Hence for most men or women Arendt is suggesting we are encouraged by the structure and organisation of modern societies to believe in the lack of meaningful action, of the lack of purpose, of the lack of solidarity, of the lack of acting plurally, purposefully and meaningfully and this despite the the political institutions of liberal representative democracies.
To then be alienated from the world is to say that some or all of these aspects do not obtain for the majority or most, and perhaps even a large or distinctive minority.īut this is not precisely what Arendt says she appears to say only that modern societies encourage us to become alienated from the world and not that we are ontologically so. I understand her notion of action to mean meaningful, purposeful, willed action therefore, an expression of agency and also, acting together plurally and I understand this to mean where the individual will is not submerged in a collective and hence dissolves but where the individual will remains distinct even when acting plurally this is her notion of solidarity. Is this the right sense of the world in interpreting the term 'alienation from the world'? Thus neither of this can be the world we are said to be 'alienated' from this leaves only the third world, the world of action. She says 'earth' here and not 'world' the earth is a part of nature and this links the artificial world of work to the biological world of labour and we can rephrase the above by saying the world of work encourages us to merely see ourselves in terms of the world of labour. Labour, for her, refers to the 'biological life' of man as an animal work, refers to the 'artificial world of objects that human beings build upon the earth', and action which corresponds to our 'plurality as distinct individuals'. The other notion of world she uses is in her distinction between labour, work and action. In a development Arendt traces to "alienation from the world," modern, automated societies engrossed by ever more efficient production and consumption encourage us to behave and think of ourselves simply as an animal species governed by natural laws.īeing trained as a mathematician and physicist, I'm naturally sympathetic to this view but I would argue that it is one view amongst others, and not neccesarily the right view to take on many other subjects arguably, the world here is the natural world of nature, and so the laws of nature and of man being seen as one animal amongst others but given what Arendt says above, she cannot mean 'world' in this sense. In the introduction to Arendts book the Human Condition is the following:
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