Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Arendt

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Author: Anna Yeatman | Charles Barbour | Magdalena Zolkos | Phillip Hansen

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Action and Appearance

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ACTION AND APPEARANCE Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt by Anna Yeatman Phillip Hansen Magdalena Zolkos Charles Barbour

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2011 The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com © Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos and Charles Barbour, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Action and appearance : ethics and the politics of writing in Hannah Arendt / edited by Anna Yeatman . . . et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-4411-8680-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4411-0173-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975–Political and social views. 2. Political science–Philosophy. I. Yeatman, Anna. II. Title. JC251.A74A818 2011 320.5–dc22 2010031502 EISBN: 978-1-4411-3031-0

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the United States of America

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Contents

Contributors Acknowledgements

vii x

Chapter 1

Action and Appearance: An Introduction Charles Barbour and Magdalena Zolkos

Chapter 2

Recalling Arendt on Thinking Robert Burch

10

Chapter 3

Politics and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt Michael Janover

25

Chapter 4

The Space of Appearance and the Space of Truth Andrew Brennan and Jeff Malpas

39

Chapter 5

Daimon Appearances and the Heideggerian Influence in Arendt’s Account of Political Action Trevor Tchir

53

Individuality and Politics: Thinking with and beyond Hannah Arendt Anna Yeatman

69

The Saving Power of Social Action: Arendt between Weber and Foucault Thomas M. Kemple

87

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

1

Chapter 8

On Action: The Appearance of the Law Peg Birmingham

103

Chapter 9

Ethics and the Vocation of Politics Steve Buckler

117

Chapter 10 Individual Responsibility and Political Authority: Hannah Arendt at the Intersection of Moral and Political Philosophy 134 Phillip Hansen

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VI CONTENTS

Chapter 11 The Miraculous Power of Forgiveness and the Promise Marguerite La Caze Chapter 12 Hannah Arendt’s ‘Comedy’: Antisemitism as Synecdoche in The Origins of Totalitarianism Karyn Ball

150

166

Chapter 13 ‘Never Seek to Tell Thy Love’: Hannah Arendt and the Secret Charles Barbour

184

Chapter 14 Arendt’s Metamorphic Figurations in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ Magdalena Zolkos

197

Index

215

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Contributors

Karyn Ball is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studies specializing in literary and cultural theory at the University of Alberta. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Women in German Yearbook, Research in Political Economy, Differences and English Studies in Canada. She guest-edited a special issue of Cultural Critique on ‘Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects’ (2000) and a special issue of Parallax (2005) on the concept of ‘visceral reason’. She also co-edited an issue of Cultural Critique on ‘Cultures of Finance’ (2007) with Susanne Soederberg of Queen’s University. Recent publications include ‘Primal Revenge and Other Anthropomorphic Projections for Literary History’, New Literary History 39 (2008), ‘Melancholy in the Humanities: Lamenting the “Ruins” of Academic Time between Bill Readings and Augustine’,Alif 29 (2009), an edited collection entitled Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (Other Press, 2007) and Disciplining the Holocaust (State University of New York Press, 2008). Charles Barbour is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy. Along with a number of book chapters, he has published in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society, Educational Philosophy and Theory, The Journal of Classical Sociology, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Telos and Parallax. Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (Indiana University Press, 2006) and co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (Koros 1995). She teaches and conducts research in the areas of political thought, ethics and feminist theory. She is particularly interested in modern and contemporary political thought, emphasizing the texts of Hobbes, Rousseau, Arendt, Heidegger, Kristeva and Foucault. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled ‘A Lying World Order: Deception as a Philosophical and Political Problem’. Andrew Brennan was professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Western Australia from 1992 until 2006, when he moved to La Trobe University, Melbourne,

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VIII CONTRIBUTORS

to take over the chair of philosophy there. In the last decade, he has also served as visiting professor at the University of Oslo and the City University of Hong Kong. His recent co-authored books have been on Logic (Continuum, 2005) and Understanding Environmental Philosophy (Acumen, 2010). As well as writing on ethics and environmental policy, he has also recently published work on comparative history and the philosophy of science. Steve Buckler teaches political theory in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, U.K. He has published widely in the areas of modern political theory, political ethics and the relationship between theory, ideology and political practice. He is co-editor of the European Journal of Political Theory. Robert Burch is Associate Professor and former Acting Chair in the Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta. Edmonton (Canada). He is the editor (with M. Verdicchio) of Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing/Rhythm/History (Continuum, 2002), and has published articles and reviews on a wide range of topics and figures in Continental philosophy from Kant to the present. Phillip Hansen is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan. He is the author of Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (Stanford University Press 1993), Taxing Illusions: Taxation, Democracy and Embedded Political Theory (Fernwood 2003), and, with Harold Chorney, Toward a Humanist Political Economy (Black Rose, 1992). He has published journal articles in Contemporary Political Theory; Studies in Political Economy; The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology and The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. Michael Janover teaches political theory and the history of political thought in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. His current research focuses on images and interpretations of the Athenian polis in the work of Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. Thomas M. Kemple is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Since the publication of his Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (Stanford, 1995), his work on the intersections of classical and contemporary social theory has appeared in Theory, Culture & Society, Telos, Journal of Classical Sociology, Max Weber Studies, and Marxism Today. He is currently working on a study of Georg Simmel’s sociological metaphysics and completing a book manuscript titled ‘Voicing Weber: Sociological Allegory and the Vocations of Modernity’.

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CONTRIBUTORS

IX

Marguerite La Caze is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Queensland. She has research interests and numerous publications in European philosophy, especially on the work of Kant, Arendt, Sartre and Derrida, and feminist philosophy, particularly the work of Beauvoir, Michèle Le Dœuff, Iris Marion Young and Luce Irigaray. Her publications include The Analytic Imaginary (Cornell, 2002) and Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (Ashgate, 2003) , as well as articles in Hypatia, Philosophy Today, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism and other journals and book collections. Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at the University of Tasmania, Tasmania, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University, Victoria, Australia. Among recent works, he is the author of Heidegger’s Topology (2006) and co-editor of Perspectives on Human Dignity (2006) and Consequences of Hermeneutics (2010). Trevor Tchir is a lecturer in Political Theory and Canadian Politics at the University of Alberta. He is co-editor of Declensions of the Self: A Bestiary of Modernity (CSP, 2008), and is currently preparing a monograph on Hannah Arendt’s theory of political action. His past research focused on Charles Taylor’s Best Account Principle and his distinction between designative and expressive language. Anna Yeatman took up appointment as professor and foundation director of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney in mid-2008. Before this she was a Canada Research Chair in Political Science at the University of Alberta for five years, prior to which she was the Chair of Sociology at Macquarie University for ten years. An interdisciplinary political theorist, Anna engages in both political theory and its applications. Her book Individualization and the Delivery of Welfare Services was published by Palgrave in 2009. Her current research project is a set of essays on individuality and politics. Magdalena Zolkos is Research Fellow in Political Theory at the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney. She is the author of Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kértesz (New York: Continuum, 2010). Her current research is focused on the post-foundational theorizing of political community, solidarity and affect.

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Acknowledgements

The contributions to this volume were first presented at the international workshop Arendt on/in Action, held at the University of Western Sydney in May 15–16, 2009. The Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney provided the auspices and funding for the workshop. Thanks go to Nikki Lengkeek and Christine Tobin of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy for their administrative support for the workshop, as well as to Azadeh Etminan for her technical assistance, and to then Executive Dean of the College of Arts Professor Wayne McKenna for providing additional funding for the workshop. We are grateful to all participants of the workshop for their insights and contributions, and in particular to those who served as paper discussants: Peg Birmingham, Hellen Pringle, Tim Rowse, Charles Barbour, Michael Janover, Ned Curthoys and Lucy Tatman. Thanks also to Nicholas Gordon for his careful copy-editing of the volume. Finally, we are grateful to Marie-Claire Antoine, Political Science Editor at Continuum, for her support and cooperation.

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CHAPTER 1

Action and Appearance: An Introduction Charles Barbour and Magdalena Zolkos

No thinker would hold our interest for any length of time unless their thought was, at crucial moments, inconsistent or riddled with uncertainties that cannot easily be overcome – not, at any rate, on their own terms. Hannah Arendt makes a similar point in her celebrated essay ‘Tradition and the Modern Age’, amidst one of her many engagements with Karl Marx. After reminding us of the countless traps that Marx set for himself (and, by tragic extension, for a whole century that followed in his wake), Arendt suddenly softens her interpretation, noting that ‘[s]uch fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers’, and that they ‘lead into the very centre’ of the work of ‘great authors’, providing ‘the most important clue to a true understanding of their problems and new insights’ (Arendt 1993: 25). Thus, despite the dangers inherent to his approach, Arendt suggests, there is never any point in completely agreeing or completely disagreeing with Marx, for at the core of his work is a disagreement, or rather a cluster of disagreements, between Marx and himself. And it is in these disagreements, or these internal contradictions, that we will find what is genuinely unique about Marx’s work – what leaves behind established lines of thought, and initiates entirely new ones instead. While ‘contradiction’ is perhaps not the right word, Arendt’s approach to the question of action (by far the question that fascinated her most) remains, at the very least, ambiguous. She insists, for instance, that only individuals can act; no supraindividual entity – neither history nor humanity nor classes nor nations – can be said to possess this capacity. At the same time, she continues, individuals only act insofar as they appear before others, or submit their words and deeds to the judgement of an audience. Indeed, according to Arendt, individuals can only be individuals insofar as they appear before others, and thereby reveal ‘who’ as opposed to ‘what’ they are. For the same reason, and along the same lines, exactly ‘who’ we are is something we can never wilfully control. It will always be left to the discretion of someone else – a spectator who, in lieu of acting or appearing in his or her own right, watches, remembers and later narrates. Thus, while action requires the existence of singular beings, that singularity is only given through plurality. It relies on something that would seem to threaten it; it needs the very thing that would seem to dissolve it. It has shape and effectivity exactly inasmuch as it remains indeterminate, indistinct and diffuse.

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2 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

The papers collected in this volume all endeavour to address, without pretending to resolve, the ambiguities or aporias at the heart of Arendt’s understanding of action and appearance, or the ambiguities of her work more generally. Despite their innumerable differences, they all take it for granted that Arendt’s writings leave us with as many problems as they solve, and represent not a system of thought or a program of action, but a collection of inexhaustible debates. If Arendt proposed that we look for the ‘new insights’ of ‘great authors’ in their ‘fundamental and flagrant contradictions’, this was not, we might venture to say, because she believed contradiction as such is new, or because she possessed a romantic taste for irrationality and paradox. Rather, it is because, in the work of ‘great authors’, such ‘contradictions’ are destined to generate ever new interpretations and readings – because they, and they alone, ensure that a work is renewed each time it is approached anew, and that it is not so much original as the source of ever new beginnings. Action and Appearance had its beginnings in an intensive two-day workshop entitled “Arendt on / in Action,” held in May 2009 at the University of Western Sydney’s Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy. While all of the contributions to that workshop have since been rewritten for publication, the spirit of that founding event nevertheless marks them all. This is not to suggest that “Arendt on / in Action” was somehow extraordinary. Indeed, for those involved (largely if not exclusively academics and scholars), it was probably among the most ordinary experiences imaginable. A group of about a dozen individuals, give or take a few at any given moment, gathered together in a room, and, in turn, discussed one another’s work. At the same time, while they are ordinary (and perhaps exactly because they are so), such events are integral to the formation and preservation of what Arendt dubbed a ‘world’, or a scene of action and appearance. Like the tables around which they are typically organized, they bring us together while holding us apart. They collect us for the sake of division. This book is, then, if not exactly a world, at least a network of collections and divisions, relations and separations, identities and differences. No doubt the papers share common themes: Arendt’s tangled relationship with philosophy and the life of the mind, especially as exemplified by Heidegger; the place of ethics in her valorisation of the political, and her efforts to come to terms with the human capacity for evil; her treatment of the individual, and the public, performative constitution of the self; her concept of a world, or that which is situated in-between humans, including language; her own use of language, and the rhetorical and literary elements of her writing; her shifting attitude towards the questions of political violence, revolution and the law. But to ‘share’ is, at one and the same time, to hold something in common and to distribute its elements – perhaps ultimately to have nothing in common except for our differences. In this sense, although it was not really one of her privileged terms, what Arendt means by politics or public life always involves a kind of sharing, and in sharing common themes, Action and Appearance might be said to articulate this point.


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ACTION AND APPEARANCE: AN INTRODUCTION

3

It would be difficult to discuss Arendt’s work for any length of time, or with any sincerity, without suspecting that, strangely or enigmatically, her thought and her concepts have a bearing on the structure and the operation of that very discussion. We cannot speak publicly about Arendt’s theory of action, for example, without wondering whether or not, in doing so, we are acting in her sense. We cannot seek to explain what she means by a ‘who’ without asking ourselves whether or not, in that very act of explanation, we are revealing our ‘who-ness’, or disclosing who we are to our immediate interlocutors. Thus there is a sense in which Arendt provides her own commentary on every commentary on her, or a sense in which she reads us even as we read her, and every act of interpretation also animates the text. Perhaps this is the experience that, since medieval times, hermeneuts have described as the ‘spirit’ rather than the ‘letter’ of the text – or, to recall Arendt’s version of the same distinction, the ‘living spirit’ as opposed to the ‘dead letter’. In any case, it is the spirit in which these essays are presented here, and the one through which, by appearing in this form, their authors seek to act. *** Robert Burch begins his contribution to Action and Appearance, as well as the book as a whole, by calling our attention to the paradoxical mixture of hesitancy and urgency that accompanied Arendt’s preparation for her Gifford Lectures on “The Life of the Mind” – the hesitancy of someone who was suspicious of philosophy, or at least uncomfortable in the role of ‘professional thinker’, but the urgency of one who feared a decline in our ability to think, and who believed that nothing other than thought could prevent the spread of the worst evil imaginable. Placing in brackets the familiar question of the relationship between theory and practice, and refusing to provide easy instrumental applications for her approach, Arendt risked a rare reflection on what Burch calls ‘the thinking experience itself’, or a kind of phenomenology of thought as such. Here, Burch suggests, The Life of the Mind is in many ways an example of what it states, or an example of what thought might look like in the wake of metaphysics and tradition, and the peculiar combination of hesitancy and urgency found in The Life of the Mind is strangely characteristic of the life of the mind. What Burch implies, Janover makes explicit: Arendt’s ‘thinking’ – and especially her thinking about ‘the world’ – is ‘set between philosophical discourse and artistic evocation’.It entails ‘an element’ of what, in a different context, Adorno called ‘das Gedichtete’ or ‘the poetized’. For Arendt, as we already mentioned above, a world both relates and separates us. It brings us together even as it holds us apart. In this sense, and as Janover explains, a world can consist of objects or images, nature or culture, facts or values. Wherever things come in-between humans, wherever things hold our common interest (in the precise etymological sense of Inter-esse), there is a world. Conversely, where such things disappear, where humans are pushed so far apart or so close together that nothing can properly be said to interest them, the


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world disappears as well. We become, as Arendt liked to say, ‘worldless’. We experience ‘world alienation’. What it might mean to have a world, and what it might mean not to have one, are the topics of Janover’s contribution. Situating her work in relation to that of Heidegger, Gadamer and Davidson, Brennan and Malpas impugn popular readings of Arendt that confuse her pluralism and perspectivism with moral or philosophical relativism, and make a strong case for an Arendtian understanding of political truth. No doubt Arendt is careful to distinguish between politics, or the realm of opinion and debate, and truth in the conventional sense. ‘Seen from the viewpoint of politics’, she writes, ‘truth has a despotic character’, in that it remains ‘beyond agreement and consent’, and thus ‘precludes debate’ (Arendt 1993: 241). Nevertheless, Brennan and Malpas insist, Arendt relies on a communicative understanding of truth. Here, and as Davidson shows, truth is a function of sentences rather than propositions. It ‘exists [. . .] only so long as there is a communicative practice in which sentences play a role’. Or, in more Heideggerian terms, truth emerges through ‘our essential relatedness to one another’, and happens ‘each time we open up an interpersonal space in which something is allowed to appear’. For Brennan and Malpas, such a philosophy of truth is not only compatible with Arendt’s political theory; it is entirely necessary for the creation and preservation of what she calls politics or a public sphere. If Tchir can be said to disagree with Brennan and Malpas, it is not so much with their reading of Arendt as it is with their interpretation of Heidegger. According to Tchir, despite many qualifications, Heidegger is not really able to account for what Brennan and Malpas call ‘our essential relatedness to one another’, for he ultimately believes that public life or ‘the They’ is ‘something into which Dasein falls’, and that ‘authentic existence can only occur by transcending this realm of others’. Arendt, on the other hand, holds that ‘it is precisely in the realm of the public, the intersubjective realm of appearance and doxa’ that ‘freedom and individuation must occur’. Tchir acknowledges that Arendt borrows from Heidegger, and especially his reinvention of the Greek notion of truth as aletheia or disclosure. Nevertheless, by maintaining that ‘who’ (as opposed to ‘what’) someone is can only be disclosed in public (that we each become ourselves through public performances, the meaning of which we can never wilfully control, but which has to be composed by the judgement of an audience), Arendt effectively ‘transplants’ Heidegger’s Dasein ‘back down to the public realm’, replacing the demands of philosophical truth with those of political virtue. For Arendt, Yeatman maintains, ‘[A]ll living beings seek to appear as an individual to others with whom they have a world in common.’ Arendt’s suggestion that the ‘who’ can only take shape amidst ‘plurality’ challenges nothing less than ‘the entire Western tradition of thinking about individuality’ – both the individual subject of liberalism, and the individual collective of its communitarian counterpart. At the same time, Arendt conspicuously avoids any examination of ‘inner plurality’, or the internal divisions that paradoxically compose the in-dividual. ‘Arendt’s inability to countenance an inner life for individuality that is not solipsistic limits her account of individuality’, Yeatman writes. She ‘seems to fear that if she concedes the existence


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5

of an interiority that is organized as a self, she may concede too much to the tradition that she has set herself against’. And this ‘fear’ is manifest in her ‘defensive [. . .] refusal to engage’ with the one discourse that might help explain, precisely, such fear and defensiveness – psychoanalysis. The paucity of Arendt’s approach to inner plurality has profound implications for her theory of politics and morality, especially as it relates to the problem of evil. While Arendt could only understand evil in terms of thoughtlessness (exemplified by Eichmann), psychoanalysis treats the ‘desire to destroy individuality, spontaneity, and animation in persons’ as a subordination of external and internal plurality to the commands of a unified will. It thus provides a much sharper distinction between action, or the inherent human capacity to begin something new, and mastery, which stifles the new by suffocating difference. Drawing on similar lines of thought, both Kemple and Birmingham explore Arendt’s theory of action, and the revolutionary principle of political beginnings, although they do so in discrete ways, with Kemple addressing Arendt’s ambiguous position on ‘the social question’, and Birmingham introducing what could be seen as a whole new line of inquiry into Arendt and the law. At certain points in her work, Arendt suggests that action relies on a separation of the social and the political, and that it can only occur within a politically organized space. At others, she seems to link all action back to that very moment of separation, or the revolutionary event that first constitutes a political space. Reminding us of similar gestures in Weber and Foucault, Kemple organizes his reading of Arendt around her admiration for Machiavelli, for whom political associations – and by extension political power – always exceed the narrow limits of established institutions. If Arendt was wary of referring to this pre-institutional political space as ‘the social’, and if she sought to distinguish it from ‘the social question’, this was only because she feared its instrumentalization, or the reduction of revolutionary action to what, in her anthropology of the human condition, she called labor and work. It was not because she was uncritically committed to the recognized political structures of her time, or doubted the salvation made possible every time ordinary people engage one another in extraordinary situations. Birmingham proposes that, between The Human Condition and On Revolution, Arendt somewhat furtively moves away from a Greek model of law as a ‘wall or border that establishes the space of action and speech’, towards a Roman conception of ‘law as “alliance” ’ – one where law is not the prior condition of political action, but ‘constituted through’ such ‘action, specifically revolutionary action’. Where Kemple finds Machiavelli hovering in the background, Birmingham discerns Montesquieu as well. For in Birmingham’s reading of the later Arendt, all law (and by extension all political order) is both rendered forceful and relentlessly threatened by the ‘living spirit’ of political action, or the revolutionary spirit that Arendt’s friend Walter Benjamin dubbed ‘divine violence’. But this is not violence in the ordinary sense. It is, instead, the power of humans as such, or humans in their simple natality and givenness – it is the difference, in fact, between violence and power, and what makes it possible to transform the former into the latter. ‘Before the law and animating the


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law’, Birmingham declares, ‘is the human being exposed in its very appearance, or in other words, in its very being manifest.’ For Birmingham, the ‘spirit’ of the law is related to what Arendt called a ‘principle’, in that it animates, but at the same time cannot be separated from, action. The spirit or principle is immanent to the performance. In this sense, Birmingham’s spirit of the law is a close cousin of what Buckler calls ‘ethics’. Buckler begins his piece by reminding us of the frequency with which Arendt commentators (both friendly and hostile) have accused her of failing to develop a credible ‘political ethics’, or to place any ‘ethical constraint’ on political action. Against this established reading, he argues that, while Arendt’s notion of politics cannot be ethically grounded in either universal-procedural or cultural-conventional principles, it is not ‘morally barren’. Rather, Arendt’s model of agonistic politics constitutes the basis for both ethical direction and ethical constrictions that emerge from within the practice or the “vocation” of politics itself. Buckler develops his discussion of the Arendtian conjunction of ethics and politics from the perspective of speech act theory. Perhaps surprisingly, he directs the reader’s attention away from the illocutionary aspects of speech (what the speaker intends to do in a given linguistic utterance) and towards the perlocutionary aspects of speech (what the speaker achieves through and as an effect of the linguistic utterance). It is from this perspective that the Arendtian notion of appearance acquires political and ethical weight. Appearance is understood as a public self-disclosure through speech in a community – one that occurs in both action and judgement, or among actors as well as spectators. And ‘ethical considerations’ emerge at the interstices of action and judgement ‘as a function of the perlocutionary circumstances of public exposure’ insofar as they help to define what is antithetical to, and destructive of, the political domain, namely violence and lying. Here ethics is not an a priori articulated code of prohibitions, but something that ‘can only operate in and through the phenomenal dynamics of action, appearance and judgment’. In concert with Buckler, Hansen refutes interpretations that associate Arendt either with an unapologetic subordination of ethics to the domain of politics or a neo-Aristotelian endorsement of a ‘thick ethical life wherein morality and politics merge in a solidaristic communitarianism’. Even though Arendt’s connection of ethics and politics is marked by paradoxes and aporias, Hansen insists, it needs to be recognized as strong and inherent, rather than situational. With this in mind, Hansen locates his discussion of Arendt’s moral and political philosophy in the context of her writings about individual responses to totalitarianism, especially her study of Eichmann. Hansen emphasizes that for Arendt judgement and action are enabled by a Socratic model of thinking as an internal dialogue with the self: ‘to distinguish right from wrong [. . .], and to act accordingly, is not to discern and apply rules but rather to sustain a certain relation to self that at the same time makes possible the ability to recognize others and their right to do the same.’ On Hansen’s account, Arendt’s discussion of civil disobedience not only offers a powerful demonstration of the close connection of morality and politics, but also requires that


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7

we develop a ‘richer’ understanding of both. What defines the mutual orientation of morality and politics, Hansen suggests, is that they frame the human subject as a ‘who’ within the common world of others and of public appearance. As such, ‘worldlessness’ becomes disastrously corrosive of both the political and the moral realm. La Caze also contributes to the inquiry into the complex relation of politics and ethics in Arendt by providing an in-depth analysis of forgiving and promising: two moral faculties that hold the central place in the Arendtian notion of action. For Arendt, La Caze reminds us, forgiveness and promising address ‘the worst consequences of [human] action - irreversibility and unpredictability.’ Thus, to the extent that they enable ‘unexpected change in the nature of politics’, they also acquire the attributes of (non-theological) miracles. Forgiveness constitutes an un-doing of the past, which is contrary to revenge, and distinct from, though not entirely incompatible with, punishment. As La Caze explains, ‘Forgiveness [can] only come from knowing [the] person’s story,’ or the ‘who’ that is ‘revealed in the story or biography of someone’s life.’ In other words, forgiveness is a moral practice that occurs only in relation to, and in the company of, others. Promises are, similarly, ‘linked to our appearance before others’ and are contingent upon human plurality. Noting the absence of passions in Arendt’s theory of politics, La Caze explains further that the Arendtian notion of forgiveness does not emerge at the site of love, compassion or pity for the other person, but is linked to respect. For Arendt respect is a correlative to ‘political friendship’. The final three contributions to the volume take up the question of action and appearance from the perspective of Arendt’s public rhetorical performance as a writer. Ball inquires into Arendt’s ambiguous figurations of Jews in her monumental text on totalitarianism, anti-Semitism and imperialism. She suggests that the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism involves a slippage (perhaps unconscious, and yet only seemingly ‘innocent’) between writing about Jews in general and writing about specific historical Jewish figures. Taking her cue from Hayden White’s Metahistory, Ball approaches that slippage through the figure of synecdoche, and the rhetorical-political effects of substituting the part for the whole. In The Origins of Totalitarianism the synecdochic integration of the general into the singular, operative at both the connotative and denotative level of the text, includes the emergence of the privileged class of ‘Court Jews’, discussion of the figure of British statesman and parliamentarian Benjamin Disraeli, and of the Dreyfus Affair. Ball’s focus on synecdoche facilitates her reading of the Origins as an interpretative-historical piece that, against the assumptions of positivist causality and linearity, or dispassionate observation, forms specific constellations of Jewish European history. Rather than side with those of Arendt’s critics who treat the analysis of anti-Semitism in the Origins as an expression of Arendt’s ‘Jewish selfhatred’, Ball suggests that the task of writing, which Arendt undertook in the Origins, was marked by an aporia. Its objective was ‘to hold Jews responsible for avoiding political initiative without blaming the victims’. For Ball, therefore, Arendt remains implicated, in complex and perhaps impenetrable ways, in her own synecdochic


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figurations in that the Origins become testimony to Arendt’s repeated engagements in ‘ “immanentist” identification with her object’. In his chapter, Barbour explores the category of secrecy across a wide range of Arendt’s texts, and the texts to which she refers. Like Ball, he draws the reader’s attention to the complexities of the rhetorical performances in Arendt’s writing, and approaches his task from a post-structuralist linguistic perspective. Organizing his interpretation around a quotation from William Blake’s poem ‘Love’s Secret’ (one that Arendt surreptitiously, or secretively, incorporates into her reflections on the non-public character of love in The Human Condition), Barbour proposes that the secret both exceeds and makes possible Arendt’s familiar distinction between private and public. It is needed for both, Barbour states, but it is contained by neither. Moreover, Barbour proposes that, inasmuch as she is a writer, Arendt cannot help but acknowledge this same point, albeit in the margins of her texts, and the shadows of her own more recognized, canonized assertions. For all writing traverses the borders between private and public life, and involves a secrecy that remains both irreducible and absolute. Zolkos concludes Action and Appearance with an analysis of the figure of the ‘conscious pariah’ in Arendt’s work – a term Arendt borrowed from Max Weber and Bernard Lazare, and that came to occupy a salient presence in many of her writings. According to Zolkos, Arendt’s texts on the pariah bring together her preoccupations with the political peripherality of Jewish populations in modern European states and some of the key concepts of her political theory: rebellion, political action and political equality. While contemporary Arendtian scholarship has offered a thorough investigation of the historical and philosophical aspects of her pariah construct, Zolkos argues that its rhetorical and figurative dimensions have been neglected. To remedy this situation, Zolkos reads Arendt’s essay ‘The Jew as Pariah’ as a kind of allegory. More specifically, she suggests that Arendt allegorizes the conscious pariah as a subject that undergoes metamorphic transformation. Here, metamorphosis codes the impossibility of containment – of a body within its boundaries, or an appearance within its species. It also brings about transformative and emancipative political possibilities. This reading of Arendt’s pariah concept redefines political marginality, refuting a spatial idiom of location (being far away from the centre) in favour of a transformative movement, and a public display of metamorphic capacities against interpellations and institutionalizations of inequality. *** Anyone who intends to add another volume to the already considerable secondary literature on Hannah Arendt risks being accused of redundancy. Could there really be that much more to say about her work or her career? Are we all not, by now, well versed in her basic themes and insights, and aware of the possibilities and the limits inherent to her approach? There is no reason not to address these questions head on. Every contributor to Action and Appearance clearly believes, not only that Arendt’s


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work can sustain the weight of countless interpretations, but also that what we mean by ‘Hannah Arendt’ is currently in the process of changing. Indeed, what Zolkos says about the metamorphic body of the pariah might, with a little lateral thinking, be applied to Arendt’s ‘body of work’, or what is sometimes called a corpus. For even in the most mundane sense, the publication of new editions of Arendt’s writing, and previously unavailable material excavated from the Arendt archive, have made it possible for scholars more effectively to retrieve the patterns of her thought, even as they have opened new horizons of interpretation. And every essay in Action and Appearance takes advantage of this situation. Among many other things, Arendt’s literary remains allow us to see that her work was invariably situated in particular debates and struggles – that it was never an abstract theory in the pejorative sense, but always engaged, located, and thereby effective. Thus to read Arendt is also to read others, or to read those around her, with whom she was involved in real conversations and arguments. The same literary remains also remind us repeatedly how deeply Arendt understood the tradition that she nevertheless believed to have collapsed, and how her writing is informed by a whole lifetime of reading, even if she rarely sets out to provide simple commentary on a canonized author, or what French hermeneuts call ‘explication de texte’. The manifestly intertextual nature of Arendt’s work, or the sense in which it operates by reflecting seriously upon the judgements of others, is also crucial to all of the essays collected in this volume, and, arguably, to any effort to read Arendt in the future. It seems very likely that Arendt will be recognized as one of the great minds of the twentieth century, comparable perhaps to Nietzsche or Kierkegaard in the nineteenth, both of whom possessed the same vehement commitment to thinking for themselves, outside of any reference to the comfortable certainty of authority, and the same conviction that writing takes root in a life, or the particular perspectives, opinions and judgements of a self. That said, no effort to historicize Arendt in this fashion, or to force her into a linear narrative about something as colossal as a century, will ever do justice to her work, especially given how sceptical she herself was about such procedures. It would be more accurate, if significantly less fashionable, to say that Arendt’s work is universal, or that it brings forth in each of its readers a universal capacity for judgement. To read Arendt, then, is to develop what, with reference to Kant, she often called an ‘enlarged mentality’, or an ability to countenance a plurality of discrete perspectives, and allow for numerous, occasionally agonistic, interpretations of the same phenomenon. It is to be invited to think the way she described thinking, to act the way she described acting, and thus to appear to ourselves and others the way she appears to us – as singular beings sharing the plurality of our worlds.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1993. Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought. New York: Penguin.


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CHAPTER 2

Recalling Arendt on Thinking Robert Burch

‘Hannah Arendt had been very reticent about discussing her “Thinking” work before she went to Aberdeen for the Gifford Lectures’; so reports Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her Arendt biography (1982: 452). Nevertheless, in the months leading up to these lectures, Arendt would participate in two conferences dedicated to her work (Arendt 1973:1979), where questions regarding her thinking about thinking could not be avoided, and where on one occasion at least, so Young-Bruehl reports, they would put Arendt ‘on the defensive’ (1982: 450). That Arendt might have been reticent to talk about thinking is understandable. Although philosophers have always sought to persuade us of what we should think as ostensibly a matter of persuading us with reasons to think what is true, in the history of philosophy talk of the thinking experience itself has been relatively rare. ‘Few thinkers ever told us what made them think, and even fewer have cared to describe and examine their thinking experience’ (Arendt 2003: 168). Faced with this reserve, Arendt admits that her own decision to talk about thinking ‘seems . . . so presumptuous’ as to call less ‘for an apology’ than ‘a justification’, especially coming, as it does, from one who has ‘neither claim nor ambition to be a “philosopher” or to be numbered among what Kant, not without irony, called Denker vom Gewerbe (professional thinkers)’ (1978: 3). A lecture series on thinking would have the likely appearance then of presuming to instruct the ‘experts’ in what is, after all, the supposed field of their expertise, which is always a risky business. It is a risky business, however, implicated in the Kantian irony to which Arendt alludes. As is well known, when it comes to the highest interests of humanity – in God, freedom and immortality – Kant opposes those whom he calls Luftbaumeister of reason, the ones who seek to establish truths about such matters by means of speculative arguments removed from all common experience and understanding (1992: 329–30). Of such ‘builders in air’, Kant asks rhetorically: ‘Do you demand then that a cognition that pertains to all human beings should surpass common understanding and be revealed to you only by philosophers? The very thing that you criticize is the best confirmation of the correctness of the assertions that have been made thus far, that is, that in what concerns all human beings without exception nature is not to be blamed for any partiality in the distribution of its gifts, and in regard to the essential


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RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING

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ends of human nature even the highest philosophy cannot advance further than the guidance that nature has also conferred on the most common understanding’ (1998: 690 [B859]). That it should be the author of the Critique of Pure Reason who makes this appeal to the ‘most common understanding’ over ‘the highest philosophy’ is not itself without irony, but the basic point remains: In our thinking we cannot step outside the bounds of possible experience without going astray, and the real presumptuousness in this regard lies with those theoreticians who would presume to make such a step as if to instruct common understanding from the outside, assuming a privilege and a knowledge exclusive to themselves. In the moral sphere, Kant’s censure of such presumptuousness is even more forceful. ‘Common human reason . . . knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and what is evil, what is in conformity with duty or contrary to duty, if, without in the least teaching it anything new, we only . . . make it attentive to its own principle; there is accordingly no need of science and philosophy to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and even wise and virtuous.’ Nonetheless, there has never been a shortage of willing ‘teachers of morals’ who would feign to give such instruction; to Kant, ‘their name is legion’ (1996: 44. cf. Mk. 5:9). Yet, it is one thing to know through a self-examined common understanding what conforms to duty and what does not; it is another to decide what to do in any particular situation—that, says Kant, requires ‘a judgment tempered by experience’ (1996: 45). Like Kant, Arendt too would turn the charge of presumptuousness back on the philosophers. Arendt may also have been reticent to talk about thinking owing to the personal closeness of the issue. In this regard, she confesses: ‘I can very well live without trying to do anything. But I cannot live without trying at least to understand whatever happens’ (1979: 303). With respect to ‘the political business’, with its fundamental commitments and calls to action in world, Arendt declares that ‘by nature’ she is ‘not an actor’ and yet for this reason claims the ‘advantage’ of being able ‘to look at something from outside. And even in myself from outside’ (1979: 306). With respect to ‘this business of thinking’, however, matters are different. ‘Here I am immediately in it’, and this immediacy makes it doubtful ‘whether I will get it or not’. This second cause for reticence suggests a third. In Arendt’s view, thinking is implicated in a basic tension: On the one hand, it ‘insist[s] on the universal primacy of the particular’, from which it draws its content as that ‘about which’ it thinks (and human thinking is always ‘thinking . . . about something’); on the other hand, from such particulars, thinking always ‘searches out something generally meaningful . . . generalization [being] inherent to every thought’ (1978: 199, 187). However, it is one thing to generalize about the meaning of particulars that appear in the world, and which as such are at least themselves in principle publicly accessible, even if their meanings themselves do not appear; it is quite another to generalize about the activity of thinking itself. In this latter regard, three factors give pause. First, the activity of thinking is not itself an appearance within the world but is an ‘invisible’ affair in a twofold sense. It not only ‘deals with invisibles’, the non-sensibly present meanings sought out in what is sensibly present, but it is also itself ‘invisible’,


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an activity that ‘removes itself from what is present and close at hand’ and withdraws into the ‘two-in-one of the soundless dialogue’ that one has with oneself (1978: 51, 193, 199). As a function of our essential way of being in the world with others, the meanings sought out in this soundless dialogue are not purely idiosyncratic (indeed, as Merleau-Ponty notes, ‘the idios kosmos [one’s own world] opens by virtue of a vision upon the koinos kosmos [the common world]’, and not vice versa (1964: 28). Nevertheless, the activity that realizes these meanings is a solitary affair, removed from the shared world of appearances (cf. Arendt 1978: 197), an activity that in a fundamental sense each one of us can only engage in for him- or herself alone. Second, there is no determination of the meaning of thinking in general before the experience of thinking in particular, nor then a general determination of what thinking is separate from particular interpretations of things already worked out in thought. Moreover, ‘thinking always implies remembrance, [and] every thought is strictly speaking an afterthought’ (Arendt 1978: 78). The thinking about thinking is thus the remembrance of remembrance, always already implicated in what one has already thought and the sense one has already made of things. There is for thought then no neutral encounter with the world as if, in thinking, one merely ‘sees’. Nor then is there a neutral account of thinking itself, free from the interpretations one has already made of things. Third, in Arendt’s view thinking is a ‘need of reason’ and as such is ‘not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning’ (1978: 15). If, then, she doubts whether she will ‘succeed’ with this business of thinking about thinking, or will even have ‘much to tell about it’ (1979: 306), it is not that she fears she will fail once and for all to arrive at universally valid knowledge about thinking; quite the opposite. The danger implicit to thinking is that its meaning will be translated into a fixed knowledge. Yet, ‘the business of thinking’, Arendt avers, ‘is like the veil of Penelope: it undoes every morning what it finished the night before’ (2003: 166–7). This image is not one of futility, but an indication that the end of thinking is the ongoing process of thinking itself, self-destructive in being ever self-critical and self-renewing. With her Gifford Lectures, one has the impression that Arendt is genuinely thinking through the matter of thinking as she goes along, seeming at times to be unsure exactly where her thinking will lead, as opposed to arguing systematically to a predetermined result. In that respect, the title Thinking might best be read ‘verbally’ as a description of the actual process in which Arendt is engaged, of which the lectures themselves are a public expression, rather than ‘nominally’ as a description of a topic that is ‘there’ to be comprehended. ‘What matters to me’ Arendt once remarked, ‘is the thinking process itself’ (2000: 5), which as a self-activity cannot be determined in advance. It is not surprising then that a scant six months before the start of the Gifford Lectures, Arendt will still insist that she ‘is not ready to tell [us] about . . . the experience of thinking” (1979: 305–06). But there is more to the issue of reticence than the presumptuousness and peculiarity of talking about thinking itself. The premise and pretext of Arendt’s turn to thinking is her claim that there is ‘an inner connection between the ability or


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inability to think and the problem of evil’ (2003: 166; cf. 1978: 3–6). This claim has far-reaching implications. For ‘if such a connection exists at all, then the faculty of thinking, as distinguished from the thirst for knowledge, must be ascribed to everyone; it cannot be a privilege of the few’ (2003: 166). Traditionally, philosophers have claimed just this privilege in seeking to transform all issues of faith, opinion and reputation (i.e., everything the Greeks meant by doxa) into matters of knowledge (epistēmē), and have regarded this work as that of the few, noble souls in contrast to ‘the many’. In Arendt’s view, it is Kant who decisively challenges this tradition by ‘denying knowledge in order to make room for faith [Glaube]’, not as a sceptical gesture or a capitulation to unreason, but as the path that ‘brings human reason to complete satisfaction in that which has always, but until now vainly, occupied its desire for knowledge’ (1998: 117, 704 [Bxxx, B 883]). In this way, Kant effectively sets limits to what is genuinely and properly knowable, so as to make room for thought, with the ultimate interests of human beings having their ‘reasonable’ satisfaction in thinking rather than knowing (Arendt 1978: 15, 63). Thinking in this sense has to do with ‘the entire vocation of human beings’, which cannot be the exclusive domain of ‘professional thinkers’ (Kant 1998: 695, 697 [B868, B871]). Yet, when Arendt first speaks publicly of these matters she does so to an audience of philosophers and professional thinkers (1971). Not surprisingly then, she speaks coyly, if not ironically. She notes the relative lack of explicit attention that thinkers in the history of philosophy have given to the experience of thinking, but does not venture to draw the obvious inference: that for thinkers who operate explicitly under the Delphic injunction, ‘know thyself’, not to describe and examine the experience of thinking is to fail in their essential task. Yet, Arendt does not then call upon her audience’s own experience of thinking as ‘professionals’, but instead flatly declares, as if everyone present would simply agree, that we are, or should be, ‘unwilling to trust our own experiences because of the obvious danger of arbitrariness’ (2003: 168). In this way, ironically, Arendt preempts the philosophers’ views on this issue on the same grounds that philosophers have traditionally challenged the many, to wit, the arbitrariness of their opinions. What Arendt proposes instead is ‘to look for a model, for an example that, unlike the “professional” thinkers, could be representative for our “everybody” ’. The example she chooses is that of Socrates: a ‘man who counted himself neither among the many nor among the few – a distinction at least as old as Pythagoras; who did not aspire to be a ruler of cities or claim to know how to improve and take care of the citizens’ souls; who did not believe that men could be wise and did not envy the gods their divine wisdom in case they should possess it; and who therefore never even tried his hand at formulating a doctrine that could be taught and learned’ (2003: 168–9). Arendt takes for granted that no one in her audience would ‘seriously doubt’ that her choice of Socrates as she describes him is ‘historically justified’. Yet, in the next breath she admits that ‘there is great deal of controversy about the historical Socrates’ and that she will ‘ignore it altogether’. Her ‘historical Socrates’ is an ‘ideal type’, by which she means ‘a figure chosen out of the crowd of living beings’, in this instance out of the crowd ‘in the past, because he


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possessed a representative significance in reality which only needed some purification in order to reveal its full meaning’. But the figure she chooses is already the mythic father and patron saint of philosophers, the one through whom the injunction ‘know thyself’ came to be handed down, and whose ‘representative significance in reality’ has presumably already been purified ‘to reveal its full meaning’ in and through the philosophical tradition that claims him. This tradition has its origin in the ideal typical purification of the historical Socrates that Plato undertakes. Herein, perhaps, lies the real basis of Arendt’s admitted presumptuousness. To the invention of philosophy by Plato, with its allegory of a two-worlds dichotomy, the true world, as Nietzsche remarks, being ‘attainable only for the wise, the pious and the virtuous’ (1997: 23), Arendt juxtaposes a renewed thinking about thinking, one that involves a post-Platonic, post-metaphysical ideal-typical purification of the figure of the historical Socrates, reclaiming him from the philosophical tradition not as the example of the wise, pious and virtuous philosopher in contrast to the thoughtless many, but as the example of ‘our “everyone” ’ who has essentially the need to think. One might venture to say that, for Arendt, the history of philosophy as Platonism has been, ironically, the history of a Denkensvergessenheit—a forgetting of thinking – insofar as traditionally the ‘philosophers and metaphysicians’ have claimed a presumptive ‘monopoly’ on the ‘capability’ of thinking, and yet have tended to leave their own thinking experience undescribed and unexamined (Arendt 1979: 303; 2003: 168). This forgetting of thinking serves to belie the philosophers’ traditional claim to virtue as identified with philosophical knowledge as essential self- knowledge. At the same time, ‘we have forgotten that every human being has a need to think, not to think abstractly, not to answer the ultimate questions of God, immortality and freedom, nothing but to think while he is living. And he does it constantly’. To forget this very human need is in an essential way to forget ourselves, a forgetting that has had ‘unpleasant’ consequences indeed. Yet, the task of thinking is not now simply to re-instate the philosophical equation of knowledge and virtue for the sake of the philosophers, but to recall the ‘inner connection’ between the failure to think and the problem of evil for everyone’s sake. Even before the Gifford Lectures, it was clear that Arendt’s views about thinking were at odds with the temper of the time. As Young-Bruehl remarks, it ‘was a time that called out for commitment’, and for this reason at the Toronto conference in 1972, Arendt’s ‘interlocutors wanted to know why she, as a political theorist, rejected both the desire to influence others as a teacher and the desire to act’ (1982: 450–51). The first to raise these concerns was the Canadian political theorist C. B. Macpherson, who by his own admission ‘owe[d] a good deal to Marx’ (1976: 423). He asked incredulously: C. B. Macpherson: Is Miss Arendt really saying that to be a political theorist and to be engaged are incompatible? Surely not! Arendt: No, but one is correct in saying that thinking and acting are not the same, and to the extent that I wish to think I have to withdraw from the world.


