BOOKS
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One other aspect of her difficulty is the very largeness of her sub–
ject: Miss Arendt is attempting to examine the various interpretations
throughout history that man has made of the
vita activa,
the life of
action, and this involves her in the correlated analyses of the life of
thought, of labor, and fabrication. This is a tremendous and funda–
mental philosophic enterprise, which involves her not only in an at–
tempt to understand the most fundamental verbs in the language-to
do, to make, to think, to be-but also in a painstaking historical examina–
tion of the historical vicissitudes of these verbs in the course of Western
history. Hegel was the first philosopher who attempted to understand
man in relation to his labor; and Marx, taking off from him, made a
philosophic reinterpretation of man that has transformed the whole of
contemporary history. Miss Arendt thinks (and, I believe, rightly) that
the ideas of Hegel and Marx on these subjects have to be fundamentally
recast if we are to make any headway in understanding ourselves and
our contemporary situation. Clearly, hers is one of the most ambitious
books to have appeared anywhere recently, and the fact that she has
been able to bring it off at all is a measure of the primary importance
of this work. Behind it I sense a great indebtedness to the thought of
Heidegger, but this debt is simply a groundwork on which she builds,
and Miss Arendt's mind is very much her own.
Having said that the book in its richness defies any encapsulating
summary, I shall now nevertheless have to contradict myself by at–
tempting one for the reader's convenience:
With the Greeks, in the era before the philosophers, the life of
action was considered the supreme type of human life, the highest and
best way that a man might live; the life of labor was confined to slaves
and therefore, as servile, lacked the dignity necessary for a free man;
production, the fabricating of objects, belonged to the artisan, who,
although not a slave, occupied a lower place in the hierarchy of Greek
values; as for the life of contemplative reason, it did not yet exist, for
the simple enough fact that philosophic reason itself had not yet come
into existence. When Pindar speaks of a man's immortalizing himself,
it is through
deeds
that he understands this to
be
accomplished: an
athlete wins an immortal victory at the Olympic games, a soldier makes
himself remembered by an act of courage on the field of battle, a poli–
tician delivers a great harangue at a decisive moment in the life of his
people-or a poet, for that matter, performs the deed of writing a great
ode. With the advent of Plato and philosophy, however, all these values
become transvalued, for the life of action takes place in the realm of
time, which has an inferior reality than does eternity, and it is only pure
