A Comparative Study On Marx And Arendt’s Concept Of "Labor"

After German Idealism, Marx criticized all the German Idealist who viewed human as just "Self-consciousness or Freewill" in the sense of traditional Metaphysics and attempted to introduce the notion of "labor" to disclose human’s essence which help us walking out from the mist of epistemological dilemma into a kind of real horizon of ontological worldview. In essence, human and the history of humanity are actually human’s (as laborer) activities of, self-definition, self-interpretation and self-creation as well as communication between individuals and history through this process of self-creation. However, Marx’s notion of "labor" and his Practical Philosophy are still suffering severe critiques because of its excessively abstract features. it would be Hanna Arendt when comes to the best reaction to the above question. On the purpose of understanding the communication between the two great philosophers, we have to know clearly the real sense of notion of "Labor" in their systems of thoughts. Labor has been the foundation of modern society. Whereas, the human condition would be determined by production and consumption and the whole society would be in such a dead circulation of production-consumption that human can never get rid of the chain of natural necessity. Also, there would not be transcendence of this mortal world which might result in non-worldness and a society of consumerism, not to mention politically immortal activities. On this account, Arendt attempted to reinterpret the essence of "Labor" in her owe new horizon by critique of Marx’s theories. There exists great distinctions between Marx and Arendt in these respects of historical background, horizon of thinking as well as timeliness and historicness, individual and human, publicity and privacy and so on, this paper intend to disclose the distinctions between their theories by analyzing the differences between their notion of "Labor".