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Macpherson: Arendt:

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But to a political theorist and a teacher and a writer of political theory, teaching, or theorizing is acting. Teaching is something else, and writing too. But thinking in its purity is different – in this Aristotle was right . . . You know, all modern philosophers have somewhere in their work a rather apologetic sentence which says: ‘Thinking is also acting.’ Oh no, it is not! And to say that is rather dishonest. I mean, let’s face the music: it is not the same! On the contrary, I have to keep back to a large extent from participating, from commitment. (1979: 304)

At least superficially, this reply pits a classical view against what ‘all modern philosophers’ say. On the issue of the distinction of thinking and acting, ‘Aristotle was right’ to distinguish the two, whereas modern philosophers have been ‘rather dishonest’ to elide them. That Arendt should invoke Aristotle in this regard has a certain plausibility. As Nicholas Lobkowicz notes in his classic study (with which Arendt was familiar), ‘Aristotle seems to have been the first Greek thinker . . . explicitly to contrast “theory” and “practice” ’ (1967: 4). Aristotle formulates this distinction in the context of determining the best life from among three commonly recognized possibilities: ‘the life devoted to enjoyment [bios apolaustikos] . . . the political life and the contemplative life [bios theōretikos]” (1984: II,1731 [1095b 17–19]). Insofar as it is based on the identification of happiness or the good with ‘pleasure’, the first kind of life is described by Aristotle as bovine and slavish, the choice of ‘the many and the vulgar’. The only reasonable choice for ‘the refined’ (hoi charientes) is that between the political and the contemplative life—the former being ‘the life of active citizenship and participation in political community’, whose goal is the honor and virtue that accrue from noble action for its own sake (1984: II,1731–2, and 1925 [1095b 22–30 and 1216a 24–6]); and the latter, the life dedicated to the search for eternal truth as ‘the life of the stranger and of detachment from political community’ (1984: II, 2103 [1325a 15–16]). Although Arendt appeals to Aristotle’s authority to insist on the ultimate difference between the contemplative and the political life as a difference between thinking in its purity and acting, it is altogether unlikely that she would side with Aristotle regarding the specific grounds upon which he makes this distinction. A brief reminder of some Aristotelian essentials will serve to make this point clear. With Aristotle, the characterization of the theoretical life as ‘detached’ from political action is based upon the presumed essential character of the ‘object’ of theorizing. In its strict Aristotelian sense, theory looks to things unchanging and eternal, the first principles and causes of whatever is. What is unchanging and eternal, precisely as such, can only be contemplated and cannot be engaged in action. The obvious condition of theory in this sense is that there are things eternal and unchanging to be contemplated. Unless that were the case, then theory would have no proper object, and hence no real point. On the assumption that the soul has the essential form to be ‘in-formed’ by whatever it perceives, the good of theory consists in the ennobling effect that theorizing works upon the soul of the theoretician insofar as,


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through contemplation, one’s soul is ‘in-formed’ by what is most noble, that is, eternal and unchanging and thereby perfect being. Such contemplation bears no direct relation to ‘practice’, nor has it any use as a means to practical ends, for practice has to do with acting and doing as a matter of our dealings and relations in the world of what is changeable, and all such ‘uses’ derive from experience, not contemplation. The ‘practical’ value of theory lies instead in the power of theory to inform the theoretician in the wise ordering of all practical activities, governing their wise use according to proper measure and proper ends. Theory, then, is not just one possible human activity among others, but the activity that accords with our particular defining ‘excellence’ (aretē). Through that activity, one realizes happiness and the fullness of being proper to human beings as such. Not only then do ‘all human beings by nature desire to know’ (Aristotle, 1984: II,1552 [980a 21] but also all human beings attain the fullness of being proper to their kind through knowledge in its highest form, that is, through the theoretical realization of divine knowledge taken in both senses of the genitive: as a knowledge of divine things tantamount to God’s self-knowledge. Leisure (scholē) is the condition for this activity according to virtue and hence for the fullness of being proper to us, not as a matter of empty time left over from all ‘nonleisure’ to be filled with play and divertissements (and perhaps a little philosophy), but as the time free from necessity as time free to fulfill our proper nature. ‘We are unleisurely [ascholoumetha] in order to have leisure [scholaxōmen]’ (1984: II,1861 [1177b 4]), Aristotle famously remarks, not because from time to time we all need a break from busyness and toil just to be idle or not working, but because the theoretical life is the life of leisure in a positive sense (cf. Arendt 1958: 323–4, n7). Leisure is needed as the free time for philosophy, and ‘philosophy is needed for leisure’ as the activity appropriate to the time freed by ‘unleisure’ (Aristotle, 1984: II, 2117 [1334a 24]). To readers of Aristotle, the foregoing sketch will be familiar. To readers of Arendt, it may still be worth reprising. For, however much she may agree with Aristotle that thinking and acting are not the same, there is not much of the Aristotelian doctrine just sketched that Arendt would accept. As she reports, ‘our present situation’ is one in which ‘theology, philosophy, metaphysics have reached an end’, not in the sense that the questions asked in these domains ‘have become meaningless, but that the way they were framed and answered has lost plausibility’ (1978: 10). Specifically, ‘what has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensory and the suprasensory, together with the notion . . . that whatever is not given to the senses—God or Being or the First Principles and causes (archai) or the Ideas—is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears, that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses’ (1978: 10). But if thinking is no longer informed by the image of a two-world dichotomy, its ruling metaphor can no longer be that of an ‘escape’ from the changing, multifarious world of the senses to the singular true world ‘above and beyond’, but that of a withdrawal to a panoramic perspective upon the world of experience itself, as the only world we have. On this point, Arendt quotes with approval the closing lines of Nietzsche’s ‘How the “True World” finally became a Fable’: ‘We have abolished the true world; which world remains left over? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! With the true world we have also abolished the


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apparent world’ (1978: 10–11). What concerns thinking is the world of experience with no ‘outside’ or transcendent ‘beyond’. ‘What is the subject of our thought?’ Arendt asks rhetorically: ‘Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we get into all kinds of theories. When the political theorist begins to build his systems he is also usually dealing with abstraction’ (1979: 308). A grasp of eternal being is not thereby sceptically denied; rather, in the thinking of experience it is no longer really the issue. But to say that eternal being is no longer the issue is to say that the condition of theory in the strict Aristotelian sense is also no longer the issue, and hence that the classical account of the purity and good of theorizing is no longer persuasive. But if that is the case, then all talk of essential natures and their defining ‘virtues’, of the fullness of being to be realized by activity according to ‘virtue’ as metaphysically defined, and hence of the good life as the ‘virtuous’ life, made possible by leisure, rings hollow. Yet, the end of metaphysics in this sense is not without ambiguity. On the one hand, it promises freedom from the whole range of metaphysical narratives that would speak of essential natures and virtues, and on that basis would articulate a singular conception of the good life, in relation to which ‘outliers’ and ‘others’ would be deemed lesser beings. But on the other hand, in the absence of such essential talk (as, e.g., Nietzsche’s description of the letzte Mensch suggests), the model of life that holds sway is that of the bios apolaustikos, a life dedicated to pleasure through the fulfillment of the myriad of human desires. But, as Greek philosophy already understood, the error of such a life is that human pleasures have no natural limit or order, and so their pursuit never brings a proper fulfillment (cf. Plato 1961: 1108 [31a]). Within such a life, there is rational calculation of means to ends, and rational determination of the best political order as the order in which the fulfillment of everyone’s desires can be maximized, but no rational determination other than in terms of efficiency and expediency to discriminate one set of desires and one life plan from another. In this scenario, the good life consists in the happiness that accrues from having one’s desires satisfied as a matter of subjective contentment, in a context where everyone more or less plays by the rules of the game, and where rational behavior consists in the efficacious calculation of means to ends. One cannot detail the positive content of the good life, based on a classical metaphysics, nor (pace Mick and Keith) discriminate in terms of a conception of the good between ‘what you want’ and ‘what you need’. Insofar, then, as Arendt regards ‘our present situation’ as the time of the ‘end of metaphysics’, she cannot appeal directly to Aristotle in defence of the purity of theory, since that defence would be based on the affirmation of the intrinsic value of metaphysical knowledge as the proper ‘end’ of human nature. Yet, there is some reason in Aristotle himself to wonder at this supposed connection. ‘All human beings by nature desire to know [eidenai]’, he writes (1984: II, 1552 [980a , 22ff.]). But, as Arendt notes (1978: 58), this famous pronouncement is something of a play on words. The Greek aorist perfect, oida, ‘I have seen’, reads as a present tense to mean ‘I know’, and the pluperfect, ēdē, ‘I had seen’, reads as a perfect tense to mean ‘I knew’. Thus, as Arendt points out, Aristotle is literally saying here, ‘all human beings by nature


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desire to have seen’, as eidenai is the perfect infinitive of oida. Aristotle’s ‘argument’ in support of this thesis plays on the linguistic connection. ‘A sign of this [i.e., that we desire by nature to know] is the delight [agapēsis] we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves, and above all others, the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but also when we are not going to do anything, we prefer sight to almost anything else. The reason is that sight, most of all the senses, makes us know [poiei gnōrixein], and brings to light many differences among things.’ Mindful of the linguistic connection between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, this argument might be rephrased: All human beings by nature desire to have seen, and the evidence for this is the delight we take in seeing for its own sake. Seeing is delightful for its own sake, since it makes things ‘intelligible’ to us, sorting out the differences in the plurality of what appears. We delight in this ‘intelligibility’ for its own sake, apart from any pragmatic, practical considerations. This reading suggests that all human beings desire to know, and to know for knowledge’s own sake, in that all human beings by nature are makers of sense, of intelligibility, seeking meaning before truth. Arendt herself develops this latter point, not by reference to Aristotle, but through her appropriation of the Kantian distinction between reason (Vernunft) and intellect (Verstand). For Kant, we know what human beings are ‘by nature’ only from experience, and not from any intellectual, metaphysical intuition (cf. Kant 1996: 98). Yet, the distinction between intellect and reason cannot itself be a merely empirical distinction. It derives instead from the ‘transcendental’ comprehension of the whole structure of possible experience. On this issue, Kant writes: ‘The concepts of reason serve us to comprehend [begreifen]; just as the concepts of the intellect serve us to apprehend [verstehen] perceptions [Wahrnehmungen]’ (1998: 394 [B 367]; cf. Arendt 1978: 57). As Arendt glosses this distinction, ‘the intellect (Verstand) desires to grasp what is given to the senses, but reason (Vernunft) wishes to understand its meaning’ (1978: 57). This gloss may be parsed in the following terms: In the first instance the work of the intellect is to make things ‘stand out’ (ver-stehen) so as to be ‘taken truly’ (wahr-genommen). Its goal is cognition, the ‘highest form’ of which ‘is intuition (Anschauung)’ as a matter of the self-evident givenness of the object (Arendt: 2003a, II, 766). All cognition advances toward such intuitions, by dissipating illusions and correcting errors, substituting one evidence for another with respect to what appears. ‘When an illusion dissipates’, writes Merleau-Ponty, ‘when an appearance suddenly breaks up, it is always for the profit of a new appearance that takes up again for its own account the ontological function of the first’ (1968: 40). There are three implications of this characterization that deserve particular attention. First, as Arendt herself notes, according to this account ‘cognition and the thirst for knowledge never leave the world of appearances altogether’, and whether it is a matter of common sense knowing or the most elaborate constructions and procedures of scientific investigation, ‘the criterion in both cases is evidence, which as such is inherent in the world of appearances’ (1978: 54). In matters of cognition, there is never the possibility, as it were, to step outside how things appear so as to test


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that within our (putative) knowledge of what appears we have got it right. The order of appearances is itself the positive limit of our cognition. Second, and more controversially, the desire to know on this account is the desire for the full presence of the object, not as a numinous ‘mysterium tremendum’ or a commanding alterity that would impose itself and even overwhelm me, but as a manageable presence, something that my vision can possess in full. Yet, thirdly, and even more controversially, on this account knowledge is essentially object-knowledge gained of and within the world of appearances; for all ‘acts of consciousness . . . are “intentional” [i.e., they are conscious ‘of’ something] and therefore cognitive acts’ (cf. Arendt 1978: 187). In that sense, knowledge is a matter of knowing ‘that’ objects are such and such, as present to us, rather than, as it were, knowing about how things come meaningfully to be for us or knowing ‘who’ others are with us. If we determine cognition in this way, then it would seem that our meaningful engagement with the world and our relations with others as the original ‘stuff’ of our experience are something more and something other than matters of strict cognition. Arendt’s claim here ‘in a nutshell’ is this: ‘The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same’ (1978: 15). Broadly speaking, it has been the goal of metaphysics to reduce all essential meaning to demonstrable truth, this work having its apogee in Hegel’s absolute self-knowing knowing. Insofar as postmodern thought would reduce all essential truth to meaning, it would be simply the dialectical reversal of the metaphysical project. Yet ‘to interpret meaning on the model of truth’, or conversely to interpret truth on the model of meaning, is in Arendt’s view, ‘the basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies’ (Arendt 1978: 15). In Arendt’s view, the ‘metaphysical fallacies’ are fundamental but misleading ways of thinking that inhabit and inform the systems and doctrines of metaphysics that we have inherited. Insofar as they are fallacies, these ways of thinking are not just accidental mistakes in reasoning that past philosophers happen to have made and that stand then to be corrected, but constitute ways in which our thinking, as if by nature, tends to deceive itself. In being metaphysical, these fallacies have to do specifically with the ways in which our thinking deceives itself in its metaphysical task, that is to say, in the attempt to transcend the world of experience in a theory of the whole. The deception, however, is not a matter simply of mistaking invalid arguments for valid ones (cf. Arendt, 1978: 45), but a matter of the way in which we have tended to frame the issue of transcendence itself, before all specific positions taken and doctrinal claims made. The source of such fallacies is not then a matter of logical ineptitude. Instead, as Arendt claims, the metaphysical fallacies arise from ‘the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world . . . is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it’ (1978: 45). Broadly speaking, what is paradoxical in this condition is that on the one hand our thinking is originally in and of the world of experience as its locus and limit, and yet on the other hand seeks to comprehend that world as a whole and in that sense must in thought be at once ‘in’ and ‘of’ the world and yet


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‘above’ and ‘beyond’ it. The deception to which this paradoxical condition gives rise lies in the tendency of our thinking to transform the ciphers and symbols by which it interprets its own experience of transcendence into concepts and categories that would describe an objective state of affairs present to knowledge. It thus tends to elide the ‘epideictic’ clarification of the experience of transcendence that lies before and beyond all objectifying intentions with ‘apodictic’ arguments that would make transcendence itself an object of knowledge. Yet, in Arendt’s view, even Kant and Heidegger—to whom for insight into the task of thinking itself she most often appeals—fall victim to this metaphysical fallacy. In the case of Kant, he calls the ‘logic’ that ‘precedes empirical truth and makes it possible . . . transcendental truth,’ and calls it truth since ‘no cognition can contradict it without at the same time losing all content, all relation to any object and consequently, all truth’ (1998: 276, 199 (B 185, B 87]). In this regard, Kant speaks of Vernunfterkenntnis, ‘knowledge from pure reason’ (1998: 695 [B 868]), which as Arendt suggests, ‘ought to have been a contradiction in terms for him’ (1978: 63). Although Heidegger is far from advancing the cause of a pure philosophy based on Vernnunfterkenntnis, and even questions the ‘correctness’ of the ‘assertion that philosophy is a matter of reason [Ratio]’ (1956: 9–10), he does call the ultimate revealing/ concealing context of meaning that ‘first makes possible the manifestness of beings . . . ontological truth’ (1998: 103–04). Thus, Arendt writes: ‘The latest and in some respects most striking instance of this [fallacy] occurs in Heidegger’s Being and Time, which starts out by raising “anew the question of the meaning of Being.” Heidegger himself, in a later interpretation of his own initial question, says explicitly: ‘ “Meaning of Being” and “Truth of Being” says the same’ (1978: 15). In Arendt’s view, thinking is a matter of reason rather than intellect, a matter of meaning rather than truth. ‘Reason itself, the thinking ability which we have, has a need to actualize itself’, and it actualizes itself by making sense of what has appeared and happened. ‘Everybody who tells a story of what happened to him half an hour ago on the street has got to put this story into shape. And this putting the story into shape is a form of thought’ (1979: 303). Stated more generally, reason (Vernunft) looks to examine (vernehmen) what appears in order to gather its sense. As the work of reason in this sense, ‘the highest form of thinking is speech’ (2003a: II, 766). Yet, as Heidegger reminds us, the root sense of this ‘speech’, that is, of logos as legein is to gather-together as one (1975: 60ff.). Reason as logos does not delimit and pin things down in order to know them with evidence and self-certainty, but at all times seeks amid what appears and has happened, a general, integral meaning. The opposite of the ‘reasonable’ in this sense is the loss of meaning, something that is merely ‘ab-stract’ and not ‘com-prehended’. Although she appeals to Aristotle in defence of the purity of thinking, Arendt explains this view not by specific reference to Aristotelian metaphysics, but by appeal to a seemingly more ancient legend, a story she repeats more than once (1978: 93; 1979: 304; 1982: 55). An oft-quoted passage from Men in Dark Times suggests the methodological basis of such appeals:


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This thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea . . . to pry loose the rich and the strange, . . . this thinking delves into the depths of the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what was once alive, some things suffer a ‘sea change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune from the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as ‘thought fragments’, as something ‘rich and strange’, and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomeme. (1968: 205–06)

Yet, the story to which Arendt appeals is not just any pearl of wisdom, but a story about the very origin of the world ‘philosopher’ (philosophos), which in the ‘process of crystallization’ may reveal something ‘rich and strange’ about the essence and origin of philosophy itself. There is more than one version of the story, but in her Gifford Lectures Arendt quotes Diogenes Laertius: When Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked Pythagoras who he was, he said, ‘a philosopher’ [philosophos] and that he compared life to the Great Games, where some went to compete for the prize and others went with wares to sell, but the best went as spectators [theatai]; for similarly, in life, the slavish hunt for fame [doxa] and gain [pleonexia], the philosopher for truth. (1925: II. 327–8)

Since this parable is told to a tyrant, its immediate lesson for life has to do with ruling. In life, those who would seek fame and gain are the ones who are enslaved, ruled by their worldly ambition and their desire for material wealth and power over others. By contrast, the one who is best and most free, ‘the one of greatest authority [eilikrinestaton]’ (Iamblichus 1965: 40), is the lover of wisdom. The underlying issue then is that of love, the different ways of life being differentiated by their ruling loves. Strangely, this picture excludes the figure of the sophist, from whom, implicitly, Pythagoras here distinguishes himself. Although under the influence of Plato, sophists were identified with mere pretenders to knowledge, in Pythagoras’ time the term would have been most directly associated with ‘The Seven Sages’. As Hegel notes, these sophists ‘were neither wise men nor philosophers but prudent, judicious men [verständige Männer], and lawgivers’ (1970: I, 180). In other words, they were men of action and great words, the founders of states, who, in setting up the laws, gave voice to the ethical sense of the community. From such ‘sophists’, the tyrant Leon might have something to fear, from a lover of wisdom as the lover of spectacle seemingly not so much. Yet this whole matter is deeply ambiguous. In the parable itself the theatēs appears to be one who is philodoxos, not in the narrow sense of a participant in the spectacle who loves only honor and glory, but as the spectator who loves to view and to understand the spectacle as a whole as a display of honor and glory (doxōn), a metaphor for the whole world of appearance in which we are together with


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ACTION AND APPEARANCE

others and in which we act. Yet the seeming ‘philodoxy’ suggested by the literal image of the spectator gets interpreted allegorically in the various tellings of the tale such that the spectator’s desire to view the spectacle for its own sake is taken to stand for the love of wisdom as a love of the knowledge of truth. In this regard, it may well be that the pearl that Arendt retrieves has been lifted, unbeknownst, from a ‘salted’ bed. Classical sources attribute this anecdote to Heraclides of Pontus, a student first of Plato and later of Aristotle, the latter invoking this image of watching the Olympian spectacle for its own sake to describe the reward that theoretical knowledge brings to us (1952: 47). The Platonic ascription poses a scholarly puzzle: Is the story told by a student of Plato to acknowledge that Plato inherits his conception of philosophy from Pythagoras, or is it told in order to read Plato’s conception of philosophy back into the philosophical past? Read as a Platonic tale, the shift from the seeming philodoxy of the spectators at the games to a philosophical ‘spectator’s’ love of knowledge as the ‘love of the sight of truth’ is hardly surprising (Plato 1961: 715 [475e]). From his experience of Socrates’ failure to convince the Athenian Court of his innocence, Plato doubts the power of persuasion. Arendt writes: ‘Closely connected with his doubt about the validity of persuasion is Plato’s furious denunciation of doxa, opinion, which not only runs like a red thread through his political works but became one of the cornerstones of his concept of truth. Platonic truth, even when doxa is not mentioned, is always understood as the very opposite of opinion’ (2005: 7–8). Yet in Arendt’s judgement, ‘the opposition of truth and opinion was certainly the most anti-Socratic conclusion that Plato drew from Socrates’ trial’. Whatever the case may be, the anecdote has typically been read in what are generally acknowledged now to be Platonic terms, so as to resolve the theoretical ambiguity between philosophy and philodoxy on the side of knowledge of truth and against the appeal of doxēs. According to Iamblichus, for example, the philosopher as spectator is the one committed to ‘the study of what is finest’ (kallistōn theōrian), whose ‘wisdom’ consists in ‘real knowledge’ (onti epistēmē) of ‘the fine’ (ta kala) as knowledge of what is ‘primary, divine, immutable, eternal’. Likewise, as Diogenes Laertius claims, in contrast to all lovers of fame and gain, the lover of wisdom is the one who, above all, ‘seeks the truth’. In this way, the Pythagorean tale is mapped onto, and gets its basic meaning from, the Platonic cave allegory, the withdrawal of the spectator from the spectacle in the former being identified with the escape of the philosopher from the cave. Although she doesn’t say so explicitly, Arendt refuses this reading, since she refuses the two-world dichotomy upon which it is based. There is only the spectacle and the spectators. Accordingly, Arendt emphasizes from the Pythagorean tale the character of the philosopher as ‘spectator’ (theatēs) but downplays the aspect of truthseeking as the seeking of something beyond the spectacle as a play of doxōn. The spectator is first and foremost a philodox, one who (in Kant’s words) ‘is knowing of the world [Welt kennen], rather than knowing one’s way about in it’, because one ‘understands the play that one has seen’, not because one has ‘participated in it’ (1974: 4). With this emphasis, Arendt’s concern is in part to distinguish, ‘in the name of honesty’, between thinking and acting, and to suggest that to think through experience


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in order to understand what is going on requires that one temporarily withdraw from active involvement and from all efforts to ‘do’ something in order to get an overall perspective. In this regard, the advantage of the spectator over the actor is that the former sees the whole spectacle and comprehends it, or at least has that aim in mind, whereas the latter is focused on getting something in particular done. It is ‘those who look at it’, Arendt remarks, ‘who finally get the gist out of it’ (1979: 303). Yet one gets the gist, as it were, by having a perspective that allows one to gather the sense of it as a whole. According to this image then, philosophical thinking may be construed generally as a ‘theorizing’ that at a remove from the immediacy of experience gathers as a whole the sense of what appears in order to think through our experience in its meaning. The preceding discussion has been an attempt simply to recall what Arendt says about thinking. I have only tried to make sense of it, to get the gist of it. I have surely not gone even as far as Arendt herself in trying to sort out the relation of thinking in which essentially I withdraw from the world of appearance, to judging and action in that world. I leave that for another time. Let me conclude instead with something of an ‘after-thought’, which had been my original, tacit concern from the start. Although Arendt’s account of thinking is expressly post-metaphysical, it is implicated in a basic ontological thesis, for it is her explicit claim that ‘being and appearing coincide’ (1978: 19). On the assumption that ‘appearing’ is always necessarily an ‘appearing to’, she holds that ‘nothing and nobody exists in the world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator’. In an odd way, this thesis serves to reprise a very traditional claim: that thinking and being are the same. They are insofar as thinking in its purity is the highest form of ‘speculation’ (spectare – looking at), and if ‘to be’ is ‘to appear’ to a ‘spectator’, then speculation, the activity of the thinker, is the being of being (Sein des Seienden). These claims have an obvious Heideggerian resonance. For Heidegger the meaning of being is the being of meaning, for which understanding/interpreting Dasein is the locus and medium. Disabused of Heidegger’s preoccupation with what Nietzsche calls the ‘big words’ (1967: 50) including his preoccupation with ‘Truth’, these relations between what appears and what ‘is’, of our thinking and appearing, ground for Arendt the view that thinking in its purity is an end in itself, since thinking as a making sense of what appears is our essential activity, our fundamental way of being, and the condition of all of our other activities. It is in thinking, moreover, that we are reconciled with whatever happens: ‘I don’t know of any other reconciliation but thought’, Arendt admits, and leaves us to riddle out what that might mean.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. —. 1968. Men in dark times. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1971. Thinking and moral considerations. Social Research 38 (3): 417–46. —. n.d.. Remarks of Professor Hannah Arendt. American Society for Christian ethics, fourteenth annual meeting, Richmond, Virginia, January 21, 1973. The Hannah Arendt papers at the Library of Congress: Speeches and writings file; 1923–1975. 011826–011839. —. 1978. The life of the mind: Thinking. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.


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—. 1979. On Hannah Arendt. In Hannah Arendt: The recovery of the public world. Ed. Melvyn A. Hill, 301–39. New York: St. Martin’s Press. (York University Conference, November 1972). —. 2000. The portable Hannah Arendt. Ed. Peter Baehr. New York: Penguin. —. 2003. Responsibility and judgment. New York: Schocken. —. 2003a. Denktagebuch. Munich/Zurich: Piper. —. 2005. The promise of politics. New York: Schocken. Aristotle. 1952. Select fragments. Trans. David Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1984. The complete works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Diogenes Laertius, 1925. Lives of eminent philosophers. Trans. R. D. Dicks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (Loeb Classical Library). Hegel, G. W. F. 1970. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin. 1956. Was ist das—die Philosophie? Pfullingen: Neske. —. 1975. Early Greek thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row. —. 1998. Pathmarks. Ed. W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iamblichus. 1965. De vita pythagorica. Ed. Augustus Nauck. Amsterdam: Hakkert. Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. The Hague: Nijhoff. —. 1992. Theoretical philosophy, 1755–1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, 301–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1996. Practical philosophy. Trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998. Critique of pure reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lobkowicz, Nicholas. 1967. Theory and practice: History of a concept from Aristotle to Marx. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press. Macpherson, C. B. 1976. Humanist democracy and elusive Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political Science 9 (3): 423–30. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. L’Œil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The will to power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. —. 1997. Twilight of the idols. Trans. Richard Polt and intro. Tracy Strong. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Plato. 1961. Plato: The collected dialogues. Ed. Edith Huntington and Hamilton Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. 1982. Hannah Arendt: For love of the world. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.


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CHAPTER 3

Politics and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt Michael Janover

Arendt: Nobody cares any longer what the world looks like. Gaus [Interviewer]: ‘World’ understood always as the space in which politics can originate. Arendt: I comprehend it now in a much larger sense, as the space in which things become public, as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable. In which art appears, of course. In which all kinds of things appear. (Arendt 1994: 20) Arendt: . . . the poems are always somehow at the back of my mind. (Arendt 1994: 13)

In a letter written to Gershom Scholem in 1963, Theodor Adorno noted that both Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin had come up with the same term das Gedichtete, the poetized, to describe what they saw in the style of the poet Hölderlin as a way of thinking set between philosophical discourse and artistic evocation.1 I wish to suggest that there is an element of das Gedichtete in Arendt’s thinking and writing about the world. For her, the world, as it appears in various formulations – the world of fabricated things, the human world of action and speech, worldliness, worldlessness, world alienation – is never simply an object of description but the figure of an evocation, an intonation or an attunement that turns her thought to a realm and reference that is never precisely captured by the descriptions she does provide. When we try to articulate just what the ‘world’ means to her, we find its meaning to be elusive, or to be multiple and proliferating under the force of a wide range of associations in which she uses the word. That is perhaps to be expected, given the wide and varied usages we have for the term. Semantically, as C. S. Lewis (1967: 214–69) noted, the word ‘world’ has a rich history in English, as do its cognates in other European languages, with turns of meaning that range from senses of space, universal or local domain, the earth or the cosmos through to expressions signifying spans of time, as in a life as a world or an epoch of life-times, as in the phrase ‘world upon world’, to mean something like age after age. Yet, the motility of Arendt’s meanings for ‘world’ is something apart from this expected multiplicity of the word’s uses. It does not stem from linguistic vagueness


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or slippage on Arendt’s part but from her deliberate attempt to meld together and play off or upon one another different ideas of activity (work, politics, thinking) and shades of value (meaningfulness, involvement in human plurality) which are granted greater amplitude and plasticity through their sounding out via the word ‘world’. It is in that sense of expanding the amplitude and the resonances of its possible meaning that Arendt seems to me to be poetizing the world, or poetically thinking it through. She enlarges its range of interpretations and limns in a new richness to its sense in each of her accounts of world and worldliness and their contrasting impoverishments in loss of world, worldlessness and world alienation. Ultimately, it is as though the world were a kind of talisman for her, a signifying symbol for all that confers meaning on human existence. Thus the world comes to stand for the space of things in-between humans brought into being by their work of fabrication, but it also connotes the element of freedom which ‘develops fully only when action has created its own worldly space where it can come out of hiding, as it were, and make its appearance’ (Arendt 1977: 169). The world wanes and can conceivably be lost altogether under various conditions. The repetitious necessity of labor, the ubiquitous processes of automatic functioning and the ‘limitless instrumentalisation of everything that exists’ (Arendt 1970: 157) spell the decline of the world as sphere of meaning. Extremes of passion in suffering, or of compassion in pursuit of absolute goodness, all detract from worldliness for Arendt, just as the pariahdom of peoples and totalitarian efforts to destroy human plurality scour and threaten to expunge the world in which freedom is possible and life meaningful. For Arendt, the world is ultimately an evaluative category as much, or even more, than it is a descriptive term. It denotes the phenomenological dimension of experience, the uniqueness and the plurality of human beings. But that experience is fragile; it requires the persistence of individuality, the spontaneity of action that is essential to Arendt’s idea of freedom as the speaking and doing of an agent among other speakers and doers; it also needs the given settings of the earth as human abode, of enduring things made by human work and resounding with human meanings. The world in Arendt’s sense can be lost, it can dwindle away or dissolve into worldlessness, and we can suffer world alienation, even though the ‘world’ in common parlance, everything that is the case in the exterior evidence of things, nature, events and persons, remains in force and actual. Hence she can write of the modern world as characterized by ‘world alienation’ and a loss of ‘worldly durability and stability’ just as she can depict the world of the concentration camps as a hellish and truly worldless world. On Arendt’s account, loss of the world or world-alienation is the general, though barely recognized, experience of citizens of the contemporary world’s richest and most powerful states. In the ‘Prologue’ to The Human Condition, Arendt writes that her book is simply intended ‘to think what we are doing’ (Arendt: 1970: 5). Arendt identifies more exactly what that potentially boundless and amorphous domain of ‘what we are doing’ contains by beginning the book with an observation on the 1957 launch of Sputnik into outer space. The significant arena of late-modern action, that


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leaves its mark on everything we are doing in Arendt’s view, is the scientific and technological adventure that aims to free humankind from the limitations of the earth. Arendt’s references to the space age, the Atomic Revolution, and the advent of automation (Arendt 1977: 271, 278; 1970: 4–7) seem somewhat dated now. Yet the analysis of what she calls ‘the world we have come to live in’ (Arendt 1977: 59) remains thought-provoking in two fundamental (and interrelated) dimensions. The first is the dimension of what Arendt calls ‘mass society’, the second the dimension of an emergent future dominated by automatic processes and artificial lives in which the final human ambition is that of ‘cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature’ (Arendt 1970: 2). Arendt argues, in a language that is deliberately dramatic, and even melodramatic, that the world we may be coming to live in is a worldless world. What is most evident in many of her accounts of the world and worldliness is the ‘thingly’ character of the world. First and foremost she writes of it as the artificial world, the world of things fabricated by human hands and human work. The crafted fabric of things made, and specifically made to last, provides the objective, tangible and durable space of human life and activity. 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 to transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness. (Arendt 1970: 7)

Without a world of things, the duration of a stable set of tangible artifacts, humans can live but they cannot live well. The earth can provide shelter and nature, and labor can yield production through which survival can be maintained, but the earth only becomes a world ‘when the totality of fabricated things is so organised that it can resist the consuming life process of the people dwelling in it, and thus outlast them’ (Arendt 1977: 210). This is the gist of the distinction between labor and work that Arendt draws in The Human Condition. Labor is continuous with nature for Arendt: it is ‘the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body’ (1970: 7). Arendt agrees with Marx insofar as he defined labor as man’s metabolism with nature. Her criticism of Marx’s socialism is that it turns the natural necessity of labor into the universal ideal of a society in which ‘all things would be understood not in their worldly, objective quality, but as the results of living labor power and functions of the life process’ (Arendt 1970: 89). The fact that humans must labor to live on earth is something to be recognized but it is a sombre recognition of a process that, in itself, imprisons us in the recurring cycle of laboring and consuming. For Arendt, labor is the ‘activity which corresponds strictly to worldlessness, or rather to the loss of the world that occurs in pain’ (Arendt 1970: 115). By contrast, work transcends the functioning of nature and the cycles of laboring and consuming. Labor is strictly endless; it can be interrupted for rest or food or restoration of energies, but the imperative demand that we labor to consume to


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labor again is ceaseless. Work, on the other hand, begins in the planning or the first step of creation of an article of use or of beauty, and ends in the completion of the act of fabrication. In The Human Condition, her most systematic book and an attempt at providing a phenomenology of the three central human activities of labor, work and action, Arendt points out that work is unique in this creation to an end. It lends to the craftsman, man as homo faber, a proximity to our imaginings of divine creation through the masterfulness in work that neither laborers nor actors can share in their pursuits. To have a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end is the mark of fabrication . . . Labour caught in the cyclical movement of the body’s life process has neither a beginning nor an end. Action, though it may have a definite beginning never . . . has a predictable end. (Arendt 1970: 144)

The end of work, whether in a work of art in the strict sense or the work of artifice and fabrication in the wider sense, is the work itself as an item made. Work comes to an end in a work and the array of man-made works provides the furniture and stuff of a world. Work is the building of the world. Considered at its simplest, worldliness is ‘the capacity to fabricate and create a world’ (Arendt 1977: 209). But the loss of the world, what Arendt calls by turns ‘world alienation’ and ‘worldlessness’, does not require the actual, physical destruction of the works in the world. The situation of worldlessness can arise for a whole people which is dispersed or displaced. Refugees, exiles, the stateless, homeless and displaced of the earth retain relation to objects as imperative matters of need and use, but they no longer move or live in surroundings in which things carry meaning as works. The things among which they move no longer relate people together through any shared set of projects and possibilities. Arendt’s lodestone in reference to displaced and dispossessed peoples as being ‘worldless’ is her personally and historically charged account of the Jews of Europe as a ‘pariah people’ in the history of the nations and the world up until the fateful events of the Holocaust and the formation of the state of Israel thereafter. This worldlessness which the Jewish people suffered in being dispersed and which – as with all peoples who are pariahs – generated a special warmth among those who belonged, changed when the state of Israel was founded. (Arendt 1994: 17)

In her stark reference to the worldlessness of the stateless Jewish people Arendt invokes an ambivalent pairing of loss of the world with an increase in specific talents and sensitivities. Worldlessness, in her view, can carry peculiarly intense countervailing benefits by way of a pronounced sense of fraternity and humanity among the members of an excluded or dispersed group.2 But for Arendt, any benefit experienced is the obverse of the marked costs of exile and displacement. In an interview, Arendt reflects on the characteristics of the Jews as a people without a land, across the centuries before 1948, and in the context of the interview her comments reflect


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both historically and personally upon the conditions of the German Jews before 1933. She remarks that ‘the specifically Jewish humanity signified by their worldlessness was something very beautiful’ (Arendt: 1994, 17).3 Beautiful, and profoundly sad; for Arendt, the beauty and warmth of that fraternal humanity is now a haunting memory of an irrecoverable epoch and a moment of melancholic remembrance for a people (her own people) almost entirely destroyed though the genocide of the Nazis. But she refuses to romanticize the memory of the specific humanity and intimacy of pariahdom. What she called the ‘great privilege of pariah peoples’ is itself finally lamentable in her account. It is a consoling privilege but one (too) dearly paid for by way of the ‘radical loss of the world’ that underlies it (Arendt 1973: 21). Worldlessness thus appears to do double duty, carrying two meanings in Arendt’s writings. On the one side it refers to the loss of sensibility or experience of the built world, the world of fabricated things. Insofar as Arendt defines worldliness as simply ‘the capacity to fabricate and create a world’ (Arendt 1977: 209), then work and worldliness tend to run together: ‘The human condition of work is worldliness’ (Arendt: 1970, 7). Worldlessness is then the loss of the capacity or the occasion to work in the mode of fabrication or craft. Or, viewed from the side of our living in the world, worldlessness consists of a lost connection to the durable, lasting quality of things, an alienation from their ‘tangible worldly realities’ (Arendt 1977: 208). In Arendt’s eyes, works of art are ‘the most intensely worldly of all tangible things’ because they can achieve a shining permanence across the ages suggesting the glorious possibility of a kind of immortality opened up by mortal, human hands (Arendt 1970: 167). In her conception of art’s radiant permanence we might hear echoes of Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force. To be a work means to set up a world . . . The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of given things. The world worlds and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. (Heidegger 2001: 43; Heidegger’s emphasis)

Arendt does not agree with Heidegger’s distinction between the world and the tangible perceptible realm; she cleaves to the sensory character of the world even as she agrees with Heidegger that a world carries significance beyond the sheer collection of things that comprise it. She eschews the portentousness of Heideggerian phrasing of the world’s worlding [sic] but the sense in which a work, most especially an artwork, reveals (opens up) a world is Arendt’s as much as it is Heidegger’s. In a second, and more far-reaching, sense worldlessness is not the loss of the world of built things as the tangible in-between of objective reality, but rather the loss of a ‘second, subjective in-between’ that overlays the first with action and speech constituting a ‘ “web” of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its


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somewhat intangible quality’ (Arendt 1970: 183). In the philosophical anthropology that Arendt elaborates in The Human Condition, labor is strictly worldless (Arendt 1970: 115, 118).4 Work builds a world of things, but only action and speech can disclose the world, by constituting the shared space of meanings, memories and stories. It is this human world of speech and action that Arendt is most concerned can dwindle away under the behavioral impact and regularisation of mass societies, or yet more fearfully may be deliberately expunged by totalitarian regimes. Her account of mass society argues that there is a predominance of structure over agency and of automatic processes over spontaneous or deliberate action in late modernity. Arendt describes the emergence of societies governed by laws, processes and forces that exceed or escape the grasp of their inhabitants, either as matters of understanding or as items susceptible to consistent and predictable influence by human actions and powers. In these societies – the technological societies of late modernity that more and more become the norm – people live, according to Arendt, ‘without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, [and they live] either . . . in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass” (Arendt 1977: 89–90). Arendt repeats the same phrasing on numerous occasions in her accounts of world alienation. It is always a matter of losing, or losing touch with, the simultaneous relation to and separation from other people. Whether the balance swings to the pole of anomic individualism and compulsive disaggregation from other people, or to compacted crowds, anxiety outside of the group and generalized conformism, the result is the same loss of capacity to act and to judge for oneself and in relation to others. To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common . . . the world like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm as the common world gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together to relate and to separate them. (Arendt 1970: 52–3)

Arendt wrote these lines fifty years ago and the idiom of mass society, prominent in sociology, and crossing over into intellectual and pseudo-intellectual conversation of the time, barely survived the end of the nineteen seventies. But, if we replace the word ‘mass’ with ‘modern’, the gist of her argument remains valid. She contends that to live together in a world means (or should mean) to share and act within a common, public realm, not simply to inhabit the same bounded space. Arendt critically assails the tendency of contemporary societies to transform every activity into a form of fungible, reproducible and repeatable labor. She fears that ‘the last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning’ (Arendt 1970: 322). In the political economy of the now globalized and


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mobile workforce, we might find all the more persuasive her overarching claims that the powers of fabrication, the capacities for making things as whole works are shrinking, gradually becoming restricted to the abilities of the artist, and that action – the capacity to initiate something new enabling ‘the disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is’ (Arendt 1970: 179) – is more frequently eclipsed than demonstrated. Her sense of the modern loss of the world is communicated through two different stories or accounts. The first story is intellectual, and is provided in Arendt’s historico-philosophical account of the modern scientific disenchantment of the world. On this account of the world’s desiccation through the expansion of instrumental reason, Arendt’s critique of ‘modern world alienation’ is reminiscent of the critique of technological mastery over nature, society and self that Frankfurt School theorists drew from Weber, Marx and Nietzsche. Both Arendt and Frankfurt School thinkers directed sharp critical attention to the reduction of individuality to automatic processes of consumption and production, and to the destruction of experience in modernity.5 But they differed in the focus of their critiques. Theorists like Adorno and Marcuse emphasized the seamless path from the mastery of nature to the domination of human subjects; Arendt, by contrast, mourns the sheer worldlessness instantiated in ‘the fact that the world between [people] has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them’ (Arendt 1979: 53). The second story is political and is sketched out in Arendt’s depiction of the Nazi death camps and their attempted, total annihilation of spontaneity and of the in-between of meaningful speech and deed. The two stories have different sources and different significances. The first grows out of Arendt’s efforts to think through the uncanny achievements of space travel and the fearful potentialities of atomic power, while the second derives from Arendt’s attempt at understanding what transpires when terror is turned from a stratagem into a principle. Perhaps it is this second story, in which Arendt tries to fathom the totalitarian efforts at excoriation of the humanity of the Jews of Europe, which provides the most telling basis for her recounting of modernity as a potentially catastrophic loss of the world. Though the experience of totalitarianism and the spectre of the death camps are the very topics of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, they remain largely unmentioned, however, when Arendt turns to the theoretical elaboration of modern worldlessness and world alienation in The Human Condition or in the essays of Between Past and Future. The absence of articulation of the most important source of the idea of worldlessness in these works is paradoxical; perhaps the darkness and silence surrounding that source more precisely point to its depth of significance. Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust, haunt Arendt’s lament for the loss of the world in modernity, though they remain outside the arc of explicit attention in her analysis and critique of modernity in The Human Condition. In Arendt’s picture of techno-scientific modernity, the world we have come to live in is more recent than modern science itself. What she calls ‘the modern age’ begins in the seventeenth century with Galileo’s telescope, the symbol of the human quest


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for an Archimedean point from which men can ‘handle nature from a point outside the earth’ (Arendt 1970: 262) and with Descartes’s universal doubt, itself symbolic of the modern loss of the self-evidence of reason and the senses (Arendt 1970: 275–76). But ‘the modern world’, by contrast, ‘was born with the first atomic explosions’ (Arendt 1970: 6). It dates back to the moment, in the twentieth century, when human beings intervened in the constituents of matter, unlocking hitherto unimagined energies and forces. This importation of cosmic processes into nature Arendt often calls ‘acting into nature’ (Arendt 1970: 231; 1977: 61–2), a phrase with which she suggests both the godlike powers that mankind takes on in its delving into the fundamental nuclear processes and the ultimate unpredictability of such powers and interventions. It is notable that when writing of human beings acting into nature, through technoscientific processes, Arendt emphasizes the hazardous unpredictability, the risky uncertainty, of action, whereas when writing of action as the quintessential political faculty, unpredictability is twinned, and largely subordinated, to the creative spontaneity of action. Her affirmation of the human capacity for action is really an affirming of action joined to speech. At the outset of her most sustained discussion of action in The Human Condition, Arendt argues that speech and action are necessarily intertwined. Together they reveal the uniqueness of individual human personality within the plurality of humanity: Without the accompaniment of speech . . . action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. (Arendt 1970: 178)

The problem that Arendt finds in ‘acting into’ nature, the threat of an untrammelled unpredictability, is that the modern world threatens to break the link between speech and action. According to Arendt, modern techno-science empowers man to ‘do and successfully do, what he cannot comprehend and cannot express in everyday human language’ (Arendt 1977: 270). In that situation, action loses its identity and character as world disclosure and is reduced to the ‘releasing of processes’ (Arendt 1970: 323). The gist of Arendt’s critique of modernity is that we are coming to live in such a way that we no longer understand, or even experience, our own lives: ‘we look and live in this society as though we were as far removed from our own human existence as we are from the infinitely small and the immensely large which, even if they could be perceived by the finest instruments, are too far away from us to be experienced’ (Arendt 1970: 323). The ubiquity of the modern concept of process presages a scenario of existence in which each of the essentially human activities – the markers of the human condition—appear no longer as activities at all but as automatic processes. A world conceived as and rapidly becoming a chain or network of impersonal processes is no world at all. It culminates in a worldless world in which the quest for knowledge of ‘what’ (appearances and phenomena) and ‘why’ (meanings) in


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thinking is replaced by the accumulation of know-how. Action as the activity that provides meaningfulness to existence by disclosing the ‘who’ of actors within the publicly shared engagement in words and deeds is turned into instrumental making; and making itself no longer builds the things of the world, with their purposive ends in durable things of utility or beauty, but is reduced to a type of labor contributing to the infinite, purposeless and meaningless life-process of the species. Arendt views modernity as ultimately fusing the triumph of the process view of reality carried through by modern science with the elevation of life itself, over the world in which life is lived, to the status of the highest good. For Arendt, the spectre of such a modernity hazards a troubling end to human spontaneity, an elimination of freedom of action and a degradation of the stable world of things wrought through fabrication into the ceaseless (and pointless) maelstrom of sheer processes. For her, ‘the loss of human experience involved in this development is extraordinarily striking’ (Arendt 1970: 321). It is this loss, or its possibility, that stands behind, or is in fact analogous to the world alienation and worldlessness that Arendt laments in modern mass society. In her view, both contemporary techno-sciences premised on increasing man’s power to act upon nature, and modern mass society dedicated to the ever-repeated accumulation of wealth, devolve upon an accentuation and valorisation of sheer processes. In this light, what are sometimes seen as inconsistent accounts of the risks of modernity in Arendt – the threat of looming conformism, and submersion of individuality and meaning in the rhythmic repetitions of labor and consumption, on one side, and the danger of unpredictable and unexpected outcomes emergent from human (scientific and technical) acting upon nature, on the other – are revealed not as contradictory portraits of modernity but as twin hazards born of the same phenomenon.6 In Arendt’s work the dangers of deadening predictability and ceaseless shock are not so much in contradiction as they are twin results, flip sides as it were, of the transformation of nature and history alike into forms of process. The problem with processes, whether underpinning the biological life-process and the processes of labor or the process view of nature, reality, and the world in modern science, is that they cannot but tend toward automatic functioning. [A]utomatism is inherent in all processes no matter what their origin might be . . . It is in the nature of automatic processes to which man is subject, but against which he can assert himself through action, that they can only spell ruin to human life. (Arendt 1977: 168)

In a world where all activities are transformed into processes and where this transformation is carried so far that ‘in the place of the concept of Being we now find the concept of Process’ (Arendt 1970: 296), there really is no sense of the world, no world at all in Arendt’s evaluative designation of that term. In such a (non)world, human beings would have lost the capability of building a lived realm of durable and stable things, just as they would have lost the capacity for action conceived as the disclosure of acting and speaking agents which overlays the world of things with a second world


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of human relationships. Even if the finality of the worldless world is not actually upon us, Arendt suggests that the ‘experiences of worldliness escape more and more the range of ordinary human experience (Arendt 1970: 323). We might wonder whether that awesome finality of world alienation, as the loss of experience by human beings of their own spontaneity, is Arendt’s most basic and pressing concern because it has its source not in theoretical abstractions but in actual events. I suggested earlier that Arendt tells two different stories of the modern loss of the world. The first is the story of the ever-growing instrumentalization of thinking and doing, the transformation of the world into a universe of technical processes which we ‘can discover and handle [but] without true comprehension (Arendt 1970: 270). But that story seems to borrow its force, its persuasive effect and affect, from a second story – the account of the totalitarian universe of terror at its nadir in the Nazi death camps – a story Arendt told in The Origins of Totalitarianism and which remains the implicit but palpable reference point for the saga of the loss of the world recounted in the works that followed. If that is the case, then the actual and most potent source for Arendt’s idea and fear of loss of the world lies in the ‘totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous’ (Arendt 1972: 457). We might conclude that Arendt’s depictions of the triumph of the processes of consumption in modern mass society, and of the process view of nature and the cosmos in modern physical science, are but speculative images by comparison with the deadly reality of those ‘most consequential institutions of totalitarian rule’, the death camps, which undertake ‘the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior’ (Arendt 1972: 441, 438). In The Human Condition Arendt argues that action is a key ontological feature of human existence because it is in action that humans disclose their uniqueness (as individuals) in the words and deeds that begin something new. ‘The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected of him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable’ (Arendt 1970: 178). The terrible irony of totalitarianism is that it is an unprecedented form of political regime, a paradoxical novelty that aims to expunge the human capacity for the unexpected. Totalitarianism snuffs out freedom – the faculty of human spontaneity in the world – not only in its enemies but in its proponents, and ultimately, if its crazed logic were realized, in all humanity. Totalitarianism instantiates the triumph of the representation of human beings as processed objects. Totalitarian regimes’ penchant for the ersatz logic, the ideology of inexorable laws of History or of Nature, reflects a deeper wish to transform the spontaneous speech and action of individuals into the automatic functioning of the species. The simultaneity of law and terror in totalitarian states is apparently contradictory but actually necessary to the fulfilment of that nightmare wish to fabricate human beings as automatic functionaries. Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action. (Arendt 1972: 465)


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When we see totalitarianism in this light, as the transmutation of the world and mankind into automatically reacting creatures or objects of processes, then we might see that what underpins and animates Arendt’s fear of the simultaneous fragmenting and compacting processes characteristic of modern mass societies, is the memory of states in which those processes attain to a zenith of power through violence and violation. In her original and compelling account, totalitarianism is a completely novel modern system of government that eliminates differences and spaces between people. Even though initially exploiting the ideological appeal to (racially or classbased) distinctions and oppositions, the end of such systems lies in the universalizing of terror beyond any conceivable instrumental utility of systems of terror as tools of power.7 Ultimately, totalitarianism is characterized by the eschewal of all differences and the creation of a state in which ‘all men have become one Man’ (Arendt 1972: 457). At the same time it carries individual isolation to the extremity of mutual mistrust and mass anxiety. Arendt suggests that one of the chief novelties of totalitarian government, and what distinguishes it from all past tyrannies, is that it does not simply demolish the public realm but destroys private life as well. It ‘bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’ (Arendt 1972: 477). In Arendt’s harrowing account, totalitarianism appears to be the most fundamental and extreme of the various instances of worldlessness she surveys. What she called the ‘iron band of terror’, that holds totalitarian states together, constricts and finally destroys both the feeling of involvement in any common world and the sense of one’s own self. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time. (Arendt 1972: 477)

Nothing makes the idea of loss of the world so palpable as the death camps of Nazi Germany. The associative force and the conceptual lability of Arendt’s key terms— world alienation, worldlessness and loss of the world—signals the fact that she is not deploying them as representations of states of affairs but as evocations of turns in human experience that demand thinking but escape the grip of any purely representational thought. Her thought concerning the world and its loss gives imaginative and conceptual form to the most powerful experiences which paradoxically threaten the destruction of experience itself. Such experiences require another kind of thinking to capture their place in and out of the world. It is this other kind of thinking, a thinking otherwise or a thinking that seeks not precisely to analyse but to evoke the amplitude, uncertainty and plasticity of the world, that I call Arendt’s poetic thinking.8 Finally, we might question whether even Arendt’s evocative concepts of worldlessness, world alienation and loss of the world are not themselves still too abstract to respond adequately to the terrors of destruction of place and meaning in the world depicted in The Origins of Totalitarianism and which, I have suggested, continue to


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haunt the meditation upon the various fractures and vanishings of worldliness in The Human Condition. Perhaps, Arendt’s silence in The Human Condition as to the most powerful instances of loss of the world – the terrors of totalitarianism and the horror of the death camps – is not simply a matter of what Mary Dietz has called ‘conspicuous exclusion’ (Dietz 2000, 93), which makes us attend to the key significance of an omitted feature or background precisely through its absence from the explicit text before us.9 That makes for an acute interpretation of The Human Condition as a book silent about but deeply responsive to the frightening experiences and ghastly experiments of totalitarianism. But is there also a further irony and deliberation in Arendt’s silence, a warning as to the limits of representation and of thought itself? It may be that for her, ‘the terrible abyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living dead’ (Arendt 1972: 441) is ultimately resistant to comprehension by any theory or conceptualization. Even the fluid and polysemic, poetic ideas of worldlessness and world alienation would only lessen the shock that the incomprehensible yet all too real events of the Holocaust should continue to carry. Yet it is this very incomprehensibility which invites, indeed compels, us to think through the most fateful and horrific of events, to try to make sense of that which makes no sense.

