Hannah Arendt on Use and Consumption

By Philip Walsh

“In our need for more and more rapid replacement of the worldly things around us, we can no longer afford to use them, to respect and preserve their inherent durability; we must consume, devour, as it were, our houses and furniture and cars as though they were the ‘good things’ of nature which spoil uselessly if they are not drawn swiftly into the never-ending cycle of man’s metabolism with nature. It is as though we had forced open the distinguishing boundaries which protected the world, the human artifice, from nature, the biological process which goes on in its very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which surround it, delivering and abandoning to them the always threatened stability of a human world.”

-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

This quote reveals Hannah Arendt’s distinctive critique of the consumer society that she realized was becoming dominant in 1950s America. It is quite different from that of the ‘culture industry’ motif that the Frankfurt School thinkers of the time were presenting, but it was no less devastating and, I think, more prescient.

[caption id="attachment_15554" align="alignleft" width="170"] Arendt Contra Sociology, by Philip Walsh (Source: Ashgate)[/caption]

Her point is that use and consumption constitute two quite fundamental orientations to the world, and that these are meaningfully aligned with work and labor respectively. A loaf of bread and a table are different not simply with respect to their physical or aesthetic qualities. Rather, they occupy different positions within the categories of meaning with which human beings confront the world – both as nature and as the ‘human environment.’

The same categories of meaning underlie the distinction between work and labor, and this is reflected, Arendt argues, in the fact that “every European language, ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words for what we have come to think of as the same activity” (The Human Condition). The tendency for ‘work’ to be understood purely as ‘labour’ and for use-objects to be treated as if they were articles of consumption are therefore part of the same phenomenon: the erosion of the meaning structure that has traditionally differentiated these activities and their outcomes. In a society where everyone thinks of their profession as mere ‘jobholding,’ they also think of the tangible products of human activity as ‘consumables.’

The threat to meaningfulness that a ‘consumer society’ (or a ‘society of laborers’, which comes to the same thing) portends is central to understanding Arendt’s urgent admonition in the introduction to The Human Condition, to “think what we are doing.”

(Featured Image: "Consumption_-Tax"; Source: Political Outcast)