Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Questions to think about as you are reading...
--How does Arendt define "labor," "work," and "action"? Do Arendt's definitions match your own conceptions?
--What is the vita activa? How does the vita activa relate to politics?
--What is the relationship between the "private" realm and the "public" realm, according to Arendt? Can you think of contemporary examples of the private and public?
--What is the "social," according to Arendt? Does she find it problematic?
--How does Arendt understand "appearance" in the public realm?
--Why is "goodness" destructive of the public, according to Arendt?

And to get the ball rolling....

My choice for a 'bad' sentence:
"The objectivity of the world--its object- or thing-character--and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence." p. 9
My explanation for why:
I think the ideas that Arendt tries to convey in this sentence are profound (i.e., that humans reside in and interact with a world of objects and things; that those materials gain significance and meaning because of the way that they are used and perceived by humans). However, I do find Arendt's repeated use of "thing" and "object" confusing on first read because of the vagueness and abstractness of both nouns. She uses "objectivity" in a way that is surprising to me and it took a couple of readings to make some sense of what she meant. Also, I was confused a little bit about how the verb "supplement" is supposed to operate: does the human condition really supplement the objective world or is it necessarily dependent upon it? Maybe another verb choice would have been better?

My choice for a 'good' sentence:
"Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one's own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human." p. 64
My explanation for why:
I think that this sentence conveys a range of ideas in an elegant and also thought-provoking way. Arendt had previously discussed how privacy was thought of by the Greeks and Romans as a form of deprivation (namely, in the private realm one could not participate in politics and one was tied to bodily needs). In the sentence above, she builds upon and complicates that earlier conception by indicating that a complete lack of privacy was also a deprivation. As a result, she leads the reader (me) to some new thoughts about the risks possible with too much privacy and too little privacy. I also liked how Arendt was able to illustrate how privacy was a necessary factor in politics. Finally, Arendt used an evocative example ("like a slave") to lend detail and specificity to her argument.