Notes 1 On Heidegger’s interpretation of poetry, see Heidegger’s Ways (Gadamer: 1994). Malpas (2006: 211–305) argues for the emphatic significance of place and space in Heidegger’s drawing together of poetizing and thinking. On Benjamin and literature, see Theodor Adorno’s ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’ (Adorno: 1967, 227–43). Arendt herself concluded her memorial essay on Benjamin with the comment that he possessed ‘the gift of thinking poetically’ (Arendt 1973: 203; Arendt’s emphasis). 2 The specific intimacies and warmth of worldlessness are not restricted to the involuntarily worldless peoples such as the pre-war European Jews but occur as well in the context of the voluntary eschewal or retreat from the world that Arendt locates in the ‘Christian principle of worldlessness’, and in the turn to inwardness as a response to an ‘estrangement from the world’ that she finds in the Stoic philosophers of late antiquity. See Arendt (1970: 53) on Christian worldlessness, and on the Stoics (1977: 146–47). 3 In her 1959 Lessing Prize lecture ‘On humanity in dark times: thoughts about Lessing,’ Arendt suggests that the ‘radical loss of the world’ is matched by a ‘warmth of human relationships’ among ‘pariah peoples’ (1973: 21.) Arendt took the term ‘pariah’ from Max Weber, who used it to refer to the particular characteristics of oppression of Jews, and from the French-Jewish essayist Bernard Lazare who argued, in the light of the Dreyfus case and the rise of political anti-Semitism in France and Europe generally, that the Jews should embrace the identity of pariahs in rebellion against the world that excluded them rather than seek acceptance as assimilated and self-denying parvenus within prevailing gentile and anti-Jewish society (Arendt: 1978). Benhabib (2003) and Bernstein (1996) provide illuminating discussions of Arendt’s relation to, and writings on, Jewish themes. 4 Arendt (1970: 38–50) argues further that the modern ‘rise of the social’ has not fundamentally altered the necessitous and natural characteristics of the labor process. She asserts that modern societies as national or regional economies akin to gigantic households


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‘exclude the possibility of action’ (1970: 40). Arendt’s evident hostility toward and fear of the growth of processes of uniformity, administration and automatic functioning in modern societies are summed up in her view that society substitutes regularity in behavior for excellence in action and that the modern social sciences ‘aim to reduce man as a whole . . . to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal’ (1970: 45). For a sharp critique of Arendt’s account of modern society, see Pitkin’s (1998) sardonically titled The attack of the blob: Hannah Arendt’s concept of the social. Villa (1996: 172–73) canvasses similarities and differences between Arendt and the Frankfurt School critiques of modern technological mastery. Hauke Brunkhorst (2004: 251) asserts that Arendt’s critique of modernity is backward-looking by contrast to Adorno’s view. Though he does not directly compare Arendt and Adorno, Martin Jay (2005: 176–77, 343–60) identifies experience and its destruction as key themes for both. Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves (n.d.), in his entry on Hannah Arendt in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, argues that Arendt’s interpretation of modernity issues in ‘two contrasting accounts’ that are ‘difficult to reconcile’. Arendt’s accounts of the unprecedented nature of totalitarian states emphasize the perverse inutility of totalitarian terror and hence the peculiar resistance of totalitarianism to comprehension through the standard causal and rational explanations of social science. ‘The structurelessness of the totalitarian state, its neglect of material interests, its emancipation from the profit motive, and its nonutilitarian motives in general have more than anything else contributed to making contemporary politics well-nigh unpredictable’ (Arendt 1972: 419). In her 1954 essay, ‘Understanding and Politics’ (Arendt 1994: 314), Arendt already argued that ‘totalitarian phenomena . . . can no longer be understood in terms of common sense and . . . defy all rules of “normal”, that is, chiefly, utilitarian judgment.’ Canovan (2000: 25–44) offers a concise and useful overview of Arendt’s account of totalitarianism. In her recent account and appreciation published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth, Elisabeth Young –Bruehl (2006: 11) suggests that while ‘it is poets or poetic thinkers who live by an expectation that language will deliver us from the temptation not to think . . . Hannah Arendt was that rare being: a thinker of poetic capacity and devotion who was not a poet but was, rather, an analyst.’ Dietz acknowledges that she takes the concept of conspicuous exclusion from the work of the historian and theorist of literature and art Harry Berger, but her essay provides a highly original and thought-provoking turning of the concept to an interpretation of Arendt. Her argument that the hellish experiment of the Nazi death camps is at once ‘saturatingly present but conspicuously held at bay in The Human Condition’ (Dietz 2000: 95) parallels, and has influenced, my suggestion that the elimination of spontaneity by the Nazis, charted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, haunts the idea of automatism that Arendt perceives in the world alienation of modernity.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 1967. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber. London: Neville Spearman. Arendt, Hannah. 1970. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1972. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: World Publishing (2nd enlarged edn.). —. 1973. Men in dark times. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. —. 1977. Between past and future. Harmondsworth: Penguin.


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—. 1978. The Jew as pariah: Jewish identity and politics in the modern age. Ed. Ron H. Feldman. New York: Random House. —. 1994. Essays in understanding, 1930–1954. Ed. J. Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace. Benhabib, Seyla. 2003. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish question. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2004. Critical theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society. In The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Ed. Fred Rush, 249–79. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Canovan, Margaret. 2000. Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism: A reassessment. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. Dana Villa, 25–44. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dietz, Mary. 2000. Arendt and the Holocaust. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. Dana Villa, 86–110. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. 1994. Heidegger’s ways. Trans. John W. Stanley. Albany: State University of New York Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Poetry, language, thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins. Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of experience: Modern American and European variations on a universal theme. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lewis, C. S. 1967. Studies in words. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Malpas, Jeff. 2006. Heidegger’s topology: Being, place, world. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Passerin d’Entreves, Maurizio. (n.d) Hannah Arendt. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt. —. 1994. The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. New York: Routledge. Pitkin, Hannah. 1998. The attack of the blob: Hannah Arendt’s concept of the social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scholem, Gershom. 2002. Gershom Scholem: A life in letters, 1914–1982. Ed. and trans. Anthony D. Skinner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Villa, Dana. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger: The fate of the political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Villa, Dana. Ed. 2000. The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 2006. Why Arendt matters. New York: Yale University Press.


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CHAPTER 4

The Space of Appearance and the Space of Truth Andrew Brennan and Jeff Malpas

Truth and justice are the twin pillars of the common life: remove them and it crumbles. – Christian Wolf (Wolf: 1969; quoted in Barth 1976: 194)

Introduction: Arendt and Philosophy Arendt’s position within philosophy has often seemed somewhat anomalous. Preferring to see her work as belonging within the realm of political thought rather than philosophy proper, she thereby distanced herself from many of the figures to whom her work would seem naturally to relate, most notably, perhaps, from that of Martin Heidegger. Indeed, Heidegger’s own preoccupation with the philosophical, even when engaged in its critique, contrasts significantly with Arendt’s eschewal of that particular designation. Moreover, the reception of her work within philosophy has itself been somewhat equivocal, her work often being relegated to the margins of the philosophical canon. When Arendt’s work has been taken into philosophy proper it has often been as an ambiguous representative of an ill-defined ‘existential’ or even ‘phenomenological’ tradition. Arendt’s thought, like that of her closet mentor, Karl Jaspers, certainly contains some idiosyncratic elements. Yet it nevertheless engages with a set of fundamentally philosophical concerns while also situating itself, in terms of the interlocutors with whom it engages, centrally within the Western philosophical tradition. Arendt’s work thus cannot be regarded as standing aside from philosophy, but is rather intimately bound up with it. What makes Arendt’s work unique, and also especially significant, is that her philosophical engagement is itself always informed and guided by her concern for the political. Philosophical reflection is thus, for Arendt, always politically situated, always oriented to the world of human interaction and encounter. Nowhere is this lesson more important than when it comes to the consideration of that question that has, at least since Plato (who, in the Republic, makes it part of the very definition of the philosophical), been considered as at the very heart of philosophy: the question of truth. Not only philosophy, but all thinking, including thinking that relates to the political, depends upon some account of the nature and possibility of truth, and this


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derives, as we shall see in the discussion below, from the centrality of truth in the possibility of discourse. Yet truth has often been entangled, particularly in the thinking that belongs to modernity, in a dialectical play of concepts that has seemed to undermine truth. Significantly, the difficulties that cluster around truth are themselves difficulties that emerge as central to modern philosophy, and that appear, not only in relation to the understanding of truth, but also in relation to the understanding of the physical world, and in particular, the core metaphysical questions concerning identity and change. Here the entanglement of Arendt’s thought with issues at the heart of the philosophical tradition, to which she may be viewed as otherwise ambiguously related, becomes very clear. Our interest here is in the question of truth in Arendt’s thought, and in the way the space of appearance that she sees as opened up in and through the political, and in and through the realm of the public, can also be understood as the space of truth. Yet we will enter into this question through the history of philosophical thought as that relates to identity and change construed in metaphysical terms. Here we shall see that the problems of how to understand the relation between sameness and difference, identity and changeability, unity and plurality, mirror the problems that also attach to the understanding of truth – indeed, the problematic character of identity in modern philosophical thought reflects the problematic status also accorded to truth. What Arendt offers, or so we shall claim, is an approach that is not blind to plurality and contingency, and yet retains a sense of the reality and centrality of truth (and also, although we shall not develop the point here, of identity, sameness and unity). Not only will Arendt’s thought thus be re-positioned in a direct, even if critical, relationship to the core philosophical tradition, but it will also be placed in close relation to that of Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer – both of whom take the question of truth to be central to philosophy, but both of whom also understand truth in a way that runs counter to much of the prevailing thought of modernity.

Eternity and Change It is still common in contemporary metaphysics to study the metaphysics of identity in terms of the ‘problem of change’. The problem, put simply, is how something can be the same while undergoing changes, or how something can at different times have contradictory properties. For the ancient Greeks, this was a major issue. The preSocratic philosophers quarrelled about flux and unity. For some of them, particularly the Eleatics, what was puzzling about the world was the appearance of change. Everyone knows that Heraclitus was puzzled about how we could step into the same river twice, for ever new waters are always flowing in, and some people believe that he constructed a theory in which flux and unity both had a part to play (see Barnes 1979). In response to arguments about flux and unity, Plato – at least according to some of his readers – introduced an ideal of truth as static, eternal and changeless.1 But if the great truths are eternal, changeless and static, then the apparent changes all around us, the ones about which the pre-Socratics engaged in endless squabbles,


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THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND THE SPACE OF TRUTH 41

cannot themselves be true. If the ultimate structure of the world is given by changeless truths, then what seems to be continual change all around us must be some kind of illusion. There are few things that mark off modern metaphysics and epistemology so starkly from ancient philosophy as the topic of change. Both Hume and Locke, for example, agree that the appearance of simplicity and identity of the self – that I am a single thing that stays much the same from moment to moment, and changes only gradually over longer periods of time – is deceptive. Instead of thinking that change is the source of illusion, it is now sameness that is the source of illusion. Underlying the apparent unity of the self, for both Locke and Hume, is a flux of ideas or impressions which succeed each other with ‘an inconceivable rapidity’ (Hume 1978: I.iv.6), or at least are constantly changing (Locke 1979: II.xiv) in a mind whose ‘actions seem to require no time’ such that ‘many of them seem to be crowded into an Instant’ (Locke 1979: II.ix.10). For Hume, just as the notion of body is a fiction which we vulgarly – but cleverly – use to catalogue and describe a manifold of diverse perceptions, so too the idea of the self is an equally useful fiction. He concludes that ‘all the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union . . .’ (Locke 1979: II.ix.10). Locke, more concerned than Hume to theorize a morally useful notion of person, one that can serve for attributing blame and praise (and suited to the political circumstances of his day), wants to connect personal identity with memory, or—more generally – with co-consciousness. ‘Nothing but consciousness’, he wrote, ‘can unite remote Existences into the same Person’ (Locke 1979: II.xxvii.25). A modern Lockean, taking materialism seriously, would note that persons are always associated with animal bodies, which in turn are composed of ‘constantly fleeting Particles of Matter’ (Locke 1979: II.iv.27). But if persons are psychological systems that are in perpetual flux, supported by bodies that are made of constantly fleeting particles, then isn’t it amazing that we hold it desirable that our lives are not characterized by too much change overall? How can we hope to satisfy such a desire? Locke put his money on system, or organization. His fleeting particles were, as he put it, ‘in succession vitally united to the same organized Body’, the body being ‘a fit Organization, or Construction of Parts, to a certain end’ (Locke 1979: II.iv.27). If fleeting particles can compose one persisting body, then successive and changing ideas can compose one consciousness. Hume, likewise, put his money on organization too, though treating this more as a kind of confabulation, fictionalizing, on our part, a tendency to think and act as though the world, and our own mental system, is not just a patchwork of this and that.

Process and Truth The shift from the ancient to the modern conception of truth is a recurring theme in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and plays an important role in Arendt’s


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thinking in that work and elsewhere. The shift in relation to truth parallels the difference just noted between some ancient approaches to the question of change and some early modern ones. If the ultimate truth of the world is something stable and changeless, then that truth is best found when the thinker’s mind also enters a state of stability and rest. So stillness – for Plato and the medieval schoolmen – is indispensable for coming at the truth (Arendt 1998: 15). Once found, the truth reveals something changeless and eternal, not some fictionalized unity, not some imagined organization, but something forever there, behind the changing seasons and flux of the world. By the time of Locke and Hume, however, all this had changed. For the flux of the world means that the search for scientific truth resists the contemplative observational style, but requires active engagement between the scientist and the matters being studied. That engagement is aided, abetted and even driven by the technology that emerged in the early modern period as part of the indispensable apparatus of astronomy, physics, optics and the other rapidly developing sciences of nature. Arendt puts it like this: ‘The central concept of the two entirely new sciences of the modern age, natural science no less than historical, is the concept of process, and the actual human experience underlying it is action’ (Arendt 1998: 232). She goes on: ‘Only because we are capable of acting, of starting processes of our own, can we conceive of both nature and history as systems of processes’ (Arendt 1998: 232). The change from truth conceived as what is eternal and graspable through stillness and contemplation, to truth understood as itself provisional and in need of various technologies and activities for its investigation, poses a problem for modernity that spreads from history, the sciences and other areas of experimental human activity into ethics, politics and the family. The lack of stability and fixity in metaphysics and science is mirrored in a lack of fixed points in the moral sphere. While revealed religions in forms such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism provide an Archimedean point outside of human and planetary life, one that provides a criterion of the ethical, or the moral, that is independent of human agents, the attempt to provide something stable or certain in secular morality has met with little success. Having failed to find a definitive secular account of right and wrong, good and bad, in Kant, Arendt concludes somewhat gloomily: In the unlikely case that someone should come and tell us that he would prefer Bluebeard for company, and hence take him as his example, the only thing we could do is to make sure that he never comes near us. But the likelihood that someone would come and tell us that he does not mind and that any company will be good enough for him is, I fear, by far greater. Morally and even politically speaking, this indifference, though common enough, is the greatest danger. And connected to this, only a bit less dangerous, is another very common modern phenomenon, the widespread tendency to refuse to judge at all. (Arendt 2003: 146)

Modernity seems, then, to pose at least two challenges for the moral philosopher. One is that, in a world where even the sciences can find no eternal verities, and where stability and fixity are at best impositions on some underlying flux, there may seem


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to be little space left for discovering the truth about ethics, and little content to be given to the notion of speaking the truth on matters that are relevant to ethics and politics. Moreover, a second challenge is that where everything is plural, then human beings and their communities are inevitably plural too. How, then, can plurality be the basis of agreement in politics or ethics, and what role, if any, does truth have to play in the business of government, relations between people and the conduct of companies? The stakes here are high. Without some notion of truth, there is nothing to guard against deceit, itself one of the subtle enemies of both morality and politics. Deceit itself is deceptive about its own character and resists being dissolved by mere rhetoric, by play of words however clever. At times of social and environmental crisis, there are often calls, both right and proper, for a new attention to truthfulness, to accuracy in our words matched with sincerity in our deeds. Without some usable notion of truth, such calls cannot be answered. For the secular society, neither the sciences nor religion can provide the needed criterion of truth, and nor does a retreat to relativism help. There are overwhelming pragmatic objections to relativism, since the relativist cannot make sense of truth except in a way in which what is true for you may not be true for me. If what is true for me is all the truth there is (for me at least), then relativism is precisely the device that promotes intolerance, oppression and the dialogues of the deaf that are so much part of contemporary culture clashes, science wars and religious crusades. A society split by relativism can have no way short of violence through which to ensure its own continuance. It is important to notice the difference between relativism understood in this way and the ‘perspectivism’ that, as we shall see, is a key element in Arendt’s position. Each time we say that something appears to be the case, or we express our opinions, we are inevitably doing so in relation to our position and actions in the world. To appear, in Arendt’s theory of the vita activa, is to see, and be seen by, other agents in a public space within which we are able to articulate disagreements and compare and contrast our perspectives. This is why Arendt, somewhat quaintly, refers to human beings themselves as ‘appearances’. To be removed from the public sphere – the space of appearance – is to be denied being, since being and appearing are coincident (in this respect, Arendt rejects the usual philosophical opposition between appearance and being). Perspectivism, as such, is not inimical to notions of truth, objectivity and factuality. Indeed, without the notion of truth, the public sphere would lack an important means of regulating its relations to the world, a topic we discuss in more detail in the following section. The challenge that Arendt has posed for us, then (and the posing of this challenge is one of the things that makes her work so important), is the necessity for an ethics and an account of truth as these arise in relation to the space of appearance – the realm that is not only revealed through the vita activa, but that is itself constituted by it. Arendt, we believe, is well aware of the challenge that she has set, and provides, at least in outline, a way to develop an account of truth as commitment to continuous engagement with others in dialogue. As such, truth welcomes self-criticism and


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social criticism as essential elements of the ethical stance, and moreover, truth so conceived is not just a central element of a democratic polity, but also an opportunity to explore our situation in a way that recognizes our own fallibility and the fallibility of others. If we are right, then in the modern world, characterized by process, not stability, and understood through activity, not contemplation, there are prospects for developing an account of truth that will provide the ingredients for a politics and ethics of dialogue and engagement.

Truth and Communication We objected initially to relativism on the practical basis that, if true, it provides no basis for an ethics. A relativized notion of truth would give rise to a relativized kind of belief—my beliefs are true for me, and yours are true for you.2 So relativism has no resources for enabling us to engage in discussion, correction and modification of belief. And if we do not have the ability to do that, then it is no longer clear what is involved in the idea of belief itself. Think, for example, of Nietzsche’s claim that truths are precisely ‘illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions’ (Nietzsche 1911: 180). Now we have to ask what sense we can make of the term ‘illusion’ in such a context. The contrast between illusion and reality is none other than the contrast between what seems to be so and what is really so – and we cannot make this contrast without presupposing the contrast between the false and the true. Likewise, if what is right for me is what is wrong for you – in the moral sense – then we would have no way of distinguishing personal preference or social convention from what is demanded by ethics or morality. The problems about relativism, then, are not just pragmatic but are open to deeper objections. They are conceptual, threatening our capacity to keep hold of important distinctions – between matters of illusion versus matters of reality, or matters of preference or etiquette on the one side versus matters of ethics on the other. The point about relativism is particularly important in the discussion of Arendt, who is sometimes herself read as a relativist about truth, especially given the opposition she depicts between Platonic stillness and modernism’s attention to process, the fixed and the motile, the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. To understand what Arendt is gesturing towards, it is important to notice that there are two different tendencies in Plato’s writing. First, in the dialogues, and the manner in which they seek to arrive at truth through the communicative engagement between Socrates and those around him, truth emerges by way of interaction within a community of inquirers, and in this way truth is something essentially communicative. On the other hand, consider the myth of the Cave, in which the philosophical pursuit of truth appears as an individual endeavour that may bring the philosopher into conflict with other people, and that is directed at the attainment of a truth that stands apart from any human community – a truth that may well be impossible to communicate. Sometimes Arendt refers to the second of these two conceptions as ‘philosophical truth’; but sometimes she talks as if truth could only be understood in terms


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of the first conception mentioned here, and so as essentially tied to communication and collective engagement. In fact, Arendt’s discussions of truth are often closely tied to her thinking about philosophy, and also her concern with the political as opposed to the philosophical. Perhaps ironically, Arendt sometimes follows Heidegger in using the ‘philosophical’ as an almost pejorative term that is contrasted with the notion of the ‘political’. Although there is room for ambiguity in interpreting her remarks here, the concept of philosophy that Arendt seems to take as problematic is that of philosophy as a solitary activity divorced from any sort of active or political life, and this conception of philosophy is closely tied to a conception of truth as similarly tied to the solitary and the apolitical (a conception that may also have dangerous political consequences). Yet against this conception of truth, and this solitary conception of philosophy – and of thought itself – one can also discern a view of truth in Arendt that ties it explicitly to the intersubjective and the communicative. Thus Arendt writes at one point, ‘Truth itself is communicative, it disappears and cannot be conceived outside communication; within the “existential” realm, truth and communication are the same’ (Arendt 1973: 86). What would it mean to understand truth as tied to communication in this way? And would not such a communicative conception of truth lead inevitably to some form of relativism? Arendt herself provides relatively little in the way of developed analysis of what might be involved in a ‘communicative’ conception of truth, but it is not hard to develop an analysis. A key move is to forgo the usual understanding of truth as a property of propositions. Indeed, the idea of the proposition can be seen as tied to the ontology of ‘stillness’ that was the focus for our opening comments here, and tied, therefore, to a conception of truth as based, not in the communicative, but rather in the solitary and static. The idea that truth is a property of propositions implies that truth is unchanging, eternal and fixed, since this is how propositions themselves are understood – they are, as it were, unchanging and eternal units of meaning, and as they remain stable and certain, so the truth value that attaches to them must be similarly permanent and steady. For some theoretical purposes in philosophy, such a conception of the proposition, the ‘what is said’ (lekton) as opposed to the words uttered, has been useful. Logicians, for example, construct semantic theories that are not intended to capture the vagaries of everyday conversation, but are intended to allow for the study of abstract relations between meaning, reference and truth. From the point of view of political philosophy, however, the notion of fixed, unchanging truth looks like a mere abstraction, one that cannot be taken at all seriously in the attempt to understand the core workings of political and social communities and the discourses in which they engage. Indeed, too much attention to technical studies of truth, truth makers, and truth bearers in logic and philosophy of language might have the consequence of encouraging a dismissive attitude towards the claims that we think Arendt is making. In what follows, then, we are not trying to undermine the importance of formal studies of truth in linguistics, philosophy and logic. Rather, we draw attention to


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a quite different understanding of truth and disclosure that can help in filling out Arendt’s sometimes elusive remarks. We start, then, by setting aside the logician’s idea of the proposition as a fiction: there are no propositions, but only sentences that are uttered at particular times and in particular contexts. Let us say it is to sentences understood in this way that truth properly attaches in the first instance. The sentence is a stating of something about something – which is precisely how the sentence implicates truth (in exactly the way that is suggested by Aristotle in his famous characterization of truth in the Metaphysics: “To say [legein] that what is is not, or that what is not, is, is false; but to say that what is is, and what is not is not, is true [alethes]; and therefore also he who says that a thing is or is not will say either what is true or what is false” [Aristotle 1933: 1011b1]). Sentences, of course, belong to languages, but to languages not as abstract systems of categories identified by the linguist and the logician, but again as things that have life in the actual practice of communication. Once we make this simple move, and give up on the attachment to the propositional as the key to truth, then most of the philosophical difficulties that are supposed to attach to truth disappear. If truth is a property of sentences, and so it is sentences that are true and false, then truth will exist only so long as there are sentences being spoken – only so long as there is the communicative practice in which sentences play a role. Truth thus becomes contingent in the same way that the meaning of sentences is contingent – both are dependent on how we use words, as well as on the way our words connect up to the world. Our words gather up and shepherd meanings, resonances and cadences that are sometimes adequate to what we are trying to say, but at other times seem to miss the mark to some extent or another. Likewise, not all in the world is unchanging, and words that are true to one situation at a certain time are no longer true even a short time later. Truths change to just the extent that the world itself changes and to the extent that our use of language changes. Truth remains the same to the extent that our use of words remains the same and to the extent that the world itself does not change. One might object, of course, that this still leaves open the old questions as to how truth itself should be understood – is it a matter of correspondence between sentences and world, or rather a matter of the communication– intentions of speakers, or instead has it to do with coherence between sentences, or perhaps just a matter of the pragmatic usefulness of certain sentences? Philosophers have tried to experiment with theories of truth and language that fit all of these possibilities, often with partial success. Correspondence theories notoriously make sense of phenomena that are hard for theorists of communication-intention to accommodate, and vice versa. All such theorizing makes a fundamental mistake through forgetting that all the notions central to theorizing truth—correspondence, communication-intentions, coherence, pragmatic usefulness and any others that we encounter – themselves derive whatever sense they have from being embedded in and dependent upon our prior practice of communicative engagement in which truth plays a central role.


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As already pointed out, the observation just made does not constitute an attack on formal work in philosophy or logic. Such work can present useful insights into how various concepts interrelate, and can suggest new ways of organizing our thoughts about truth, entailment and other logical and linguistic relationships. Our concern is with the scope and limits of systematization. No formal system has yet been able to deliver trouble-free, comprehensive, precise and non-paradoxical definitions of concepts such as truth, presupposition and reference. The moral we suggest is that we recognize the limits of formal theorizing – for attempts to give precise formulation to the nature of truth are bound to run up against problems that cannot themselves be resolved by appeal to formal systems or to some new form of precise discourse. As Wittgenstein cautions, in §81 of the Philosophical Investigations, to think that our everyday language only approximates to some ideal language or calculus is to stand at the brink of a misunderstanding (Wittgenstein 1953). In the light of such a remark, truth must also be understood, not as some philosophical ideal, but rather in its functional role in the operations of communication and understanding. It is just such a differently oriented approach to truth that Arendt attempts to provide. As she explores matters, the real character of truth comes most clearly to the fore when we reflect on the way in which communication is essentially a matter of our being able to use a mark or set of marks (whether written or spoken) in order to orient another person (or ourselves at another time) to some feature or features of the world at the same time that it also opens and keeps open a freedom in the other’s response to that feature or features – it opens up a space in which a determinate appearance is possible and yet maintains a freedom in the orientation to that appearance. It is thus that Heidegger, whose work remains influential in Arendt’s thinking (especially when it comes to the question of truth), talks of language, and the speaking that goes with language, as a matter of the making salient of things, the bringing of things to appearance, and yet as doing so in a way that holds open a free play of possibility in such appearance.3 It is thus that Heidegger can refer to truth as unconcealment – as aletheia.4

The Space of Appearance The invocation of the Heideggerian concept of truth as aletheia is an important point, since it seems to us that this is a notion that underlies much of Arendt’s thinking, even though it is virtually never made explicit.5 It is also an idea that underpins the thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer, another of Heidegger’s students, and our own reading of Arendt is heavily indebted, not only to Heidegger but also to Gadamer. For Gadamer, as for Heidegger and, we would argue, for Arendt, the possibility of communicative understanding always involves the recognition of our inevitable situatedness, and rejection of the privacy or interiority of meaning. As is clear from Truth and Method, and emphasized in later works, Gadamer not only regards


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understanding itself to be linguistically mediated, but always sees language itself has having a complex inter-personal character (not involving only the third person, but also, and more importantly, the second person) (see Gadamer: 1998, 2001; and also Malpas: 2010). It is this character of language, and its public aspect, that provides the basis for thinking about truth as something objective, despite the contingency to which we have already referred above. On this account, understanding is always based in our current situatedness, which allows us to encounter things from a particular perspective and with a particular set of interests – this is why Gadamer and Heidegger both insist on the essential historicality of understanding and the role of tradition. Yet inasmuch as understanding always involves an awareness of the existence of such alternative views, so it is always directed, in spite of its partiality, to the ‘object’ or ‘matter’ (Sache) at issue. In this respect, historical situatedness and tradition function, not as a base of determinate and prior agreement from which understanding proceeds, but rather as opening up a commonality that consists simply in a commonality of engagement between different interlocutors with respect to the same objects of concern – a commonality that Gadamer also insists is worked out only in and through language, and so one might say, in necessary interconnection with truth. In Arendt’s writings, this idea reappears as a key element in the constitution of the realm of common engagement – the public realm – which she also characterizes as the realm ‘of the real’. She writes: ‘Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object’ (Arendt 1998: 57–8).6 In this way, it seems, the variety of our ‘perspectives’ on the world turn out to be, not a barrier to our access to the world or to others, but the very means by which such access is effected. It is important to note the essentially political nature of Arendt’s and Gadamer’s accounts. While Arendt writes about the ‘massifying’ tendency of totalitarian regimes, in which worldlessness occurs – the phenomenon by which people are no longer able to participate and appear in the public realm – the same phenomenon is present to a lesser extent in many traditional and religious practices. For example, students of traditional medicine are required to learn by heart the texts that define the traditional formulas and thereby define the categories of the world for that medical practice. Likewise traditional religious training involves memorising and studying texts and interpretations with the aim of building a uniform perspective among acolytes. For both Gadamer and Arendt, the claim that such traditional practices are totalitarian would be not so much wrongheaded as simply exaggeration. A tradition that is no longer open to fresh perspectives, and which seeks to press all into uniformity, is one that has lost any sense of the individual and, simultaneously, of truth. In speaking, in saying something about something, which is to say, in making a claim to truth, we open up an interpersonal space in which something is allowed to appear, but to appear within a space of possibility. Something appears as determinate


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and as yet also open to determination – possibility is thus enabled through the projection of something as an actuality. Yet that projecting is always a projecting into a space of plural possibility; it is also a projecting into a space that is public and potentially contested. Arendt emphasizes the commonality of the space in which the appearing of things is possible. That space is an interpersonal space, and in an important sense it is a public space – we might even say that Arendt’s position is one that expresses a certain form of cosmopolitanism, in the sense that it is only within the public space that is centered on the space of the polis that the ordered world that is the cosmos can come into appearance and be formed as a world (the polis is thus, as Heidegger suggests, the polos around which the cosmos itself turns [Heidegger 1992: 89]). Such a position exactly parallels Heidegger and Gadamer’s conception of the formation of world through the engagement between human beings, and the interplay between human beings and the place in which they find themselves, an interplay that occurs in the opening of language. Yet as Arendt emphasizes the commonality of the open space of appearing, she also emphasizes its essential plurality. In The Human Condition she comments: ‘The end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective’ (Arendt 1998: 58). We would argue that the ending of the ‘common world’ is itself the closing down of the space of appearance that is also the space for the emergence of truth and meaning, and the space for the emergence of human being as such. Significantly, the maintenance of a common world is itself tied to the concept of truth, since truth itself contains within it the necessary idea of its own plurality and the plurality of speaking. Relativistic conceptions of truth, far from being pluralistic in the sense of associated with commonality, presage the ending of the common world of which Arendt’s speaks. Relativistic conceptions of truth, and any conception that would urge us, in the phrase of Gianni Vattimo (2009), bid farewell to truth are conceptions that also, in spite of their possible good intentions, cut off the possibility of the real engagement that underpins the realm of common human life and also the possibility of political engagement and political action. They do so by refusing to allow that in speaking we are making a claim on one another as well as on the world; it is this making of a claim that constitutes the real basis of political engagement and action, and that also opens up and maintains the space of political and human being-together. Such claims are not absolute, nor are they immune to negotiation, but they are not dispensable. The practice of politics takes place within the common world that is also, to some extent, opened up by the political itself. This common world is not a space whose plural character is to be understood as just a matter of sheer difference or alterity – such a conception of plurality is no conception of plurality at all, since it does not envisage any engagement between the plural positions it envisages. This is why relativistic positions, for instance, can be understood as positions that simply replace the true commonality of the world with the singularity of individual perspectives – perspectives that remain isolated from one another, remain outside of the realm of the


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communicative, remain within a certain form of the ontology of stillness. In this sense, too, relativistic conceptions, and conceptions that do not recognize the centrality of truth within the public space of appearance, must also be counted as conceptions that not only lead to a diminished understanding of the political, but also to a diminution of the proper basis for the ethical. In his famous argument for the claim that moral terms cannot be defined naturalistically, the English philosopher G. E. Moore introduced the open question argument. Whatever naturalistic way is proposed for defining ‘good’ – say in terms of what is pleasant – Moore thought there would be an open question about whether the definition worked. It is always possible to say, ‘I agree, the action was pleasant, but was it good?’ (Moore 1903:§13). But if our account is correct Arendt and Gadamer— and Heidegger – cannot be seen as looking for a way to found truth in politics and ethics either in formal definitions, or in more fundamental natural properties of the world. Ironically, Moore’s open question argument can provide a general way into understanding the role of ethics in the space of appearance. Because of our very relatedness, and because of the plurality of perspectives, there always has to be an open question possibility for nearly everything of substance that we want to say. Again, note that this is by no means a commitment to relativism. If relativism is correct, then there can be no open questions about substantive moral and political questions, for the answers to these are true for some and false for others. By contrast, in a world of plural perspectives, there will be no end of questions to open, and endless debate about how best to answer them. Ethical practice is not a matter of what we can do independently of one another, but of what we do in our essential relatedness to one another – a relatedness that we can now see is articulated in and through the common space of appearance in which our own being comes to appearance alongside the being of others. The claim that ethics makes on us is exactly akin to the claim made by truth itself. It is a claim that derives from our being always and already participants in the same complex space of appearance, and from the fact that the plurality of our being is itself something to be worked out only within the singularity that is the world. This conjunction of the plural and the singular, especially as it is understood in relation to the ethical and the political, is perhaps close to that which can be found in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (2000),7 but is clearly evident also in Arendt. What Arendt’s work suggests, however, in a way that remains obscure in Nancy, is how the notion of the ‘plural-singular’ must be understood, not only in relation to the public realm (and that implies much more than we have been able to explore here), but also in relation to the communicative nature of that realm, and the essential role played by truth in its constitution.

Notes 1 It would be more accurate to say that in Plato, there is an apparent tension between two ways of thinking of truth, and the search for it that correspond to two different aspects of his thought, a matter we return to later in the paper.


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2 Although, this also has the interesting consequence that each of us has to accept the truth of both our own beliefs and those of others – which means, for instance, when applied to relativism itself, accepting as true that my neighbour’s belief in the truth of relativism is true, as is my own belief in its falsity, is here the basis for the commonplace place objection concerning the self-contradictory or at least para-consistent character of relativism. 3 See, for instance, the discussion at the end of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Heidegger: 1996). 4 The account of truth and its relation to language that is offered here is similar to that which is developed in Malpas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Malpas: 1992) – while not discussed in the text above, the work of Donald Davidson is a key source here, especially his Truth and Predication (Davidson: 2005). 5 This is so notwithstanding Arendt’s strange comments (at least as they relate to Heidegger), in The Life of the Mind (Arendt 1977: I.15) regarding Heidegger’s talk of the ‘truth of being and its relation to the “meaning of being.” ’ 6 See also Arendt’s important discussion of the connection between speech and action in Chapter 5 (and especially her comments on what she calls ‘the space of appearance’, Arendt 1998: 199ff). In The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, Jacques Taminiuax points to the centrality of the idea of the common world in Arendt’s thinking (Taminiaux 1997: 92–3), as well as its origin in Aristotle’s comment in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1176b36ff, that ‘what appears to all, this we call being’ (Aristotle: 1969). 7 This is also a key idea in Malpas’s (1999) idea of ‘philosophical topography’ (a notion that underpins much of our approach here).

Bibliography Aristotle. 1933. Metaphysics, Books I–IX. Trans. Hugh Tredennick, London: Heinemann (Loeb edn). —. 1968. Nicomachean ethics. Trans. H. Rackham. London: Heinemann (Loeb edn). Arendt, Hannah. 1973. Men in dark times. New York: Penguin. —. 1977. The life of the mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn. —. 2003. Some questions of moral philosophy. In Responsibility and judgment, 49–146. New York: Schocken. Barnes, Jonathan. 1979. The Presocratic philosophers: Thales to Zeno. London: Routledge. Barth, Hans. 1976. Truth and ideology. Trans. Frederic Lilge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davidson, Donald. 2005. Truth and predication. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. 1998. Praise of theory. Trans. C. Dawson. New Haven: Yale University Press. —. 2001. Gadamer in conversation. Trans. C. Palmer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 1996. The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hume, David. 1978. A treatise of human nature. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, John. 1979. An essay concerning human understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Malpas, Jeff. 1992. Donald Davidson and the mirror of meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. Place and experience: A philosophical topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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—. 2010. The beginning of understanding: Event, place, truth. In Consequences of hermeneutics. 261–80. Ed. J. Malpas and S. Zabala, Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Moore, G. E. 1903. Principia ethica. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being singular plural. Trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1911. On truth and falsity in their ultra-moral sense. In Complete works, ed. Oscar Levy, Vol II. 173–92. London: George Allen & Unwin. Taminiuax, Jacques. 1997. The Thracian maid and the professional thinker: Arendt and Heidegger. New York: State Uiversity of New York Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 2009. Addio alla verità. Rome: Meltemi. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wolf, Christian. 1969. Grundsätze des Natur-und Völkerrechts. Halle: Renger.


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CHAPTER 5

Daimon Appearances and the Heideggerian Influence in Arendt’s Account of Political Action Trevor Tchir

Hannah Arendt proposes that political action discloses who the actor is, as it discloses the world. Arendt conceives action as deeds and speech that reveal disclose new or unexpected aspects of the world in ways that interrupt normalizing social processes. The meaning of a disclosive act is retrospectively judged in a discursive community of spectators, an exchange of opinions, or doxai. Arendt holds that action is only meaningful through the disclosure of who the actor uniquely is, a form of revelation that she posits as the basis of human dignity. She suggests that disclosive action’s existential achievement is a redemptive reconciliation to one’s existence (1959: 187). Arendt’s account of disclosive action helps us to reconceive the individuated actor, not as a sovereign and self-transparent subject whose action expresses an authentic individual essence or constative what, but rather as a decentered and ecstatic who whose action, in plurality with others, reveals meaningful dimensions of the shared world through the performance of acts and speech before public spectators. The idea that no actor can occupy a position of control with respect to his life story, that no one can make his story, extends to a critical displacement of the notion of freedom as sovereignty. It is generally acknowledged that Arendt’s account of action is a reworking of Aristotle’s notion of praxis, as interpreted by Martin Heidegger, one of Arendt’s early professors. Especially since the publication of the correspondence between Arendt and Heidegger, much has been written about their intimate relationship. In this discussion, however, I have limited my research to published texts and lecture notes, leaving their personal correspondence aside. Heidegger developed the ideas of Being and Time while offering lectures on Greek philosophy, the originality of which attracted young scholars from across Germany. At Marburg, in the winter semester of 1924–1925, Heidegger presented a course on Plato’s Sophist, which incorporated an introductory section on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. These lectures were attended by Gadamer, Strauss and Arendt, among others. It is striking how


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concepts that Heidegger engages within this particular course – in his reappropriation of Platonic and Aristotelian concepts that anticipate his existential analytic of Being and Time – find new, altered form throughout Arendt’s subsequent writing. Arendt adopts Heidegger’s image of freedom as an open and active disposition to Being, rather than as a characteristic of the will as self-mastered or self-transparent. Further, in her thesis that action reveals the who of the actor as it reveals the world, Arendt incorporates Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s resolute action as disclosive of both the who of Dasein and of the act’s context. Both thinkers engage the Greek notion of truth as aletheia, disclosure as un-covering or un-forgetting. Arendt, however, offers a superior account of the relationship between freedom and publically relevant action, as well as the phenomenon of the public engendering of action’s meaning and of the actor’s who, when she transplants Dasein’s most authentic mode of encounter with Being according to Heidegger – noetic vision above the opinions of the many – back down to the public realm, the site of exchange of doxai. In the final section of this discussion, I argue that the existence of a plurality of variously situated spectators of political events, and so the dignity of doxa, is incorporated into Arendt’s account of the moral-deliberative facet of action, both through her account of the Socratic two-in-one of thinking, and through her account of Karl Jaspers’s valid personality, who performs his thought in public, a kind of thought that has ‘gone visiting’ the standpoints of others.

Action’s Decentered Disclosure of the Who There exists a contradiction in action’s disclosure of the who, between the actor’s self-stylized performance that attempts to present his virtuosity to the public, and the ultimate impossibility of the actor’s controlling who he discloses. In The Human Condition, Arendt compares the who to the daimon of Greek religion, ‘which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters’ (1959: 159–60) . The daimon is a mediator between the gods and mortals, an advisor in the manner of the Oracles. Arendt notes: ‘Socrates used the same word as Heraclitus, semainein (to show and give signs), for the manifestation of his daimonion’ (ibid., 351n). Like the daimon of ancient Greece, the who is disclosed behind the back of the actor, visible only to spectators, but never fully controlled by the actor. According to Waterfield, a translator of Plato’s Republic, this personal deity is likely Pythagorean in origin (1998:, 418n) and was understood as ‘the genius or guardian spirit of your life – which, ultimately, makes you the particular individual you are, with your predilections and life-pattern’ (ibid., 457n). On one hand, the disclosure of the who is achieved through the public presentation of a coherent personality. Dana Villa suggests that the self prior to action, understood biologically and psychologically, is fragmented and dispersed, lacking objectivity or worldly reality (1996: 90). It is marked by a multiplicity of conflicting drives, needs, feelings and wills. Arendt holds that even action’s motives are hidden


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from the actor’s own introspection. Public appearance and discourse with others calls the divided self out from its interiority, where it must speak as a recognizable voice. For Arendt, it is a stylized actor, the public persona or valid personality, that appears before others in public as relevant. Arendt also holds, however, that the disclosure of the who is implicit in everything the actor says and does, including features that cannot be willfully concealed from the view of spectators. The actor never knows whom he discloses, despite his best attempts at the stylization of a public personality (Arendt 1959: 159–60). Even for those who encounter the actor, either as a co-actor or spectator, it is impossible to fully reify the appearance of the who ‘in the flux of action and speech’ (ibid., 161). So, who is disclosed, exactly? Arendt argues that most attempts to identify the who lead to a description of what he is, a description of universals, categories of social function or standards of human behavior that conceal the who’s uniqueness. Within the what, Arendt includes the actor’s talents or shortcomings, his function in the totality of social production, his biological traits, objects that represent his life’s work and even his moral intentions (159). Arendt presses the distinction between the existential who and the categorical what to distinguish properly political affairs as those that deal with a plurality of whos whom actors and spectators can never ultimately dispose of, as stable entities, according to a principle of reason or will (162). Given the plurality of unique whos, the logic of techne, which depends on stable and namable entities, is inadequate for fully reckoning with the complexity and dignity of human affairs. The impossibility of identifying a human essence in the who is due in part to the historicized conditionality of human coexistence (11). The identification of the who thus entails an identification of decentering conditions that situate action as a response to events, and is thus inseparable from the disclosure of meaning within the world. ‘Great’ deeds and speech disclose the significance of historical time and its everyday relationships. Action is world-disclosive; it has a revelatory capacity to become historical, since it takes place between discursive subjects who overlay the world of durable things and make it a place of appearance and meaning (162). Heidegger posits an ontological who that maintains itself as identical through changes in experiences and behavior (1962: 150). But who is this? Much of the existential analytic of Being and Time attempts to answer this question. Heidegger concludes that the question of who Dasein is can only be answered by demonstrating phenomenally the ontological origin of the unreified Being of Dasein (ibid., 34, 72). Heidegger presents Dasein not as a self-transparent subject or will, but as a ‘clearing’, an open structure of play, through which entities stand out as meaningful, given the context disclosed by Dasein’s taking a stand. This account of human existence, fundamental to Arendt’s account of action, suggests why the who often appears as vacuous, if one searches for a substantial, self-willing subject rather than for a conduit for the emergence of various forms of Being or meaning in the world. Heidegger’s account also centers around a particular notion of freedom, a ‘letting-be’ at odds with the notion of freedom as the assertion of will or the humanizing of nature through conceptual or material labor (ibid., 143). Similarly, Arendt


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defines action as free insofar as it is neither under the dictates of intellect nor will, free from motive and its intended effect. This is not to say that freedom and the performative disclosure of the who have nothing to do with the faculty of willing. On the contrary, Arendt writes in The Life of the Mind that action is the redemption of the inner war between the will and its counter will, between velle and nolle (1978: 101). Action that discloses the who is spontaneously propelled by the will, but free action must not be conceived by a particular determination of this will, be it moral or logical, for then the will would not be spontaneous. Freedom is here not a question of a subjective disposition of the will, or the successful objective actualization of a will that is mastered, but is rather grounded in a particular existential disposition within a shared world characterized by uncertainty. In Heidegger’s sense, the German word for ‘open’, frei, reveals its etymological significance as the root of ‘freedom’, Freiheit. Freedom is understood as an existential, open comportment to Being rather than as a disposition of a grounded subjective will. Heidegger describes Dasein as an entity whose characteristics are not properties present-at-hand, categories by which the what of Dasein can be understood, but rather existentialia (1962: 67, 71). Dasein exists in the performance of acts and the projection of possibilities in a world of reference relations into which Dasein is thrown. Dasein finds itself in a world it does not control, with a finite range of possibilities received historically and culturally. This ‘thrownness’ is what makes Dasein uncanny or unhomely, never quite at home in the world. Dasein first encounters beings within a totality of involvements, where each entity is pre-reflectively met as equipment for whatever project Dasein is concerned with (ibid., 99). Entities are projected upon a whole of significance or reference relations. The purpose of discourse is to articulate the intelligibility of the ‘there’ in which Dasein is disclosed along with the meaning of entities that speech picks out from the totality of these relations (80, 191, 204). In speech, the who is revealed along with the world.

Truth as Aletheia Heidegger’s recovery of truth as aletheia helps shape Arendt’s conception of the disclosure of the who as a decentered phenomenon in which the world is disclosed. Aletheia, according to Heidegger, was the central concept for understanding truth in pre-Socratic Greek experience. It signifies an unconcealment or un-forgetting. Heidegger sees the productionist ontological prejudices of the metaphysical tradition as obscuring a more primordial experience of Being, an experience from which traditional ontology, pioneered by Plato and Aristotle, is derivative. Heidegger seeks to make the question of Being and its history transparent and available for Dasein’s interpretive reappropriation, by uncovering the primordial experiences in which Western civilization achieved its first ways of determining and discovering Being. As Villa has already shown, Heidegger’s notion of aletheia, recast in Arendt’s notion of disclosure, gives Arendt a framework to consider the vita activa in a way that abandons a teleological approach based on a given definition of the what of human


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nature and its ends, to focus rather on the conditions necessary for the disclosure of meaning. In his 1942 Parmenides lectures at Freiburg, Heidegger suggests that the German Entbergung, or disclosure, comes closer to the original meaning of aletheia, but that Unverborgenheit, or unconcealedness, is the more direct translation (1992: 12). In the Marburg lectures that Arendt attended in 1924–1925, Heidegger states: ‘This privative expression indicates that the Greeks had some understanding of the fact that the uncoveredness of the world must be wrested’ (1997: 11). As aletheia signifies truth as an event (Ereignis) of disclosure, it must be differentiated from truth as a correspondence between a thought, representation or predicate, on the one hand, and a given state of affairs, on the other. This, according to Heidegger, is the notion of truth that the Socratic school introduced and that subsequently concealed the original experience of aletheia. According to Heidegger, whereas the ontologically primordial notion of logos is as an existentiale, a mode by which Dasein reveals a relation to Being performed within a dialectic between the hidden and the disclosed, logos became identified with assertion, so that grammar and language philosophy sought their foundations in the ‘logic’ of logos, which was based on the ontology of the present-at-hand, where there is no hidden remainder (1962: 209). Mark Wrathall writes that aletheia means that we see truth in an opening of the world. A being is true if it shows itself as that which it is – so what is originally unconcealed is a being, not an assertion about a being (2006: 265n). This is fundamental to Arendt’s conception of Being as appearance, as that which opens up to variously situated spectators. Although we view an entity from a particular standpoint, like spectators in a theatre, this relativity does not mean that we are cut off from the observed entity. Charles Guignon explains that what we see is not a mere representation – it is not unreal – rather, it is how the thing presents itself to us from that particular standpoint (2006: 13–14). As Jacques Taminiaux notes, Arendt deconstructs the paradox and fallacy of Platonic dualism at the root of the history of metaphysics, the primacy of Being over appearance, and the notion of a true world versus an apparent one (1997: 127). Aletheia implies a particular understanding of the nature of speech and discourse. Heidegger argues that assertions do not merely represent the world, but rather disclose it at the same time as they disclose the speaker (1997: 12). Speech is a way of orienting in the world so that a state of affairs can show up, so that certain relations stand out from the situation that before were apprehended in a pre-predicative, unarticulated totality. The first pre-predicative notion of unconcealment means that we are properly disposed to the unarticulated, practical totality from which propositions then make certain aspects of the situation manifest. Those aspects that we pick out and find salient will depend on who we are. For Heidegger, the history of metaphysics is a history of concealments and forgetfulness. Dasein grows into a traditional way of interpreting itself, so that its own possibilities are disclosed and regulated by this tradition. When tradition and its prevailing truisms become master, however, what they transmit are delivered over


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to Dasein as self-evident, which is itself a form of concealment. Guignon explains that epochs of the history of Being are brought about by events that disclose possibilities for a historical people, while concealing others. Humans may fall under the illusion that nothing is hidden, that what appears is the final truth about reality. Nothing remains a challenge or a new possibility, as the world presents itself like a collection of items for use, and everything is leveled to the sphere of the familiar. What is forgotten, in a second-order concealment, is that this epoch actually emerged out of concealment and that it itself conceals other human possibilities (Guignon 2006: 19). The self-evidence of tradition blocks access to its own sources, so that Dasein cannot go back and make them its own through what Arendt would call an act of augmentation. For Arendt, a disclosive deed serves to undo an order of forgetfulness. It breaks through the familiar and reveals new historical possibilities or augments possibilities that have lain dormant. Heidegger explains the daimon in the context of the Greek experience of man’s ecstatic or decentered role in the unconcealment of Being. Man is eudaimon if he is properly attuned to Being. The divine, or daimon, looks out into the ordinary, points and gives signs to man (Heidegger 1992: 117). It makes a claim on man as the bearer of logos and mythos, as he who is historically destined to help clear the way for Being to appear: “Where the daimonion, the divine which enters into unconcealedness, the uncanny, must be said explicitly, there the saying is legend, a mythos” (117). Arendt’s references to the daimon also portray the who as an ecstatic discloser of Being or transcendence. This is apparent especially if we read her account of action along with the Myth of Er, which was, for Heidegger, a primordial myth, one of the central legends of the Occidental tradition. The myth of Er is told in the final chapter of Plato’s Republic. It relates what becomes of souls between one life and the next, and the relative roles that necessity and choice play in determining man’s destiny. According to the myth, souls spend ten times the length of their last human life in the underworld or in the heavens, where they receive punishment or reward for their deeds. Then souls return to a meadow where they encounter the three Fates, the daughters of Necessity: Lachesis (who sings of the past), Clotho (who sings of the present), and Atropos (who sings of the future). Lachesis throws lots into the crowd of souls, determining the order in which each then chooses from a collection of sample lives. An intermediary declares: No deity will be assigned to you: you will pick your own deities. The order of gaining tokens decides the order of choosing lives, which will be irrevocably yours. Goodness makes its own rules: each of you will be good to the extent that you value it. Responsibility lies with the chooser, not with God. (Plato 1998: 375)

After the souls finish choosing, they approach Lachesis, who gives ‘each of them the personal deity they’d selected, to accompany them throughout their lives, as their guardians and to fulfill the choices they had made’ (378). With their daimon, they then pass under the spindles of Clotho and Atropos, and under the throne of Lady


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Necessity, thus fixing their chosen destinies. The souls then travel to the Plain of Oblivion, or Lethe. Here they camp by the River of Neglect (or Carelessness), from which they are all required to drink a certain amount, before being thrown back to Earth, like shooting stars, to be born again. This myth serves to illuminate many dimensions of Arendt’s account of disclosive action. Here, the daimon is described as the soul’s birth attendant, a connection to the Arendtian phenomenon of natality and beginning. Further, it articulates one’s fateful ‘thrownness’ into a situational context of action, the impossibility of fully controlling who one discloses. In the story, the order of tokens is assigned from without. But, on the other hand, the souls choose their own accompanying daimon. There is a degree of self-election after the order of choice is assigned. One can decide how one will act given one’s situation. Thus, the myth expresses the essential contradiction between thrownness and freedom at the root of disclosive action, as Arendt describes it. We may read the myth of Er as an account of Heidegger’s uncanny call of Being coming from both inside and outside the actor. This call is to act and speak in ways that reveal truth, that undo the forgetfulness imposed, according to the myth, on the Plain of Lethe.

