ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters on operative concepts, I mapped out the conceptual undercurrent of Arendt’s mindset, its phenomenological provenience, and her partial transformation of it. Revealing this framework not only can help us to better understand and locate her arguments. It can also bring to light an original way to think about the interplay between the meaning-structures human life produces, simply by its enactment, and its subjection to pre-given meaning-structures (historically, culturally, naturally etc.)—and how this forms a “world.” Arendt captures this interplay in her composite theoretical figure of “conditions” and “conditionality,” a concept developed against the background of Heidegger’s existentialia. By focusing on activities that actualize conditional structures and that thereby generate specific experiences and specific forms of meaning, I present a phenomenological reinterpretation of Arendt’s three basic activities of labor, work and action, the activities which actualize the conditions of life, worldliness and plurality.
