Kafka in Arendt's Human Condition - Part I

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt explores many aspects of antiquated social hierarchies through the lens of self-reflection. Arendt’s mastery lies in pointing out the flaws of our current ways of life through writings that can provide a broader perspective. However, she was not the first person to investigate social philosophy in this sense. Franz Kafka, one of the most prolific novelists of the 20^th century, is best known for his legacy of portraying the dark underbelly of our social and political system – one that seems perfect and efficient on the outside, yet one that has sent countless victims into an eternal cycle of mundane existence.

Here, I will attempt to relate Arendt and Kafka through the lesser-used medium of The Human Condition. In this article, I will summarize the relevant parts of Arendt’s work, and analyze the ramifications implied from them. Then, I will try to imagine a society governed by these results and introduce Kafka. Over the next few articles, I will individually review three of Kafka's famous short stories through Marx's and Arendt's lens. I will give a brief overview of each story with a summary and attempt to relate their themes to the grassroots of homo faber and the presently corrupted definition of labor, work, and action in the vita activa framework.

The Human Condition (HC):

I. Overview:

In writing the HC, Arendt’s objective remains clear – to find the reasons that explain the purpose of human action. The book is written as a systematic analysis of what she calls the vita activa (active life), diving deep into its three elements (work, labor, and action) and drawing parallels with their morphed interpretations in the 19^th-century industrial human civilization. As a meta-analysis, the book is a social commentary that serves as a wake-up call to reshape the idealistic society that industrious humans have been conditioned to strive towards, for that ideal is itself fundamentally flawed. How (and why) it is flawed is a complicated matter that Arendt thinks is related to the importance we place on the three components, and how we perceive their core definitions.

The technical definitions of labor, work, and action are relatively simple themselves. Labor consists of the acts that facilitate biological survival, resulting in life itself. Work, as Arendt puts it, is activity “whose mortality is not compensated by the species’ ever-recurring life cycle.” It produces something that transcends the act of its creation and embodies achievement, giving an existential meaning to life beyond mere survival. Finally, action relates to collective intellectual development – activities between humans as initiators of work, governing the motives behind our decisions and acknowledging multiple human realities as a part of a unified existence.

What complicates these concepts are their implications to 19^th century social psychology. Her concern lies with the contract inherent in societal advancement – as a species, we gain the ability of manufacture and automation, but is the loss of vita activa’s egalitarian sub-functioning worth it?  Arendt thinks not. All labor, work, and action are modified in ways that abuse self-worth and lead to eventual collective disintegration. The labor relation is relatively direct: self-worth has long been determined by labor (jobs), and automation could lead to its disappearance, essentially destroying social hierarchy as we know it. This relates to work, as mass-production cheapens its qualitative importance and encourages consumerism. Action, as a result, becomes materialist and unpredictable, ending in a self-reinforced cycle of fragmentation and chaotic functioning.

With these themes in mind, this paper deals with select critiques of labor, work, and action presented in the HC in relation to Kafka. I will now proceed to analyze parts of the HC to summarize Arendt’s views in the context of the 19^th century’s industrial shift and introduce Kafka.

II. Arendt’s Views (And What They Mean):

Arendt dedicates Chapter 3 of the HC to the concept of labor, looking at its transformed use over history and criticizing Karl Marx’s social theories in the process. The ancient times had a disfavoring view of labor, maintaining that “…to labor is to be enslaved by necessity, and this enslavement was inherent in the conditions of human life.” They saw labor as an inevitable hindrance to true intellectual and physical freedom. Only the subjection of others (slaves) to one’s necessities could allow this freedom. Aristotle himself argues that slaves cannot be called “men” as long as they are totally subject to necessity. It is important to note that such views were held with a restrained definition of labor. Necessity entailed activity that was (reasonably) essential for survival, and this was extended to virtually any activity that hindered the rate of social and intellectual enlightenment.  

However, the increasing importance of political theory gradually made the boundaries of necessity broader, eventually including the previously sought political enlightenment within it. The definition of survival was expanded beyond biological survival to productive social functioning. The hierarchy of social roles was untouched, but their inclusion as a necessity into our individualities made them ever-more important as measures of societal influence.

In this vein, it is interesting to observe a “role-reversal” of traditional thought in the modern age, which has evolved to glorify labor above all and place animal laborans at an equal position to animal rationale. Arendt seeks to find a reasonable theory distinguishing animal laborans and homo faber and does so by analyzing one of the greatest political theories in the modern world – the socialism of Marx and Smith. Her criticisms will be discussed in detail with comparison to Kafka’s works, but a basic understanding of them is presented here. In a nutshell, she disagrees with Marx on the view that human nature is associated with the animal laborans. Marx believed in an intrinsic “productivity” of labor, while Arendt viewed the acts of labor to be utilitarian failures, rendering immediate consumption and carrying almost no individual value. Marx’s view of labor did not fit in her vita activa structure, for she never considered labor to be an agent of human expression and influential capacity. Kafka’s works, then, act as a sort of ‘uneasy handshake’ between the two philosophies, applying Arendtian perspectives in a Marxian world.

Overall, we can see many of the same questions of social philosophy presented in Kafka’s stories. Living at the turn of the modern age, his stories are shaped by and set in a world of labor reification and manufacturing monopolies. Much like Arendt, his stories reconsider social functioning by emphasizing their intricate flaws. However, in doing so, he routinely manages to indirectly establish Marxist ideologies and attack them using Arendt’s critiques. I will be discussing three such stories: Metamorphosis, The Hunger Artist, and An Imperial Message. Each of them loosely maps to narrativize Arendt’s concepts of labor, work, and action, respectively.