Aristotelian Praxis and Poiesis, Phronesis and Techne Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle at Marburg was fundamental to Arendt’s account of action as free from instrumental reason (the calculation of means and ends) and as action that contains its own end in its disclosive performance. In Book VI of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle presents the chief intellectual virtues. Heidegger interprets this as Aristotle’s exposition of the multiplicity of possibilities of aletheia. Each virtue is read as a mode of disclosure by which Dasein affirms or denies the appearance of beings. The five modes of aletheia are techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, and nous (Heidegger 1997: 15). Our discussion focuses on techne and phronesis, the respective disclosive modes of poiesis and praxis. Heidegger proposes that in Book VI, Aristotle questions the entities to be disclosed, and whether the respective modes of disclosure properly disclose the archai, the beginning or founding principles of those beings. The second step, in which modes of disclosure are evaluated as to their ability to disclose the archai of beings, establishes a criterion for whether the mode of aletheia is a genuine one. Arendt likewise questions the conditions for the disclosure of the who and the world. Particularly in The Human Condition, she asks to what extent and under what conditions the modes of disclosure of labor, work and action disclose their archai. Heidegger reads techne as the know-how that guides production. The arche of the beings of techne is the eidos, the idea, and is imagined in the psyche of the producer, but is determined prior to producing. While this eidos guides the process of becoming that is the production of the finished work (ergon), this work does not, once completed, disclose its maker. Instead, the ergon resides beside (tara) the activity, and as


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finished work, is no longer the object of poiesis. Since the finished ergon is the telos of poiesis, the telos also resides outside of the maker, once the activity of poiesis is complete. Techne possesses the ergon as an object of its mode of aletheia only as long as the ergon is not yet finished; techne is only concerned with beings insofar as they are in the process of becoming. When it is finished, the ergon escapes the dominion of techne and becomes the object of use. As Taminiaux suggests, Aristotle sees poiesis as inferior to praxis partly because, once realized, the end of poiesis becomes a mere means relative to other ends (1997: 37). The ergon has a relation to something else, not an end in itself, but for further use. In techne the arche is, in a sense, not available (Heidegger 1997: 15, 28–29). The Heideggerian and Arendtian difference between what and who comes directly from the Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis, as Taminiaux explains: Poiesis aims at a product that is external to it, in which it reaches its term, and shares its reproducibility with those general aptitudes required to produce it. Praxis has no external product that may be generalized. What action introduces into the world is the uniqueness of someone: not the initiative he or she has of making something, but the initiative open to the individual for being somebody. (1997: 86)

Dasein usually understands Being in an improper mode, according to everyday modes of use. Taminiaux writes that according to Heidegger the ‘production ruling over everyday concern is animated by a specific gaze . . . the circumspect sight on the surroundings and networks of means and ends looming inside it’ (Taminiaux 1997: 39). This is the know-how of techne. An authentic mode of understanding Being, conversely, involves Dasein understanding itself according to its own potentialityfor-being. In the case of praxis the arche and the telos reside within the actor. Praxis is for its own sake: hou heneka. Heidegger writes that the life of man is characterized by praxis and by aletheia, ‘the uncoveredness of Dasein itself as well as of the beings to which Dasein relates in its actions’ (1997: 27). Phronesis is a mode of disclosure in the service of praxis, a disclosure that, according to Heidegger, makes an action transparent to itself. Phronesis is deliberation over that which is good for the deliberator. That which phronesis discloses is the ariston anthropon ton practicon, what is best for man among things attainable by action. Taminiaux adds: “Poiesis is subservient, while praxis being oriented toward living-well is free because its desire is liberated from sheer necessities and usefulness and acting on this basis makes a singular existence worthy of being commemorated or commended as exemplary’ (1997: 38). In the case of poiesis, the telos is a being over and against Dasein, whereas in praxis, the telos is the proper Being of man. Thus, Dasein is the arche of the deliberation. What phronesis deliberates about is not what brings praxis to an end; a result is not constitutive for an action, but only the eu, the how, is constitutive (Heidegger 1997: 34–7) . The telos is the eupraxia, so that the concern is not that something should come to pass, but that the action comes to pass in the correct way. This notion is paralleled in Arendt’s


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well-known idea of the self-contained dignity of the performative disclosure, action as an end in itself. The telos of phronesis, Dasein itself, is a for the sake of which, not an in order to, a distinction Arendt recasts repeatedly when explaining the nature of the inspiring principles and meanings of action. Heidegger’s exposition of the characteristics of a ‘situation of action’ is decisive in Arendt’s notion of the who and the world disclosed through action. Heidegger posits, following Aristotle, that action is framed by five conditions: first, that of which it is the action; second, the means available; third, the objects of use standing in a determined possibility of use, so that Dasein can freely dispose of them; fourth, the time in which action is carried out; fifth, Dasein’s being with others (Heidegger 1997: 100–01). The entire context of acting Dasein, from arche up to telos, is disclosed by phronesis. This is an early source of Arendt’s idea that performative actors disclose the world situation that contextualizes their acts. According to the structure of phronesis, the action, that in favor of which Dasein resolves, is anticipated. In this anticipation, which is, in a way, also the arche, the circumstances of the situation of action are not given, but are still concealed. It is only out of the constant regard toward that which Dasein resolves that the situation becomes transparent. What does not translate to Arendt is the notion that phronesis makes action fully transparent to itself. While Arendt would allow that the actor may learn about himself and the world through his act, she resists the notion of self-transparency. Much of the tradition following Aristotle understands phronesis as involving the positing of good ends. While Arendt’s actor may envision a telos and have good intentions, his act throws him into the realm of appearance, where transparency is impossible, and where intended ends cannot always be attained. Thus, instead of emphasizing the telos of action, Arendt emphasizes the disclosure of its arche, the who. Action is always thrown into the web of relationships, where it sets off new processes. Like poiesis, it has effects that become part of the world over against man. Part of the reason for this is the existence of spectators and the new meanings that their doxai attribute to the actions they judge.

Authentic Dasein and Doxai Arendt’s notion of plurality is an alteration of the Heideggerian notion of Mitsein (with-being), the idea that Dasein always exists among others. This difference is fundamental to how Heidegger and Arendt differ in their answers as to how the who is disclosed. There are, according to Heidegger, different ways of being with others, which allow for more or less of an authentic existence. For the most part Dasein lives in an inauthentic way in relation to others. Heidegger refers to others as the anonymous, the public das Man (the They) (1962: 164). The They maintains itself according to an average verdict of what it regards as valid, successful, permitted or of interest. This tends to level what is unique and exceptional, and to gloss over the original meanings of linguistically transmitted cultural sources by treating them as common sense. The set of interpretations maintained publicly tends to control and distribute


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an average understanding and state-of-mind with regard to beings and events (212). The average ways things are interpreted provide self-assurance, covering over the essential groundlessness of interpretations. Dasein’s concerns become dispersed in the They, and this makes it difficult for authentic individuation, in which Dasein makes possibilities its own. Dasein gets so caught up in the average, authoritative opinion of the They that it loses sight of its possibility of contributing to the disclosure of Being. Like Arendt’s ‘rule by nobody’ in the bureaucratized world that is a symptom of her ‘rise of the social’ (Arendt 1959: 35), Heidegger’s image of the They implies an agency of which one can say: ‘It was no one’ (Heidegger 1962: 165). Thus, no one is individuated; no one can be held responsible for his action. Guignon writes that among the They, Dasein becomes replaceable, mere points of intersection of social roles and functions. We become busy but tranquilized, and assured that everything has already been worked out and that nothing calls for a responsible decision (Guignon 2006: 29). In its average everydayness, the who of Heidegger’s Dasein is the nobody characteristic of the They. It is this inauthentic mode of existence that reflects Dasein’s fallenness, Dasein’s usual tendency to become lost in fascination with the public interpretation of the world. This interpretation bears an average intelligibility and appears falsely as a complete disclosure of Being. Dasein forgets that there can be other elements of Being that can be disclosed, and that the public disclosure of meaning rests in concealing other possible interpretations and possibilities of Being. The effect is a reassuring concealing of public opinion’s own contingency. Dasein has fallen into the public world, and away from itself as an authentic potentiality. Heidegger presents the possibility of another kind of comportment, that of authentic existence. Through it, we come to a clearer understanding of both Dasein’s existence as care, with its projection of existential possibilities, but also, as Villa has shown, of the theoretical background for a number of fundamental distinctions in Arendt: the public versus private realm, freedom versus necessity, meaning versus instrumentality, and political versus social (Villa 1996: 115). We also come to understand a fundamental difference between Heidegger and Arendt, highlighted by Taminiaux, between Heidegger’s who, individuated through a speculative withdrawal from plurality, and Arendt’s who, individuated through action within the context of intersubjective plurality. Heidegger’s description of the authentic Dasein in Being and Time picks up from his earlier reading of Aristotle at Marburg. Heidegger interpreted Aristotelian phronetic praxis as an activity concerned not with the achievement of particular ends, but rather with Dasein’s comportment itself as the arche and for-the-sake-ofwhich. In his image of authentic Being-toward-Self, Dasein’s authentic attitude is not geared toward a variety of posited ends, but rather emanates from Dasein’s care for itself. In care, the constancy of the self, as anticipatory resoluteness, gets clarified (Heidegger 1962: 369). An authentic mode of Being, one that pulls Dasein up from dispersal in the They, implies Dasein’s being-free for its own potentiality and self-transparency with regard to its different possibilities. To find itself out of the


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They, Dasein must first have its potential for an authentic Being-one’s-self attested to through the voice of conscience, revealed as a call. The call is an appeal to Dasein, calling it to take action and to realize its own potentiality-for-Being-its-Self, which Heidegger calls resoluteness. Resoluteness is authentic disclosure, attested by conscience (ibid., 313–18, 341–43). The call of conscience never suggests a content for action. It never tells Dasein anything useful, calculable or assured. Expectations that it should are disappointed, and, according to Heidegger, underlie a material ethic of value. Such expectation would also hinder the free nature of action that the call of conscience spurs (340). The resolution is the disclosive projection of what is possible at the time, given the situation. Guignon writes that as the authentic individual commits resolutely, he brings himself into the situation by defining how things will matter in relation to his resolution, so that only the resolution itself can provide what kind of stand to take (2006, 28–30). The call of conscience comes from Dasein itself. This call to Dasein by Dasein, however, comes not in a self-willed, voluntary form. The contradiction at work here brings us to the heart of the unfolding the nature of the who. The call is similarly ecstatic in Arendt’s account. I want to emphasize again that Arendt accentuates these ecstatic elements of action’s disclosure of the who in her periodic references to the daimon figure, which, in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, is a voice of conscience involved in the two-in-one, a voice that arises in specific worldly situations but that prescribes no specific content for action, and comes in an uncanny way, both from within and outside the actor. Being toward one’s own potentiality means that Dasein is already ahead of itself. There always remains a potentiality for Being that is not yet actual, still to be settled. Dasein never reaches wholeness until death (Heiddegger 1962: 236, 279–80). As long as Dasein is alive and continues resolutely to take a stand, Dasein’s identity is not a settled matter, but open to reinterpretation. This partly explains how a complete image of the what of the self cuts off or conceals further possibilities of Dasein, in its reification. It is also a reason why Dasein itself, as a constant not-yet, can never get a full grasp on its own who (292). Dasein’s projection of possibilities in the face of its own oncoming death is, for Heidegger, the source of Dasein’s individuation, its principium individuationis. This notion resonates in some ways with Arendt’s argument that the who of the actor can only adequately be narratively rendered once the life of the actor has ended. Until then, there still remain possibilities, situations in which to act. Here Arendt engages the Aristotelian idea that man is only eudaimon at the end of a complete life (Aristotle 1998: 14). Similarly, according to Arendt, self-disclosure can only become fully manifest at the end of a complete life, when the spectator’s judgement and consequent narrative is rendered. Arendt, however, reverses Dasein’s primacy of Being-toward-death, in favor of the notion of natality, or action as a redemptive response to one’s birth. While an actor may have his impending death in mind as an existential condition of his action, Arendt proposes that the actor individuates himself by responding to the fact of his birth, by responding to his first beginning with


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further beginnings: ‘Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought’ (1959: 111). Authentic resoluteness of Dasein as a groundless projection of possibilities re-emerges in Arendt’s notion of public courage and performative disclosure as containing their own arche and telos. This performance is delivered into an intersubjective web of relationships, one that recasts Heidegger’s notions of ‘thrownness’ and guilt. There is a crucial difference, however, between Heidegger and Arendt regarding the possibilities of individuation in relation to others. Heidegger maintains that the public stance of the They is something into which Dasein falls, and that authentic existence can only occur by transcending this realm of others. Conversely, it is precisely in the realm of the public, the intersubjective realm of appearance and doxa, that Arendt proposes that freedom and individuation must occur, despite the risk of the appearance of unreflective doxa. Arendt admits that guilt, contingency and ‘thrownness’ are part of public performance, that this is part of why it takes courage to appear in public, where our acts become part of the web of relations that we cannot control, and biography will be determined by the opinion of spectators. This, however, does not mean that we fall away from an authentic realm of disclosure, or attunement to Being. Rather, it is only in public, among others, that we individuate at all and come to learn about the situation that provides the context of our actions. In a 1948 article now translated as ‘What is Existential Philosophy?’ Arendt writes that, according to Heidegger, the essential character of authentic Dasein is its being separate from the They of the world that entangles it, and that only in devoting itself to being a self in the mode of guilt, facing the nothingness of Death, can it reach a principium individuationis (Arendt 1994: 181). Dasein can only be itself by pulling back into itself from being-in-the-world. Villa writes that Heidegger posits the most promising disclosive and authentic activity as the solitary poetic and creative activity that uncovers the truth of Being that has been concealed by the idle talk of the public realm, rather than as ‘doxatic’ political action within the public realm (1996: 154). In contrast to Heidegger’s monological and elitist concept of the singular creative figure, Arendt’s actor appears as a representative of humanity. In her later writing, Arendt incorporates within the actor’s resoluteness the element of responsibility toward the world, most especially through her theory of judgement. Taminiaux reads Arendt’s theory of disclosive political action as a sustained response to Heidegger’s transformation of Aristotelian praxis into a conception of an authentic mode of seeing. After Heidegger’s reappropriation, phronesis is no longer the judgement of private and public matters, but a solipsistic resoluteness. For Heidegger, individuation occurs through Dasein’s silent, internal and solitary confrontation with nothingness, with its own mortality, and as an answer to the call of conscience, Gewissen. This conception of individuation is counter to expression and communication, the sharing of words and deeds (Taminiaux 1997: 34). The world in Heidegger’s account is not held in common by variously positioned doxai, as it is in Arendt, but is ‘revealed only by the encounter with nothingness experienced through


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anxiety by a radically isolated existing being’ (ibid., 34). This extracts many aspects of Aristotelian phronesis, the necessity of plurality, the regard for others, exercise of virtue in public, and ‘doxatic’ excellence in rendering a valid opinion. Following Book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Heidegger ends up placing sophia and the contemplative life higher on the scale than phronesis, because through it Dasein has the possibility of athanazein, immortality. For Heidegger – who never questions Plato’s identification of bios theoretikos, the understanding of Being, as the highest life, above bios politikos and doxa – these other forms of life are a sign of Dasein’s fallenness. Arendt sees in Heidegger the philosopher’s hostility to the polis, to public opinion as opposed to the authentic Self. From his perspective, the public realm only conceals the truth. Only by withdrawing from the world does authentic Dasein individuate itself. Taminiaux traces Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as a unique mode of seeing, removed from the fallen sphere of the They, to his distinction between a symbolic order of logos and an intuitive order of noetic vision, a distinction following Husserl. While Heidegger’s notion of authentic Dasein is pure or devoid of symbolism, Arendt’s retrospective narration of the who opens up to ‘unlimited symbolizing’ (Taminiaux 1997: 87). Husserl distinguishes between referring, the function of the symbol, which indicates a relationship between an indicator and something indicated, and signification, which is ‘putting in view that at which it aims’ (Taminiaux 1997: 60). Following Husserl’s distinction, Heidegger delineates the phenomenon from the mediateness of the symbolic, or indirect representation. According to Heidegger, while semantic logos shows something understandable, only apophantic logos shows something from within itself, lets something be seen by pointing it out, unveils that about which it speaks. Heidegger’s first distinction between Dasein’s everyday comportment versus its authentic way of being corresponds to his second distinction between the symbolic and the intuitive (Taminiaux 1997: 66). Logos stands in a second position of the disclosure of Being, compared to speechless noetic vision, the intuitive order. For the most part, the sign is merely a tool ready-to-hand for Dasein’s concerned production (67). Pure noein, intuitive seeing, is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being that entities possess and is the purest and most primordial kind of truth. Being, as the surplus with respect to the given properties of entities and situations, is available to intuition. Intuition sees that which an intentional act reveals, while transcendence is the understanding of the surplus or excess Being of beings. So, according to Heidegger, the authentic self should be approached by means of the intuitive order, not the symbolic one. Logos is ‘purified of any communication whatsoever, of any expression, even of any monologue, so as to be collected in the silent hearing of a call with no other referent, no other caller, no other aim than the Selbst’ (Taminiaux 1997: 76). Contrarily, for Arendt, the who is revealed to others through speech and deed, in a context of plurality, and its immortality depends on retrospective narrative, a concretization of fragile and fleeting action through stories whose exemplary order can be interpretively expanded in the future. This is another element of Arendt’s thought


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well captured by the daimon figure, which, according to Greek religion, was a sign of the Oracles. Julia Kristeva notes that these signs were ‘condensed, incomplete, and atomized’ in a way that gave rise to the ‘infinite action of interpretation’ (2001: 74). Arendt responds by bringing praxis and individuation back into the realm of public, discursive relations. The presentation of a valid doxa is the foundation of Karl Jaspers’s notion of valid personality. Doxa is how the world opens up to the subject, so that by disclosing one’s doxa, the who also discloses a valid perspective on the world. Arendt writes in her laudatio to Jaspers that world-disclosive action and its judgement, through the appearance of the valid personality, make the public realm a spiritual realm. That the public realm is a spiritual realm means that it is the space in which transcendent Being may be disclosed, the meaning of phenomenal appearances, but in a way that requires the symbolic or representative order, in an active and continual interpretive expansion of spectator judgements. Michael Gendre notes that because Heidegger’s Dasein is permeated with negativity, or structural transcendence, it can disclose aspects of other beings. This transcendence, or the ontological difference between Being and beings, is the ground of Dasein’s truth disclosure (Gendre 1992: 31). The disclosure of transcendence, its ‘vindication’ (ibid., 32), occurs not through noetic seeing, but rather through action and judgement within the phenomenal world, the actor’s introduction of the new into the world and the spectator’s affirmation or refusal of appearances according to a standard of which the appearance is exemplary, a gesture that, as Gendre suggests, secures the link between immersion within the phenomenal realm and the withdrawal into thinking, the link between appearance and Being.

Performing the Two-In-One Arendt’s public address to Jaspers – given on the occasion of Jaspers’s acceptance of the Peace Prize of the German book trade – links the spiritual dimension of the public realm to the performance of one’s thought as a valid personality, the testing of one’s thinking activity in the form of public judgements articulated before a plurality of spectators, which is to ‘answer before mankind for every thought’ (Arendt 1995: 75). Arendt highlights that the performative, public disclosure of the who is decentered not only by the world situation to which the valid personality’s speech responds, but also by the doxai of spectators who judge its meaning and whose standpoints the speaker has already potentially visited (73–4). We recall that the who disclosed in action, the who depicted in The Human Condition, was emptied of moral intention, something Arendt saw as pertaining to the universal categories of the what. Read in light of Arendt’s treatment of Jaspers’s valid personality and the Socratic dialogues, however, Arendt’s who regains moraldeliberative force. Arendt describes Socrates’ two-in-one, later called conscience, as the fellow who awaits Socrates at home, with whom he converses in quiet (1978: 190). By Arendt’s reading, Socrates’ daimon is a sign sent by Apollo, the God of the oracles,


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and makes Socrates examine his own life, a life in service to the God through activity and full awareness. She writes that Socrates’ ‘life is a service to the god because he makes others do what his daimonion made him do’ (1960: 10). In a course on Plato given at Columbia in 1960, Arendt explicitly relates the daimon to Theos, ‘the divine working principle’ (1). Here Arendt wonders of the daimon: ‘Is it conscience?’ (1). In these lectures Arendt concludes that the daimon, as the divine principle for Socrates, is precisely the capacity to think, the two-in-one as a thinking dialogue between me and myself. This activity accesses thoughts that, in Arendt’s words, ‘are never anything like properties that can be predicated of a self or a person’ (1978: 42). The origin of our thinking activity, that which appears to men as a divine element, is uncanny in the sense of coming from both inside and outside the thinker, like Heidegger’s call of conscience and Socrates’ daimon. Arendt writes: ‘The experience of the activity of thought is probably the aboriginal source of our notion of spirituality in itself . . .’ (44). In The Life of the Mind, Arendt proposes that thought is marked by duality, a conversation between myself and I, an activity of asking and answering. For Socrates, the daimon is that which helped him think through the aporia, the perplexities, that he encountered in this inner dialogue (Arendt 1960: 6). Conscience’s criterion for action is ‘whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words’ (Arendt 1978: 191). In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the jury that on that day, his daimon never once objected to his course of action. In the activity of thought, other individuals, either alive or dead, are represented in the internal dialogue. A prospective spectator is represented. Thus, the duality of the two-in-one’s thinking reflects the essential alterity of the space of appearance. This two-in-one of thought, this original duality, is the internal reflection of the plurality of the external world and ‘explains the futility of the fashionable search for identity’ (187). This is powerfully represented in the image of the daimon, like Heidegger’s call of conscience, announcing itself both from inside and from outside the agent. That moral deliberation prior to action requires an internalization of the plurality of the world gives further credence to Arendt’s situating free and disclosive action in the sphere of intersubjectivity, rather than accepting Heidegger’s authentic Dasein as authenticating and individuating itself through noetic seeing that ultimately detaches itself from the realm of intersubjectivity and the symbolic order.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1959. The human condition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. —. 1960. Plato. Seminar at Columbia University, New York, N.Y., Subject File, 1949–1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. —. 1978. The life of the mind. San Diego: Harcourt. —. 1994. What is existential philosophy? In Essays in understanding: 1930–1954. Ed J. Kohn, 163–87. New York: Schocken. —. 1995. Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio. In Men in dark times, 71–80. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co. Aristotle. 1998. The Nicomachean ethics. Trans. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.


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Gendre, M. 1992. Transcendence and judgement in Arendt’s phenomenology of action. Philosophy and Social Criticism 18 (1): 29–50. Guignon, C. B. Ed. 2006. The Cambridge companion to Heidegger. New York: Cambridge University Press. (2nd edn). Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. —. 1992. Parmenides. Trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Pres. —. 1997. Plato’s Sophist. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2001. Hannah Arendt. Trans. R. Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. Plato. 1998. Republic. Trans. R. Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Taminiaux, J. 1997. The Thracian maid and the professional thinker: Arendt and Heidegger. Trans. M. Gendre. Albany: State University of New York. Villa, D. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger: The fate of the political. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wrathall, M. A. 2006. Truth and the essence of truth in Heidegger’s thought. In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. C. B. Guignon, 241–67. New York: Cambridge University Press. (2nd edn.)


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CHAPTER 6

Individuality and Politics: Thinking with and beyond Hannah Arendt Anna Yeatman

It is indeed as though everything that is alive — in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others – has an urge to appear, to fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its ‘inner self ’ but itself as an individual. (Arendt 1978: 20; emphasis in the original)

Introduction Hannah Arendt’s thought is noteworthy for many things. Among these, and perhaps rather neglected in the reading of and commentary on her work, is her idea of individuality. For Arendt, individuality is phenomenal in character, and any interiority is anchored in the phenomenal–worldly existence of someone who risks appearing to, disclosing herself and thus becoming an individual in the company of other individuals. It is through how a creature expresses and enacts its quality of being alive as a distinct being in relation to its fellows and how they receive and make sense of this appearance that individuality is constituted. All living beings seek to appear as individuals to others with whom they have a world in common. Individuality, then, is a phenomenological and relational reality wherein appearance, as the action of the one who seeks to appear, the plural existence of beings who both seek to appear and to respond to such appearance, and the world that they share are the three terms. So far, Arendt’s idea of individuality applies to all living beings, and it is clear she intended this, but of course she is most interested in the kind of individuality that is characteristic of the species that uses speech – the human species. It is speech that makes possible the mental activities of humans (thinking, judging and willing) and that ensures that the urge to appear of the human being will take the form of deeds, either accompanied by words or designed to provoke the words of the others, the spectators of such deeds. It is speech that transforms the appearance of the individual into the disclosure of an actor. By the same token, the individual may not be willing to risk such disclosure of herself, and, in this case, will avoid the promise of speech and action.1 In seeking to appear to others, by means of deeds and speech, the human


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being (the actor) must engage what it means to be a unique being within a plurality of such beings who have to share a world and work out shared terms of coexistence. It is in this sense that individuality is not only inherently relational, it is also inherently political. Arendt’s idea of individuality is compelling. It is also unusual, for Arendt sets herself against the entire Western tradition of thinking about individuality. In this tradition, individuality is understood as the emanation of something that already exists independently of its appearance or expression, something that is said to inhere within the very being of the individual. The same proposition is made regardless of whether ‘the individual’ at issue is a single individual human or a people. In this frame of reference, the world of appearance, involving as it does a plurality of unique beings, is radically discounted and is valued only for its instrumental value in serving the individuality that is posited as an already existent substance. Arendt, then, can be understood as offering an alternative account to the one we find in liberal thought where there is an easy slide from positing the individual singular to positing the people or the group as an individual singularity. Liberal thought is weak precisely in relation to what it takes to be most axiomatic – the positing of individuality as such – for it confers on it a self-evident character. It is this that makes possible the slide from the individual human being to an individual collectivity. Arendt’s account of individuality cannot be applied to collectivities or groups for, by their nature, these are social entities that substitute the demands of group membership for the freedom of individuality and for the distinctive relationship that is one of inter-individuality, what Arendt called plurality. Unlike liberal thinkers, Arendt offers a theoretical account of individuality. Individuality occurs only in the context of an earth-bound relationship between human beings. This is not just any relationship. It is one in which human beings desire to appear as distinct beings to their fellows and in which their fellows are receptive to such appearance. One or both of these conditions may not obtain. Arendt’s work on individuality can be understood as a series of reflections on the nature of these conditions. For Arendt, the appearance of individuality has two modes. One is birth: someone new with a given set of characteristics appears in the human world. The second is a ‘second birth’ when the individual risks disclosing herself to others in action. In her emphasis on individuality as appearance, Arendt turns it into a relational and worldly phenomenon. She decisively cuts away any suggestion that individuality is monadic in character or that its relationship with others articulates something already in existence. Arendt refuses all forms of solipsism. In particular, she rejects philosophical solipsism wherein individuality is understood to be contingent on a withdrawal from the world of human relationships into the activity of thinking. Taminiaux (1997; see also Tchir this volume in Chapter 5) argues that this type of critique was driven by Arendt’s rejection of Heidegger’s philosophical solipsism, the notion that ‘the only authentic form of individuation’ occurs in the solitary and worldless


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activity of thinking (Taminiaux 1997: 47), an intentional turning away from human plurality.2 Arendt agrees that the activity of thinking requires a human being to withdraw from immersion in worldly practice and relationships – thereby creating a space within which to think undisturbed by worldly ties – but not only does she insist that such withdrawal is only relative and partial, she refuses to accept the proposition that it is in the process of inner retreat that a person finds his own true being, his individuality. Thus Arendt refuses to ground the worldly appearance of individuality in something that is said to already inhere within the individual. While this secures her ability to offer an account of individuality, there is also something defensive about her refusal to engage with psychoanalytic thinking about the self. Arendt insists on the chaotic darkness of one’s inner life, an unintelligibility that deserves protection, for it is this that harbors the unpredictability and spontaneity of individuality. Disclosure or appearance is integrally tied to what such disclosure hides. Arendt is closer than she may have wished to psychoanalysis, in a statement such as this: I shall now focus more closely on the principle of presence in absence and absence in presence, a concept that lies at the heart of the Freudian conception of the dialectically constituted/decentered subject. This principle subtends the dialectical movement between mutually negating and preserving dimensions of experience. Presence [consider here Arendt’s term ‘appearance’] is continually negated by what it is not, while all the time alluding to what is lacking in itself. That which is absent is always present in the lack that it presents. (Ogden 1996: 20–21)

Arendt’s insistence on the chaotic and ever-changing character of the internal emotional–somatic life of the individual is well taken. She remains, however, antagonistic to a conception of the self, for she thinks this must lead in the direction of positing ‘a closed, integrated, organically grown and cultivated individual who then as it were looks around to see where in the world the most favorable place for his development might be’ (Arendt 1970a: 8). Yet she assumes without explanation precisely what psychoanalytic thinkers such as Winnicott were interested in: how is it that an individual acquires the ability to contain internally his or her chaotic and ever-changeful emotional–somatic states? Winnicott, and other post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers of the Object Relations tradition, explain how it is possible for the individual to acquire sufficient internal organization or integration to become the center of its experience. This is a process by which the individual acquires a sense of self. The process may not occur at all or it may only occur partially. The critical factor is the provision and the quality of ‘the facilitating environment’ (Winnicott’s term) offered to someone on her birth by those who are her parental others. In effect, Winnicott and those he has influenced (for example, Alvarez) propose that the baby’s individuality, its aliveness, appears only as it is actively invited to appear by its parents. Here seeking to appear to others is first acquired as an active desire only if those on whom one as a baby is absolutely dependent, invite and take pleasure in one’s appearance. These psychoanalytic accounts of the vicissitudes of a baby’s acquisition


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of a sense of self bring out how the spectator role – adopted by those who receive and make sense of the appearance of the individual – is a form of action requiring something more than just being present as witnesses or spectators. This something more is an invitation to the individual to seek appearance. Arendt offers a conception of individuality, especially in The Life of the Mind, that resonates with Winnicott’s idea of ‘the true self.’ wherein individuality ‘means little more than the summation of sensori-motor aliveness’ (Winnicott 1990: 149). Winnicott provides an account of how, depending on the availability of a facilitating environment, the infant achieves unit status or a degree of internal organization that permits her to experience herself as the centre of her subjective experience. Arendt seems to fear that if she concedes the existence of an interiority that is organized as a self, she may concede too much to the tradition she has set herself against. Thus, when in The Life of the Mind she draws on the work of the Swiss philosophical biologist Adolf Portmann, she does so selectively. She takes up only one of two characteristics Portmann attributes to living things – Selbstdarstellung, which she translates as self-display, a dynamic activity associated with a desire to appear to others. She ignores the other characteristic – Weltbeziehung durch Innerlichkeit, an activity of relating to the world that arises out of an organized interiority. Marjorie Grene (1974: 269–70) explains this second characteristic: ‘Display’, however, is not simply color, sound, smell, as such, but the exhibition to the senses of animals of perceptible forms and patterns characteristic of other animals, whether of their own or other species. It is a display of – what? Living things are not mere surfaces, nor are they, as used to be said, simply ‘sacks full of functions’. Just as their superficies, their appearances to one another, form a significant, indeed essential, aspect of their nature, so does what very broadly speaking one can call their ‘inner life’. A second essential character of living things, in other words, inseparably allied to but contrasted with display, consists in the fact that organisms are centers of perceptions, drives, and actions. (Grene 1974: 270; emphases in the original)

Arendt seems to concede this when, in The Life of the Mind (1978, 21), following Portmann, she suggests: ‘In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness.’ Yet she (1978, 27) cannot follow this through lest she seem to resubscribe to the solipsistic idea of individuality as a ground that precedes and causes how the individual appears to others: ‘Could it not be that appearances are not there for the sake of the life process, but, on the contrary, that the life process is there for the sake of appearances?’ Arendt’s inability to countenance an inner life for individuality that is not solipsistic limits her account of individuality. She cannot explore the possibility that a world wherein it is possible for human beings to be co-present as individuals, and thereby to engage creatively their potential for initiative, is also a world where the appearance or disclosure of individuality to others has internal resonance and effect. Essentially, she fails to understand the dynamic relationship between the intersubjective and the intra-psychic aspects of individual experience. Even while her thought


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suggests that what she calls the life process (the internal processes of being alive as an organism) must be mediated by the articulation of individuality qua spontaneity in relation to the world of human affairs, she continues to think that organic functioning is species-generic: ‘Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others, and this appearance is by no means the outward manifestation of an inner disposition; if it were, we probably would all act and speak alike’ (Arendt 1978: 34; emphasis in the original). Expressing one’s feelings in speech involves the symbolic mediation of what Arendt proposes as a species-specific capacity for affect, that which makes the emotion of anger the same in all humans prior to speech. Because it is an individual who speaks, the symbolic mediation of affect is simultaneously its individualization. Arendt says as much in referring to Aristotle’s distinction between the sameness of ‘the affections of the soul’ for all and their individuation when once spoken or written (see 1978: 34). Further, speech is not only oriented toward others, it not only involves the symbolic mediation of affect, it also invites the person who speaks to become self-aware in the process of giving symbolic expression to affect, and thereby to think about herself as the subject of what Christopher Bollas (1993) calls ‘selfexperience’. The appearance of individuality, in other words, cannot occur without simultaneously developing an interiority that informs the individual’s sense of self as much as does her experience of how others respond to her appearance to them. Such interiority cannot be located anywhere in particular within the individual. When referring to the individual activity that is thinking, Arendt says it cannot ‘be physically located in the brain’ (1978: 52), but this does not mean that thinking is unlocated. It has a topos, one that is interior to the individual, and that involves a complex interplay between the intrapsychic and intersubjective aspects of that individual’s experience. If Arendt’s account of individuality is limited, this is perhaps not the place to begin appreciating the significance of her achievement. She is the only political thinker to insist on an inherent and reciprocally constitutive relationship between freedom to assume life as an individual and politics. The implication of her argument is to call into question the liberal view of politics as a means to an end, the end being security for the individual to engage in a solipsistic form of activity, whether this be philosophy (as in the Platonic tradition) or something else. Solipsistic individualism betrays a disregard and disdain for the very world in which the conditions of individuality either obtain or do not obtain. We might say that the solipsist is a free rider in relation to what it is that human beings must do if they are to enjoy a relational space within which each is able to appear to his fellows as an individual, and, in turn, appreciate them as such.

‘The paradoxical plurality of unique beings’ Individuality denotes that which makes one human being different from another, or ‘distinct’ (Arendt 1958: 175–6). Uniqueness can appear only in relationship, that is, the uniqueness of one can appear only as it is welcomed and acknowledged by another


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unique being. More than this: the relationship has to be such that it offers or, at least, presupposes a fundamental acceptance of the simple existence, the existence as such, of the individual as this distinct being. Birmingham (2006: Chapter 3) suggests that here we find in Arendt’s thought the principle of givenness: ‘It is our being-toward-birth that allows for whatever unity and wholeness marks human existence: being-toward-birth is accompanied by gratitude for our very givenness’ (Birmingham 2006: 80). Our birth is the condition of our capacity for freedom, understood in the Arendtian sense, as the capacity for beginning. Here is Peg Birmingham on this important point: . . . being in the world precedes any explicit love of the world; it is what gives rise to desire and love. One’s gratitude at finding oneself in the world predates any activity in the world. Arendt suggests that our capacity for initium, for beginning, is dependent upon a prior givenness. This priority of gratitude and affirmation is also true of my relation to my neighbor: ‘It is not love that discloses to me my neighbor’s being. What I owe him has been decided beforehand according to an order that love follows but has not established.’ (Birmingham 2006: 80; the citation is from Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine)

In relation to the other, Arendt takes from Augustine the phrase vol ut sis (I want you to be), an idea of love as an unqualified and welcoming acceptance of the existence of the other, however she presents/appears: This mysterious existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shapes of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Vol ut sis (I want you to be)’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. (Arendt 1979: 301)

Love as an orientation to the other that is governed by a simple acceptance of the being that is characterizes intimate kinds of relationship, and in this respect is different from what Arendt seems to suggest when she speaks of the actor as a spectator, one who is receptive to the actions of others. This public modality of an orientation to plurality presupposes rather than articulates a simple acceptance of the being of the individual. In action the individual is vulnerable to the spectatorship of others, for she risks disclosing in her deeds and speech who she is to them. For Arendt all living beings belong to a communal species existence and are distinct in their manner of being alive. Only human beings, however, ‘express’ and ‘reveal’ their distinctness in speech and action: ‘Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other’ (Arendt 1958: 176). Arendt repeats this idea offered in The Human Condition but in a different form in The Life of the Mind. There she says that, unlike animals, human beings do not merely engage in self-display, they also engage in self-presentation, a mode of


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self-appearance that involves an element of deliberation as to what to display to others. Her awareness of the complexity of mind is indicated by her suggestion that what one is willing to reveal is simultaneously the hiding of what one is not willing to reveal – thus the surface, which can be known, is betrayed by a depth to which it alludes but which remains elusive: In addition to the urge to self-display by which living things fit themselves into a world of appearances, men also present themselves in word and deed and thus indicate how they wish to appear, what in their opinion is fit to be seen and what is not. This element of deliberate choice in what to show and what to hide seems specifically human. (Arendt 1978: 34; emphases in the original)

Appearance inherently involves a relationship between two terms – the individual who appears and those to whom she appears – and it usually, though not necessarily, involves a third term: ‘some worldly objective reality’ which constitutes a common interest or concern for these individuals. Thus, ‘most action and speech is concerned with this in-between’ (Arendt 1958: 182), which as it is addressed and spoken about comes into being or ‘appears’ as an object of common reference. In this way ‘the world’ that individuals share is a phenomenal reality; it comes into being only through their orientation in speech and action to it as something they share and by which it is constituted in its specificity. Speech and action, then, are communal activities; they make sense only with reference to sharing a relationship by which each is constituted both as singular and as sharing a world. Speech enunciates the meaning of the deed, what it is the actor thinks he is doing and why, how it relates to what it is that he and others have done before, and what it is he and they might or should do now: The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do. (Arendt 1958: 179)

How actors engage with meaning – disclosing it, interpreting it and seeking to understand it – constitutes what Arendt calls a ‘subjective in-between’ that adds the layer of meaning to the objective worldly reality that they share: Since this disclosure of the subject is an integral part of all, even the most ‘objective’ intercourse, the physical, worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another. (Arendt 1958, 182–3; emphasis in the original)

Arendt terms ‘this second, subjective in-between’ ‘the “web” of human relationships’ (Arendt 1958: 183). The world of human affairs is the term Arendt gives to these


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complexly entwined in-betweens, implying as they do different kinds of connection between human beings in their appearance to each other as distinct beings. ‘Plurality’ is the term for the kind of community that arises between human beings when they appear to each other as individuals who share a specific historical– worldly reality. By the nature of the human condition, human beings are already in some sense together. The question of the political concerns the mode of this togetherness. The political denotes that mode of being together that is plurality: The polis, properly speaking, is not the city–state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. (Arendt 1958: 198)

Arendt’s emphasis is on a form of commonality that welcomes and works with difference, where the most elementary difference is that of the distinctness of the individual living being. As she declares at the beginning of the section ‘What is Politics?’ in ‘Introduction into Politics’, ‘Politics is based on the fact of human plurality,’ and ‘Politics deals with the coexistence and association of different men’ (Arendt 2005b; 93, emphasis in the original). Contrary to her proposition that ‘human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings’ (Arendt 1958: 176), really there is nothing paradoxical about it, for it is the only form of community that is possible if human uniqueness is to be accorded a space within which to appear. Arendt is self-conscious about a paradoxical harnessing of plurality and uniqueness because she is so aware of working against the grain of an entire tradition of understanding of what it is to be an individual, one in which individuality is understood as possible only through the act of withdrawing from one’s worldly communal existence into a solitary, interior space. By The Life of the Mind, Arendt seems to have reconsidered her position. Now she thinks that a withdrawal into thinking is never complete, not just because the philosopher still has to eat, work, etc., but because thinking ‘remains geared to appearance’: . . . when the philosopher takes leave of the world given to our senses and does a turnabout . . . to the life of the mind, he takes his clue from the former, looking for something to be revealed to him that would explain its underlying truth. This truth – a-letheia, that which is disclosed (Heidegger)—can be conceived only as another ‘appearance’, another phenomenon originally hidden but of a supposedly higher order, thus signifying the lasting predominance of appearance. Our mental apparatus, though it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance. (Arendt 1978: 23–24)

She argues that a withdrawal into thinking is always in relationship to and tension with one’s situation within a common and historical world shared with others. In effect, Arendt is clarifying the import of the point that she makes in ‘What is Freedom?’—‘We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves’ (Arendt 1977: 148). Here Arendt


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argues against the Stoic understanding of freedom as something that can be found in one’s internal life even if one is a slave in the world shared with others, an idea that relies upon the assumption that the individual is able to establish a mastery or sovereignty over his own being. Not only does she refuse the proposition that such self-mastery is freedom because, as she insists, it involves the self’s use of its capacity to will to tyrannize itself (Arendt 1977: 163), she also proposes that Epictetus, the first Stoic philosopher, could not have imagined freedom if he had not already known it as a worldly phenomenon: According to ancient understanding, man could liberate himself from necessity only through power over other men, and he could be free only if he owned a place, a home in the world. Epictetus transposed those worldly relationships into relationships within man’s own self, whereby he discovered that no power is so absolute as that which man yields over himself, and that the inward space where man struggles and subdues himself is more entirely his own, namely, more securely shielded from outside interference, than any worldly home could be. (Arendt 1977: 148)

In her insight into freedom, as a historically contextual idea of retreat from the world into one’s inner being, Arendt implies that for Epictetus it made sense to organize his internal world of experience in terms of this idea. She indicates that she understood far more than she was prepared to theorize of the inherent and dynamic connection between the organization of the inner world of an individual and the subjective world of interpreted relationships that the individual shares with historical fellows.

The Connection between Worldly and Inner Plurality Arendt never sought explicitly to theorize about the connection she makes between a worldly plurality and an inner plurality that renders thinking as an internal conversation possible: ‘Men not only exist in the plural as do all earthly beings, but have an indication of this plurality within themselves’ (Arendt 2005a: 22). If we are to be capable of thinking of a kind and quality that permit us to give an account of our thoughts to our fellows, thus moving away from our inward focus back into the world of human affairs, then it is because we want to sustain an orientation to plurality. In other words, thinking will not divorce itself from plurality unless the individual discounts it. Arendt offers Lessing and Socrates as examples of thinkers who built into their conceptions of thinking an orientation to plurality: The fermenta cognitionis which Lessing scattered into the world were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers. Lessing’s thought is not the (Platonic) silent dialogue between me and myself, but an anticipated dialogue with others, and this is the reason that it is essentially polemical. (Arendt 1970a: 10) [Socrates’ ‘art of midwifery’ or maieutic] had its significance in a twofold conviction: every man has his own doxa, his own opening to the world, and Socrates therefore must always


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begin with questions; he cannot know beforehand what kind of dokei moi, of it-appearsto-me, the other possesses. . . . Yet, just as nobody can know beforehand the other’s doxa, so nobody can know by himself and without further effort the inherent truth of his own opinion. Socrates wanted to bring out this truth which everyone potentially possesses. . . . The role of the philosopher, then, is not to rule the city but to be its ‘gadfly’, not to tell philosophical truths but to make citizens more truthful. (Arendt 2003: 15)

In her reflections on ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, Arendt argues that a capacity to tolerate the solitariness of an internal space within which one can dialogue with oneself or think for oneself is central to personal responsibility, a sustained practice of examining things and making up one’s own mind (Arendt 2003: 45). She asks of those who refused to collaborate with the Nazi regime: ‘in what way were those few different who in all walks of life did not collaborate and refused to participate in public life, though they could not and did not rise in rebellion?’ She responds: ‘They were the only ones who dared judge by themselves’ (Arendt 2003: 44). She continues later to say of ‘this kind of thinking’ that it does not depend on ‘a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters’ but rather on ‘the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself . . . that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself, which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking’ (Arendt 2003: 45; emphasis added). Arendt does not explicitly enquire into whether such an inward capacity can develop only if the individual is ethically responsive to plurality, but she seems to presuppose this. Just how such a ‘disposition to live together explicitly with oneself’ is cultivated and whether it presupposes that an individual has internalized the experience of plurality are not questions that Arendt asks, at least not directly. Perhaps she tacitly understood this. Think of the essay on Rosa Luxemburg in which Arendt emphasizes Luxemburg’s unflinching courage, her intellectual honesty as well as her stubborn individualism, in insisting upon reality even and especially when it contradicted Marxist orthodoxy. ‘What mattered most in her view was reality, in all its wonderful and all its frightful aspects, even more than revolution itself. Her unorthodoxy was innocent, non-polemical; she recommended her friends to read Marx for “the daring of his thoughts, the refusal to take anything for granted”, rather than for the value of his conclusions’ (Arendt 1970b: internal quotations refer to Peter Nettl’s biography of Luxemburg). Arendt suggests the significance of the late nineteenth-century ‘milieu’ (Arendt 1970b: 40) in which Rosa Luxemburg was formed, one that was ‘a highly significant . . . source . . . of the revolutionary spirit in the twentieth century’, and one that ‘has now completely disappeared’ (Arendt 1970b: 40). Arendt affirmed, ‘Its nucleus consisted of assimilated Jews from middle-class families whose cultural background was German . . . whose political formation was Russian, and whose moral standards in both private and public life were uniquely their own” (Arendt 1970b: 40). Arendt proposes this was a milieu centered on a ‘unique ethical code’, one wherein a dangerously innocent independence of mind, an unworldly idealism and clarity of intellectual attachment to ethical principle were at home.


