the vita activa. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used the term vita contemplativa to critique the modern obsession with relentless productivity and mindless consumption. South Korean philosophy Byung-Chul Han promotes the vita contemplativa in his book The Burnout Society.
In last Sunday’s philosophy break newsletter, Jack Madsen covers Hannah Arendt’s work on the vita activa, the life of activity, which she contrasts with the vita contemplativa, the life of contemplation.
In her 1958 book The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes labor from work from action:
- Labor “consists of what we must do, along with all other animals, simply to meet our biological needs.” What we produce from this — a clean house, cared-for-animals, a fresh body — must be renewed again and again because those things are “canceled out by consumption.” When we do labor, we are acting as animal laborans.
- Work produces artifacts — a book, a trading system, a ceramic mug — and in this way it changes life’s neverending repetition by making something new. “Work for Arendt involves not the repetitive tasks of labor,” writes Madsen, “but goal-directed strategy, calculation, and planning for the future. Time becomes linear, rather than circular.” Work reshapes the world with what it creates. It has purpose beyond subsistence and consumption.
- Action, the highest level in Arendt’s vita activa, is how we disclose to others who we are. Madsen writes, “It’s where we appear before one another as equals to discuss, deliberate, and instigate something unprecedented in the public realm…. action brings meaning to the human world.”
But in the modern world, Arendt suggests, action and work are devolving into labor, producing items for consumption such as fast fashion that lasts only one season, a TikTok video that you watch for 45 seconds, a fancy lavender latte with steamed milk art on top that is consumed within 30 minutes.
Madsen isn’t all on board with Arendt’s ideas:
We might find aspects of Arendt’s analysis troubling – particularly her dismissal of labor’s potential for significance. I might not be changing the world or distinguishing myself from others when I wash the dishes, go for a morning walk, or enjoy a cup of coffee, but does that really render them the least meaningful activities available to me? Doesn’t meaning also depend on the kind of attention we bring to whatever we engage in, be it mindfully eating our lunch, or cheerfully talking to a colleague?
Maybe to solve the complaint that life is meaningless, we should be focused on our ability to find meaning in the ordinary, rather than require our occupations to be extraordinarily meaningful.
I find her framing useful in that it makes sense of the main activities I take on each day. I labor to take care of my house and garden, and the pets who live here. I work at developing a trading system that allows me to generate income and growth of my investment portfolios, and I leave something lasting behind (if I share it, or even if I just use the returns to make my life and that of my family better). I take action here on my daily blog, and occasionally through my email newsletter, disclosing to the world who I am and what I stand for. Ironically, what I stand for is the enactment of the vita contemplativa, but I can only practice it because I also practice the vita activa every single day.