Arendt didn’t celebrate animal laborans, but she didn’t condemn it either. Her tone is often mournful or diagnostic, not moralistic. Animal laborans—the human as laboring, biological being—is for her a fundamental and inescapable part of the human condition. It represents our embeddedness in life’s cycles: birth, decay, hunger, maintenance, reproduction. It is the part of us that labors to survive.

In The Human Condition, Arendt sees animal laborans as tied to necessity and the private sphere—the realm of household management, bodily maintenance, and reproduction. This was historically associated with women and slaves in Greek antiquity, hence “excluded” from the public space of action. But she’s not endorsing that exclusion—she’s describing how certain capacities were historically devalued in favor of action (praxis) and speech.

Importantly, Arendt does acknowledge that the laboring aspect of human life is deeply meaningful. It sustains life itself. And in modernity, she notes, animal laborans rises into public view for the first time. Labor becomes central—economically, socially, and politically. But her concern is that it displaces the other aspects of the human condition (work, action, thought) and redefines freedom as freedom from necessity, rather than freedom to begin, to judge, to speak.

She also notes that in the rise of animal laborans, something paradoxical happens:

“What was once mere life, sustained by necessity, now becomes the highest good.”
In other words, the preservation of life replaces its meaning. Survival replaces world-building. Consumption replaces action. This is what troubles her.

So, to summarize:

• She sees animal laborans as an essential part of being human.

• She respects its centrality to biological life.

• Her critique is not of labor itself, but of its elevation to the sole or dominant criterion of value.

There’s even a tenderness in how she writes about this figure. Animal laborans is not wicked—it is vulnerable. It suffers, it strives. But it cannot speak the who, only the what. And when it rules, politics becomes economics, and freedom becomes a management problem.

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