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The hidden equalizer of those who always treated one another as equals – and hardly anyone else – was the essentially simple experience of a childhood world in which mutual respect and unconditional trust, a universal humanity and a genuine, almost naïve contempt for social and ethnic distinctions were taken for granted. What the members of the peer group had in common was what can only be called moral taste, which is so different from ‘moral principles’ [rule-based morality is what Arendt means here]; the authenticity of their morality they owed to having grown up in a world that was not out of joint. This gave them their ‘rare self-confidence’, so unsettling to the world into which they then came, and so bitterly resented as arrogance and conceit. (Arendt 1970b: 41 - passages within quotes are citations from the Nettl biography.)

The Historical Provocation of Arendt’s Individualism: The Concentration Camps Rosa Luxemburg’s milieu was familiar to Arendt; it probably also described that of her mother, a great admirer of Rosa Luxemburg. In all likelihood Selbstdenken was something Arendt imbibed from her own formative milieu, and would have used her philosophical training to cultivate in herself even if she had not been historically provoked by the experience of totalitarianism to explicitly reflect on it. As Richard Bernstein (1996: 3) suggests, one of the reasons her work continues to attract so much interest is ‘her steadfast independence . . . [which] is so luminous.’ Here Bernstein echoes Arendt in her essay on Karl Jaspers where the tropes of luminosity, illumination, lighting up and clarity are repeated in relation to how his extraordinary sense of personal responsibility, his world-embracing independence of mind and his ‘inviolability’ in the face of Nazi dictatorship, entered into the clarity and quality of his thinking: ‘Because his existence was governed by the passion for light itself, he was able to be a light in the darkness glowing from some hidden source of luminosity’ (Arendt 1970c: 76). Again Arendt remarks on the significance of his formative milieu as one that conduced to Jaspers’s inviolability: “His father and mother were still closely linked to the high-spirited and strong-minded Frisian peasantry who possessed a sense of independence quite uncommon in Germany’ (Arendt 1970c: 77). She suggests that, while forced into defensive isolation in the Nazi period, Jaspers was not alone, for his ‘good fortune’ was to enjoy a marriage that ‘has never been merely a private thing’ (Arendt 1970c: 78). This marriage was conducted as an ‘interspace’ between individuals in which Jaspers’s wife’s Jewishness was central to its conditions of possibility (the idea of interspace features in the essay on Lessing, Arendt 1970a: 13. [This marriage] has proved that two people of different origins—Jaspers’s wife is Jewish – could create between them a world of their own. And from this world in miniature he has learned, as from a model, what is essential for the whole realm of human affairs. Within this small world, he unfolded and practiced his incomparable faculty for dialogue, the splendid precision of his way of listening, the constant readiness to give a candid account


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of himself, the patience to linger over a matter under discussion, and above all the ability to lure what is otherwise passed over in silence into the area of discourse, to make it worth talking about. (Arendt 1970c: 78)

A number of commentators, Margaret Canovan and Richard Bernstein especially, argue that Arendt’s work has to be understood primarily as a set of responses to her need, as someone who belonged ‘to the group of Jews expelled from Germany at a relatively young age’ (Arendt 1970a: 17), to understand totalitarianism, especially in its Nazi form. ‘The result of understanding is meaning, which we originate in the very process of living insofar as we try to reconcile ourselves to what we do and what we suffer’ (Arendt 1994: 309). Canovan (1994: 7) declares: ‘Virtually the entire agenda of Arendt’s political thought was set by her reflections on the political catastrophes of the mid-century.’ The shape Arendt’s conception of individuality assumed owes much to her analysis of the essence of totalitarianism as expressed in the phenomenon of the concentration camps (see Canovan 2000, Dietz 2000, and Jacobitti 1996). Dietz’s essay is especially insightful, arguing that the Holocaust is an unspoken but saturating presence in The Human Condition, specifically that Arendt’s ideas of action and of the political as ‘the space of appearance’ are intended as ‘a grand optimistic illusion’ designed to counter the ‘hellish experiment of the SS concentration camps’ (Dietz 2000: 92–6).3 In her essay “The Concentration Camps,” first published in Partisan Review in 1948, Arendt offers a phenomenology of the death camps. For Arendt the raison d’être of the concentration camps is that they are designed to destroy individuality, it being clear, she argues, that they have no other functional purpose. She asserts that, for as long as they are physically alive, the inmates are reduced to ‘inanimate men’, to ‘the living dead’ (Arendt 2000: 240). They are systematically stripped of a space within which to appear as the distinctive personalities that they are and are reduced ‘to a bundle of reactions’: ‘The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything that is personality or character’ (Arendt 2000: 241). If he survives the experience, ‘when, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his personality or character unchanged, just as they had left it’. Arendt’s principal stress in the essay is on what it means to be reduced to a bundle of reactions – it is to be denied ‘all spontaneity’: ‘Those who aspire to total domination must liquidate all spontaneity such as the mere existence of individuality will always engender, and track it down in its most private forms, regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may seem’ (Arendt 2000: 254). Arendt explains that ‘spontaneity as such, with its incalculability, is the greatest obstacle to total domination over man’ (Arendt 2000: 255). The freedom to act spontaneously is not just freedom to initiate something new, but even more fundamentally it is the freedom to express one’s sense of aliveness as a distinct being. This aspect of freedom is invited when others welcome the individual on the occasion of her birth and give her a name of her own as well as when they


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mourn and memorialize her on the occasion of her death. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt states her conception of individuality as the bios that is marked out as the interval between birth and death: To be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s departure. On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance, as they follow upon each other, are the primordial events, which as such mark out time, the time span between birth and death. (Arendt 1978: 20)

It is the hallmark of the destruction of individuality in the concentration camps that human beings are reduced to enduring the painful paradox of living death: they are excluded from the human world and subjected to absolute domination. Subject as they are to ‘systematic torture and systematic starvation’, they are in ‘an atmosphere of permanent dying’, neither permitted to be alive as individuals nor to have a meaningful death (Arendt 2000: 242). They are deprived of any usefulness while constantly being reminded of their superfluity, and they are efficiently and arbitrarily destroyed. Arendt (2000, 243) remarks that ‘such unreality, created by an apparent lack of purpose, is the very basis of all forms of concentration camp’ and further: ‘It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure’ (Arendt 2000: 244). The process is deliberate, systematic, and proceeds by a relentless series of stages: ‘The insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses’ (Arendt 2000: 245). First individuals are stripped of all civil standing, and then once in the camp, they are stripped of any juridical personhood. This comes about through ensuring there is no logical connection between anything they do or may have done and what it is they are subjected to now – sheer arbitrary terror. Theirs is a ‘total disfranchisement’ (Arendt 2000: 249), a taking away of all that constitutes the individual as rightfully entitled to be regarded as an individual agent by others. Secondly, they are murdered in such a way that they can have no hand in their own fate, nor are they able to die in order to save others; on the contrary, they are forced into all kinds of complicity with their domination. Arendt terms this ‘the murder of the moral person’, a process by which ‘conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible’ (Arendt 2000: 251). Finally, after these two forms of the death of the individual – first his civil persona, then his inner sense of morality –Arendt suggests that the ultimate destruction of individuality itself ‘is almost always successful’ (Arendt 2000: 253). This is the reduction of men to ‘ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react’. This ‘is the real triumph of the system’ (Arendt 2000: 253). Here in the negative we find a rich account of individuality, one that integrates different aspects of individuality: the civil constitution of the individual as a person;


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the sense of being the subject of one’s own inner experience, someone whose birth was welcomed and whose death was marked; and someone whose aliveness is manifest as spontaneity, initiative and the freedom to begin something new, to discover or express something that was not there before. Thus the concentration camp as the limiting case of the space of appearance indicates the essential conditions for individuality. Individuality, both when it is invited to be/appear and when it is subject to destruction, is a quintessentially political phenomenon. The implications of this, of course, are far-reaching. Arendt’s phenomenology of the concentration camps is incomplete because she focuses on the experience of the victim as it is evoked by the institutional design of the camps. She does not open up the other side of the relationship – what is it that conduces to and develops a desire to destroy individuality, spontaneity and animation in people? This is something other than the inability to think for himself that Arendt ascribes to Eichmann, surely? Canovan (2000) suggests that Arendt attempted to answer this question in her reflections on the modern experience of superfluousness and the scientific–technological substitution of making for action. Here is a summary passage: [On one line of interpretation that Arendt offers] totalitarianism represents not so much a conscious project as the set of grooves into which people are likely to find themselves sliding if they come to politics with certain sorts of aims, experiences, and deficiencies, all of them characteristic of modernity. Foremost among the aims is a quest for omnipotence fuelled by the belief that anything is possible and by ‘modern man’s deep-rooted suspicion of everything he did not make himself’. The central experience is loneliness – that experience of ‘uprootedness and superfluousness’ that make people cling to movements and to ideological logicality as a substitute for the lost world of common sense and reality. The key deficiency is the loss of the world itself, the stable human world of civilization that anchors human beings in a common experience of reality and hedges a space of free action with necessary limits and laws. (Canovan 2000: 38; emphases in the original)

The suggestion is that those who either lead or are recruited to the exercise of absolute domination are themselves participants in historical processes of self-deadening, loss of inner life and loss of animation. The account is not complete even if it captures the tonality of the historical currents with which Arendt was concerned. The experience of superfluousness does not automatically translate into loss of a common world; it might provoke action that develops a new world in common. Arendt’s real and profound insight here was her suggestion (recurrent in her work) that the mistaken idea of freedom in terms of an omnipotent will is a mistake that has a basis in the phenomenology of the human condition – in the desire to control or master reality that is expressed in the attempt to substitute making for action. Thus, there is a real phenomenological basis for the worldless conception of individuality as a turning away from plurality and as the effort to establish control, both over the self and the self’s environment.


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Individuality as Both Aliveness and the Principle of Beginning Who-ness is the idea Arendt introduces in The Human Condition: ‘Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” ’ (Arendt 1958: 178). It is in action that the individual discloses his who-ness to others. This is not something he has control over because it is the manifestation of the principle of beginning, a principle that inheres in his birth, his given status as a newcomer, as this appearance is received and responded to by a spectator: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not propose a spectator” (Arendt 1978: 19; emphasis in the original). The nature of action is ‘initiative’ – the bringing into existence of something that was not there before: it is the disclosure of hitherto unknown possibility. The human individual’s capacity to initiate follows upon his status as a beginner: ‘Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners, by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action’ (Arendt 1958: 177). Nikolas Kompridis (2006) explains the significance of ‘the idea of a new beginning’ to democratic politics. The frontispiece quotation for his (2006) collection is from Dewey: ‘Each individual that comes into the world is a new beginning: the universe itself is, as it were, taking a fresh start in him and trying to do something, even if on a small scale, that it has never done before.’ The disclosure of possibility heretofore unknown is always contextually specific because it is a creative engagement with ‘specific historical conditions’ (Kompridis 2006: 48). It is in such disclosure of possibility for new beginnings that the possibilities of humanitas itself are revealed: Personality . . . is very hard to grasp and perhaps most closely resembles the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit which accompanies every man throughout his life, but is always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself. This daimon – which has nothing demonic about it – this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space exists; that is the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we ordinarily mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm, there is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas. By that they meant something that was the very height of humanness because it was valid without being objective. (Arendt 1970c: 73)

The elusive quality of a distinct personality is expressed as its signature in the style of action. Arendt’s conception of who-ness is similar to what Winnicott (1990) calls ‘the spontaneous gesture’ of the ‘True Self’. Like Winnicott, Arendt suggests that it is the receptive response of others that allows individuality as it seeks appearance to become real. It is for this reason that individuality or personality, as Arendt calls it, is neither subjective nor objective – it is both.


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Since sentient beings – men and animals, to whom things appear and who as recipients guarantee their reality – are themselves also appearances, meant and able both to see and to be seen, hear and be heard, touch and be touched, they are never mere subjects and can never be understood as such; they are not less ‘objective’ than stone and bridge. The worldliness of living things means there is no subject that is not also an object and appears as such to somebody else, who guarantees its ‘objective’ reality. (Arendt 1978: 19)

The individual can determine or will what it is he wishes to disclose of himself, but even here who he is peeps through. The individual’s intentional disclosure – so far as it accounts for how he appears – is self-protective in nature; he brings to light what it is he wants in order to keep hidden other aspects of his being (they remain undisclosed). This idea of Arendt’s is similar to Winnicott’s proposition that those who are fortunate enough to enjoy a sense of reality for their True Self will use normal compliant politeness and the like to protect their True Self and keep it hidden.

Conclusion I have sought to provide an account of Arendt’s conception of the integral relationship between individuality and the political, and, in so doing, to suggest that she offers a theoretical account of this relationship that liberalism does not. In exploring this relationship, we must be careful not to abstract one term of the relationship and consider it independently of the other. The political refers to the modality of relationship between human beings when they are invited to be co-present as the distinct beings that they are and to engage in the possibilities of the gift they enjoy – being born as distinct living beings who able to take initiative. Their appearance in being born as distinct beings is the condition of the appearance of their who-ness in action. If the private sphere is one in which individuals are present to each other in the simple gift of their existence, the public sphere, if and when exists, is a relational space wherein individuals can appear to each other in taking up their freedom as beings capable of action, of new beginnings.

Notes 1 In The Life of the Mind, Arendt seems to be proposing that any living thing seeks to appear to its fellows as the unique center of animation of life that it is. Of course psychoanalysis explores what it is for individuals to feel ‘dead inside’ rather than alive when their worldly persona is infected by this lack of liveliness. At the same time psychoanalysis is premised on the proposition that, even subject to such profound inner difficulty, the individual communicates by his very mode of being in relation to others (his ‘appearance’) his suffering, and his desire to be relieved of it. It is clearly an interesting issue that I do not take up here to explore the connection as well as the distinction between the desire to appear and the question of whether someone is willing to risk disclosure of ‘who’ they are in their speech and actions. The relevant passage on this last point from The Human Condition is: ‘Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed and word, he


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must be willing to risk the disclosure, and this neither the doer of good works, who must be without self and preserve complete anonymity, nor the criminal who must hide from others, can take upon themselves. Both are lonely figures, the one being for, the other against, all men; they, therefore, remain outside the pale of human intercourse and are, politically, marginal figures who usually enter the historical scene in times of corruption, disintegration, and political bankruptcy’ (Arendt 1958: 180). 2 Taminiaux (1997: 13) proposes that The Human Condition ‘in its structure as well as its themes - may be viewed as a retort to Heidegger’ with respect to his privileging of the vita contemplativa over the vita activa. Given the fundamental problem Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies posed for Arendt, who was his student and erstwhile love, this explanation of The Human Condition is consistent with the one offered by Canovan, Dietz and others, referred to below. Taminiaux (1997: 16) summarily portrays key points of difference between how Arendt and Heidegger understood individuation: ‘Whereas Heidegger is focused on being-toward-the-end and on the anticipation of one’s own death, which as a certain impossibility is the most individuated possibility, Arendt puts the burden of individuation on what she calls “natality”, conceived not as the mere emergence of zoe but as a capacity to initiate something unforeseeable and exceptional. Whereas Heidegger divorces individuation from any interaction as a result of the anticipation of one’s own death, Arendt places it within human plurality. Where Heidegger separates authentic praxis from any communication and reserves its manifestation to the intimate and silent knowledge of Gewissen, Arendt insists by contrast on the essential link between praxis and lexis.” 3 Dietz takes the phrase ‘grand optimistic illusion’ from Nietzsche’s discussion of Thucydides’ ‘Funeral Oration of Pericles’ in Human, All Too Human, suggesting that here Thucydides ‘is engaged in a project of inventing an imaginary time and space, an imaginary Athens, that serves a significant purpose. It creates a contrary world that does not so much obliterate the established fact of evil . . . as interfere with, counter, or block the human impulse to ruminate upon and incessantly rekindle the perpetual memory of hardship and evil, thereby fanning the flames of desire for retribution and revenge. The Funeral Oration deflects this injurious impulse by offering the intervening image or “countermemory” of Athens as glorious, magnificent: “the school of Hellas”, where “the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation” are each carried to their “highest point”. This fixation upon “what was” is modulated by the liberating power of this imaginary world; the obsession with retribution is thus deferred. By inventing an alternative world swept clean of horror, suffering, and degradation, Thucydides’ solution offers the Athenians a way toward thinking themselves anew, and thus provides a path toward forgetting the evil of the day before.’ Dietz continues: ‘In much the same way that Nietzsche suggests that Thucydides was engaged in assisting in the convalescence of the Athenians, so I want to suggest that, in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt was responding to the trauma of survival that faced the Europeans, and especially the Germans and the Jews, in the wake of the overwhelming deadliness of Nazism and the burning darkness of the concentration camps’ (Dietz 2000: 92).

Bibliography Alvarez, Anne. 2002. Live company: Psychoanalytic psychotherapy with autistic, borderline, deprived and abused children. East Sussex and New York: Brunner-Routledge.


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Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1970a. On humanity in dark times: Thoughts about Lessing. In Men in dark times, 3–33. London: Jonathan Cape. —. 1970b. Rosa Luxemburg. In Men in dark times, 33–57. London: Jonathan Cape. —. 1970c. Karl Jaspers: A laudatio. In Men in dark times, 71–81. London: Jonathan Cape. —. 1977. What is freedom? In Between past and future, 143–73. New York: Penguin Books. —. 1978. The life of the mind. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1979. The origins of totalitarianism. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich. —. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1994. Understanding and politics. In Essays in understanding 1930–1954. Ed J. Kohn, 307–28. New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace & Co. —. 1996. Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. —. 2000. The concentration camps. In I. Hamilton The Penguin book of twentieth-century essays. Ed. I. Hamilaton, 237–58. New York: Penguin. —. 2003. Personal responsibility under dictatorship. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. J. Kohn, 17–49. New York: Schocken. —. 2005a. Socrates. In The promise of politics. Ed. J. Kohn, 5–40. New York: Schocken. —. 2005b. Introduction into politics. In The promise of politics. Ed. J. Kohn, 93–201. New York: Schocken. Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish question. Cambridge: Polity Press. Birmingham, Peg. 2006. Hannah Arendt and human rights: The predicament of common responsibility. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Bollas, Christopher. 1993. Being a character: Psychoanalysis and self experience. London: Routledge. Canovan, Margaret. 1994. Hannah Arendt: A reinterpretation of her political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2000. Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism: A reassessment. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. D. Villa, 25–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Dietz, Mary G. 2000. Arendt and the Holocaust. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. D. Villa, 86–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grene, Marjorie Glicksman. 1974. The understanding of nature: Essays in the philosophy of biology. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel. Jacobitti, Suzanne Duvall. 1996. Thinking about the self. In Hannah Arendt: Twenty years later. Ed. L. May and J. Kohn, 199–220. Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press. Kompridis, Nikolas. 2006. The idea of a new beginning: A romantic source of normativity and freedom. In Philosophical romanticism. Ed. N. Kompridis, 32–60. London and New York: Routledge. Ogden, Thomas H. 1996. Subjects of analysis. Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1997. The Thracian maid and the professional thinker: Arendt and Heidegger. Albany: State University of New York Press. Winnicott, D.W. 1990. Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment, 140–53. London: Karnac Books.


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CHAPTER 7

The Saving Power of Social Action: Arendt between Weber and Foucault Thomas M. Kemple

Today we take for granted the existence of a social sphere which is neither public nor private, neither entirely personal nor entirely political, but somehow beyond or even beneath these distinctions. The massive social conglomerations of modernity, especially the crowded or isolating spaces created by megacities, tend to expose the intimate life of each to the gaze of all, or they collapse political life into personal troubles and reduce social problems to technical matters to be treated by specialized experts. The danger under these distressing conditions is not just that they may lead to disastrous consequences which we can neither control nor calculate, but also that they may destroy our very capacity to separate ourselves from one another – at least enough to think and speak autonomously, or to work and act collectively. Hannah Arendt is among the first political thinkers to identify what is novel about the rise of the social sphere out of the spirit of modern crises. Revolutionary movements of the modern age have opened up the precarious chronotope of ‘society’, a field which mediates the spaces of public and private life, and which opens a temporal gap between past and future. In general terms, the social world is the domain of interests, of beings who dwell among and appear between other beings (inter-esse). Social life constitutes a time and space of appearance in which matters of collective concern are discussed and things in common (res publica) are shared: ‘Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this inbetween space that all human affairs are conducted’ (Arendt 2005: 106). Modern mass societies threaten not only to annihilate the necessary intervals between people which make thought, speech and action possible, but also to dismantle the societas itself – that expandable system of sustainable alliances and flexible linkages in which strangers and intimates appear as both distinct from and bound to one another. The typical characterization of Arendt as a political philosopher should not distract us from acknowledging her original contribution to social theory. Despite her frequent and fierce criticisms of the social sciences for their often reductive conception of political action in terms of mere collective or individual behavior, she


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maintains a distinctive perspective with regard to the social orders and powers which make political life possible. Taking a longer view of these processes, she argues that occidental history begins at the revolutionary moment when the Romans politicized the in-between space and interrupted time of the socius. This legacy nevertheless leaves unresolved the question of whether the historically contingent ties of society are necessarily established by the exercise of violence or sustained by the recognition of sovereignty. Here is where it is instructive to return to the theses of Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology and an important influence on Arendt. Often assumed to represent the ‘classic’ position on the foundation of sovereignty in coercion, Weber defines legitimate rulership, domination or authority – Herrschaft – in terms of the capacity to threaten death or exert force. Insofar as the sovereign order of the social is secured by a belief in the legitimacy of a regime or a ruler to dominate or execute individuals, and to command or lead a people, it takes institutional form through varying combinations of traditional monarchy, charismatic leadership or state bureaucracy. In the final instance, the credibility of a social regime is enforced by the actual application or virtual display of violence by individuals or collectives which monopolize the means of coercion. Thus, from Hobbes in the seventeenth century to Weber in the twentieth, the rule of order in modern civil societies has been largely conceived in terms of the double right of the sovereign to threaten death and to let live, a principle which is iconically symbolized on the composite image on the frontispiece of the Leviathan (1651): the monarch with his ambiguous smile and robust torso composed of the bodies of the citizenry holds the crosier of salvation in his left hand and the sword of war in his right. Where Arendt argues against any despotic fusion of civil society with state sovereignty in her defence of political action and free speech, Weber reformulates the very notion of sovereignty in order to examine the relative autonomy of the social sphere itself. In recent years, many social and political theorists have taken up Michel Foucault’s challenge to the Hobbesian problem concerning whether political or social orders constitute potential realms of free thought and action. Beyond the ‘threshold of modernity’, he argues, the objectives of power shift from protecting the juridical domain of sovereign power to regulating populations, from the legitimate enforcement of laws through the menace of death to the measured application of norms in the interests of managing life. The power of the state and of ‘the sovereign’ to punish and conscript must therefore be distinguished from the governmental and disciplinary power of the social sphere whose operating principle is to ‘make live and let die’, and whose objective is to manufacture and manipulate docile citizens. The contrast between these positions exposes an ambiguity already evident in the premodern concept of rulership which had divided the two ‘subjects’ of the reigning lord and master, on the one hand, from the subjected will of the multitude, on the other. These complementary modalities of sovereignty and discipline each entail the assertion of rights and responsibilities, entitlements as well as obligations, as Otto von Gierke (1987: 70–71) points out in an important passage from 1881, familiar to Weber, on the splitting of the corporate and individual personality:


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And so it fell out that even in medieval theory, we may already see that the single Personality of the State is torn asunder into two ‘Subjects’ corresponding respectively to the Ruler and the Assembly of the People. Between them there is a conflict as to which has the higher and completer right; but they are thought of as two distinct Subjects each with rights of a contractual kind valid against the other and with duties of a contractual kind owed to the other; and in their connection consists the Body Politic.

Foucault problematizes the traditional assumption of a contractual distribution of social constraints and political liberties which modern theories of power have taken over from their medieval predecessors. A trace of this legacy can be detected in the double meaning which the word ‘subject’ still carries in connoting both the freedom to exercise willful and conscious agency over oneself and others, and the compulsion to submit, subordinate or subjugate oneself under the rule of a higher order. Instead of arguing that either social conditions or political action make genuine freedom possible, Foucault is concerned to expose the historical modes of subjectification (assujetissement) which render the question of their relationship significant and problematic in the first place. The present essay asks a simple question: Does Hannah Arendt’s genealogy of the emergence of ‘the social sphere’ suggest a middle or alternative position between a conception of power based on legitimate sovereignty, as in Weber’s classic formulation, and of power articulated through apparatuses of social discipline, as identified by Foucault? A straightforward answer to this question is obviated by the contradictory and sometimes confusing ways in which Arendt, Weber and Foucault conceive of ‘the social’ (or ‘society’) as a mediating or immanent realm of appearance which comes between the private and public spheres, as distinct from the political domain, and as emerging out of the revolutionary movements of the modern era. The three sections of Weber’s early draft of Economy and Society (1910–1914) on ‘Law’, ‘Domination’ and ‘The City’ examine the relatively autonomous (eigensetzliche) socio-logics of ‘communalization and sociation’ (Vergemeinschaftung und Vergesellschaftung) across a wide variety of cultural, political and economic domains. By contrast, as the titles of the trilogy of Foucault’s later lectures at the Collège de France suggest – ‘Society Must be Defended’ (1976), Security, Territory, Population (1978), and The Birth of Biopolitics (1979) – the practical tasks of defining and securing the borders of the social can be more precisely specified as cultural and political matters of life and death, as strategies for enhancing the vitality, health and longevity of each and every social member. Arendt’s celebrated account of the rise of the social in The Human Condition (1958), which she later expands upon and modifies in Between Past and Future (1961) and On Revolution (1963), arguably combines and complements many of the key features of each of these discussions while upholding critical distinctions which they may appear to obscure: ‘Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public’ (Arendt 1958: 46). Arendt views sovereignty less as a guarantee than


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as a persistent threat to the experience of individual autonomy and collective freedom, which she conceives not in conventional terms as an interior property of the will, but rather from a classical perspective as the capacity to act in public by initiating or interrupting a course of events which may proceed otherwise. In her later work, Arendt begins to imagine a position beyond the double bind of private necessity and public vulnerability, envisioning instead the emancipatory potential of modern revolutions to lay sustainable foundations for new social and political orders. Here I wish to offer what Weber would call an ‘interim reflection’ (Zwischenbetrachtung) and what Foucault would consider a ‘problematization’ concerning Arendt’s theory of political action in general, and her sociological conception of the revolutionary act in particular. In what sense does ‘the social question’ posed by modern revolution (especially the French and American experience of the late eighteenth century) suggest an alternative to the ‘procedures of legitimate domination’ (Weber), on the one hand, and the ‘apparatuses of discipline’ (Foucault), on the other? Curiously, all three thinkers take up this question in view of how it is posed for the modern age by Machiavelli (the Italian experience of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries), who charts a middle course between religious reformation and political revolution. Following Machiavelli, each thinker draws selectively and critically upon the conceptual logic and vocabulary of religious discourse, not as a way of advancing a disguised political-theological agenda but in order to examine historically specific manifestations of what I shall call the ‘saving power of social action’. Rather than suggest that these theoretical positions can be forced into a synthesis, I want to consider whether Arendt’s ‘intermediate position’ opens a way out of the tendency of sovereign and disciplinary power to reduce political action to bare life and to silence political speech with violence.

Society between Sovereignty and Discipline Toward the end of his 1978 lecture course, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault (2007: 276) states that his aim is not actually to provide a history or genealogy of the modern state, but more modestly to examine some of the refracted sides of ‘the reflexive prism’ through which the state came to appear in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fourth of these lectures, the influential discussion previously published under the title ‘Governmentality’, he suggests a kind of Polybian scheme which projects three contrasting images of how the social sphere may be constituted and ruled: (1) according to a repertoire of disciplines for normalizing individuals; (2) through an assemblage of technologies for regulating populations; and (3) by appealing to a set of ritualized procedures for legitimizing authority.

In the first instance, disciplinary techniques tend to operate ‘centripetally’ on the bodies and minds of citizens by isolating and enclosing, segmenting and concentrating


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individuals in the spaces where they live, work and die, ultimately in the interests of maximizing their health, longevity and productivity. On a larger scale, regulatory controls are ‘centrifugually’ deployed in order to secure social order and sustain a balance of social forces, as in the development of the military–diplomatic apparatus of nation–states abroad or the operation of a police apparatus at home. Finally, these coordinated procedures for exercising power and securing order support the general framework of political sovereignty, as expressed in the idea that ‘the king reigns but does not govern’. While these strategies for maintaining social order may coexist in different combinations and contexts, they do not necessarily form a historical sequence: So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by, say, of government. In fact, we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism. (Foucault 2007: 107–8)

Foucault’s overall objective in this pivotal series of lectures, and in the courses that precede and follow, is to situate this ‘reflexive prism’ within a genealogy of bio-power, and more precisely, to construct a model of social power which is exercised over life itself, rather than simply imposed through political force or cultural persuasion. The birth of civil society at the threshold of the modern age can therefore be understood not just in terms of the rhetoric of the rights and liberties of citizens, or of state repression and emancipation, but also according to the ‘governmental’ logic of social strategies, forces and tactics articulated through a revised and updated vocabulary of battle, attack, defence and protection. The first major historical point of reference for this transformation in social and political thought is the principia naturae expressed during the European civil and religious wars from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, in which the ‘natural laws’ governing the health, morbidity, criminality and vitality of populations are no longer broadly understood to constitute the cultural aspirations of ‘mankind (le genre humain)’, but also more specifically the biological metabolism of ‘the human species (l’espèce humaine)’ itself (Foucault 1997: 245; 2007: 75). A second major reference point, for Foucault (2008), emerges with the rise of liberalism as a general framework for politics, and in particular, of the ratio status or raison d’état from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Here, the classic liberal discourses of market-freedom, common-wealth and labor-time are expanded upon in terms of the need to foster the life chances, human capital and entrepreneurial spirit of each and all. In the wartime economic schools of German (Freiburg) ‘ordo-liberalism’ and American (Chicago) ‘anarcho-liberalism’ of the mid-twentieth century, for example, the conceptualization of society expressed through sovereign representations and symbolic rituals is progressively reformulated to emphasize the mechanisms or assemblages (dispositifs) understood to be necessary to manage


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a so-called normalizing society, ‘a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation’ (Foucault 2007: 253). Elsewhere Foucault (2008: 85–6, 105–06) notes that the common inspiration for the Chicago and Freiburg schools, and for the Frankfurt school in the same decades, is the work of Max Weber in the early part of the century, for whom the Marxian concern with the contradictory logic of capital gave way to a focus on the irrational rationality of capitalism. Weber outlines the larger picture of this configuration of ‘the social orders and powers’ (his working subtitle for Economy and Society) by examining the legal–rational objectives and procedures of the bureaucratic state, on the one side, and the entrepreneurial techniques and disciplined conduct of life required by the capitalist economy, on the other. In this sense, the more restricted model of strategic power sketched in Foucault’s genealogies of the rise of the normalizing society can be understood to fit within Weber’s more expansive tripartite schema of legitimate domination (legitime Herrschaft), as expressed above all in his famous typology of the ‘traditional’, ‘legal–rational’ and ‘charismatic’ bases of authority and rulership. In conventional sociological terms, the micro-mechanisms of ‘governmentality/discipline/ sovereignty’ support and secure the macro-institutions of ‘bureaucracy/capitalism/ normalization.’ The latter in turn are typically sustained by commonly held beliefs in time-honored customs (tradition), in the recognition of personal gifts of grace and popular appeal (charisma) or through the enactment of rational rules and enforceable statutes (laws). Despite Weber’s distinctive emphasis on the specific ‘perspective (Augenmaβ)’ required of the modern political leader, and especially the conditions and qualities of ‘politics as a vocation’, he shares Foucault’s broader view of the contested and polyvalent character of the field of social power. While Foucault (1978: 91–92) argues that ‘power comes from everywhere’ and is constituted through ‘resistance’, Weber (1978: 53; in Walliman, Tatsis and Zito 1977: 231) states that, “within a social relationship, power means any chance (no matter what this chance is based on) to carry through an [individual or collective] will (even against resistance).’ For each, the crux of the social question lies in whether the dynamism of constitutive power ‘from below’ (specifically governmental or disciplinary struggles) can be maintained from within and against the stabilizing structures of constituted power ‘from above’ (the institutions of the capitalist–economy and the nation–state). These issues are touched on by Arendt in her general conception of power as the capacity to effectively unite word and deed, that is, to bring knowing and doing together in a single movement of speech and action. To clarify the historical and practical implications of this notion, she contrasts the exercise of power with the application of violence, which may even cancel out power when exercised to the extreme. As Arendt (1970: 44–46) argues in her essay On Violence, power and violence must each be distinguished from authority, which may require obedience but is ultimately upheld through respect and recognition. Her ‘meso-theory’ of action developed earlier in The Human Condition complements Weber’s typology of social action in Economy and Society insofar as each aims to advance an understanding


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(Verstehen) of how people make sense out of their reciprocal actions with one another in a variety of meaningful contexts (Sinnzusammenhänge), which are not always reducible to situations of command and obedience, or relations of leading and following. Arendt’s scheme also exceeds Weber’s by projecting a broader philosophical conception of the worldly project of the vita activa across a spectrum which includes animal labor and productive work, as well as higher forms of articulate speech and abstract thought. Just as ‘the redemption of life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication,’ Arendt (1958: 236) argues, so is the creation of a cultural world redeemed by the expression of ultimate values in deeds, words and ideas. While power and authority cannot be equated with domination and coercion, political and social life are also not reducible to the productive process of work or to the biological metabolism of labor. The human condition, understood as the gift of freedom rather than as a natural given, is rooted in the ability of social actors to think beyond the provision of animal needs, and thus to create a social and cultural world which can foster meaningful political display and deliberative discussion. Arendt’s own trinitarian vision of the human potential of social power projects a larger picture than that of either Weber or Foucault insofar as she understands authority to provide the sublime summit of the human condition for which religion and tradition provide the base. Here, ‘religion’ broadly denotes a bond between social beings which is recognized as sacred and immanent, rather than a superstitious belief in a transcendent principle, and ‘tradition’ refers to a cultural lineage of temporal continuity sustained by human memory, rather than simply the sheer force of custom or the mindless persistence of historically bound practice. In Arendt’s own ‘reflexive prism’, historical regimes of authority, religion and tradition are created and maintained, or threatened and destroyed, by revolutions and wars, crises and accidents, and by the daily routines and chance occurrences of ordinary life. Expressed in Weber’s terms, the common ties of a modern civil society may either secure or subvert the overarching institutional processes of bureaucratization, capitalization and normalization. And in Foucault’s vocabulary, everyday life in the modern world regulates or resists the deployment of disciplinary, governmental and sovereign powers, which are not necessarily enforced in the last instance by the legitimate domination of the bureaucratic state. Short of abandoning themselves to either the chaotic flux of biological struggles or a rigid set of cultural constraints, the social members of a human community must ultimately devise ways to imagine and express the often inhuman sources of order and change (O’Neill: 1972). Insofar as social action has a distinctly political objective, it aims to break both the biological cycle of private labor and the linear progress to which culturalhistorical work is chained. In contrast to sociological arguments which reduce political events to social action, and against political theories which conceive state power in terms of the monopoly of violence, Arendt emphasizes the transformative potential of the political act in drawing its strength from the cultural resources of authority. In Beyond Past and Future, Arendt (1961: 122) traces the origins of the


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Roman conception of authority to the myth-making act of its foundation upon a ‘tradition’ commemorating the Greek world which preceded it: ‘Authority (auctoritas), in contradistinction to power (potestas), had its roots in the past, but this past was no less present in the actual life of the city than in the power and strength of the living.’ As suggested in the Latin word auctoritas, which is itself related to the verb augere (to increase, conserve or augment), the wisdom and experience of the ancients is remembered and expanded upon as it is handed down (traditio) to people living in the present, tying them back (religio) to the promises of the past while also binding them to future generations. Thus, the social foundation of authority in knowledge, belief and tradition, rather than simply in power, domination and violence, provides the space and time for the appearance of a common world which actors struggle to bring into existence, and which they hope will endure beyond them.

From Revolutionary Action to Social Foundation Like Georg Simmel and the nineteenth-century ‘classical sociologists’ who preceded him, Weber, Arendt and Foucault pose a similar existential and phenomenological question which each answers in historical, philosophical and pragmatic terms: ‘How is society made possible?’ (Simmel: 1971; Kemple: 2007). But in contrast to most standard accounts which trace the sources of sociological thought to the ‘Hobbesian problem of order’, each somewhat surprisingly considers Machiavelli’s thought to be the crucial reference point for understanding the shifting configurations of power and authority that have given birth to the modern age. Each reads Machiavelli’s work not just as providing an exemplary expression of or model for this transition, but above all as an event in its own right, an enactment in discourse which in some sense helps to bring this change into being. Although appealing to the foundational precedent of the Roman Republic, Machiavelli marks the emergence of the social sphere into the modern age not simply through an authorial gesture of inauguration, but above all as the consequence of revolutionary action. At first glance, Foucault’s view of Machiavelli’s contribution seems incompatible with the approaches taken by Arendt and Weber. Foucault (2007: 243–8) treats The Prince as expressing the pinnacle or endpoint of the preceding age, in contrast to its European reception from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, which he sees as a turning point for the era which followed. In contrast to the writings of later generations of political thinkers, Machiavelli’s notorious treatise on the education of the prince signals the end of an earlier era of political theory and practice, but offers no ‘art of government’ or theory of ‘raison d’état’. His advice on how to constitute the state (lo stato) as a ruler’s personal means for acquiring and unifying a principality stops short of recommending impersonal administrative rule over a territory and population, which became the key feature of subsequent programs of the modern bureaucratic state, as Mansfield (1983) has pointed out. Only the doctrine of ‘Machiavellianism’, as constructed retrospectively by later readers and writers, can be said to have initiated a series of reflections on the political conditions needed to


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secure law and order within a modern civil society, though Machiavelli himself did not imagine a split between the status of citizens and the actions of social members. Arendt (1961: 140) nevertheless insists that Machiavelli’s thought does mark the inaugural moment of the modern worldview with its call to establish a new social foundation through a radically political act of revolution. Like the Americans and French who invoked him, Machiavelli was inspired by the Roman passion for foundation and, more specifically, by the will to repair the trinity of religion, tradition and authority which had been broken by the challenge to papal and monarchical rule accompanying the rise of a market society. In On Revolution, Arendt (1963: 37) elaborates on this argument with reference to the breaking point of revolution, which Machiavelli viewed as a necessary act of civic solidarity even when it involved sacrificing eternal salvation. In other words, the specific revolutionary pathos of the absolutely new, of a beginning which would justify starting to count time in the year of the revolutionary event, was entirely alien to him. Yet, even in this respect he was not so far removed from his successors as in the eighteenth century as it may seem . . . It was in more than one respect that Robespierre was right when he asserted that ‘the plan of the French Revolution was written large in the books of Machiavelli’; for he could have easily have added: We too ‘love our country more than the safety of our soul’ . . . The question, as Machiavelli saw it, was not whether one loved God more than the world, but whether one was capable of loving the world more than oneself.

The other side of Machiavelli’s partisan advice concerning the proper conduct of the prince is the problem, left for subsequent generations to solve, of ensuring social order among populations through regulatory controls. But his characteristically Renaissance impulse also led him to return to the ancients as a way of addressing the present political crisis through social action. His concern was less to rebel against political repression or to reject the corruption of the Church than to expose a fatal weakness within the ideal of Christian goodness and virtue, and within the doctrine of free will, insofar as they eclipse valorous commitment to the virtuosity of great deeds. Arendt’s fanciful elaboration on Robespierre’s musings regarding the supreme ‘love of country’ is itself a displaced allusion to an imagined speech recounted in Book III of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, a late work completed around 1525. Here he recalls the events of a century and a half earlier which pitted the public force of citizens against the private corruption of the Signori. His account is framed less as a matter of an historical record of the past than as an allegorical tale, complete with fabricated political speeches which implicitly pass judgement on wars upon which Florence was then embarking: ‘The love that we bear, magnificent Signori, for our fatherland [patria] first made us gather and now makes us come to you to reason about [ragionare] the evil that one sees already great and yet keeps growing in this republic of ours, and to offer ourselves ready to


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eliminate it’ . . . The war [of the Otto Santi, 1375–78] . . . was administered with such virtue [virtù] and with such universal satisfaction that the magistracy was extended to the Eight every year; and they were called Saints even though they had little regard for censures, had despoiled the churches of their goods, and had compelled the clergy to celebrate the offices – so much more did those citizens then esteem their fatherland than their souls (1988: 109, 114).

The fictional aspect of Machiavelli’s rhetorical presentation here is remarkable for how it conveys historical truth in a way that does not conform to post-nineteenth century conventions for reporting historical facts. He does not attempt to represent the past realistically by referring to the authenticated accounts of witnesses or official documents in an effort to convince fellow scholars; rather, he envisions great events and invents eloquent speeches like this one in order to enlighten publics and to instruct leaders. Machiavelli’s dramatic technique involves depicting what appears to be an almost fatalistic process (fortuna) as if it were actually the condition for the success or failure of valorous action (virtù). As Antonio Negri (1999: 85, 89) has remarked, if his literary–analytical task in imaginatively telling these stories (istorie) is to identify the obstacles which tragically prevent people from acting as the subjects of history, his philosophico-political project is to reveal potential interruptions in the ebb and flow of historical events, and possible gaps in the natural process of growth and decay, which can spell either the ruin or the rebirth of regimes. Not surprisingly, Machiavelli’s Istorie have perennially appealed to later readers concerned with the interplay of virtù and fortuna and interested in the dynamics of freedom and destiny which confront political actors in a variety of historical circumstances. Like Robespierre in the grip of the the French Revolution and Arendt anticipating the upheavals of the 1960s, Weber also paraphrases a version of this passage in his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919), which he delivered shortly after the armistice of the First World War and in the midst of the revolutionary ferment which he was then experiencing in Munich. Warning against succumbing to the misguided enthusiasms of the masses, he alludes to Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories in order to instil a sense of both historical destiny and political responsibility in his young audience. The revolt of the rebellious Florentines against the papal interdict threatening the salvation of their souls thus suggests an allegorical lesson about principled action, a moral tale which he insists is more instructive than the ‘cool approbation’ of any Kantian philosophical dictum, and more convincing than the shrill ideological slogans about ‘the future of socialism’ or ‘international peace’: Again and again the interdict was imposed on Florence . . . and yet the citizens [Bürger] of Florence fought against the Holy See [Kirchenstaat]. Machiavelli had such situations in mind when, in a beautiful passage in his Florentine Histories (if my memory does not deceive me), he has one of his heroes praise those citizens who placed the greatness of their native city [Vaterstadt] above the salvation [das Heil] of their souls. (Weber 1994: 366)

In Economy and Society, Weber specifies the historical conditions which laid the groundwork for these events, made possible through the relative autonomy enjoyed


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by the guilds of warriors and craftsmen in the Mediterranean towns, and specifically among the associations of commercial traders and citizens in cities like Florence, from the middle ages to the Renaissance. These developments would eventually give birth to a modern homo politicus out of the freedoms embodied by the homo economicus of the medieval urban commune: ‘The Italian popolo was not only an economic category but a political one . . . In the truest sense of the word it was a “state within the state” – the first deliberately nonlegitimate and revolutionary political association’(Weber 1978: 1302). Machiavelli’s account of the revolt of the Florentine citizens illustrates this newfound freedom while poignantly dramatizing the tragic dilemma faced by political actors at a great turning point of history, insofar as they must decide between what Weber calls an ethics of responsibility or answerability (Vorantwortungsethik) and an ethics of conviction or conscience (Gesinnungsethik). Where the former ethic prescribes strategic or instrumentally rational actions with a view to their consequences, the latter entails acting solely on the basis of ideal values or ultimate ends. Rather than project a plan of action for the present, Machiavelli’s account of this perennial human drama thus exemplifies for Weber the irresolvable conflict between the pragmatic consequences and ultimate principles of religion and politics, or in terms Weber uses elsewhere (1994: 165–82), between the law of the god of unconditional love and the law of ‘the genius – or demon’ of violence. It thus clarifies the ‘polytheistic’ choice which modern citizens are sometimes compelled to make between eternal salvation in the next world and honor, glory or virtue in this one. In extreme circumstances, ordinary citizens and great heroes may not only be called upon to perform revolutionary acts of courage which effect a mutazione in state and society, but also to envision the foundation of an enduring body politic which would not require the sacrifice of self or soul for the love of the world. The writings of Machiavelli provide a curious sounding board and mirror reflection for these later thinkers in their attempts to test the limits and promise of an emerging social sphere in the late modern age. Whether understood to mark the beginning (Arendt), the high point (Weber) or the completion (Foucault) of a momentous epoch, his works are read as constituting a certain “speech-act” in their own right, and even as a kind of “text-work” which shapes a course of events which might otherwise not have turned out as they did. The revolutionary action of beginning something for the first time, or of founding and restoring something anew, is also a work of making, building and crafting history, if only in speech and writing. It is a project exposed to the uncertainty of sustaining or salvaging an initial inspiration, and vulnerable to the danger of securing power through time. In Arendt’s terms, the event of thought may find glorious but only fleeting form in the language of history, poetry and drama, but it may also seek to establish a lasting institutional context of meaning for the appearance of future thoughts, words and actions. The autonomous citizenry which Machiavelli conceived of as the cornerstone of the new republic, but which later revolutionaries hoped to build and improve upon, does not simply exert power through sovereign violence; it exemplifies another way of living together in remembering a common past and anticipating alternative futures.


