For the world to be a human home, the human artifice must provide a space fit for action and speech—activities entirely useless for life’s necessities and of a different nature than fabrication.
By Hannah Arendt, from The Human Condition
Key Arguments
- A genuine human world is a home only if it accommodates action and speech, not just production and utility.
- Action and speech are ‘entirely useless for the necessities of life,’ marking their non-instrumental character.
- These activities differ in kind from fabrication, by which the world of things is produced, underscoring the need for a distinct public space beyond making.
Source Quotes
remove his pain, and if mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking men need the help of in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, 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. 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. We need not choose here between Plato and Protagoras, or decide whether
Key Concepts
- 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.
Context
23 THE PERMANENCE OF THE WORLD AND THE WORK OF ART (lines 3413–3420): Clarifies the requirements of the human artifice to sustain political life distinct from productive fabrication.