Chapter 42

Homo faber, Arendt contends, was the first to ascend the hierarchy under the inversion that made the vita activa supreme. The implications of this are outsized: increases in the human capacity for human knowledge and progress have always come as a result of new tools and equipment.

Quoting Kant, Arendt notes the inextricable relationship between making and learning. Making necessitates experimentation, which presages the creation of new knowledge as an idea is honed and executed. And yet, she posits, some of this has been lost, too, as “why” and “what” have become subsumed into “how” through the process-focused advent of automation. This, to Arendt, constitutes another inversion: rather than the ends justifying the means, the means are now optimized at the expense of the ends.

The trade-off for the supremacy of vita activa and homo faber is significant: something existing only in contemplation can exist fully unblemished in perpetuity, but to reify something from that idea is to make it perishable. Anything a person makes can be destroyed, spoiled, broken, or otherwise jeopardized, and by privileging the tangible, reified product over the contemplative notion is to make mortal and flawed what was once perfect and eternal.

Chapter 43

The next hierarchical inversion, Arendt explains, might be surprising to some given the runaway success of homo faber through the early part of the modern age: the unexpected ascension of animal laborans to the position of the majority.

When the aforementioned shift from “what” to “how” mechanized the fabrication process, a fundamental disruption occurred. While the act of handmaking had previously been based on craftsmanship and ingenuity, automated making required repetition and a division of labor. The fabrication process was broken down into constituent parts, each simple enough to require labor, not work, to complete. Homo faber faced obsolescence as the role of production shifted from work into labor.