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The Saving Grace of Social Life As Arendt remarks in the footnote to her comments on the model Machiavelli provided for the French Revolutionaries (1963: 276–77), the Florentine Histories valorize the love of the world through social action, even though reasoning critically (ragionare) about human evil and sacrificing oneself valiantly for kin and country may be condemned as sacrilegious. Ironically, the ‘Otto Santi’ may be praised as heroes, saints and saviours of Florence even as they risk the safety, well-being (bien), and salvation (Heil) of their souls, as later commentators, including Weber, have noted. Although revolution may challenge or even destroy religious tradition and political authority, it can also restore the sanctity of critical thinking and a reverence for political action. In different ways, Arendt, Weber and Foucault draw upon religious discourse in a selective way to expand upon this ‘saving power of social action’, that is, in their understanding of the trust and faith needed to sustain workable social institutions. At first glance, each appears to develop the deceptively simple thesis that Carl Schmitt proposes in Political Theology, an essay initially written in 1923 as a posthumous commentary on Weber: ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (1988: 36). Schmitt argues that modern political notions of the decision and the event, the exception and the emergency, are in some sense analogous to the belief in ‘the miracle’ in religious thought. Writing around the same time, Walter Benjamin (1978: 297–300) takes issue with the reactionary implications of Schmitt’s conclusion that ‘divine violence’ expresses the ultimately destructive, expiatory and law-destroying side of the exercise of sovereign power over mere life (bloβes Leben), even when undertaken for the sake of life itself. Each asks whether this newfound power over life – or “bio-power,” as Foucault would later call it – might constitute a stimulus for revolutionary action or even a basis for social order. Insofar as the foundation of social life in modernity is understood to emerge from a revolutionary event, it appears to be made possible either by a violent break with the law which is ethically, historically or even theologically justified (Schmitt), or by the restoration of an historical link which redeems a “socio-religious” bond between past and future generations (Benjamin). In negotiating this dilemma, Weber, Arendt and Foucault are less concerned with the general question of whether violence can be transcendentally sanctified, or whether sovereignty should be sanctioned by divine appeal, than they are with the historical problem of how social order is articulated in particular circumstances. Rather than suggest that any of these thinkers entertains the project of a political theology, if only in hidden or disguised form, I want instead to conclude with some speculations on how and why each seriously considers the prospect of a social soteriology (which, in some sense, resonates with that of Machiavelli) to be worth considering as a modern preoccupation. In different ways, they acknowledge the redemptive potential of the vita activa, understood not just as political action, narrowly conceived, but also as the coordination of labor, work, action and thought to create the foundations and redeem the authority of social life, short of fundamentalism and authoritarianism. Although Arendt herself rejects any political theology of ends, she


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does not shy away from religious vocabulary in her description of the ‘miracle’ of political beginnings as a presupposition for secular social and cultural projects. In her lectures on the ‘introduction into politics’, for example, Arendt (2005: 111–12) acknowledges that the way “leading into” (Einführung) political life is often experienced as a kind of ‘infinite improbability’ or ‘ultimately unexpected occurrence’, though not necessarily as a supernatural event or a superhuman feat. In the later lectures that make up Security, Territory, Population, Foucault also ponders over the social and political dimension of religious thought in his attempt to recover the ‘subjugated knowledges’ of pastoral techniques of care and vigilance from the theological–dogmatic writings of the early Christian era (2007: 196). Here the physical security and spiritual well-being of all and each (omnes et singulatim) become as much the concern of the sovereign leader who acts as a kind of ‘shepherd of men and souls’ as of any individual member of the ‘flock’ of believers and followers. This corpus of learned commentary on the Biblical narratives of servitude and exile thus projects a counter-history to authoritative accounts of the foundation of Roman imperial sovereignty, and prefigures the thought, language and conduct which later came to inspire the Protestant reformers and political rebels of the early modern era. Weber’s celebrated thesis picks up this argument at a later stage of occidental history by pointing out, among other things, that the Protestant appeal to the sacred character of the inner life and personal conscience of individual members of a community of belief also inspired natural law theorists to articulate the immanent character and teleological legitimacy of positive or ‘enacted’ law: ‘After religious revelation and the authoritarian sacredness of a tradition and its bearers have lost their force, [n]atural law [becomes] the specific form of legitimacy of a revolutionarily created order’ (Weber 1978: 867). This secular, rational and even sacred reverence for social order can be understood to constitute the last stand and highest achievement of ‘charisma’, that divine gift of grace which first began to exert its influence in the early Christian community whom Saint Paul proselytised in his epistles: This charismatic glorification of ‘Reason’, which found characteristic expression in its apotheosis by Robespierre, is the final form that charisma has adopted in its fateful historical course. It is clear that these postulates of formal legal equality and economic mobility paved the way for the destruction of all patrimonial and feudal law in favour of abstract norms and hence indirectly of bureaucratization. It is also clear that they facilitated the expansion of capitalism. The basic Rights of Man made it possible for the capitalist to use things and men freely, just as the this-worldly asceticism – adopted with some dogmatic variations – and the specific discipline of the sects bred the capitalist spirit and the rational ‘professional [Berufsmensch]’ who was needed by capitalism. (Weber 1978: 1209–10)

In Weber’s suggestive words, ‘the charisma of reason’, which was given its fullest expression in the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century, could not fully efface and displace the last traces of the miraculous ‘gift of grace’ which had been particularized in the Protestant conception of the calling, vocation, profession


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or occupation (all meanings connoted in German through the Lutheran conception of Beruf ). Like Foucault’s reflections on the disciplinary project of ‘pastoral power’, and Arendt’s sense of the ‘miraculous’ character of revolutionary beginnings, Weber also implies that ‘the social question’ posed by modern movements of reform and revolution may call in part for a qualified response in religious terms. In On Revolution, Arendt draws a surprising contrast between two forms of radical republicanism, one expressed through the anti-colonial resentments driving the American Revolution and the other in the antimonarchical and populist sentiments animating the French Revolution. In each case, events which initially seemed to be of only local significance eventually came to take on world-historical importance. Despite the appearance of a radical break with traditional forms of domination, the American declaration of an independent ‘Novos Ordo Seculorum,’ a motto which is still inscribed on the dollar bill (along with ‘In God We Trust’), asserts historical continuity with the past in the act of establishing lasting and autonomous forms of government. Such workable social institutions were outlined in the system of confederated wards, districts and counties coordinated through self-governing voluntary associations, citizens’ councils and constituent assemblies aimed at maximizing public participation while minimizing the hubris of ‘Caesarism’, a point recently developed by Baehr (2008: 187–212). By contrast, the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ effected a more emphatic rupture with tradition by calling for individual and collective emancipation through the creation of unprecedented legal–rational institutions of authority. Each movement faced the problem of beginning, which both the Americans and the French understood in political terms as an act of liberation or constitution, an event which may break from the past and open a path to the future. But they also encountered the problem of continuing, as the social passion for public renewal and political transformation gave way to narrower preoccupations with private prosperity and personal sovereignty. Arendt (1961: 164) thus wonders whether ‘politically, this identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.’ In the end, the retreat from the public sphere of action and speech to the interior domain of conscious will imperils the promise of social freedom by diminishing it to a claim by the individual to a right to sheer survival. From its paradoxical foundation out of a revolutionary act of destruction and creation, of rupture and continuity, the modern social sphere has led a perpetually precarious existence. As Weber points out, the freedom demanded by ‘the charisma of reason’ does not just provide a defence against authoritarian control over individual conscience, but also an ideological basis for the ‘free and equal’ deployment of the liberal apparatuses of bureaucratic domination and capitalist exploitation. In contrast to the ancient Greek concept of the zoon politikon, in which the capacity for political action is assumed to be inherent in the form of life which constitutes the human condition, modern power grafts the natural life of the citizen and the biological body of the Berufsmensch onto the juridico-political order of the nation–state and its capitalist political economy (cf. Agamben: 1988). Arendt thus suspects that the


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compulsion to labor and consume within the mass culture of liberal societies tends to break down genuinely human life into the merely biological needs and desires of animal existence (1969: 297). The ‘rights of man’ may therefore be invoked whenever individuals require protection from the arbitrary restrictions of the state and a guarantee of social freedoms. In an argument anticipated by Arendt three decades earlier (2005: 165), Foucault (1997: 15) suggests that the birth of the era of bio-power out of the spirit of modern revolution sutures the principle of natality to the practice of nationality, restraining the capacity for freedom through the proliferation of techniques of subjectification. In this socially produced ‘state of nature’ war is no longer a continuation of politics by other means, as in Clauswitz’s classic formula, but politics a continuation of war by other means. Nor is politics simply the expression of religious beliefs in another language, as Schmitt might have it (cf. O’Neill: 2008). The saving power of social action does not require appeal to the intervention of any saint, or any god, but only to the ordinary miracles of living and dying and the worldly graces of thinking, acting and speaking.

Bibliography Agamben, G. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1961. Between past and future. New York: The Viking Press. —. 1963. On revolution. London: Penguin Books. —. 1970. On violence. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. —. 1969 [1951]. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. —. 2005. The promise of politics. Ed. J. Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Baehr, P. 2008. Caesarism, charisma and fate: Historical sources and modern resonances in the work of Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. Critique of violence [1921]. In Reflections. Trans. E Jephcott, 277–300. New York: Schocken Books. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. —. 1997 [1976]. ‘Society must be defended.’ Ed. M. Snellart; trans. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2007 [1978]. Security, territory, population. Ed. M Snellart; trans. G Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2008 [1979]. The birth of biopolitics. Ed. M Snellart; trans. G Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gierke, Otto von. 1987 [1881]. Political theories of the Middle Ages. Trans. F. W. Matiland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kemple, T. M. 2007. Allosociality: An introduction to Simmel’s social theory of the limit. Theory, Culture & Society (Annual Review) 24 (7–8): 1–19. Machiavelli, N. 1988 [ca. 1525]. Florentine histories, Trans. L. F Banfield and H.C Mansfield. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mansfield, H. C. Jr. 1983. On the impersonality of the modern state: A comment on Machiavelli’s use of state. American Political Science Review 77(4): 849–57. Negri, A. 1999. Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state. Trans. M Bosckagl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.


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O’Neill, J. 1972. Authority, knowledge, and the body politic. In Sociology as a skin trade: Essays toward a reflexive sociology, 68–80. New York: Harper & Row. —. 2008. Ecce Homo: The political theology of good and evil. (Unpublished essay). Schmitt, C. 1988 [1922/1934]. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Trans. G Schwab. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Simmel, G. 1971 [1908]. How is society possible? In On individuality and social forms. Ed. D. N. Levine, 6–22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallimann, I., N. Tatsis and G. V. Zito. 1977. On Max Weber’s definition of power. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 13: 231–5. Weber, M. 1978 [1910–1914/1918–1920]. Economy and society. Vols 1 and 2. Ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich. Los Angeles: University of California Press. —. 1994 [1916]. Between two laws. In Weber: Political Writings. Ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs, 75–79. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —. 1994 [1919]. Politics as a vocation. In Weber: Political Writings. Ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs, 309–69. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


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CHAPTER 8

On Action: The Appearance of the Law Peg Birmingham

Arendt’s thinking on the relations between action and the law varies considerably from her initial formulation in The Human Condition to her later writings, especially in On Revolution, On Violence and in her long essay ‘Introduction into Politics’ in The Promise of Politics. Thinking of the relation between action and the law in The Human Condition, Arendt argues that the law is the wall or border that establishes the political space for action and speech. Indeed, she suggests that while the law is the necessary condition for political action, the law itself is not constituted through political action. She makes this same point in her essay ‘What is Authority?’ (Arendt: 1968b). However, in her later writings, most especially in On Revolution and ‘Introduction into Politics’, Arendt moves from an understanding of the law as ‘wall’ or ‘border’ to an understanding of law as ‘alliance’, suggesting that the law is constituted through political action, specifically revolutionary action. According to this latter view, Arendt argues that action is the spirit of the law, which she locates in ‘the phenomenon of revolutionary power’ (Arendt 1963: 41). In what follows, I will focus on Arendt’s later view of the relation between action and the law, focusing specifically on how revolutionary action is constitutive of the law. Going further, I will then try to show that in thinking through this relation between action and the law (and revising her own thinking on the matter), Arendt gives us important resources for rethinking one of the most difficult political issues of our times, namely, the problem of lawful, nonviolent political borders. But first, it is important to understand why Arendt changes her mind on the constituting power of the law. To understand this, we must turn to the opening pages of On Revolution as well as her 1966 essay, ‘Introduction into Politics’ and think about the relations of violence to political action, especially vis-à-vis Carl Schmitt and the problem of the sovereign decision.

Sovereign Power, Violence and the Law It is significant that two of Arendt’s most important reflections on political action, On Revolution and ‘Introduction into Politics’, begin with a long reflection on total annihilation. The consideration of the threat of ‘total war’ inaugurates both essays.


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The task of politics today, Arendt suggests, is to address the problem of total violence that threatens to annihilate not only politics, but the worldly space of appearance itself. Thus, while she claims in both essays that the meaning of politics is freedom, she suggests that ultimately the way into politics – the way into a space of freedom, of acting freely with a plurality of others – must be through the threat of violence. And to complicate matters further, Arendt suggests at the conclusion of her introduction to On Revolution that all political action, defined as the capacity of beginning something new, is rooted in an ‘originary crime’: ‘The relevance of the problem of beginning to the phenomenon of revolution is obvious. That such a beginning must be intimately connected with violence seems to be vouched for by the legendary beginning of our history, as both biblical and classical antiquity report it: Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus; violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be made without violence, without violating’ (Arendt 1963: 20). Here, Arendt surprisingly suggests that that all political action begins in violence. This claim not only seems to bring violence and politics much closer in Arendt’s political thought than some of her writing suggests, most notably her remarks in the opening pages of The Human Condition, but it also seems to bring her much closer to Schmitt than is usually thought to be the case. To judge Arendt’s proximity to Schmitt on this matter of violence, we need to turn briefly to Schmitt’s position on the sovereign power, violence and the law. As is well known, for Schmitt the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The sovereign, Schmitt argues, ‘produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision’ (2005: 13). In the face of a threat to the very existence of the state, the sovereign decision suspends the law in the name of ‘public safety and order’ (2005: 9). Thus, at the center of the sovereign decision is an antinomic reality in which the sovereign has unlimited authority to suspend the laws in order to reestablish the conditions of their effectiveness. The sovereign decision, without ground and without justification – a deus ex machina – is a decision ‘in the true sense’ insofar as it marks a cut between the legal and the extra-legal (Schmitt 2005: 6). This is, for Schmitt, the ‘miracle’ in politics and marks the inescapable theological moment of the political. Moreover, for Schmitt establishing the political space and the effectiveness of its law is a miracle insofar as it is without justification. There is at this moment a coup de force that marks the new beginning. And this seems to be Arendt’s argument as well in her reading of Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel: There is no beginning without violence. And because sovereignty is always established upon this border of the legal and extralegal, state sovereignty is established by and through its borders. Politics is therefore a borderline concept. The political space for Schmitt is marked by a sovereign decision that establishes borders between legality and illegality, order and disorder, friend and enemy, the internal and external, life and death. The law that secures the borders is itself violent, and politics seems inherently to evoke the presence of the police. And yet we must be cautious. As close as Arendt seems to be to Schmitt in the introduction to On Revolution, her subsequent essay On Violence, written five years


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ON ACTION: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LAW 105

later, reveals just how far removed she is from him not only in her thinking on the relations between violence and power, but also in pondering the ‘miracle of beginning’ that founds the political space of action. With her friend Benjamin’s essay of similar title never far from her thoughts, it is my suggestion that Arendt’s essay On Violence is an extended reflection on whether violence is inseparable from political beginnings. In other words, it is my view that Arendt’s essay On Violence reveals a change of mind regarding the relation between action and the law. Still further, it seems to me that under the threat of total war and total annihilation in a globalized world, where the concept of humanity has become an ‘inescapable fact’, (Arendt 1952: 298), Arendt realizes that an understanding of the law as first of all a wall demarcating the space of political action from the violence outside the gates of the city, secondly as rooted in domestic policy with no concept of foreign affairs, and thirdly as not constituted out of political action but instead rooted in some sort of sovereign decision, only hastens the total annihilation of the world.

Arendt and Benjamin: On Violence To grasp Arendt’s debt to Benjamin as she reflects on the relations between action and violence, we must turn first to her biographical essay on Benjamin. Arendt begins this essay by citing approvingly Benjamin’s distinction in Elective Affinities between critique and commentary. Following Benjamin, she argues that critique is engaged in ‘truth content’, while commentary is after ‘subject matter’ (Arendt 1968a: 156). The commentator is a chemist concerned with ‘wood and ashes’ while the critic is an alchemist inquiring about the ‘flame’, the ‘enigma of being alive’. Arendt quotes Benjamin directly: ‘Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by” (Arendt 1968a: 157). Whereas commentary focuses only on the concrete realities that with time die out in a work in order to establish their meanings, critique focuses on what in the work consumes its historical and material content and makes it alive, or rather, endows it with a life that transcends history. Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, then, is an inquiry into the ‘living flame’ of violence; it is, in other words, concerned with the enigma of what is alive in violence, the living spirit of violence. As we shall see, this notion of critique infuses his notion of divine violence, while the lack of living spirit characterizes mythical violence. Similarly, Arendt’s essay on violence is also animated by the enigma of being alive as she too attempts to grasp the ‘living spirit’ of power and action. And, I suggest, her distinction between the deadly force of instrumental violence and the living spirit of power is extremely close to Benjamin’s distinction between mythical and divine violence. In her essay On Violence, citing specifically C. Wright Mills and Max Weber, Arendt notes the theological element in most understandings of the relations among power, law and violence, arguing that this understanding of violence is ‘confirmed and fortified by the addition of the Hebrew–Christian tradition and its “imperative


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conception of law” ’ (Arendt 1970: 39). In this framework, violence is linked to power understood as domination and force; further, it is always instrumental. Violence is the means by which authority enforces the law. Arendt points out that the problem with this is that ultimately the most extreme means can be used to justify political ends: ‘The very substance of violent action is ruled by the means–end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it’ (Arendt 1970: 4). As I suggested before, Arendt’s understanding of violence as instrumental force is very close to Benjamin’s notion of mythical violence. Recall that Benjamin (1986) opens his essay by claiming first that a critique of violence is always in the context of justice and the law. The critique of violence, then, is always carried out in a moral context. Moreover, he claims that in the legal realm violence is a means to an end. If violence is a means to an end, then is it not then the task of critique to establish the criteria for just and unjust ends? Benjamin answers no. The task of critique (and here he follows his definition of critique in Elective Affinities) is to consider whether ‘violence, as a principle, could be a moral means even to just ends’ (Benjamin 1986: 277). In other words, the task of critique is to question the violent means themselves, ‘without regard to the ends they serve’ (Benjamin 1986: 277). Following his definition of critique in Elective Affinities, Benjamin goes on to argue that one type of means, mythical violence, is a law-making and law-preserving violence that will use all means for the sake of the sole end of preserving itself. Mythical violence, very close to Arendt’s understanding of instrumental violence, is a calculating and coercive violence in the name of the law. Moreover, both Benjamin and Arendt argue that instrumental violence, however justified, is always bloody and tied to biological life, understood as ‘mere life’ (Benjamin 1986: 297). Benjamin argues that mythical violence, always in the service of establishing new law (and here it is apparent that he has in mind something like Schmitt’s sovereign decision), is the ‘exercise of violence over life and death’ where ‘blood is the symbol of mere life’ (Benjamin 1986: 277). This bloody violence reveals ‘something rotten in the law’ (1986: 286). Arendt goes so far as to argue that coercive, justified violence is always framed in terms of biological justifications, positing that there is a long tradition of ‘organic thought in political matters by which power and violence are interpreted in biological terms’ (Arendt 1970: 75). Indeed, she argues that if we continue to think of the political in biological terms, then it is true ‘that destruction and creation are two sides of the natural process, so that collective violent action, quite apart from its inherent attraction, may appear as natural a prerequisite for the collective life of mankind as the struggle for survival and violent death for continuing life in the animal kingdom’ (Arendt 1970: 75). Both Arendt and Benjamin argue that instrumental and coercive violence is not animated by living spirit, but instead is a sovereign law that exalts itself, through death, above natural and biological life. And again, bloodshed is the mark of this violence which is always exercised in the name of destiny and fate against which no living action is deemed possible. Benjamin and Arendt agree that justified (mythical)


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violence must be rejected; both issue an injunction against instrumental calculation – violence as a means to an end in which the notion of the ‘lesser evil’ is often invoked, a notion that all too often finds us finally embracing an evil more horrifying than one could ever imagine. As is well known, Benjamin contrasts bloody, mythical violence whose end is a law-constituting and law-preserving violence with ‘divine violence’. Benjamin writes, “If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood” (Benjamin 1986: 297). Divine violence, he argues, cannot be justified through a set of ends, but constitutes a ‘pure means’ without ends. Thus, divine violence transforms the time of the law; it turns the fateful time of mythical violence into the time of ‘sacred transience,’ which for Benjamin is the experience of finitude. Destructive of fate and destiny, it is the experience of the radical contingency and unpredictability of finitude itself. The divine injunction, Benjamin argues, concerns the ‘soul of the living’. It is (and this will be very important for what follows) ‘pure manifestation’. Divine violence reveals something ‘rotten in the law’; it exposes and severs the nexus between law and violence and, thereby, manifests the subject of mythical violence (Benjamin 1986: 287). The general strike is exemplary because it transforms the dead and lifeless victims of mythical violence into living actors who no longer submit to what in the name of lawful destiny and fate has been thrown their way. In short, divine violence seeks to release life in a contract with death through political action. I suggest that Arendt’s essay on violence, especially her insistence on the distinction between violence and power, is an attempt to develop and clarify Benjamin’s understanding of ‘divine violence’. If ‘divine violence’ is the attempt to transform the law by infusing it with living spirit, then Arendt suggests it would be more precise to say that the opposite of mythical, coercive violence is not another type of violence, but instead, revolutionary power. Certainly, Benjamin says as much when he points to the general strike as an example of divine violence. Arendt writes, ‘When the Athenian city–state called its constitution an isonomy [emphasis mine], or the Roman spoke of civitas [emphasis in text] as their forms of government, they had in mind a concept of power and law whose essence did not rely on the command–obedience relationship and did not identify power and rule or law and command” (Arendt 1970: 40). Here rule of law rests on the power (potestas) of the people, who do not obey the law but support it. Arendt writes, ‘All political institutions are manifestations and materialization of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them” (Arendt 1970: 41). She calls the ‘living power of the people’ the ‘phenomenon of revolutionary power’. Revolutionary power, she suggests, is the living spirit of the law (see especially Arendt 1963: 215–81). Arendt makes a distinction between power and authority that mirrors Benjamin’s distinction between divine violence and mythical violence. Power, Arendt argues,


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‘corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together’ (Arendt 1970: 44). Authority, on the other hand, can be vested in persons or it can be vested in offices – ‘Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey’ (Arendt 1970: 45). Authority is at the heart of mythic violence. The move from mythical violence to divine violence (or what Arendt simply calls ‘power’) is the move from being subjects of the law to becoming actors who overturn or transform the law. I want to elaborate on this last point in Arendt’s thinking. In the recently published Jewish Writings, specifically in her writings of the early 1940s, Arendt calls for a Jewish army, again surprising for a thinker who is usually associated with an unwavering insistence on the rejection of violence from politics. But if we look closely at her calls for a Jewish army, we see that Arendt’s thinking is very close to her remarks in the essay On Violence, which as we have seen is a rejection of justified violence understood in terms of a means–end relationship. Arendt’s call for a Jewish army is not simply a call for self-defence; instead she argues that the constitution of a people depends on its ability to manifest itself through action. “But what characterizes the events in France this time is that they are not simply symptoms of angry self-defence, but an expression of a sense of human responsibility for others, and that means an expression of political will. These events are also not an expression of sympathy as frequently repeated phrases like “these poor unfortunates” might lead you to believe; (Arendt 2007: 176–7). In her call for a Jewish army, Arendt is calling for active resistance against what could be seen as destiny or fate. The point here, and I will come back to it briefly at the conclusion of these remarks, is that Arendt’s call for a Jewish army was not made in the name of a lawmaking or law-preserving violence, but in the name of the living spirit of the actors themselves. Again, this is what Arendt calls ‘revolutionary power’, and what Benjamin names the divine violence of the general strike. It is resistance in the name of the living and through a law that neither binds nor is coercive, and this last because it is a law infused with the sacred transience of existence with its radical contingency, unpredictability and anarchy. In other words, it is a law infused with the living spirit of political action. We can now return to the conclusion of Arendt’s introduction to On Revolution, specifically to her remark that all beginnings seem rooted in an original violence. To repeat, she points to the respective slayings of Cain and Romulus. These tales, she argues, suggest that ‘whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime’ (Arendt 1963: 20). The inherent violence endemic to all beginnings, she states, ‘is vouched for by the legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical and classical antiquity reported it’ (Arendt 1963: 20). She concludes by stating, ‘The conviction, in the beginning was the crime – for which the phrase “state of nature” is only a theoretically purified paraphrase – has carried through the centuries no less self-evident plausibility for the state of human affairs than the first sentence of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word,” has possessed for the affairs


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of salvation’ (Arendt 1963: 20). Significantly, Arendt’s claims regarding an ‘original fratricide’ or ‘original crime’ at the heart of political organization occur in the context of legends and myths, all of which posit original violence at the heart of politics. Yet, as we have seen, Arendt’s later essay On Violence suggests, following Benjamin, that a distinction must be made between ‘mythical violence’ and ‘revolutionary power’. All of the examples that point to an original violence as the foundation of political action come from myth and legend, a violence that Arendt argues is absent from revolutionary power animated by political praxis. And, going further, when she cites the ‘self-evident plausibility’ for this original violence, it seems to me that she is displaying more than a trace of irony, especially if we consider how often Arendt derides the ‘self-evident’ nature of things, calling instead for the task of comprehension, for facing up to the burden and shock of reality, which for her is anything but self-evident. Still further, she suggests that if we separate the question of beginnings and political action from legends and myths (as well as a theological framework), then we are able to raise anew the question of whether all beginnings are necessarily violent. Here we need to return again to the ‘miracle’ of beginnings.

The Condition of Action: The Miracle of Natality It is my contention that Arendt’s reflections on the ‘spirit of the laws’, specifically her founding this spirit in the event of natality is her answer to Carl Schmitt’s grounding of political action and the law in the ‘miraculous’ decision of the sovereign. Certainly for Arendt, like Schmitt, a ‘miracle’ marks the foundation of the political. Rather than a sovereign decision, the miracle for Arendt is rooted in an event. This, in turn, I submit, transforms the Schmittean framework of sovereign violence which, as we have seen, is always the problem of a ‘miracle’ that marks a ‘founding violence’. For Arendt, the miracle that is the condition of the political is the anarchic event of natality. The beginning, she argues, ‘is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves all things’ (Arendt 1968b: 18). The final optimistic words of the otherwise deeply pessimistic The Origins of Totalitarianism are those of Augustine’s: Initium esse homo creatus est (that a beginning be made man was created). ‘This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man’ (Arendt 1952: 479). We do not need to wait for a god to save us; instead, we are saved by this archaic beginning which, in principle, each of us already is. For Arendt, the event of natality is the arché in the double etymological sense of origin and rule. In other words, the event of natality is the unpredictable, anarchic origin that carries its rule or principle within it. As Arendt points out: ‘What saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself or, to be more precise, that beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are coeval’ (Arendt 1963: 213). And in The Human Condition, she writes: ‘The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal “natural” ruin is


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ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted’ (Arendt 1958: 157). Here we can begin to see how Arendt’s concept of action, the centerpiece of her political thought, is indebted to the Jewish messianic tradition and allows for rethinking the notion of the ‘miracle’ at the foundation of the political, a miracle that I submit allows for a transformation of the law. In The Human Condition, at the conclusion of the chapter on action, Arendt cites ‘the opening messianic passages of Isaiah, “A child has been born unto us” ’ (Arendt 1958: 247). However pessimistic Arendt’s thought, she refused to renounce hope in the world. The end of the otherwise profoundly pessimistic Origins of Totalitarianism refers to Augustine: ‘that a beginning be made, man was created.’ And this is the beginning that she returns to in The Human Condition: ‘for unto us a child is born’. Here Arendt announces faith in the world – not in God, but in the world. The world is saved through the event of natality, which she argues is the ontological condition of action. Natality saves the world from its inherent ruination. Arendt writes in The Human Condition: ‘The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, although they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin’ (Arendt 1958: 246). For Arendt the principium of the archaic event of natality is double: the principle of initium and the principle of givenness. All too briefly, in the anarchic, unpredictable event of natality, two different principia emerge without coincidence: the principia of beginning (initium) and the principia of givenness. Each of these principia gives rise to a different relation: the first is a relation to plurality, the second to uniqueness and singularity (for a longer discussion, see Birmingham: 2006). Examining Arendt’s debt to Montesquieu is helpful in grasping the status of the principium at work in the event of natality and what this means politically. In Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argues that the various institutions and laws that constitute a form of government are always animated by a spirit or ethos. He understands spirit as the affection that provides the principle of action within a particular regime: ‘There is this difference between the nature and principle of government that the former is that by which it is constituted, the latter that by which it is made to act. One is its particular structure, and the other the human passions which set it in motion” (Montesquieu 1949: 19). Thus, Montesquieu argues that a monarchy is animated by love of honor, a republic by love of virtue, and a tyranny by fear. The animating affection is the origin (arché) of action, and as such carries its rule or principle within it.1 What interests Arendt is Montesquieu’s claim that political principles are different from the laws that order a particular political space. Laws, she argues, establish limits or boundaries that circumscribe and stabilize action. Principles, on the other hand, are sources of action and motion, providing the ‘common ground in which the laws are rooted and from which the actions of citizens spring’. Principles are ‘moving principles’ that orient action and ‘map out certain directions (Arendt 1994, 335).


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At the same time, the laws, if they are to have spirit, must be infused with these principles. Just as Arendt explicitly criticizes sovereignty from the point of view of initium, with its inherent capacity for power and action, so too she criticizes sovereignty from the principle of givenness, with its unconditional demand that we may affirm the gift of unqualified singularity. While the initium calls into question any claim to sovereignty, because it must always be asserted in the plural, the principle of givenness thwarts any claim to sovereignty (particularly state sovereignty) because it is that which is always outside any identity (including national identity) that could argue for hegemony over unqualified existence. Following from this, we can now consider the difference between Arendt and Schmitt on the founding of the political space. As we saw before, for Schmitt the founding of political space is made in the sovereign decision. Schmitt follows Hobbes on this point, arguing that the sovereign decision is the constituting power that establishes the political space and the effectiveness of its laws. The coup de force of the sovereign decision brings law to the light of the day. The authority of the laws for Schmitt emerges out of an originary decision, an originary violence as it were. By contrast, and following Arendt, I want to argue that prior to the sovereign decision appearance itself takes place, what she calls the ‘disturbing miracle’ of givenness (Arendt 1952: 301). The space of the political for Arendt is not primarily or first of all the realm of logos, nor is it the result of a constitutive decision; instead, the space of the political is first of all the space of appearance, the exposure or the taking place of a ‘commonality of singularities’ (Arendt 1968b: 98). Before the law and animating the law is the human being exposed in its very appearance, or in other words, in its very being made manifest. Appearance is first of all exposure to the world. I submit that this echoes Arendt’s first sense of the ‘public’ in The Human Condition: ‘For us, appearance – something that is seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality’ (Arendt 1958: 50). Arendt understands this appearance as life, as ‘being among men’ (inter homines esse), and distinguishes it from death, that removal from the world of appearance (Arendt 1958: 51). Only the second sense of the term ‘public’ denotes a ‘common world’. Prior to and distinguished from the publicness of a ‘common world’, there is singular, unique life appearing as such, albeit always lived among other human beings. In other words, appearance as such is a worldly appearance, although not yet a common appearance, the latter being for Arendt constituted through the common interests, the inter-esse, of a plurality of human beings. Prior to the sovereign decision is the exposure and taking place of appearance as such. This is what Benjamin calls ‘manifestation’, or ‘pure means’ without end (Benjamin 1986: 294, 290). For Arendt, the refugee is the exemplary figure of this being made manifest. Without logos or proper identity papers, nevertheless, the refugee exposes the rightful appearance (exposé de droit) of the purely human as such. The appearance of the human as such is a principled appearance and, to paraphrase Agamben, in the coming community this principled appearance of the human as


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such will be the spirit subtending the law, surrounding it like a halo. This appearance, this being made manifest, which is another way of characterizing the disturbing miracle of givenness and initium, is the spirit that animates the law; it is the basis for all political decisions, declarations and performances. And this to my mind refutes the notion of originary violence, a coup de force that constitutes the law. Instead, what animates the law, its spirit as it were, is gratitude for various kinds of givenness accompanied by the joy of inhabiting, together with a plurality of others, a world where the miracle of beginning saves us from ruin.

Action at the Borders: The Appearance of New Worlds In conclusion, I want to take up the question of lawful borders, asking whether it is possible to think of borders and boundaries not established through the mythical violence of the sovereign decision? At first glance, despite her profound differences with Schmitt on the miracle that inaugurates the public space, Arendt does not seem to give a positive answer to this question. As I noted at the outset of this essay, Arendt’s initial formulation of the law in The Human Condition seems to take over without critique the Greek notion of the law as the ‘wall’, the border that distinguishes between violence (outside the walls of the public space) and politics, the persuasive space of speech and deed among isonomia - citizens who neither rule nor are ruled. The ‘wall,’ Arendt points out, is the first name of the law, the nomos that erects a barrier between the barbarian and the citizen, between violence and peace. What seems entirely lacking in Arendt’s account of the Greek polis, with its distinction between violence and politics, is any analysis of the wall itself, this place of the law, this border between barbaric violence and persuasive speech and action in the public space. It is as if Arendt’s political thought leaves intact at least one of Schmitt’s fundamental claims: politics is a borderline concept and as such is inherently violent. Despite all of Arendt’s arguments that the polis is a place of persuasive speech and action, not a place of violence, the violence of the wall itself suggests otherwise. But this is not Arendt’s last word on the subject. In her 1966 essay, ‘Introduction into Politics’, contemplating a world now engaged in ‘total war’ with the means of ‘total annihilation’, she suggests that we return to Troy, the ‘ur-city of the war of annihilation,’ asking what we can learn about the meaning of politics, law and violence from the respective Greek and Roman ‘embellishments’ of this city and of this war. She points out that, according to Homer, Achilles desired an adventure far from home and the confinement of the household, and so he led a group of many ‘kings’ – ‘free men living in the isolation of their households’ to Troy (Arendt 2005: 172). In Arendt’s reading, glory, not Helen, was the motive animating the voyage. The problem is what happens when the war ends, when the space of adventure vanishes and the heroes return home. What happens next, she claims, is instructive for the Greek conception of law and political space: ‘The public space does not become political until it is secured within a city, is bound to a concrete place that itself survives


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both those memorable deeds and the names of the memorable men who performed them and thus can pass them on to posterity over generations. This city, which offers a permanent abode for mortal men and their transient deeds and words, is the polis” (Arendt 2005: 123). Greek law constitutes the city; it is productive, originating in a theological framework – that is, it originates from Zeus, ‘the guardian of borders and border stones’. What matters is the marking of borders. Arendt writes, ‘The law is, so to speak, something by which the polis enters into its continuing life, something it cannot abolish without losing its identity. And the law is not valid outside the polis; its binding power applies only to the space that it encloses and delimits’ (Arendt 2005: 181). At the same time, she argues, the Greeks had no foreign policy: ‘they [the Greeks] likewise believed that whenever the polis dealt with other states, it no longer actually needed to proceed politically, but could instead use force – whether that was because its continuation was threatened by the power of another community or because it wished to make others subservient to it’ (Arendt 2005: 129). For the Greeks, the law is not a bridge between one political community and another; instead it is a wall and the site of mythical violence. Most importantly in Arendt’s reading, the Greeks ‘became themselves’ through the law that establishes the border between the citizen and the barbarian. Moreover, the law preserves the identity of the Greek citizen, which Arendt argues is first gained in battle. Greek political identity is for Arendt initially gained in the violence of war and then established legally in the internal borderland between free citizen and slave. By contrast, Arendt argues, Roman politics begins as foreign policy. The descendants of Troy, annihilated, do not return home. Instead, they arrive on Italian soil where there is a concern for ‘full justice for the defeated’. I quote the text at some length: . . . with the Romans, politics grew not between citizens of equal rank within a city, but rather between alien and unequally matched peoples who first came together in battle. It is true that, as we noted, struggle, and with it war, marked the beginning of political existence for the Greeks as well, but only insofar as they became themselves through conflict and then came together to preserve their own nature. For the Romans, this same struggle became the means by which they recognized both themselves and their opponents. Thus, when the battle was over, they did not retreat inside their walls, to be with themselves and their glory. On the contrary, they gained something new, a new political arena, secured in a peace treaty according to which yesterday’s enemies became tomorrow’s allies. (Arendt 2005: 178)

Rather than relegating violence beyond the gates of the city, new entities are introduced here, namely, the treaty and alliance, which transform the political space itself. Arendt writes, ‘It was most definitely not a matter of fanning the old flames anew, of simply returning to the old outcome, but rather of inventing a new outcome for war’s conflagration’ (Arendt 2005: 178). For Arendt, the peace treaty that binds two nations allows for the appearance of a new world that rises up between them or, more precisely, the peace treaty guarantees the continuation of a new world that they now


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share in common (Arendt 2005: 178). It is significant that already in 1943 Arendt is calling for a federated European Union. And she makes the same argument about Palestine, going so far as to call for a new Mediterranean federation that would include the federated bi-national state of Palestine. For Arendt, the Roman conception of law is political, arising not out of a sovereign decision, but out of praxis: ‘The formulation of law, of this lasting tie that follows the violence of war, is itself tied to proposals and counterproposals, that is, to speech, which in the view of both the Greeks and the Romans was central to all politics’ (Arendt 2005: 179). Understood as alliance, law is neither sovereign nor dominating, neither commandment nor imposed standard. Again following Montesquieu, who understands the law as alliance, Arendt argues that the law must be understood as regulator of different domains of power. The principle of alliance is the claim to power without the further claim to sovereignty. Such an alliance, she argues, ‘gathers together the isolated strengths of the allied partners and binds them into a new power structure by virtue of free and sincere promise’ (Arendt 1963: 170). Most importantly, the regulation of different domains of power emerges out of shared political practice. Again, it is the political praxis of promise-making that for Arendt properly constitutes the law and allows for new worlds to emerge from what had formerly been places full of hostility, conflict and violence. New worlds emerge from political praxis in which the parties bind themselves through the promise to a future that truly allows for something new. Indeed, Arendt’s view of the law as alliance rooted in shared political practice supports her argument for civil disobedience. Built into the notion of law as alliance is the notion that political actors not only make the law through shared political praxis, but at the same time, they may challenge these alliances. At several key places in her work, Arendt makes clear that ‘support’ rather than ‘obedience’ properly marks the citizen’s relation to the law. And, she argues, this support can be taken away in those moments when actors view the law as unjust. Her critique of Plato’s view of the law in the Crito is instructive. According to Arendt, Plato’s view of the law is entirely consistent with his understanding of the law as that which both calls a city into being and gives the citizens of the polis their political identity. To turn against the law is to become an enemy of the city. To disobey would be an act of war against the city. For Plato the law is the foundation of the city and to disobey it would be to declare an act of war against it. Important to Socrates’ argument in the Crito is his remark that he went to war for Athens. That he went to war is central to his argument as to why he must obey the law, even if the verdict against him was unjust. He was willing to sacrifice his life for the city, a sacrifice by which the city established its borders. Only within this domain can we argue about whether the law is just or unjust, but what we cannot do, according to Plato, is challenge the law itself. Once the city has rendered its verdict, the citizen must obey. To do otherwise is to declare an act of war against the city. Arendt disagrees. If the law is understood as alliance, then the notion of civil disobedience is built into the law. While the law, understood as alliance, often


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emerges out of war, the sacrifice of war does not establish the political borders. As we saw above, for Arendt political borders are instead gained through subsequent political praxis by victors and vanquished alike. The law does not emerge from sacrifice but from political action. Emerging out of political action, the law then can always be challenged by political action. And because the law emerges out of political action and not the violence of war, civil disobedience by which political actors challenge the law must itself be non-violent. In still other words, while Arendt, in the tradition of her friend Rosa Luxemburg, understands political action as a kind of ‘permanent revolution’, she suggests that the revolution itself must constantly strive to turn violence into non-violent practice. In contrast to the Schmittean conception of the law as rooted in the miraculous sovereign decision that violently distinguishes between friend/enemy, included/ excluded, life and death zones, the Arendtian conception of law is rooted in alliances in which spheres of power are conjoined and through which new worlds are possible. Inspired by the miraculous principles of givenness and initium and constituted through political praxis, the law is animated by the living spirit of the actors themselves. At the same time, borders, by definition places of crises, hostilities and emergencies, no longer emerge from a sovereign decision, but instead are constituted out of the power and action of the actors themselves who are part of these crises. In this way the borders (and this includes internal borders as well) are opened, and various alliances are negotiated and renegotiated. Rather than a strict distinction between violence and politics, we could say then that the political task today is to transform violence into politics. More precisely, it is to transform the violent and bloody sovereign law into shared political praxis animated by the living spirit of the law.

Notes 1 In her later essay, ‘What is Freedom?’ Arendt develops further her understanding of a principle of action that provides ‘common ground’. Referring again to Montesquieu, she argues that principles of action are not inherent to the self nor do they prescribe particular goals: ‘Principles do not operate from within the self as motives do - but inspire, as it were, from without, and they are much too general to prescribe particular goals, although every particular aim can be judged in the light of its principle once the act has been started’. Again, principles of action ‘map out certain directions’; they orient action without prescribing it. Arendt insists that principles must be enacted and ‘become fully manifest in the performing act itself’ (Arendt 1968b: 152).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1952. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1963. On revolution. New York: Penguin Books. —. 1968a. Men in dark times. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Co. —. 1968b. Between past and future. New York: Penguin.


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—. 1970. On violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich. —. 1977. Between past and future. New York: Penguin. —. 1994. Essays in understanding. New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace & Co. —. 2005. The promise of politics. New York: Schocken. —. 2007. The Jewish writings. New York: Schocken. Benjamin, Walter. 1986. Critique of violence. In Reflections. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, 277–301. New York: Schocken. Birmingham, P. 2006. Hannah Arendt and human rights: The predicament of common responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Montesquieu. 1949. The spirit of the laws. Trans. Thomas Nugent. London: Haftner Library of Classics. Schmitt, C. 2005. Political theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


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CHAPTER 9

Ethics and the Vocation of Politics Steve Buckler

Many commentators on Arendt, even sympathetic ones, have argued that there is a missing normative element in her thought (Jay 1978; Benhabib 1996; Kateb 2000). It has often been pointed out that Arendt does not appear to develop a political ethic, certainly of a conventionally recognizable sort, and it has been inferred from this that her political theory lacks any credible role for ethical constraint. This perceived lacuna has often in turn been put down to her unfortunate nostalgic attachment to what she takes to be a classical model of politics as an ‘agonal’ undertaking, geared to self-disclosure and the realization of glory, a model that encourages us to see moral limitations upon action merely as obstacles to the realization of greatness. This absence of space for ethical constraint has been thought to curtail the significance of Arendt’s theory as a challenging alternative to more mainstream approaches. I want to suggest, however, that whilst it is true that she does not develop a political ethics of a conventional sort, it is wrong to infer from this that Arendt’s understanding of politics is morally barren. Further, I want to argue that far from inhibiting the incorporation of ethical considerations, the dynamics of the agonal model that Arendt adopts, where things are judged ‘by the criteria of greatness’, may supply a source of ethical constraint and guidance, even if the specific substantive character of these ethical considerations cannot generally be determined a priori (Arendt 1958: 205). I frame this argument by reference to the idea of politics as a vocation. This is an idea that I think is appropriate to Arendt’s conception of political agency and it permits an exploration of the moral implications of that conception in terms of a vocational ethics – that is, a set of ethical considerations and constraints arising from a particular vocational practice and grounded in the purposes, motives and commitments that define that practice. I will contend that Arendt’s political ethics is grounded in the specific and distinctive experience of political agency itself, rather than being derived from any set of principles or reference points outside that mode of experience. The ethical dimension of politics, in this sense, needs to be understood in the context of the distinctive conditions and dispositions that characterize politics as a vocation.1 It may initially seem counterintuitive to associate Arendt with a vocational conception of the political, with its implications of exclusivity and the need for a group


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of people who specifically dedicate themselves to the pursuit of politics in the way that the rest of us do not or cannot. After all, Arendt sees politics as an engagement pertinent to the full realization of identity and as a condition of the possibility of freedom, and so she views political action as a way of fully ‘completing’ ourselves as human beings. But I do not think that these two senses of politics are necessarily irreconcilable: the image of politics as a practice that ‘completes’ us is not incompatible with the recognition that some are more involved in politics than others. I will return to this point later on; first, I want to consider Arendt’s treatment of the relation between politics and morality at a general level.

Politics and Morality It is no surprise that Arendt does not offer traditional political ethics, in the form of some set of moral precepts, thin or thick, which supervene upon politics so as to constrain and guide the conduct of public life. She associates attempts to provide such precepts with the inclination to legislate for politics from a vantage point outside it, an inclination that was the principal flaw in what she regards as the now lapsed philosophical tradition, which constantly sought escape from the ‘moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents’ (Arendt 1958: 220). The aim of the philosophical tradition was to supply ‘standards and rules, yardsticks and measurements’ by which to guide politics and thereby to mitigate its otherwise intrinsically messy, circumstantial and conflictual character (Arendt 1990: 102). The ultimate ambition was, in accordance with the Platonic view, to find ‘theoretical foundations and practical ways to escape from politics altogether’ (Arendt 1958: 222). The attempt was unsuccessful and, as we can now see from a standpoint after the lapse of the tradition, inevitably so: attempts to rein in politics under the auspices of general moral precepts or conceptions of the good were misplaced. The assumption had been that basic, universal moral principles carried authority sufficient to constrain the realm of action because they were beyond argument. This proved not to be the case, something that became most sharply evident, for Arendt, in the experience of totalitarianism, where moral precepts thought to be permanently authoritative were jettisoned in the context of the corrosive conviction that ‘everything is possible’ (Arendt 1968: 459). This conviction, characteristic of totalitarianism, is profoundly anti-political: for action to answer to the requirement for coherent, plural interaction on a public stage, it needs a context of constraints, including ethical ones. Experience now tells us, however, that traditional moral precepts cannot supply this.2 In turn, this thought underwrites the commensurate view that the life of pure virtue – the life that traditional precepts formally delineated – is inappropriate to politics. In common with Weber, Arendt sees the life of goodness as unsuitable in the public realm and, if practiced politically, as potentially destructive. If one neglects the priorities of politics because of ‘moral duty’ one becomes ‘what so many good men, engaged in public affairs, tend to be – an idealistic fool’ (Arendt 1982: 54).


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This contrast between the moral and the political is exemplified more specifically in Arendt’s treatment of the operation of conscience, a phenomenon that she understands, in a manner following the Socratic account, as a product of the ability to think, to engage in a dialogue of the self with the self. The bifurcation of consciousness within the self, evident in thinking, opens up space for obstacles to arise with respect to actions which, if undertaken, would mean that one would be unable to live with oneself. Conscience, however, is unpolitical: its concern is with ‘the individual and its integrity’ (Arendt 1972: 50). As such it is not action-guiding with respect to public conduct, where a plurality of agents and perspectives is in play (Arendt 2003: 123). The voice of conscience may gain some public relevance in emergencies, when, for example, one faces the danger of colluding with evil; however, such emergencies are characteristic of circumstances in which processes have been released that threaten all boundaries, when ‘everything is possible’ - circumstances, that is, where the practice of politics has been emasculated. The non-negotiable commands of conscience are not pertinent generally to the public realm (the realm of negotiation par excellence) because they do not answer to the condition of plurality: in politics we must judge ‘according to the world and not the self’ (Arendt 2003: 91). In conditions of public plurality, then, what matters is not how one sees oneself (the basis of conscience) but how one is seen – which points us back toward the agonal: ‘Unlike human behavior which . . . is judged by “moral standards” taking into account motives and intentions on the one hand and aims and consequences on the other – action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness’ (Arendt 1958: 205).3 So the inapplicability of conscience demonstrates in specific terms why the eternal voice of the ‘good’ cannot gain currency in politics. But if the attempt, as it were, to shut down the noisy, argumentative business of politics by the application of the quiet and consistent voice of the good must fail, it leaves a legacy, as Arendt sees it, in what she refers to as the continuing ‘prejudice’ expressed in the belief that politics is ‘an unethical business’, a ‘fabric of lies and deceptions woven by shady interests and even shadier ideologies’ (Arendt 1990: 102; 2005: 98). This prejudicial despair of the political results from the fact that the assumptions of the tradition have, over time, found their way into the general culture.4 The question, therefore, is whether Arendt can offer any sense of how pertinent ethical considerations can be derived from politics viewed ‘with eyes unclouded by philosophy’ – that is, with attention focussed upon the experience of the political itself rather than upon supposed eternal principles that would allow us to ‘sort out’ politics and so transcend it (Arendt 1994: 2). To see what might be implied here, it is useful first to bring out a contrast by looking at the most common contemporary ways of grounding political ethics theoretically and seeing why precisely Arendt’s conception of politics eludes ethical characterization in terms of these approaches. Speaking very broadly, the most influential ways of formulating a political ethic are, on the one hand, in the form of procedural principles, more or less independent of conceptions of the good and grounded in reason, and, on the other hand, in the form of conventional principles, based upon


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shared moral and cultural assumptions of the sort often used to substantiate communitarian standpoints. Arendt’s thinking cannot, I suggest, be assimilated with either of these approaches. In terms of procedural ethics, this point can be brought out by reference to the work of Seyla Benhabib, who argues that there is a missed opportunity in Arendt’s work, in that she might have used the model of Kantian reflective judgement, to which her own account of judgement appeals, as a basis for developing a political ethics of a ‘discursive’ sort (Benhabib 1988: 44). Of course, the faculty of judgement is central to Arendt’s political theory, and we shall have reason to return to this in more detail later on. For now, however, we can confine the discussion in a more general way to Benhabib’s suggestion that reflective judgement could provide a ‘moral foundation for politics’ (Benhabib 1988: 46). Insofar as reflective judgement involves looking at things from the putative standpoints of others, and the validity of judgements is grounded in their communicability, it is possible, Benhabib argues, to offer a ‘procedural model of enlarged thought’ that would provide a source of ethical guidance and constraint in politics. Understood as a formal operation, judgement can underwrite a universal procedural ethics: in Benhabib’s account this amounts to a blueprint incorporating prescriptions that bear comparison with Habermasian discourse ethics. Benhabib, however, recognizes that this goes beyond anything Arendt appeared to have in mind (or would have concurred with) and in developing the idea she has to play down to an implausible extent the agonal strand in Arendt’s account of action (see Villa 1999: 151–2). Even if procedural ethics promise a thin set of prescriptions, these nevertheless appear as univocal injunctions derived from outside the plural performative conditions of politics itself. I will also seek to show later that in downplaying the element of performance, the aesthetic element in action, Benhabib downplays the very aspect that might provide the basis of a form of internal constraint in the public realm. It is worth noting at this point that these considerations provide the basis for Arendt’s own departure from Kantian ethics. Kant’s publicity criterion for moral judgement rests ultimately on the monological basis of a universalizable logic that can and will be grasped by any suitably rational individual mind. In Arendt’s view, it is a matter of reflective judgement and needs an actual test, a particular case to which it can be applied, rather than resting simply on an operation of a priori reasoning in the form of a logical verdict grounded in the principle of non-contradiction (Arendt 1982: 49). For Arendt, action is judged not with respect to general categories but with a view to ‘greatness’, which can only, by definition, be established in the particular. In this sense political judgement is comparable with judgements as to the beautiful, which is why Arendt finds the basis for political judgement in Kant’s aesthetics rather than in his ethics (Arendt 1958: 205; Hansen 1993: 212–17). If Arendt’s account of politics cannot be made to answer to procedural ethics grounded in universal rationality, nor can it be made to answer to an ethical framework appealing to cultural convention. Certainly, the latter kind of approach would seem to move the ethical focus away from what Arendt takes to be the ‘Olympian’


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injunctions sought by the philosophical tradition. But this standpoint is also problematic from an Arendtian point of view because it rests upon a kind of solidarity in belief that cannot accommodate the freedom and spontaneity characteristic of authentic politics. The injunctions derived from a shared moral culture still have, from the point of view of plurality, a supervening and constricting character. It is in the nature of public action, for Arendt, ‘to break though the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis’ (Arendt 1958: 205). A communitarian account of politics would seem, on Arendt’s account, to display a tendency to marginalize the possibility of authentic freedom and therefore to impose a set of ethical prescriptions that would have the effect of negating spontaneity. A communitarian style of ethics, therefore, shares an unpolitical quality in common with any theoretical account, or pseudo-political standpoint, that would stress criteria that apply as a result of accidents of birth, such as gender or race. Ultimately, then, neither a procedural nor a conventional approach can provide appropriate ethical grounding for politics because they offer principles that supervene upon the political from elsewhere. In doing so, they necessarily threaten to short-circuit the actual enactments of plurality that make the political. The injunctions of reason and the injunctions of culture each appear, from the point of view of the political at least, univocal, and so sound a quiet and self-possessed voice that always threatens to emasculate the noisy, multivocal condition of plurality. If this is so, then any ethics consistent with Arendt’s conception of politics must have a nonsupervenient basis. If her political theory can incorporate ethical guidelines, they must be ones that derive from the condition of plurality itself. To take this further, it is next worth noting those capacities that form features of the public realm and which do seem, on Arendt’s account, to have some moral significance.

