In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt (1958: 9) characterizes a “vita activa” comprising “three fundamental human activities: labor, work and action.” For Arendt “animal laborans” 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.

Homo faber is the work of our hands 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 differently from all natural surroundings… 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.

Hannah Arendt places the power to act at the core of the human condition. She proposes (1958: 157) that a life without speech or action “is literally dead to the world, it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.” For Arendt (1958: 9) action is:

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.