Here I Stand, Exercising What My Creator Gave Me, Forever

Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

“The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”

Ancient Greek definition of happiness. Taken from “The Greek Way,” by Edith Hamilton, 1930. In more familiar terms: happiness is the pursuit of improving one’s mind, body, and soul, in a community that enables one to reach their full potential. For when you could use some guidance.

“With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non [fundamental condition], but the conditio per quam [causal, or instigating, condition]—of all political life.

[...] Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers.”

The beginning of Chapter 1 of The Human Condition, by the frankly genius philosopher Hannah Arendt, a book published in 1958 that I consider to be her masterpiece and one of the most important works of humanity, describing what it means to be human. For when you need a clearer answer than ‘42’ to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

“Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God.”

The gist of how Martin Luther concluded his defense on the 18^th of April, 1521, during his sentencing trial after being cancelled for mailing his listicle of 95 grievances against the Catholic Church to his bishop a few years earlier. A good companion to the following quote.

“From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

The probably apocryphal words of surrender from hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, or Joseph), a leader of the wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) to General Miles of the United States Army on the 5^th of October, 1877, after at least eight hundred men, women, and children had been ethnically cleansed from their homes and then managed to skillfully elude abduction and internment at the genocidal hands of the US Army for three months while they unsuccessfully searched for asylum and refuge. What both hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt and Martin Luther were expressing, whatever their actual words, was their inability to be other than who their creator made them, and, come whatever may, they were going to remain true to themselves and their creator. To help when you need to stand tall against the world.