Moral Faculties in Politics: Promising and Forgiveness Arendt sees the capacities for promising and forgiveness as forming the only predetermined ‘code’ that is pertinent to action. They establish ‘the only strictly moral duty of the citizen . . . [the] condition of all other, specifically political, virtues’ (Arendt 1972: 75). They do not, however, provide precepts applied to politics from the outside; rather, they are ‘built into the very faculty [of acting] . . . control mechanisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending processes’ (Arendt 1958: 246). These ‘control mechanisms’ mitigate the two most troubling characteristics of action, its unpredictability and its irreversibility, therefore helping prevent action from becoming self-destructive. But how far does this get us in terms of a substantive political ethic? Kateb notes that these faculties only in the end mitigate those two particular characteristics of action and therefore, whilst important, are wholly inadequate as a general framework for ethical constraint in politics (Kateb 2000: 143).5 And in any case, Arendt believed that the attempt to formulate these faculties, which


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are features of action, into a prior constraining framework for action would be self-defeating (Arendt 1958: 244). Nevertheless, even though they cannot underwrite a substantial political ethic, the significance afforded to promising and forgiveness in Arendt’s thinking may be suggestive. Their pertinence to the public realm rests on the fact that they do have something of the character of action (albeit in the mode generally of stopping or limiting a process rather than starting one): this is so because promising and forgiveness constitute enactments that are, for Arendt, unconditioned and revelatory (Arendt 1958: 241). In relation to this they are also capacities that appear in the form of utterances: they can be understood as linguistic enactments. As Arendt sees it, whilst the earliest public deeds may have been great enterprises, ‘adventures’ undertaken by heroic figures and immortalized by poets, these did not yet properly create a political arena – this only emerges when public space is settled and bounded, at which point it is words as much as deeds that become the principal hallmark of political action (Arendt 2005: 183). In view of this, it is worth considering the engagements of promising and forgiving from a linguistic point of view. Looked at from this perspective, what appears to afford them significance pertinent to the public realm is their performative character, their nature as speech acts. Their relevance here would appear to be related to what, in Austinian terms, we would think of as their illocutionary force (their significance as doing something in speaking), contractual in the case of promising and declaratory in the case of forgiving (Austin 1975). They both constitute self-binding speech acts that are appropriate to the task of stabilizing and giving predictability to an arena characterized by the potentially unending processes inherent in the plural circumstances of action, where ‘innumerable conflicting wills and interests’ pertain (Arendt 1958: 183). The self-binding force of promising and of forgiving is capable of providing islands of stability in a context that may otherwise be unstable to the point of self-destruction. Looking at this ‘moral code’ from the perspective of linguistic performatives allows us to draw a suggestive distinction between promising and forgiving, on the one hand, and the supervening injunctions derivable from more traditional forms of political ethics, on the other. Pronouncements of the latter sort have, from the point of view of the political, a univocal character, but their claim to authority over the public realm rests on the fact that they are spoken in a universal originating voice attached to no one in the public realm. Their significance, therefore, remains, again using Austinian terminology, at the ‘constative’ level, as articulations of that which was the case prior to the articulation. They cannot, that is, acquire performative status as speech acts: in claiming such a status they would be acts without agents, unless, of course, one countenances the possibility of transcendental agency of one sort or another, a possibility which, whatever its other merits or demerits, cannot sit readily in any relation to the public realm. Moral injunctions may be the voice of a god but, lacking visibility, a god lacks the primary quality that makes entry into the public realm possible. In view of these considerations, it would appear that moral injunctions of this sort cannot acquire the characteristics of action in the way that promising or forgiveness can.


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This would suggest, from a linguistic point of view, that the performative conditions of speech provide a way for moral considerations to become relevant to politics. At the level of ‘control mechanisms’, where the capacities that carry negative force, putting a stop to things, are at issue, the illocutionary conditions of speech would appear most pertinent – here self-binding articulations can interrupt the chains of action and response characteristic of the public realm. When we are concerned with more substantive constraints that apply to action as initiation, when persons are acting, as it were, within the web of relations that constitutes the public realm and when action, judgement, response and counter-response are characteristic, it may be fruitful to attend to the perlocutionary conditions of action. The public realm is after all, for Arendt, a context in which no one is entirely the author of his or her own story and where we are dependent for the meaning of what we do upon others. In a context in which the meaning ascribable to action is generated in this way, it may be in the perlocutionary conditions of speech – in terms of its effect upon others – that sources of constraint can be identified.6

Perlocutionary Conditions: The Context of Appearance and Judgement Our attention is drawn back, then, to the irreducibly interactive context of the public realm, where action is always tied to the response of spectators, a context where perlocutionary circumstances are likely to prove pertinent. To understand this context we need to return first to the pivotal faculty of judgement, a faculty ‘almost entirely neglected by the tradition of political as well as philosophical thought’(Arendt 1973: 222). Spectators assign meaning to action and pass verdicts upon agents through the application of reflective judgement. Through the exercise of the ‘enlarged mentality’, taking into account the standpoint of others, spectators form an opinion on what they see. In contrast with what, in Kantian terms, may be seen as determinant judgement, wherein general rules or principles are applied to the particular and where, therefore, particular cases are assimilated, reflective judgement forms a general opinion on the basis of the particular case itself. Taking into account the standpoints of others nevertheless saves reflective judgement from falling into the merely idiosyncratic, giving it a claim to intersubjective status. As such, reflective judgement is a faculty that proves particularly relevant with respect to Arendt’s conception of visibility and the response to it in the public realm, wherein we are concerned with ‘the disclosure of the agent in the act’ (Arendt 1958: 180). Here, the ability to exercise judgement with respect to the particularity of the ‘who’ that is seen, rather than the generality of the ‘what’, is constitutive. If reflective judgement proves, in this way, central to the idea of a public realm, then we might expect it to provide the basis for a kind of ethical constraint that is grounded in, rather than transcendent of, that realm. But what sort of constraint is implied? As noted earlier, Benhabib argues that Kantian reflective judgement may be seen as a formal operation, claiming universality through an appeal to the putative


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standpoints of a universal spectatorship. This, she suggests, makes it a basis for a priori ethical principles. This account of judgement and of the ethics that it certifies, however, are at odds with Arendt’s own standpoint. For Arendt, judgement is sufficiently tied to the actuality of political circumstances that it cannot be susceptible to substantive elaboration as a formal, universal operation: ‘[judgment consists in] the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present . . . judgment is endowed with a certain specific validity but is never universally valid’ (Arendt 1977: 221; emphasis added). In this sense, for Arendt, the operation is more deeply tied into the particularity of appearance and reception, to the dynamics of performance in its particular setting.7 Of course, the fact that the verdicts of judgement are not universal does not necessarily mean that the nature of judgement as a formal operation cannot be described in terms that are universal; Arendt does see something universal in the intersubjective conditions of reflective judgement. The question here, however, is whether an elaboration of this kind can yield anything like substantive political ethics. Benhabib thinks that it can in a form redolent of Habermas, of principles of design that would secure the required communicative conditions. But whilst Arendt believes that the model of judgement she deploys does spring directly from the experience of politics, she gives no indication that it can be formalized as a set of institutional constraints. Quite the reverse, in fact: it is because the circumstances of reflective judgement cannot be formalized and imposed in this way that it answers to the authentic experience of the political. Judgement, in Arendt’s view, involves an appeal to our ‘common sense’; although to do the work required of it here, the concept of common sense needs to be understood in terms of its specific usage. Common sense, for Arendt, is not simply a sense common to us all that could be unpacked and codified. Rather, it is a sense, articulated through reflective judgement, as to the specific appropriateness of the things we see and a sense which, through its communicability, fits us into our community. The judgements of common sense solicit but cannot command, or otherwise guarantee, universal assent. Again, judgements of this sort are not purely subjective; they have an impartiality that is generated by the acknowledgment of the viewpoints of others, but is not ‘the result of some higher standpoint . . . above the melee’ (Arendt 1982: 42). The communicative solicitations of common sense put us, as it were, on the same discursive terrain but do not carry the force of a transcendent injunction. By the same token, the validity of its judgements ‘will reach as far as the community of which my common sense makes me a member’ (Arendt 2003: 140). What are the implications of this for ethical considerations in the realm of action? Judgement cannot supply a basis for an a priori set of moral criteria. The verdicts that judgement brings are circumstantial, only determinable in practice. This again is a function of the conditions of plural visibility that characterize the public realm; however, these are conditions that also create significant imperatives for those acting in public, imperatives that allow us to entertain, in an ethically significant sense, the idea of politics as a vocation. By contrast with traditional accounts of political ethics


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that would require actors to conduct themselves in the light of a substantive, predetermined ethical code, the imperative implied in Arendt’s conception of the public realm is to act in the light of exposure to the circumstantial judgement of spectators, who are the providers of verdicts. This is consonant with Arendt’s invocation of what she takes to be the ancient model, where the desire for self-disclosure and glory ‘did not know any “moral” considerations but only . . . an unceasing effort always to be best of all’ (Arendt 1977: 67). As performers, actors ‘need an audience to show their virtuosity’ (Arendt 1977: 154). So, inherent in action is the requirement to submit oneself to the public gaze and render oneself eligible for judgement.8

Ambition and Constraint This gets us closer to the nature of ethical considerations in politics, but it is a theme best approached through a further iteration in the form of attention to the motivation that attends the engagement of politics, the motivation for stepping onto the public stage. Relevant here is the question of what the attraction might be of the vocation of politics, given that action is arduous and inherently risky, dependent as it is on the contingent opinion of others. A number of elements motivate action: there will be specific, classifiable ends in view, there will be broader goals at stake and there will be inspiring principles. All of these are circumstantial factors that the agent entertains, but none on its own provides the definitive meaning of the act: meaning arises through judgement passed on the act as a complete performance. For this reason, equally, none of these elements can provide the basis for an action-guiding ethical blueprint.9 It is in this context, however, that agents disclose themselves ‘even when they wholly concentrate on reaching an altogether worldly material object’ (Arendt 1958: 183). In relation to this, equally important, aside from the principles and ends that come to the actor from the outside, are the motives that provide the inner drive to act. Here, the passion for self-disclosure and the ‘ambition that strives for excellence emerge as central factors (Arendt 1973: 276). It is this passion that provides people with a disposition to enter the public realm, whatever their concrete aims might be, and it is consummated in ‘the joy and gratification that arise out of . . . appearing in public . . . thus acquiring and sustaining . . . identity” (Arendt 1977: 263). Whilst the expression of this vocational passion itself (like intentions, goals and so forth) is not definitive of the meaning of the act, which judgement establishes, it does suggest that the passion for action, and the gratification it brings, are dependent upon the circumstance of being seen, upon spectatorship. Agents depend upon the opinion of spectators and, as Arendt notes, ‘opinion’ and ‘glory’ have a common etymological root in ancient Greek (Arendt 1990: 94). If the ambition to acquire glory is a key motive that attracts one to the vocation of politics, susceptibility to opinion is directly implied in this: the space of appearances ‘assures the actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and generally, appearing before an audience of fellow


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men’ (Arendt 1958: 198). It is equally here that ethical questions become relevant, implied in that vocational passion for politics itself. The perlocutionary circumstances of action imply the desire to provoke the appropriate judgement that bestows glory. For Arendt, in subjecting themselves to the public gaze, actors equally subject themselves (in terminology commensurate with, but more moderate than, that of ‘greatness’ and ‘glory’ deriving from the ancient model) to the ‘approbation or disapprobation’ which results from the operation of judgement. Judgement pronounces upon ‘what manner of action is to be taken in [the public realm] . . . as well as how it is to look henceforth, and what kinds of things are to appear in it’ (Arendt 1977: 223). The judgement of spectators thereby places a demand upon actors seeking approbation with respect to the appropriateness of disclosure, which reflects not a prior moral precept but a decision as to who deserves to inhabit the public realm. Judgement amounts to ‘choosing our company’ and those desiring glory wish to be chosen (Arendt 1982: 270).10 As we have seen, the reflective judgement that spectators bring to bear is circumstantial and is related to a common sense that is not susceptible to prior codification. So actors have to make their own assessments as to what might be acceptable and what might not: there can be no manual or blueprint for this, which is one reason why politics is a risky business (Arendt 1958; 186). But it is also here that a sense of constraint arises, in terms of a judgement with respect to the perlocutionary implications of agency. The imperative is to act in the light of anticipated approbation. The faculty of judgement, therefore, is essential to the actor as well as the spectator: as a member of the same community, the actor can appeal to common sense to discover the appropriate constraints that, if observed, will avoid disapprobation. The sense of constraint, then, corresponding with the approbation or disapprobation that judgement might articulate, is given in the fact that those verdicts of judgement answer to and help constitute the political culture that actors and spectators share and which is embodied in their common sense. For Arendt, ‘the critic and spectator sits in every actor’ (Arendt 1982: 63). This must be the case if action is to constitute an achievement sufficient for authentic reward, for the acquisition and confirmation of one’s public identity and for true ‘public happiness’. And anticipating a response is already embryonically present in knowing how to act – how to insert oneself successfully in the web of public interactions. Some commentators have argued that Arendt sees judgement as entirely distinct from action, as a faculty that is applied and produces verdicts only with the passage of time. On this view, judgement is a capacity associated with the vocation of the historian rather than that of the political actor (Beiner 1994: 382). It may be the case that historians have a significant role here; we are familiar with the way in which political reputations are revised over time. But this does not mean that the judgement of spectators there and then is not important, or that the anticipation of judgement does not answer substantively to the agonal engagement of action. Arendt is clear on this: the actor is concerned with fame, and fame ‘comes about through the opinion of others . . . [the actor] does not conduct himself according to an innate voice of reason


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but in accordance with what spectators would expect of him. The standard is the spectator’ (Arendt 1982: 62). The relation of judgement to action is in this sense parallel to that Kant describes between artistic genius and taste: art is the product of genius, but it needs the application of taste, which ‘clips its wings . . . [and] gives guidance’ (Arendt 1982, 62). It is in anticipation of judgement in the light of perlocutionary aims that the actor finds constraint. Actors desirous of glory need spectators, and there is no other, more covert means of achieving glory. Another way of characterizing this sense of constraint, in the light of susceptibility to judgement, is in respect of the dispositional dimension to the political requirement of self-disclosure. Eligibility for judgement means making oneself susceptible to being told, or to judging, which dispositions to consummate in public and which to leave at home. Again, it is the ‘who’ and not simply the ‘what’ that solicits judgement. The perlocutionary dynamic that attends public appearance incorporates a judgement about the dispositions that are exposed in the acts observed and in the patterns of motive, intentions, aims and goals that these acts are seen to embody, which come together in the complete performance, disclosing the ‘who’. Again there is no predetermined blueprint for this, and so a key requirement for political actors is flexibility with respect to the dispositions one brings to bear in action, in the light of the public gaze. The perlocutionary context, then, creates an imperative for actors seeking approbation to decide what of themselves they should disclose through public acts. This provides a further confirmation of the fact that unmediated goodness cannot be an appropriate way of life for the public realm. But it also, by the same token, shows us that badness as a way of life is inappropriate to politics. The ‘good man’ won’t (and cannot if his commitment is to the life of pure virtue) leave any dispositions at home. Arendt in this sense shares Weber’s view that if one is to be a saint, it is necessary to be a saint in all things; this does not answer to the requirements of politics, of course (Weber 1994: 358). Such a proposition has clear Machiavellian resonances but, as in Machiavelli, it does not imply that politics is simply a realm of evil. Arendt follows Machiavelli in condemning those acts that bring power but not glory: ‘Badness that comes out of hiding is impudent and directly destroys the common world . . . badness can no more shine in glory than goodness’ (Arendt 1958: 77). The dispositions that the political actor brings to bear in action and therefore exposes in public are, again, susceptible to judgement; and the anticipation of judgement provides a constraint in this respect. Simple goodness does not answer to the ethical terrain of politics, and nor does evil; constraints upon public actions, and the public dispositions to which they answer, apply nevertheless and are directly related to exposure to the kind of contingent judgements that may bring the approbation that the political actor craves.

Ethical Implications It is in the nexus of action and judgement that ethical considerations arise as a function of the perlocutionary circumstances of public exposure. It is clear that the


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constraints implied here cannot be distilled and codified; this is not to say, however, that there are not some forms of conduct that would seem to be disallowed per se on the basis of Arendt’s conception of the political. Specifically, violence and lying, two features upon which Arendt comments directly, would seem to be disallowed. It is important, however, that the prohibitions here are not grounded in prior moral injunctions supervening upon politics from elsewhere but are rather implied in the specific nature of political action itself. They represent self-destructive forms of agency, for they destroy the conditions for action. Violence does so because it is mute and, as we have noted, the essence of the public realm is speech. So violence threatens to destroy the communicative conditions of collective empowerment that are generated by authentic action: ‘every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence’ (Arendt 1973: 87).11 Violence can destroy power but can never create or produce it. Victories of violence over power are, from a political point of view, self-defeating, as violence unconstrained by power becomes an end in itself (Arendt 1972: 53). Arendt’s rejection of political violence, then, is not derivable from a universal precept – she is no pacifist – rather, it stems from the fact that violence is specifically antithetical to politics. In the case of lying, there is a similar issue. The problem with lying does not derive from a universal injunction; this is made evident in the fact that Arendt does not view all instances of lying in politics as equally problematic. The difficulty is not with what Arendt calls the ‘traditional’ lie, by which she means state secrecy or the diplomatic concealment of intentions, which she describes as ‘almost harmless’ (Arendt 1977: 52). The real problem concerns manipulation of public perceptions, the rewriting of history and truth being ‘manoeuvred out of the world’ (Arendt 1977: 231). The difference here is not measured against a precept but is related to the damage done to the public realm. The public realm depends upon factual truth, so the latter sort of lying becomes anti-political (Arendt 1977: 250). But there is no absolute injunction to be truthful here: ‘truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings . . . the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness’ (Arendt 1972: 11). It is the comprehensive rendering of truth as irrelevant that is the problem, and the argument that systematic lying destroys the fabric of the public realm ‘must not be confused with the protests of “idealists” . . . against lying as bad in principle’ (Arendt 1977: 255). 12 So violence and lying are self-destructive forms of action. It is instructive again to establish a contrast with Kantian ethics. Kant could see prohibitions on violence and lying as potentially formulable in terms of maxims susceptible to a verdict that would invoke logical contradiction in the light of a monological ethics. But Arendt’s injunctions against them depend not on prior moral axioms, resting instead upon an account of politics that itself does not stem from disengaged philosophical reflection but instead derives from experience. Again, it is a consideration made pertinent by our recent experiences, particularly the experience of totalitarianism which, through the complete annihilation of the political, has shown us the true nature, potential


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and fragility of the public realm. Beyond these general prohibitions, derived from the nature of the political itself, more substantive constraints are contingent upon judgement and therefore are determined in actuality.

Political Implications A further issue here concerns the implications that ethical considerations of this sort, derived from a vocational conception of politics, carry with respect to contemporary politics. Clearly, the considerations that I have associated with Arendt’s theory must apply in terms rather different from those supplied by the ancient model from which she seeks illumination. The conditions of the ancient polis, of direct participation on the part of all citizens, look inapplicable to modern societies that are too big and too democratic to accommodate them. Of course, Arendt is famously sceptical about what she takes to be the inauthentic politics of the contemporary world, in which the capacity for judgement is, on all sides, degraded and where action, therefore, is compromised by the intrusion of unpolitical considerations associated with socio-economic institutions and interests. In its place, she argues for a proliferation of devolved public forums – the ‘council system’ –constituting a participatory hierarchy, such that at each level ‘it will become clear which one of us is best suited to present our view before the next higher council’ (Arendt 1972: 190). This broad indication would appear to be the nearest Arendt gets to any sort of blueprint for the best form of political organization, although it is not an abstract ideal: the council system ‘seems to correspond to and spring from the very experience of political action’ (Arendt 1972: 189). Whether, or how far, such a plan is practically realizable in contemporary circumstances is imponderable, but the point is that our own compromised and threadbare political culture retains traces of authenticity – Arendt’s skepticism with respect to modern politics is not entirely a counsel of despair. And if authentic politics is still to be possible in large-scale democratic societies, it remains the case that we need self–selecting political elites made up of those ‘who have a taste for public freedom and cannot be happy without it’ (Arendt 1973: 279). Furthermore, it is essential to a polity that some wish to be more prominent, or to take greater responsibility politically, because there are very many to whom the whole idea of public appearance is distasteful, as it was to Arendt herself (Arendt 1973: 276–9). This acceptance of the role of political elites does not mean that Arendt is antidemocratic in her thinking, as some have argued (Wolin 1994). The ‘council system’ does not exclude citizens from politics, but it recognizes that some care more, are more disposed to or are more ambitious in relation to politics. Those who care rather less, are less disposed to them or less ambitious are not therefore excluded; participation is open to them, even if they choose to keep it to a minimum. We need, however, those who are driven (amongst other things) by the desire for public approbation or glory toward maximal participation. Equally, it is implied in the nature of that very desire that such people must acknowledge and subject themselves to the judgement


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of a community of spectators, of which they too are members. They are able and will wish to make, in the pursuit of their passion, judgements in the light of common sense as to what is acceptable and what is not. By the same token, they will seek, in pursuing their vocation, to make judgements as to what dispositions they should seek to bring to bear, and therefore make visible politically. The condition of visibility, then, generates immanent constraints with respect to the pursuit of ambition and guidance with respect to the exercise of practical judgement. It is in this sense that politics has the potential to be a self-regulating field of endeavor, and this is why, for Arendt, the remedies against the misuse of public authority ‘lie in the public realm itself . . . in the very visibility to which it exposes all those who enter it’ (Arendt 1973: 223).13

Conclusion Arendt’s concern with ‘saving the appearances’ of the political renders moral legislation for politics an inappropriate aim for the political theorist, and so the absence of an a priori political ethic in her work is no oversight. For Arendt, the multi-perspectival common world is one ‘for which no common measurement or denomination can ever be devised’ (Arendt 1958: 57). Rather than resolving action into the terms of moral reflection and therefore compromising its phenomenal potential, Arendt offers an understanding of the dynamics of disclosure – of acting and judging – that makes space for ethical constraint. Arendt’s analysis of the conditions of political life would seem to have some formal ethical implications. In particular, the demand for conditions appropriate to the enactment of freedom becomes a central contextual feature framing political judgement. But this formal requirement does not exhaust the substantive ethical component in politics. And, just as freedom can only in the end be guaranteed in action, so political ethics can only operate in and through the phenomenal dynamics of action, appearance and judgement. That its substantive import cannot be settled a priori should not be taken to mean that its operation is therefore compromised. The argument that politics contains a form of ethical self-regulation will doubtless fail to satisfy many for whom the key requirement is a universalizable, a priori moral framework. This demand, however, which is essentially a demand for commensurability between politics and morality, has always been one that moral philosophy has found difficult to realize, whilst still giving credence to politics in actuality. The view that, if moral philosophy cannot produce a code adequate to the task of ‘reining in’ politics, then politics is lost, is one that needs challenging. Arendt’s political ethics mounts such a challenge. Further, the political ethics that Arendt offers draw our attention back to the political fabric, making available its own critical vocabulary. It is criticism in the voice not of the despairing philosopher but of the concerned citizen. What is implied here is a more immanent form of critique, based upon an awareness of how politics can become self-defeating, and how, correspondingly, the authentic human qualities


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upon which real politics call may atrophy. Some general critical concerns prove relevant here: sensitivity to the potential for ideology to become pathological or for rhetoric to collapse into obfuscation; to the potential for ethical justification to turn into casuistry; and to the potential for freedom to capitulate to demagoguery or to concede too readily to the overarching managerial demands of social institutions. In this light, an approach respecting the autonomy of the political makes room for critical judgements and does not prevent the theorist (who is, after all, a citizen) from saying what should or should not be done in the circumstances. It does imply, however, that such judgements are discursively oriented and are made in the context of an awareness that in politics nothing is final. Such a critical engagement is appropriate to, and forms part of, the general ongoing concern with what experience tells us are the full potentialities and pitfalls of politics. Arendt’s theoretical vocabulary, therefore, provides space for ethical considerations pertinent to politics, but it is a space that cannot be captured for the moral theorist and is instead given over to the distinctive experience and vocation of politics itself.

Notes 1 Bringing the theme of vocation to bear here clearly creates comparisons with Max Weber’s famous treatment of the idea of politics as a vocation (Weber 1994). In the course of the subsequent discussion, I will point to resonances between Arendt’s account and Weber’s, where relevant. This said, the argument here does not depend upon the comparison: Weber’s conception of politics was different in decisive ways from Arendt’s and his account owed much to an analytical socio-economic framework of a kind that Arendt did not entertain. 2 It is certainly the case that, for Arendt, a key element in the constraints that stabilise the public realm is a system of laws and rule-governed institutions; for an interesting discussion of this aspect of Arendt’s thinking, see Waldron (2000). This does not, however, exhaust the issue of political ethics. The idea that a system of this kind, designed on the basis of foundational moral principles, would guarantee the ethical dimension to the political, must be, on Arendt’s account, complacent. And it is certainly no guarantee of freedom, which requires positive enactments; by the same token, it is no guarantee of the ethical adequacy of those enactments. 3 This does not mean that motives, intentions, aims and consequences are not relevant features of action. It is simply that the meaning of the complete act, upon which judgment is invited, cannot be reduced to any of these elements. We shall return to this point later. 4 Arendt recognizes that this prejudice, like most, has to an extent a ‘legitimate experiential basis’ in respect of our compromised political culture; however, because it is an unexamined prejudice, it hardens into conventional wisdom as to the inherently suspect nature of politics and of those who practice it (Arendt 2005: 101). 5 See also Canovan (1992: 198). 6 This is not to imply that speech acts cannot have significant characteristics that are illocutionary and perlocutionary: they can and often do. The point rather is that the dynamics of perlocutionary effect and response may be more appropriate to the question of ethical constraint in an agonal context. This is something reflected in the fact that perlocutionary


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7 8 9 10

11

12

13

descriptions appeal to a more specific context rather than to the more formal (and therefore more predictable) appeal to convention that illucutionary descriptions make. For an extended discussion of the relationship between illocutionary and perlocution acts, see Alston (2000: 33–50). For contrasting views on this point, see Taylor (2002) and Zerilli (2005). For an account of the element of ‘theatricality’ in Arendt’s conception of politics, see Villa (1999: 128–54). For a useful discussion of motives and principles in Arendt’s political theory, see Knauer (1980). Although it is a judgment made in an extreme case, Arendt’s verdict upon Eichmann is exemplary here: ‘just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations . . . no one . . . can be expected to share the earth with you’ (Arendt 1965: 279). Here Arendt clearly disagrees with Weber, who thought that ‘the decisive means of politics is the use of violence’ (Weber 1994: 360). Equally, for Arendt, Machiavelli’s justification of violence for the purpose of foundation is related to his mistaken assimilation of political creation to the capacity for manufacture, itself an intrinsically violent engagement (Arendt 1977: 139). Violence has, in the modern age, become central to a conception of politics as rule, which is in turn linked to the (unpolitical) equation of acting with making (Arendt 1958: 228). A further implication here is that rhetoric, a legitimate political art, should not be confused with simple lying. For Arendt, the Sophists had the ability, in practicing rhetoric, to present matters in public so that they could be seen from all sides – we underestimate them if, following Plato, we ‘condemn them on moral grounds’ (Arendt 2005: 167). Some may be inclined to point to cases that look troubling with respect to the argument being made here. One could point, for example, to regimes that receive high levels of approbation but which nevertheless seem to us morally deficient. The question arises as to what we are meant to say in relation to such cases. If such regimes are based upon denials of freedom or otherwise on the use of violence and lying, then Arendt’s account provides a basis for condemning them as anti-political. They can therefore be judged as inhumane on the basis of an appeal to political criteria. The fact that they may nevertheless receive approbation only points to the fact that the ability of citizens to make plausible judgments on their polity and the vibrancy of the political culture which that polity harbours are factors that tend to stand or fall together. Most of these troubling cases would, I think, fall foul of these political criteria. If we can find any that do not but which we are nevertheless inclined to say are morally distasteful, then this may only mark a limit to the relevance of judgments across polities. We might find reason to object to such regimes on the basis of deep moral convictions, but this is different from an objection on the basis of political standards – and such deep moral convictions, like the operation of conscience, may be thought to hover in the background with respect to political life rather than playing a direct part in it.

Bibliography Alston, William. 2000. Illocutionary acts and sentence meaning. London: Cornell University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. London: University of Chicago Press. —. 1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Viking.


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—. 1968. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harvester. —. 1972. Crises of the republic. New York: Harcourt Brace. —. 1973. On revolution. London: Penguin. —. 1977. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. London: Penguin. —. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Ed. R. Beiner. Brighton: Harvester. —. 1990. Philosophy and politics. Social Research 57 (1): 73–103. —. 1994. Essays in understanding 1930–1954: Formation, exile and totalitarianism. Ed. J. Kohn. New York: Schocken. —. 2003. Responsibility and judgment. New York: Schocken. —. 2005. The promise of politics. Ed. J. Kohn. New York: Schocken. Austin, J. L. 1975. How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beiner, Ronald. 1994. Judging in a world of appearances: A commentary on Hannah Arendt’s Unwritten Finale. In Hannah Arendt: Critical essays. Ed. L. Hinchman and S.Hinchman, 365–88. Albany: State University of New York Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1988. Judgment and the moral foundations of politics in Arendt’s thought. Political Theory 16 (1): 29–51. —. 1996. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. London: Sage. Canovan, Margaret. 1992. Hannah Arendt: A reinterpretation of her political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, Phillip. 1993. Hannah Arendt: Politics, history and citizenship. Cambridge: Polity. Jay, Martin and Leon Botstein. 1978. Hannah Arendt: opposing views. Partisan Review 45 (3): 348–68. Kateb, George. 2000. Political action: Its nature and advantages. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. D.Villa, 130–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knaur, James. 1980. Motive and goal in Hannah Arendt’s concept of political action. American Political Science Review 74 (3): 721–33. Taylor, Dianna. 2002. Hannah Arendt on judgment: thinking for politics. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2): 151–69. Villa, Dana. 1999. Politics, philosophy, terror: Essays on the thought of Hannah Arendt. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Waldron, Jeremy. 2000. Arendt’s constitutional politics. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. D. Villa, 201–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1994. Political writings. Ed. P. Lassman and R. Spiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolin, Sheldon. 1994. Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the political. In Hannah Arendt: Critical essays. Ed. L. Hinchman and S. Hinchman, 289–306. Albany: State University of New York Press. Zerilli, Linda. 2005. We feel our freedom: imagination and judgment in the thought of Hannah Arendt. Political Theory 33 (2): 158–188.


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CHAPTER 10

Individual Responsibility and Political Authority: Hannah Arendt at the Intersection of Moral and Political Philosophy1 Phillip Hansen

The current preoccupation with universal human rights, and legal, political and social justice has brought moral questions to the center of political philosophy. The willingness or unwillingness of governments to secure basic rights has become a standard for political legitimacy. In light of this, contemporary treatments of human rights tend to subordinate politics to morality and so transform political issues into primarily moral ones, a tendency that for some theorists has raised serious concerns (Geuss 2008; Cohen 2006, esp. 487ff). I share these concerns. In this paper I examine how Hannah Arendt’s treatment of issues in moral philosophy can illuminate what is at stake in contemporary accounts of morality and human rights. Arendt herself contributed to the central role accorded these issues. Her well-known treatment in The Origins of Totalitarianism of the ‘right to have rights’ powerfully explores how the creation of millions of stateless individuals who lacked the protection of organized political authority played a key role in the emergence of totalitarian political, legal and social forms. Several recent studies have insightfully explored the contemporary significance of her work for human rights concerns (e.g., Birmingham 2006, 2007; Parekh 2008). But as with so many other questions raised by this work, the relation of the moral to the political in Arendt’s thought has elicited distinctive, even conflicting, responses. Arendt’s magisterial account of totalitarianism leaves little doubt that by all standards it was evil. This suggests that moral questions are central for her. However, some analysts – George Kateb, perhaps most notably – view Arendt as an unapologetic defender of the dignity of the public realm and of an agonistic conception of political action (Kateb 2007).2 They criticize her for subsuming morality under politics and thus slighting traditional moral concerns. Others see her as a neo-Aristotelian proponent of a ‘thick’ ethical life wherein morality and politics merge in a solidaristic communalism. I do not think either perspective is quite right. In my view, Arendt has a robust moral perspective, even though it does not take the form of a Kantian deontological


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ethic or even the specific conception of moral agency associated with contemporary human rights discourses. At the same time, while obviously sympathetic to republican ideals of active citizenship and solidarity, she is no communitarian thinker or proponent of ‘thick’ ethical bonds – hers is a solidarity of autonomous agents, of strangers (Hansen 2004). How to proceed? I argue here that, while Hannah Arendt is better known for her work in political as opposed to moral philosophy, her writings in moral philosophy reveal that her moral and political thinking are closely connected, and in perhaps surprising ways. In exploring this connection I focus on two fascinating and challenging claims that Arendt makes: that when people profess to obey they actually consent or support; and when they claim to be forced they are actually being tempted. This paper suggests there are implications of these ideas for both individual responsibility, the domain of moral philosophy, and political authority, the realm of political philosophy. These in turn lead us back to Arendt’s powerful conception of the inter-ests, the spaces between that unite and separate people and, in so doing, help to establish ‘worldly’ ties between individuals, without which neither politics nor, I would argue, morality is possible. It may be that Arendt’s contribution to moral philosophy and its intersection with political philosophy turns on the question of how we fill the ‘spaces between’.

The Dilemmas of Morality and Moral Philosophy: Freedom, Willing and Judging As Jerome Kohn succinctly notes, “[n]o one was more aware than Arendt that the political crises of the twentieth century . . . can be viewed in terms of a breakdown in morality. . . . But the controversial, challenging and difficult heart of what Arendt came to see was that the moral breakdown was not due to the ignorance or wickedness of men who failed to recognize moral “truths”, but rather to the inadequacy of moral “truths” as standards to judge what men had become capable of doing’ (Kohn 2003: x–xi). Knowing the right thing to do to and with others is no guarantee that we will do it; at the same time the failure to act morally need not be, and usually is not, a matter of wickedness or depravity. Traditional morality, with its universal principles under which we could deductively classify our actions, presupposed the existence of conscience and the sense of right and wrong, of good and evil. Having a conscience meant being secured from committing immoral or evil or reprehensible acts because conscience had a voice, whether that of God or reason; it spoke and commanded in the language of ‘Thou shalt not’. For Arendt, Adolf Eichmann and the experience of his trial blew this apart. Eichmann claimed to have, and seemed to possess, a conscience, at least as normally understood. He saw himself bound by law and duty. In his ‘official’ capacity he felt the law, as reflecting the will of the Fuehrer, with which he was obligated to align his own, had to be unflinchingly applied without exceptions. Under the extreme


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circumstances of totalitarianism, having moral standards and a conscience seemed inadequate to prevent evil. If having a conscience and possessing moral standards seemed shockingly insufficient (not least for Arendt because of the ease with which many Germans reversed these standards while the Nazis ruled and, with apparently comparable ease, reverted to them in the post–World War II period), upon what, then, could an effective morality be based? To address this question Arendt turned to thinking and judging. For her, the ability to distinguish right from wrong and to act accordingly, even in the face of immense pressure to do otherwise, was the outcome of neither cognition and thus knowledge, nor intellect, which generated concepts, including standards of morality. Rather, it involved the two-in-one dialogue of thinking and the related capacity to exercise reflective judgement, that is, judgement without pre-existing rules about what is fit or unfit to inhabit a common world shared with others (Arendt 2003a; cf. McClure 1997; Hansen 1993, Ch.6). Because neither thinking nor reflective judging is bound to the determinate qualities of cognition or intellect, each has a contingent character. We can stop and think at any time without warning, and the challenges of judging can and do crop up in unanticipated ways. This contingency links thinking and judging to freedom – for Arendt the raison d’etre of politics and thus of action, that element of the vita activa corresponding to the ‘human condition’ of plurality, as Arendt famously argued in The Human Condition. Action, which constitutes a new beginning by initiating a new set of consequences in the human ‘web of relationships’ that we can neither predict nor control, is the potentially terrible but also miraculous and distinctively human capacity that encapsulates and expresses our freedom. Action always ‘shows itself’ to others, as it were; and this is why it is governed neither by a motive that sets it in motion nor a goal at which it aims. While this understanding of free action is central to Arendt’s political philosophy, for her morality is also about freedom. This appears dubious, especially from the perspective of a Kantian deontological moral philosophy with its focus on the ‘good’ will and its capacity to be bound by the categorical imperative. Although morality requires that there be choices, traditional moral language is replete with elements of obligation and command. Arendt is not so sure. This is why, I think, she emphasizes two points that suggest important elements of her distinctive moral philosophy, its surprising intersection with her political philosophy and thus the inner connection of morality and politics. First, while she devotes a considerable amount of attention to the will and willing, and even links these to judging in freedom, the tensions and contradictions within which the will is inescapably entangled, once we reflect upon its role as both initiator and arbitrator, render problematic any idea that the ‘good’ will is basic to morality, even as the will is indispensable for acting in the world. Arendt is highly critical of the identification of freedom with willing and its association with sovereignty as a threat to genuine politics (Arendt 1968: 70ff; Arendt 2003b: 133ff). The idea of a general will as the foundation and expression of a political community and the basis of


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political authority has carried the implications of this identification into the institutions and practices of modern political life, with ominous consequences (Arendt 1965). I think Arendt views the relation of the will to morality in a similar light: morality so understood also entails a kind of sovereignty, where it is possible to mistake single-minded and decisive action according to a rule with right action as such. (This same problem exists in the political realm, where cognitive or conceptual truth can overwhelm the opinion upon which this realm depends.) Hence Arendt turns to thinking and judging, although neither offers any guarantee against the commission of evil, any more than action as the actualization of a principle and the ‘miraculous’ initiation of something new can guarantee against political horrors; totalitarianism exemplified both of these challenges and threats.3 Secondly, there is Arendt’s emphasis on reflective judgement, that is, judgement for which there is no general rule under which particulars can be fitted, as opposed to determinative judgement, where there are such rules for distinguishing right from wrong and thus what one ought or ought not to do – in other words for morality. But since such judgement depends upon thinking, which is an internal dialogue we conduct with ourselves, and this thinking involves putting oneself in the place of another, in terms of which we formulate our judgements by taking into consideration the multiple perspectives of others, reflective judging has an inherently political, or worldly, dimension. Our judgements, including moral judgements, must be able to withstand the light of a public realm of appearance, where this appearance cannot be controlled in advance. For Arendt, judging seems free in two senses: because it requires that we discover the general rules under which particulars can be fitted; and because it seeks but cannot compel general assent.4 This I think is why Arendt attempts to find the basis for Kant’s political philosophy in his Third Critique, not in his Second. Yet there may be a tension here. Because Arendt puts so much weight on thinking and personal judgement, she might appear to harbour an excessive concern for the self: with respect to acting morally, the ability to live in harmony with oneself seems to trump all other considerations. But is it not the case that I refrain from murder because I do not want to harm another, rather than because I have to live with myself? Moral action requires a shared world that Arendt’s account of the relation of thinking and judging to morality appears to discount, if not forsake. As I see it, however, Arendt’s ‘moral’ self is a worldly self – it is the cognitive or conceptualizing self that becomes ‘unworldly’. Herein lies the significance of reflective judging and its public implications. When we think, and on that basis judge, we withdraw from the world precisely in order to return to it – it is never far away. There is a powerful phenomenological thread running through Arendt’s position: mind is very much embodied, worldly. In light of Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition, the collapse of morality under totalitarianism manifested world alienation, not selfalienation. My analysis in the rest of this paper presupposes and hopefully clarifies this ‘worldly’ self.5


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The intersection of political and moral philosophy in Arendt’s work, in my view, is indicated through an account and critique of the will and its relation to freedom that is intended to illuminate a richer conception of politics and political authority but with inescapable implications for morality, as well as an account and critique of judgement that is designed to provide a better basis for morality and individual responsibility but with an intrinsic political cast. Her treatment of the relation of temptation to force and of obedience to support helps illuminate this connection.

The Dilemmas of Morality and Moral Philosophy: Force, Obedience and Conscience Arendt’s claims about the relation of temptation to force and obedience to support appeared in her 1964 essay ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, which was written on the heels of both the Eichmann trial and an important trial in Germany in 1963 of SS officers from the death camp at Auschwitz. Both trials highlighted the reality of a radically distinct and unprecedented form of rule for which our received categories of political analysis were utterly inadequate, a ‘new order’ under which ‘every moral act was illegal and every legal act was a crime’ (Arendt 2003c: 41). Arendt addressed two vital issues: how the totalitarian experience posed the question of the law-abiding citizen, and what under the circumstances was required for someone to be a responsible moral agent. For Arendt, the beliefs that ‘to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same’ and that consent and obedience are equivalent are perniciously false (2003c: 18, 46). She was neither unaware of nor indifferent to the reality that under the threat of force people can and do commit acts that violate moral norms and that committing acts under these circumstances might well exempt them from legal consequences, at least where the legal standards were not themselves of a criminal character (i.e. under non-totalitarian situations). Furthermore, she knew that the assumption that obedience was a pre-eminent political virtue essential for the survival of a body politic has deep historical and philosophical roots (2003c: 46). Indeed this is very much at the heart of the challenge and threat totalitarianism has posed. Both justifications have been advanced to explain if not exonerate those who willingly filled prescribed roles in the institutions of the totalitarian state. This was plausible precisely because such people typically were not ‘outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but . . . the most respected members of respectable society’, who, ‘regardless of party affiliation and direct implication, believed in the “new order” for no other reason than that it was the way things were . . . ’ (2003c, 42–3). These deeply rooted assumptions can and do go unquestioned because under ‘normal’ (i.e., nontotalitarian circumstances) they work to cushion if not eliminate the impact of the consequences of day-to-day interactions that are not foreseen and can be harmful; in short, to use Arendt’s understanding of the matter, they are one way of reconciling ourselves to things unintended and undesired. They can form an element of the process by which the consequences of the human capacity to act, which would


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otherwise continue unabated, can in fact be brought to a humanly acceptable conclusion. According to Arendt, we achieve this by means of forgiveness or punishment. Equating temptation with force and obedience with support can condition either or both. But this presupposes life in a non-criminal state, where the normative spirit of lawfulness and the laws, themselves, are more or less in harmony. Things are dramatically different under totalitarianism. For Arendt we need to clarify why they are wrong, even if widely accepted. Arendt credits to Mary McCarthy the idea that we are in fact tempted when we claim to be forced. She uses it to explore Socrates’ argument that it is better to suffer than to commit wrong. She had taken for granted this claim, which she called ‘the basic assumption of all moral philosophy’ (Arendt 2003b: 75), because it seemed crucial to the existence of conscience as the capacity not only to recognize the distinction between good and evil, but to resist the latter. One would rather suffer than commit wrong because it was in the end impossible to live with a wrongdoer: oneself. The experience of totalitarianism called the Socratic position into question. Apparently, most people, and especially Nazis like Eichmann, had lost or never had a conscience. But as I noted earlier, to her evident astonishment, Arendt concluded that in fact Eichmann appeared to have one. To be sure, this conscience was skewed. During the course of police interrogation about his role in transporting people to the death camps, he insisted that he was legally, and presumably morally, obligated to ensure that victims suffered no unnecessary hardships. He saw no irony in the claim. In Arendt’s words, ‘Eichmann’s conscience rebelled at the idea of cruelty, not that of murder’ (2003c: 42). But rebel it did. Eichmann had ‘resisted’ the ‘temptation’ (albeit to do the right thing) and so, in a bizarre way, retained his stature as a free agent capable of moral choices. Thus the claim that he had always in principle tried to live his life according to the Kantian categorical imperative (while acknowledging that he had failed to do so). In any case Arendt believed the court in Jerusalem was correct in treating him as an agent and not as a ‘cog’. As Arendt saw it, the problem posed by Eichmann’s actions, and those of countless others, was that these took place within a structured legal order, although one in which the laws themselves were criminal. Indeed, the Nazis never formally revoked the penal code that existed when they took power, nor even the Weimar Constitution itself. As the Auschwitz trials demonstrated, an SS concentration camp functionary could be charged with criminal offences, including murder, even as he participated in a ‘criminal system that had made mass murder, the extermination of millions, a legal duty’ (Arendt 2003d: 228). (The defendants at the 1963 Frankfurt trial were themselves charged with murder, a fact which immensely complicated the determining of criminal guilt, as well as legal and moral responsibility.) So while the Nazi legal and political order was criminal, it was not nihilistic: ‘The ease with which consciences could be dulled [but not abolished] was partly the direct consequence of the fact that by no means all was permitted’ (Arendt 2003c: 42).


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Thus the problem was not so much whether Eichmann or others had a conscience: the problem was with conscience itself as we had come to understand it. For Arendt conscience is often identified with sentiment, with feelings of guilt or innocence. But such feelings offer no reliable indicators of right or wrong: ‘Guilt-feelings can, for instance, be aroused through a conflict between old habits and new commands – the old habit not to kill and the new command to kill – but they can just as well be aroused by the opposite: once killing or whatever the “new morality” demands has become a habit and accepted by everyone, the same man will feel guilty if he does not conform. In other words, these feelings indicate conformity and non-conformity, they don’t indicate morality’ (Arendt 2003b: 107). This is a powerful critique. To be sure, Arendt is not arguing that conformity per se is the problem; it becomes such only, as Arendt (2003a: 189) puts it, ‘when the chips are down’. One cannot avoid conforming all the time, since otherwise social life would be impossible. But the extreme circumstances of totalitarianism, which explode all standards and in doing so reveal our flawed understanding of many of them, tell us something that is germane for everyday experience, too. They indicate how it is possible actually to distinguish right from wrong, without any guarantee that such a distinction, alone, will secure us against committing wrongful or evil acts. Arendt turned here to thinking and judging for answers to the question of how to account for those who did not conform but in various ways, including withdrawal from any form of public life, resisted. Thinking, which involves ‘not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself’, makes possible the capacity to judge (Arendt 2003c: 44–5). Recall that such judgement involves not the subsumption of particulars under preordained rules that can be learned by rote, but rather the ability to take particulars as they come and determine for oneself how these should be appraised. The capacity to judge and ultimately to say ‘no’ while others conform is tied intimately to the habit of examining things and making up one’s own mind. But this is more likely to happen when individuals also as a matter of course engage in the two-in-one dialogue that characterizes thinking. And thinking in this sense is not about discovering or constructing standards and rules, but rather about the articulation of what for Arendt is a profound reality: ‘that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves’ (2003c: 45). Thus, to distinguish right from wrong, that is, to judge and to act accordingly is not to discern and apply rules but rather to sustain a certain relation to self that at the same time makes possible the ability to recognize others and their right to do the same. Where individuals thought and judged for themselves, ‘they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided it would be better to do nothing . . . because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all’ (2003c: 44).6 The dialogic character of this process meant that self-reflection was neither


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purely solipsistic nor simply private, but rather a personal matter that was inherently worldly, if not political: the fear of living with a criminal necessarily meant not only that others, in whose position one might imagine oneself, would be directly harmed by one’s actions but that the kind of self-judgement one makes would be the same judgement others, with whom one had to live, would also make were they to think and judge as well. Under the circumstances, if you judge either that you could or could not live with yourself, you are implicitly claiming that others could or could not live with you either. Indeed, as I understand Arendt, the death sentence handed down by the court in Eichmann’s trial represented precisely this kind of judgement – Eichmann showed that by not wanting to share the world with one of its peoples, he forfeited the right to have others share the world with him – and this is why Arendt approved of it, even though the court itself did not defend it in this way. In some cases those who in Nazi Germany made the judgement that they could not live with themselves as murderers ‘also chose to die when forced to participate’. In effect, they recognized the difference between force and temptation (Arendt 2003c: 44).7 And this leads to Arendt’s second claim: that obedience equals support. Arendt raises this issue in response to those who justified their participation in the administrative apparatus of the Nazi state on the grounds that if they had not done so, there would have been chaos. Obedience to superior orders as well as the law was absolutely essential if any organization was to function at all. It seems eminently reasonable to claim that obedience ‘is a political virtue of the first order, and without it no body politic could survive. Unrestricted freedom of conscience exists nowhere, for it would spell the doom of every organized community’ (2003c: 46). This is Hobbesian reasoning that Arendt elsewhere makes a considerable effort to explore and relate to the emergence of a distinctively bourgeois politics and, in the extreme case, totalitarianism itself (Arendt 2004: 186ff). In this context, she argues that only children or slaves must obey because they are helpless if they refuse to cooperate. No political leader or organization can function or even survive without the cooperation of many others, who are therefore responsible for what they do. Thus they actually support what is being done and do not simply and mindlessly obey (even if they become ‘mindless’ in blocking out the reality of support). Here again is a moral question with an inescapable political dimension. We are responsible because in sustaining a political body, we manifest the reality of what Arendt calls plurality: the fact that not one person but many live on earth and inhabit the world, and that each one of us is alike in being unlike anyone else. To behave by rote is to deny plurality. In this sense, Eichmann was particularly noteworthy because his actions that so significantly contributed to the deaths of millions represented a frontal assault on plurality and thus the human fabric itself. Arendt concludes from this that those who refused to participate – and were therefore ‘irresponsible’ – were in the circumstances exercising judgement in the face of extreme conditions, under which they were essentially powerless (but not thereby required to obey). She suggests, however, that there is potentially power in such ‘powerlessness’. If the many upon whose support any organized political or


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bureaucratic body depends refuse to cooperate, the impact would be immense, even if this were not a matter of formal resistance or rebellion. Thus in the 1960s and 1970s, Arendt took seriously civil disobedience and even the possibility of incorporating it into the state. Many commentators found this idea peculiar, if not perverse. But it makes sense when we note Arendt’s claim that ‘[m]uch would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word “obedience” from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these things through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man’ (Arendt 2003c: 48). Although critical of certain features of them, Arendt was enthusiastic about the student and anti-war movements precisely because their practice of widespread civil disobedience suggested there were forces of resistance at work in the face of proto-totalitarian features evident in Western societies, that there were still significant numbers of people prepared and able to think and judge for themselves (Arendt 1972).8 We tend to view civil disobedience as a moral stand against immoral actions by governments (and thus largely symbolic and likely ineffectual). It is clear that Arendt, too, saw it as moral response. But this was not because it represented a challenge to politics. Rather, it represented a richer, more adequate version of both – by calling into question the central place typically accorded obedience in each of them. Arendt’s reference to ‘the dignity or honor of man’ suggests issues at the heart of contemporary concerns about human rights and raises the question of Arendt’s role in this. What I wish to do in the concluding section of this paper is not so much relate Arendt’s ideas directly to current accounts of human rights, but rather suggest elements of Arendt’s understanding of the essential features of human agency, especially with respect to her unique and distinctive conception of worldly relations as involving inter-ests or ‘spaces between’. This could further clarify for us the relation of morality to politics at the core of debates around human rights and their enforcement.

The Human Condition and Human Agency: Human Nature, Worldliness and Personal Responsibility In The Human Condition, Arendt (1958) argued that it was unlikely we possessed a distinctively human nature and that even if we did we would be unable to know it.9 In other words, she dispensed with the concept of ontology (although she may have fudged this in her claim that we should not assume we have a nature or essence ‘in the same sense as other things’). Many commentators (me included) have wondered about this because it seems impossible to undertake any exploration of the human situation from the vantage point of moral or political philosophy without holding, if only implicitly, some ontological assumptions (cf. Kontos 1979). For Arendt, however, the experience of totalitarianism, and of the Eichmann trial, offered convincing evidence that there was something awry with thinking in these terms; that such


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thinking reinforced our inability to be clear about what we needed to learn about ‘the human condition’. (Perhaps, paradoxically, she repudiated ontology in the name of ontology.)10 As I see it, the problem for Arendt lies in the failure of most attempts to explain totalitarian evil successfully on the basis of allegedly fixed human characteristics. One such effort involves the idea that totalitarianism simply represented the most extreme consequence and expression of the evil that lurks in the hearts of all, of the perfidy to which humans are by nature prone. This view is behind the claim that ‘there is an Eichmann in each of us’, a claim, as noted, that Arendt explicitly rejects (cf. Hill ed. 1979: 308). But it also supports another view she finds dubious: that the ultimate culprit is humanity itself, so all are (collectively) guilty. Arendt rejects the notion of collective guilt. For her, it is just as wrong morally to feel guilty about something one has not done as it is for someone who has indeed committed wrongdoing to experience no remorse; in any case, she saw the whole idea of collective guilt as a kind of whitewash, for if everyone is guilty, then no one is. On the other hand, there is the claim that because Eichmann and others were brought to justice, and this in turn triggered international efforts to establish institutions that would as much as possible ensure that the horrors of Nazism could never be repeated (and such efforts stand behind the contemporary commitment to universal human rights and the establishment of institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda), there is clear and compelling evidence that in the face of evil, good people can and will respond. For Arendt, an Israeli Military Court expressed this clearly: a ‘feeling of lawfulness . . . lies deep within every human conscience, also of those not conversant with books of laws’, in the face of which the actions of those serving the Nazi criminal state manifested ‘an unlawfulness glaring to the eye and repulsive to the heart, provided the eye is not blind and the heart is not stony and corrupt’ (Arendt 2003c: 40). The problem with this ‘rather optimistic view of human nature’ is that, while it suggested a human faculty to judge, it amounted to ‘hardly more than that a feeling for such things has been inbred in us for so many centuries that it could not suddenly have been lost’ (Arendt 2003c: 41). But this would not do because evidently most people in Nazi Germany behaved ‘lawfully’: they adhered to the laws of a criminal state and its ‘new order’. As noted earlier, this was largely a matter of conformity, not malignancy and a conscious effort to commit evil. So we seem stuck. And Arendt herself appears to deny a way out precisely because she rejects the idea of human nature as traditionally understood. Yet she does claim that not everyone went along with the dictates of the criminal state, and the ability of those who refused involved the ability to think and (reflectively) judge. So there must be something here, however ‘mysterious’: “For only if we assume that there exists a human faculty which enables us to judge rationally without being carried away by either emotion or self-interest, and which at the same time functions spontaneously, that is to say, is not bound by standards and rules under which particular cases are


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simply subsumed, but on the contrary, produces its own principles by virtue of the judging activity itself; only under this assumption can we risk ourselves on this very slippery moral ground with some hope of finding a firm footing’ (Arendt 2003c: 27). This is why we might speak of the paradox of ontology in Arendt’s position. Nonetheless Arendt does indicate the need for ‘a firm footing’ for any plausible and practically effective moral standards, and this must be established on grounds other than emotion or self-interest. Her account of worldliness is central to this task. Arendt developed her notion of ‘the world’ and worldliness in the context of establishing her well-known distinction between the private and public realms of human existence. Arendt understood the world as a common point of reference that allows us to see and so encounter others in multiple ways, and to be encountered by them, for the ‘presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves’. Not identical with the earth or with nature, this common world ‘is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together. To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time’ (Arendt 1958: 50, 52). As is well-known, this common world gives rise to a public realm that alone can house a ‘space of appearance’, an ‘inter-est’ within which people can show themselves through word and deed as ‘who’ they are, that is, manifest their specific and particular qualities as speaking and acting beings. Only where there is a public realm can this take place. And only where this is possible can there be the (political) judgement about ‘who’ one is in light of the speech and action that characterizes this realm, and in which therefore we can attend to our common affairs, because only here is it possible to ‘move about’ and view things from the perspective of others by taking their place without taking it over. Without this common world, where people are united and separated at the same time, we would confront the peculiar situation that, in Arendt’s evocative and memorable terms, ‘resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible’ (Arendt 1958: 53; my emphasis). This is the phenomenon of worldlessness, or world alienation, which destroys the political realm. The idea of people pressed together but no longer related to each other is central to Arendt’s account of mass society, which harbours totalitarian possibilities wherever it exists. But it also has ominous consequences for morality: we cannot fall back on morality as a way of being with others when the political realm itself collapses. This is because a world of things is essential for humans who are not and must not themselves be things, but are always faced with the threat they could become things. And this is likely to happen precisely when they lose a world of things


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that can unite and separate them at one and the same time. In this light we can understand more clearly the distinction Arendt draws between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ one is. This involves the difference between, on the one hand, a kind of revelation that is possible only in a worldly setting that can house a space of appearances and so become the basis for stories that bear meaning and can be told (and without which, for Arendt, neither morality nor politics is possible); and, on the other hand, a deterministic, categorical description based on attributes that can be crafted for show and can also provide the foundation for the organization and direction of mass behavior, wherein anyone can be replaced by anyone else.11 It is no coincidence that Eichmann, the cliché-spouting (non)person, a self-crafted bearer of attributable characteristics, emerged along with the development of the irresponsible and world-destroying Nazi bureaucracy.12 What would seem a retreat into the self imposed by either withdrawal or expulsion from a common world, a public realm, where one could through self-reflection establish rules of proper conduct, is in reality a loss of self because one loses the bearings that come from participation in such a world. This participation and the relation to others it makes possible and expresses is the condition of the two-in-one dialogue of thinking and the capacity to judge particulars without relying on general rules under which to subsume them (cf. Young-Bruehl 2006). And, as we have seen, it is this loss of a common world that destroys the possibility of morality and creates conditions under which large numbers of people will go along with the dictates of a criminal state. Absent this world, such a state provides a kind of order that offers stability to people. But this order is like the séance – which is why, once it collapsed, people tended to act as if it had never existed, or at least they had had no part in it. And this was one of the most stunning consequences of the Nazi experience. Expulsion from participation in a common world – the loss of ‘in-between’ spaces – accounts for ‘the very slippery moral ground’ that confronts anyone wishing to deal with the totalitarian experience – and other politically and morally relevant phenomena as well. It is why the key issue is one not of guilt but of responsibility. In the final analysis, it complicates the whole question of human nature. But Arendt was not being fatalistic here. As the example of those who sought by withdrawing from participation in the affairs of the criminal state to preserve the world by thinking and judging for themselves made clear, even in ‘dark times’ we have the right to expect and demand that people think and judge and take on the burden, not of collective guilt, but rather of collective responsibility: ‘[t]his vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, [as] the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men’ (Arendt 2003e: 157–8). Arendt was aware that withdrawal or expulsion from the world and the loss of connectedness with others can result from a number of enabling conditions. Among these are misery and loneliness, poverty and despair. She argued that deprivation of many kinds, including material want, can make people desperate enough to seek totalitarian solutions in the face of unendurable hardships. In other words, she


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pointed in the direction of the need for social justice (even though she has not often been viewed in these terms). But this is itself a huge issue that takes us beyond the bounds of this paper. What I hope I have accomplished here is at least to indicate why in my view Arendt evinces a distinctive and powerful approach to the relation of morality to politics and the intersection of moral and political philosophy, and why it would be worthwhile to pursue this further.

Notes 1 The ideas taken up in this paper were initially tried out in an advanced undergraduate and graduate seminar on Arendt’s moral philosophy offered in the 2008 winter semester at the University of Regina. Previous versions of the essay were presented at the Annual Meeting, Atlantic Provinces Political Science Association, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 3–5 October 2008; and at Arendt on/in Action: A Workshop, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 15–16 May 2009. I want to thank all of those, students and colleagues alike, who offered helpful comments, and in particular Peg Birmingham, Magdalena Zolkos, Anna Yeatman and Charles Barbour for their incisive and supportive suggestions and criticisms. I also want to extend my gratitude to the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney and its administrative staff, Christine Tobin and Nikki Lengkeek, as well as all the participants, for making the workshop a rewarding and memorable experience. 2 Martin Jay and Richard Wolin are other prominent proponents of this view. To be sure, Kateb seems to have modified his earlier views to some extent, while, as I see it, still maintaining the core of his position. 3 At the same time, Arendt did not want to abolish the will, as it were, a tack she seems to attribute to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Rather, in rendering it ‘non-sovereign’, she sees the will as a shaper of the self that emerges through the revelation of one’s ‘who’ in a public space of appearance. The will is neither a spontaneous initiator nor a descriptive attribute, but a conditioned conditioner. This is, one might say, a ‘worldly’ will of one who knows that sovereignty is impossible because one lives unavoidably in a plural world, a ‘web of relationships’, with others. Along with thinking and judging, willing is a dimension of the inner world of the vita contemplativa, where if the proper balance is achieved among thinking, willing and judging, the self in going inward does not escape from reality but develops a heightened sense of it (see Young-Bruehl: 2006). 4 In a related vein, Veronica Vasterling (2007) suggests that for Arendt judgment can be appraised in light of two standards, representativity and independence. 5 I am grateful to Peg Birmingham for raising this important issue and prodding me to clarify my position here. I am also aware that phenomenology itself is a contested concept and can carry different implications even where these emerge from a common Heideggerian source. Although I cannot pursue this here, my own position undoubtedly owes more to Merleau-Ponty than to, for example, Levinas. 6 Elsewhere, Arendt puts it this way: ‘If I would do what is now demanded of me as the price of participation, either as mere conformism or even as the only chance of eventually successful resistance, I could no longer live with myself; my life would cease to be worthwhile


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8

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for me. Hence, I much rather suffer wrong now, and even pay the price of a death penalty in case I am forced to participate, than do wrong and then have to live together with such a wrongdoer’ (Arendt 2003e: 156). There are echoes here of George Orwell’s powerful evocation in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the ability of the Party/State to compromise people and destroy their ability to resist by inflicting or threatening to inflict pain of such unimaginable terror that to escape it, one commits acts which so violate one’s sense of morality and integrity that the ability to live with what one has done becomes impossible. It is Julia, Winston Smith’s lover, who acknowledges her own betrayal of Winston to him: ‘Sometimes . . . they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so”. And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick . . . But that isn’t true . . . You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself’ (Orwell 1975: 234–35). Julia recognizes the difference between temptation and force and is doomed to be haunted by the knowledge of it. It is important to see this because, as Magdalena Zolkos has pointed out to me, it is possible to interpret the situation of torture this experience illuminates as one in which the suffering subject chooses to interchange the other with oneself: the other is made to experience what the subject is experiencing. It seems to me that what is vital here is that in the face of this Julia still recognizes the distinction between force and temptation, and remains haunted by it. And this may be yet an additional hideous quality of torture itself – that even as it attempts to obliterate agency, it parasitically exploits this capacity for personal responsibility, which proves to be remarkably resilient. For my own attempt to relate Arendt to Orwell, see Hansen, 1992. To be sure, Arendt argued that members of these movements tended to misunderstand what they were doing because, in their own way, they remained committed to inappropriate if widely held notions of the content of politics. In this case, it wasn’t the idea of obedience that was the problem: it was violence. For an account of Arendt’s own fears about possible proto-totalitarian features she detected in U.S. society during the last years of her life, see Arendt 2003. ‘The problem of human nature . . . seems unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense. It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves. Moreover, nothing entitles us to assume that man has an essence or nature in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it’ (Arendt 1958 10). Another, not unrelated, explanation for Arendt’s wariness about ontology involved her complex relation to Heidegger and his attempt to lay out a fundamental ontology. It is interesting that she advanced her claims about human nature at the beginning of The Human Condition, which she had intended to dedicate to Heidegger. For a stimulating and suggestive treatment of the relation between the thought of Arendt and Heidegger, see Villa, 1996. This calls to mind the distinction Heidegger draws in Being and Time between Dasein, whose characteristics are understood as existentialia, and other entities, whose characteristics are grasped through categories: ‘The entities which correspond to them require different kinds of primary interrogation respectively: any entity is either a “who”


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(existence) or a “what” (presence-at-hand in the broadest sense)’ (Heidegger 1962: 71). Whereas Heidegger then goes on to claim that an understanding of the relation of the two necessitates clarification of the horizon within which the question of Being can be formulated properly in a context within which we have lost touch with it, Arendt points instead to the necessity for clarifying worldliness in the context of ‘world-alienation’. 12 It seems to me we can also read in this the important difference Arendt draws between narrative storytelling as a consequence of action and its revelatory meaning and ideology as a fabricated, pseudo-logical explanation of reality. Just as the Nazi state offered a kind of ‘order’, ideology provides for people an orienting tale that can serve as a source of solace, a kind of ‘spiritual’ order. With respect to these issues, see Arendt 1958: 2004.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press. —. 1965. On revolution. New York: The Viking Press. —. 1968. What is freedom? In Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought, 143–71. New York: Penguin Books. —. 1972. Civil disobedience. In Crises of the republic, 49–102. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. —. 2003a. Thinking and moral considerations [1971]. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn, 159–89. New York: Schocken Books. —. 2003b. Some questions of moral philosophy [1965–1966]. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn, 49–146. New York: Schocken Books. —. 2003c. Personal responsibility under dictatorship [1964]. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn, 17–48. New York: Schocken Books. —. 2003d. Auschwitz on trial [1966]. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn, 227–56. New York: Schocken Books. —. 2003e. Collective responsibility [1968]. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn, 147–58. New York: Schocken Books. —. 2003f. Home to roost [1975]. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn, 257–75. New York: Schocken Books. —. 2004. The origins of totalitarianism. With a new introduction by S. Power. New York: Schocken Books. Birmingham, Peg. 2006. Hannah Arendt and human rights: The predicament of common responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2007. The an-archic event of natality and the ‘right to have rights’. Social Research 74 (3): 763–76. Cohen, Jean L. 2006. Sovereign equality vs. imperial right: The battle over the ‘new world order’. Constellations 13 (4): 488–505. Geuss, Raymond. 2008. Philosophy and real politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Hansen, Phillip. 1992. ‘When men [sic] are different from one another and do not live alone’: Orwell and Arendt on total control and ontology. In Toward a humanist political economy. Ed. H. Chorney and P. Hansen, 161–84. Montreal: Black Rose Books, Montreal. —. 1993. Hannah Arendt: politics, history and citizenship. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2004. Hannah Arendt and bearing with strangers. Contemporary Political Theory 3(1): 3–22. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Hill, Melvyn A. Ed. 1979. Hannah Arendt: The recovery of the public world. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kateb, George. 2007. Existential values in Arendt’s treatment of evil and morality. Social Research 74(3): 811–54.


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Kohn, Jerome. 2003. Introduction. In Responsibility and judgment. Ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn, vii–xxix. New York: Schocken Books. Kontos, Alkis. 1979. Through a glass darkly: ontology and false needs. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3(1): 25–45. McClure, Kirstie M. 1997. The odor of judgment: exemplarity, propriety, and politics in the company of Hannah Arendt. In Hannah Arendt and the meaning of politics. Ed. C. Calhoun and J. McGowan, 53–84. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Orwell, George. 1975 [1949]. Nineteen eighty-four (1949). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Parekh, Serena. 2008. Hannah Arendt and the challenge of modernity: A phenomenology of human rights. New York and London: Routledge. Vasterling, Veronica. 2007. Plural perspectives and independence: political and moral judgement in Hannah Arendt. In The Other: feminist reflections on ethics. Ed. H. Fielding, G. Hiltmann, D. Olkowski, A. Reichold, 246–65. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Villa, Dana. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger: The fate of the political. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 2006. Why Arendt matters. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.


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CHAPTER 11

The Miraculous Power of Forgiveness and the Promise Marguerite La Caze

My chapter explores the power that forgiveness and the promise, as potentialities of action, have to counter the two difficulties that follow from the possibility of being able to begin something new or what Arendt calls the ‘frailty of human affairs’: irreversibility and unpredictability (Arendt 1998: 18892). 1 Acts of forgiving and promising are expressions of freedom and natality, as they begin human relations anew: forgiveness creates a fresh beginning after wrongdoing, and the promise initiates new political agreements. Arendt argues that forgiveness and the promise depend on plurality. They also create more favorable conditions for people to live together in the public world. Historically, forgiveness has been important in political thought in the form of pardon. In contrast, promises have been conceptualized in political thought primarily in contract theories. Arendt argues for her view that action is different from labor and work in that its redemption arises from itself through her account of forgiveness and promising. Labor is redeemed through the made world of objects, and work is redeemed by the meaningful narratives that speech and deeds create (1998: 236). In the case of action, the ‘faculty’ of forgiving allows for the possibility of redemption from ‘irreversibility’ or the problem of not being able to reverse what one has done (1998: 237). The remedy for unpredictability is the promise. Forgiving undoes the deeds of the past, while promises set up security, continuity and durability amidst uncertainty. Without these remedies the human condition itself seems to be destroyed.2 Nevertheless, these remedies themselves are fraught with uncertainty.3 For instance, one of the forms of unpredictability that the promise may dispel human unreliability is also something that may undermine what Arendt calls the miraculous force of the promise. The other form of unpredictability is the impossibility of envisaging the consequences of actions. These faculties of forgiving and making promises embody a moral code that, unlike the concern for the self Arendt elsewhere identifies with morality, are directly linked with the world. I examine the nature of the moral code that can be inferred from these faculties in the light of Arendt’s arguments concerning the relation between ethics and politics.


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THE MIRACULOUS POWER OF FORGIVENESS AND THE PROMISE

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Ultimately, the miraculous potential of action depends on its basis in natality, the possibility of new beginnings that can provide faith and hope. Much faith and hope in goodwill is needed to consider that this limited moral code could operate in political life and that it is sufficient. This is the point, I argue, where Arendt’s thinking about action needs to be linked to a fuller consideration of ethics and passional motivation. I will first consider in detail what Arendt has in mind in writing of the miraculous power of forgiving and promising, highlighting some of the tensions and lacunae in her account, and then consider their usefulness as a moral code in political life.

What Does Arendt Mean by ‘miracle’? In the context of a discussion of what would be needed for a decisive change for the better in political life, “Introduction into Politics,” Arendt characterizes miracles. I will quote her at length: To ask in all seriousness what such a miracle might look like, and to dispel the suspicion that hoping for or, more accurately, counting on miracles is utterly foolish and frivolous, we first have to forget the role that miracles have always played in faith and superstition that is, in religions and pseudoreligions. In order to free ourselves from the prejudice that a miracle is solely a genuinely religious phenomenon by which something supernatural and superhuman breaks into natural events or the natural course of human affairs, it might be useful to remind ourselves briefly that the entire framework of our physical existence the existence of the earth, of organic life on earth, of the human species itself rests upon a sort of miracle. For, from the standpoint of universal occurrences and the statistically calculable probabilities controlling them, the formation of the earth is an ‘infinite improbability’. And the same holds for the genesis of organic life from the processes of inorganic nature, or the origin of the human species out of the evolutionary processes of organic life. It is clear from these examples that whenever something new occurs, it bursts into the context of predictable processes as something unexpected, unpredictable, and ultimately causally inexplicable just like a miracle. (2005a: 1112; see also 1998: 178)

In a parallel way, human action starts something anew and seems like a miracle in the context of the probability that things will continue as they have before. The beginning or miraculous quality of freedom itself comes from natality. Thus, Arendt identifies miracles with ‘the improbable and unpredictable’ (2005a: 114). In this sense, unpredictability is both a danger and a potential for welcome change. If one thinks, for example, of the collapse of non-democratic regimes in Eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, or even the election of Barack Obama, we get some sense of this miraculous quality. The miracle is an unexpected change in the nature of politics. Promise and forgiveness are miracles because they seem improbable and they interrupt what may seem an inevitable course towards disaster (Arendt 1968; 170). Arendt understands new beginnings or improvement in politics in terms of forgiveness and promise. To see why she does so, we need to explore her account of both forms of action in more detail.


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Forgiveness and ‘Unknowing’ Wrongs In both The Human Condition and ‘The Tradition of Political Thought’ (2005a), written earlier in the 1950s, Arendt sees forgiveness as one of the remedies for the vagaries of human action, and a better one than ideas of providence or Kantian or Hegelian accounts of history, which argue that human history is a form of continuous progress.4 In ‘The Tradition’ Arendt makes the even stronger point that ‘we never know what we are doing’ in action, and ‘since we cannot stop acting as long as we live, we must never stop forgiving either’ (2005a: 57). The implication is that because we are always making mistakes, we should always be ready to forgive the mistakes of others. Here Arendt also says that ‘forgiving is the only strictly human action that releases us and others from the chain and pattern of consequences that all action engenders’ (2005a: 59), a claim she revises with the introduction of the concept of the promise in The Human Condition. Although forgiveness is a reaction, according to Arendt it partakes of some of action’s character of unpredictability. She writes that forgiving ‘is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven’ (1998: 241). In The Human Condition Arendt links forgiveness to wrong actions that have been committed ‘unknowingly’ or without awareness of the depth of the wrong, a characterization that suggests forgiveness is only appropriate for some actions. She writes: ‘The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing is the faculty of forgiving’ (1998: 237). She, however, bases her view on the thought that ‘crime and willed evil are rare’ (1998: 240), so most wrongs deserve forgiveness. These wrongs and their consequences are an aspect of the irreversibility of human life. It is not clear that such wrongs really require forgiveness, as they are ‘mistakes’. Forgiveness tends to be thought of as a response to actions intended to harm others, on the grounds that thoughtless mistakes don’t require forgiveness. The strength of Arendt’s formulation ‘could not have known’ makes the set of actions narrower, in my view, since then we shouldn’t forgive negligent actions. Only those actions in which we really don’t know what we are doing count. Arendt uses this language to describe those who helped Hitler’s rise to power: ‘They . . . truly did not know what they were doing nor with whom they were dealing’ (2005b: 126). The question of whether those who do wrong know what they are doing is complex, and Arendt clearly believes that the category of forgivable acts is a broad one. Nevertheless, Arendt doesn’t hold the view that all wrong is committed unknowingly, as she believes some deeds are unforgivable. Forgiveness ‘does not apply to the extremity of crime and willed evil’ (1998: 239), which destroy human affairs and power. Another reason one might not believe that Arendt’s view constitutes genuine forgiveness is that she describes it as a kind of ‘dismissal;, so that the kind of psychological state involved is not that of forgiveness but more of a Nietzschean obliviousness, forgetfulness or rising above trivialities such as the misdemeanors of others. In On


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the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche credits forgetfulness with being a force opposed to making promises, for which memory is required (2000: II, 1). Like Arendt, he links forgetfulness to the possibility of something new. A further reason for questioning whether Arendt is discussing forgiveness as such concerns her examples of forgiveness. She argues that we need a secular conception of forgiveness and that the power to forgive is primarily a human power. Among the examples she gives of forgiveness in a political sense are the Roman principle of sparing the vanquished and the right of commuting the death sentence (1998: 239). These examples do not qualify as forgiveness; they are parallel to forgiveness, as are amnesty, clemency, mercy, reconciliation, and so on, but they are not the same. Another important question is whether forgiving really undoes the past.5 Answering this question gives us some clues as to what Arendt means by the term ‘forgiveness’. This meaning emerges through a contrast with the pursuit of vengeance. Arendt makes the central point that giving up revenge is essential to avoid a vicious cycle of violence and to attain a relatively stable political life (1998: 24041). Forgiveness in this sense means that we don’t have to endure the consequences of all our actions. Giving up revenge can be seen as a kind of setting aside of hostile passions, or at least refusing to act on them. Forgiveness is the opposite of vengeance, Arendt argues, since vengeance means that the process that was originally begun by a mistake or trespass is continued through a chain reaction. In contrast to revenge, ‘the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way, and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action’ (1998: 241). For Arendt, revenge is a kind of automatism, whereby we simply react, unlike the action of forgiving. In revenge we are like machines or animals without the power to reflect or change history. In contrast, forgiving is linked to acting, just as destroying is linked to making. Revenge is a destructive response; Arendt’s view has much to be said for it, although it could be argued that sometimes we may forgive wrongs that are willed.

Punishment Another alternative to forgiveness is punishment. It is not the opposite of forgiveness, as revenge is. For Arendt, they both try to put an end to something that would otherwise go on endlessly. ‘It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable’ (1998: 241). This is what characterizes ‘radical evil’. We can’t forgive or punish such offences, in Arendt’s view, since they transcend the realm of human affairs. Radical evil for her is extreme evil. Radical evil involves treating human beings as superfluous (1976: 444), a process that in the Nazi regime involved eradicating first the juridical person, second, the moral person, and finally all spontaneity (1976: 451). Furthermore, in Arendt’s account, radical evil or absolute evil differs from other kinds of evil in that it cannot be explained by evil motives, such as greed, hatred or revenge (1976: 445).


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One might view punishment as different from both forgiveness and revenge in being neutral; it doesn’t exhibit the initiatory character of forgiveness, but nor does it show the destructive and automatic aspects of revenge. One might think that one cannot both punish and forgive, on this understanding, as punishment is considered an alternative to forgiveness. Because Arendt links them, however, one could argue that some wrongs may both be punished, say by the state, and forgiven by the victim(s), or the state may punish and forgive by punishing very lightly. This point will become clearer if we look more closely at what Arendt means by forgiveness. Forgiveness as Personal By the ‘redemption’ of forgiveness Arendt means that, if we are forgiven, we have the possibility of starting anew rather than being defined by the wrong we have committed. Furthermore, she believes that forgiveness is essentially personal, although not necessarily private and individual, because we forgive a person for what they have done for their sake, for who they are (1998: 241). Arendt declares, ‘To put it another way, in granting pardon, it is the person and not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless evil there is no person left whom one could ever forgive’ (2003: 95).6 My interpretation of this idea is that when we forgive, we always forgive a person, a who and his/ her actions, and we may do this in a public or collective way. Thus Arendt’s view involves ceremonial forgiveness and forgiveness by a group or representative of a group of an individual, but does not seem to include forgiveness of groups, as these would not constitute the proper who. Human beings are distinguished from objects, plants and animals by being unique (1998: 176). It is this uniqueness, which is revealed through speech and action, that renders them possible candidates for forgiveness. Arendt explains: This disclosure of the ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide—is implicit in everything somebody says or does. . . . it is more than likely that the ‘who’, which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimōn in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.7 (1998: 17980)8

This explanation is obscure since, while an obvious understanding of the ‘who’ is as a character, the reference to qualities and shortcomings rules that out as a possibility. The relation to forgiveness also becomes more questionable. For instance, it might seem reasonable for Arendt to argue that we forgive someone for who they are, meaning we forgive them when they have transformed their character or if we think that a particular wrongdoing is out of character.9 However, if character isn’t relevant, it’s difficult to see what provides a rationale for forgiveness. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt discusses what she calls ‘mere existence’: ‘all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape


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of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation’(1976: 301). The reference to talents suggests the ‘who’ isn’t the subject here, yet the other references to friendship and love link back to the ‘who’, as does Arendt’s further claim that this aspect of the person is ‘single, unique, unchangeable’ (another miracle). Our ethnicity is one example she gives. Elsewhere Arendt distinguishes between our persona or role and ‘something else’, ‘something entirely idiosyncratic and undefinable and still unmistakably identifiable’ that manifests or comes through even when we change roles (2003: 13). Thus we forgive a person due to the individuality that is disclosed in action.10 Another hint Arendt gives concerning what she means by the ‘who’ is that it is revealed in the story or biography of someone’s life, so that forgiveness could only come from knowing that person’s whole story (1998: 186). Each person is unique and so everyone has the potential to be forgiven. Self-Forgiveness Arendt argues that we cannot forgive ourselves as we do not appear to ourselves and cannot be both the subject and object of forgiveness. We are dependent on others to forgive us. Without forgiving, we would be defined by a deed from which we could not recover. Without promises, we would not be able to keep our identities. (I will discuss this point further on.) Therefore, both faculties depend on plurality: ‘For no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self’ (1998: 237). For Arendt, this is the deepest reason we can’t forgive ourselves because we don’t appear as a who to ourselves in any distinctness. This is an interesting idea, that we are more of a what to ourselves, that we see ourselves (more than we see others or than other see us) in terms of our achievements and failings. While Arendt might concede that we can go through processes of being less hard on ourselves for something we have done, or even forgo revenge on and punishment of ourselves, any understanding of these processes is parasitic on the forgiveness of others. Arendt’s position here seems to contrast with her often expressed view that we have to live with ourselves and her account of thinking as a kind of conversation with ourselves. Shouldn’t this plurality within the self allow for the possibility of selfforgiveness? Arendt clarifies this point in ‘Thinking and moral considerations’, by noting that ‘in a sense I also am for myself though I hardly appear to me” (1998: 183). She means that we are conscious of ourselves but we don’t appear to ourselves as we appear to others. In that sense we cannot perceive the ‘who’ on the basis of which to forgive. We could aim, however, to create a harmony with ourselves after wrongdoing, a kind of reconciliation with the self, if not self-forgiveness. In the following two sections, I will examine the features of the promise.


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The Promise The stability inherent in the promise has been recognized by the political tradition, Arendt notes, for agreements and treaties are found in the Roman legal system and contract theories abound in political philosophy. The unpredictability promises dispel has two aspects: the basic unreliability of human beings and ‘the impossibility of foretelling the consequences of an act in a community of equals where everybody has the same capacity to act’ (1998: 244). The force that keeps people together is the force of mutual promise or contract. Such promise has to be understood in a way that acknowledges plurality. It is important that the promise is not considered to be the uniting of the plurality of people in a single will, for example. Sovereignty can describe a group of people bound together by a promise, Arendt argues, rather than the false sovereignty claimed by individual or collective entities. She says that ‘sovereignty resides in the resulting, limited independence from the incalculability of the future’ (1998: 245). For her, it is better to be bound by a promise than to be completely free, because this ties the future to the present. Arendt also discusses the nature of the promise in the context of her elaboration of the American Revolution, where she presents a more complex view than that in The Human Condition. She gives the example of the political societies formed by early British immigrants to America as a political realm ‘that enjoyed power and was entitled to claim rights without possessing or claiming sovereignty’(1965: 168). If we agree to work together, we have greater power or capacity to act. Arendt separates this freedom to act from the sovereignty of mastery and self-sufficiency.11 While promises only create ‘islands of predictability’ and ‘guideposts of reliability’, Arendt doesn’t argue this is a failing or weakness in the promise. On the contrary, she claims that it is self-defeating to try to cover the future entirely through promises (1998: 244). We have to accept unpredictability to some extent. Arendt sees the development of the American federation as stemming from the compacts that were made from the Mayflower onwards by British colonists, so that a new authority could be formed based on all these preceding forms of authority. She draws a sharp distinction between a social contract that is a real promise based on equality and a fictitious social contract in which consent to be governed is presumed. In the first, Arendt insists, we gain power and lose isolation; in the second, we lose power and have our isolation protected (1965: 170, 181). What Arendt means is that in the promise we experience a plurality and community that are a source of power rather than giving up that power to the government. She writes, ‘In other words, the mutual contract where power is constituted by means of promise contains in nuce both the republican principle, according to which power resides in the people, and where a “mutual subjection” makes of rulership an absurdity . . . and the federal principle, the principle of ‘a Commonwealth for increase’ . . . according to which constituted political bodies can combine and enter into lasting alliances without losing their identity’ (1965: 171). In contrast, Arendt takes the other kind of social contract to consist in a monopoly of power or ‘absolute rulership’ and a ‘national principle’ where the government is supposed to represent individual wills. Arendt’s historical


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suggestion is that the early American colonists invented a new political idiom based on the promise. She believes they stumbled on the idea that people’s worst faults can be kept in check by joining together with others. Furthermore, Arendt argues, the promise is fundamentally connected to the power of action, as it links people together so that they have power. Thus, the promise involves our world-building capacity in its concern for the future. She sums up: ‘The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands a plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and keeping of promises, which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty’ (1965: 171).12 This power, Arendt implies, is what enabled the colonists to defeat England in the War of Independence. Moreover, a series of promises, combined with common deliberation, provided the republican principles on which the American Revolution was based (1965: 214). Against a tradition that views revolutions as the violent founding of a new states, Arendt sees the best revolution (the American one) as formed by a series of linked promises. In ‘What is Freedom?’ Arendt expands the reach of the promise even further, writing, “All political business is, and always has been, transacted within an elaborate framework of ties and bonds for the future such as laws and constitutions, treaties and alliances all of which derive in the last instance from the faculty to promise and to keep promises in the face of the essential uncertainties of the future’ (1968 164). Thus the promise underlies not only the founding of states but also their continuation and day-to-day organization. Further understanding of Arendt’s idea of the importance of the promise can be found through her approving reference to Nietzsche, when she says that ‘Nietzsche saw with unequalled clarity the connection between human sovereignty and the faculty of making promises, which led him to a unique insight into the relatedness of human pride and human conscience’ (1998: 245). For Nietzsche, memory is what links the original promise or act of will with the action and so he calls it the will’s memory. He writes, ‘someone making a promise is . . . answerable for his own future!” (2000: II, 1). The ability to make a promise is a sign of pride in one’s own freedom. Promises should be made made ‘ponderously, seldom, slowly’ (2000: II¸2), and the awareness of the responsibility that flows from freedom becomes conscience. It is unfortunate, Arendt remarks, that these insights had no effect on his concept of the will to power. Promises, like forgiveness, are tied to our relations to others rather than our relation to ourselves. Promises to Ourselves Arendt’s account of the promise parallels that of forgiveness in linking the promise to plurality and making promises to ourselves dependent on promises to others. Promises have a special role in establishing our identities. She writes: ‘Without being


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bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfils, can dispel’ (1998: 237). Thus, the hope that promises will be kept links us to others and the continuity that keeping promises provides confirms our identity. Otherwise we are just playing a role before ourselves one that lacks ‘reality’, in Arendt’s words, and perhaps authenticity. A argument similar to the one Arendt makes concerning forgiveness is relevant here. While we make commitments to ourselves or resolutions and so on, these practices rely on a conception of promises made to others. In the case of forgiveness and promises, Arendt doesn’t consider the possibility of forgiveness or promises that are not fully conscious, and her construction of promises as linked to our appearance before others clearly makes deliberate, conscious promises and commitments prior to any non-deliberate or not fully conscious promises. Now we can begin to see how forgiveness and the promise constitute a moral code for politics.

Morality and Politics With the exception of forgiveness and the promise, Arendt sees morality and politics as two distinct realms. She believes that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgement describes the process of forming political judgement, through the process of enlarging one’s mentality by imagining how one might think and feel if in another’s place (1998, 241).13 Arendt is generally wary of morality’s role in politics because she believes there is a danger of righteousness, or imposing moral standards that are considered by her to be inappropriate in that context. She distinguishes between morality and politics in this way: ‘In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center of political considerations of conduct stands the world’ (2003: 153). For her, morals generally concern the capacity of the individual to be at one with himself or herself¸to be unwilling to live with himself or herself as a either a thief or a murderer, whereas in politics concerns are with ‘the world and with public welfare’ (1968: 245). Since Arendt views morality, ordinarily speaking, as individuals understanding truths for themselves according to their own consciences, morality seems out of place in politics, where a plurality of actors argue concerning what is to be done. Nevertheless, Arendt’s view of the relations between morality and politics are complex, as she acknowledges conflicts between them, believes that morals may be important in times of crisis, and possesses the special moral code I am exploring here. Arendt acknowledges that there can be some moral issues wherein morals seem to conflict with politics. She writes, ‘There are many ways in which political and moral standards of conduct can come into conflict with each other, and in political theory they are usually dealt with in connection with reason-of-state doctrine and its


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so-called double standard of morality’ (2003: 154). The idea is that reasons of state, such as security, can override morality. Arendt believes that the only case in which morals are absolute and one can have an excuse for not participating in politics is in extreme situations when one is asked to do something that one simply cannot live with (2003: 156). People had to rely on their own consciences rather than the beliefs and actions of their community during the Nazi period. She believes that conscience is much more important in extreme situations and that normally adhering to common morality in everyday matters is enough (2003: 104). Only when the mores of the day become distorted, as they are under totalitarian regimes, does conscience become vital. A problem with these mores, however, is that they are not very deeply rooted, and can be changed ‘like table manners’ (2003: 50). One way of understanding Arendt’s suggestion of a ‘moral code’ is to put forward a better way of thinking about ethics in politics than has hitherto been provided. Arendt writes of Kant’s ethics: ‘the inhumanity of Kant’s moral philosophy is undeniable . . . because the categorical imperative is postulated as absolute and in its absoluteness introduces into the interhuman realm which by its nature consists of relationships something that runs counter to its fundamental relativity’ (1995, 27). Her point is that public life or politics is an arena of opinion and discussion where predetermined ethical principles like Kant’s don’t have a place. The only way, she argues, for ethical principles to be verified, is through particular individuals, such as Socrates, or fictional examples, such as King Lear (1968: 248). When we are deprived of such examples we tend to be deprived of our moral sense, Arendt believes. Thus, we need to understand what is distinct about the moral code based on forgiving and promising. Initially, forgiveness and promise appear to offer a very limited moral code. One commentator, George Kateb, finds this moral code inadequate because both forgiveness and promises have to be assessed for their consequences and purposes so cannot constitute a morality in themselves. He concedes that Arendt provides the outlines of a code of conduct that could be linked with principles and virtues she discusses elsewhere and that it is ‘inspiring’(Villa 2000, 143). Forgiveness and the promise as a moral code seem incomplete in that they provide little ethical guidance.

The Passions and Political life Arendt’s understanding of politics is further complicated by her divorce of the passions from politics. Forgiveness must be based on respect or friendship rather than love, she argues, in order to make it suitable for the public sphere. Love, by its nature, is unworldly, and is not only apolitical but anti-political, according to Arendt. She believes that love destroys the in-between or space that relates us to and separates us from others. Arendt writes that ‘love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. (“Never seek to tell thy love/Love that never told can be.”) Because of its inherent worldlessness, love can


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only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world’ (1998, 52). Therefore, Arendt concludes, it can’t be only love that has the power to forgive. Love forgives in the private sphere, respect in the public sphere. For Arendt, respect is a kind of political friendship, without intimacy or closeness, with the space of the world between us, and does not depend on qualities we might esteem. She believes we have lost respect for others in the modern age. The features of respect are the refined equivalent of love’s concern with the who and unconcern with the what of a person’s ‘qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings and transgressions’ (1998: 242). Arendt says, ‘Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person’ (1998: 243). One might consider that respect cannot refer to the uniqueness of the who since it applies to everyone. This point appears to raise a problem concerning forgiveness. If we are almost all equal in deserving respect, all should be forgiven. There seems to be a tension between forgiveness based on love and response to the who or unique individual, and forgiveness based on respect for everyone. Arendt could respond to this issue, however, by suggesting that all that is forgivable or in the nature of a mistake should be forgiven.14 She probably believes that love is anti-political because she is thinking of intense love, since she describes it as passion and remarks on the need for privacy. In a note, Arendt also says that love itself is a rare experience (1998: 242). She does not consider love as benevolence or sympathy here, which could play a role in public life. Respect may be considered worthy of politics, as it is more an attitude than a passion and we can have greater control over it. Examining her criticisms of the role of passions in political life will help here. In On Revolution, Arendt refers to what she calls political passions, distinguishing between passions that are suitable for public life and those that are unsuitable. First, she is very critical of compassion and pity, which she blames for the ferocity of the French Revolution (1965: 81). Her argument is that private experiences like pain or personal feelings or passions should not be made part of political discussion and decisions. Arendt claims that physical pain is ‘the most private and least communicable’ experience (1998: 50). Similarly, compassion is a co-suffering with particular others, whereas pity is an abstract concern for the suffering of a group: ‘compassion, to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related’ (1965: 85). Arendt views compassion as something that affects us without leading to action, and pity as a violent force in public life. Essentially, Arendt conceptualizes compassion as too internal and certain to bear the scrutiny of public discussion. For Arendt, compassion is a passion, whereas pity is a sentiment. Pity is based on being at a distance from sufferers and their suffering, yet relies on the existence of suffering to be enjoyed (1965: 8889). Thus, pity is equally unsuitable for public life.


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Arendt’s criticisms of the role of these experiences are part of her larger argument against the invasion of the political realm by social issues. Such questions as how to deal with poverty for Arendt belong to the household or, if part of politics, they should be dealt with by experts. A focus on private experiences, she argues, also leads to an obsession with human motivation, a search for hypocrites and destruction of those considered suspect, like the program carried out by Robespierre. Arendt divorces goodness in general from the public sphere in The Human Condition (1998: 738). This way of understanding the passions, however, neglects their variety, their nature and their capacity to be changed.15 Conversely, the list of passions suitable for public life (political passions) Arendt provides does not strike one as concerning passion per se: ‘courage, the pursuit of public happiness, the taste of public freedom, an ambition that strives for excellence regardless not only of social status and administrative office but even of achievement and congratulation’ (1965: 2756). Kateb notes that the will to power, or ‘the passion to rule or govern’, doesn’t feature in the inventory and that courage is crucial for Arendt (Villa 2000: 136). These are virtues rather than passions, and indeed Arendt is interested in virtu or excellences in political life, which she understands as virtues of performance, like ‘flute-playing, dancing, healing, and seafaring’ (1968: 153; 1998: 207). These aren’t moral virtues as such, either, although they may provide the conditions of a moral life. ‘[H]onor or glory, love of equality, which Montesquieu called virtue or distinction or excellence’ (1968: 152) and ‘solidarity’ (1965: 8889) are like virtues rather than passions. Kateb suggests that Arendt’s references to solidarity, honor and dignity are more aesthetic than moral (Villa 2000:140). Yet I take these references to be a gesture towards recognition of a fundamental respect owed to human beings that emerges elsewhere in her work. The virtues Arendt discusses could be linked to particular passions to develop this aspect of her account. While I do not have the space to explore this question in detail here, a sense of the educable nature of the passions that takes seriously love, respect as a feeling, and wonder could flesh out the insights of Arendt’s moral code.16 This could be achieved partly through exploring Arendt’s discussions of love and respect.

The Moral Code of Forgiveness and the Promise Arendt’s moral code, supplemented by consideration of the passions and the virtues she discusses, would afford a more substantial, if not complete, contribution to ethical politics. First, it must be acknowledged that Arendt is not offering a moral code in a conventional, normative sense. In keeping with Arendt’s phenomenological approach, the point about forgiving and promising is not how or when we should forgive or promise but simply that these are possibilities that are open to us to act and counter the worst consequences of action irreversibility and unpredictability. The moral code Arendt discusses is relevant to political life and escapes the strictures she


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makes against morality in politics in many of her works because of their special connection with action. It should be noted that Arendt doesn’t expect the conditions of political action to account for all of life. Labor and work provide some of these conditions, in that we need a private life as well as a stable and durable world, where human beings ‘can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table’ (1998: 137). This is why Arendt doesn’t believe they need to be discussed as part of an understanding of politics; rather, they are what stand behind politics. Arendt sees forgiveness and the promise as constituting a special moral code for political life: “In so far as morality is more than the total sum of mores, of customs and standards of behavior solidified through tradition and valid on the ground of agreements, both of which change with time, it has at least politically no more to support itself than the goodwill to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them” (1998: 245). These are the only moral precepts that come from the will to live with others in acting and speaking, and so they are like ‘control mechanisms’.The ‘moral code’ based on forgiveness and the promise Arendt refers to is distinct from other moral codes: ‘The moral code . . . inferred from the faculties of forgiving and making promises, rests on experiences which nobody could ever have with himself, which, on the contrary, are entirely based on the presence of others’ (1998: 238). Relations based on forgiving and promising others determine the extent and modes through which one might forgive or keep promises to oneself, as I have already noted. Without forgiveness and the promise, we would be victims of automatic necessity (1998: 246). Arendt argues that the faculty of action interferes with what she calls the law of mortality as action interrupts the flow of everyday life by beginning something new. She characterizes action in this way: “Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history” (1998: 89). The ‘who’ or agent is revealed in action and speech. What renders actions distinct from labor or work is that actions are not based on rules and are not concerned with outcomes or consequences in the way that making something with a particular end in view is. The faculties of forgiveness and the promise correspond to the human condition of plurality, so they are ways of acting within the distinct political space of appearances. Although I have reservations about Arendt’s limited conception of a moral code for politics, there are certainly insights to be drawn from her emphasis on the significance of these two kinds of actions. One of the most important forms of forgiveness, understanding forgiveness in Arendt’s sense of putting aside vengeance in the case of minor wrongs may be the need for forgiveness of broken promises. One of the excesses of political life is a continual harping, a kind of moralism concerning politicians’ broken promises about trivial matters, often broken due to drastic changes in circumstances or a compromise with reality. This Arendt envisaged. An acceptance of the need for political compromise or changes of mind could lead to greater trust and more open discussion of political alternatives. The promise also features in


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political life after mistakes are made, so forgiveness and the promise are linked in that further sense. If a promise to change is made, that can be the condition for forgiveness. Political forgiveness might appear in the reacceptance of ‘rogue states’ by Western powers, the lifting of the embargo on Cuba (if it were to happen) or peace in the Middle East. The promise appears in the development of relatively stable and democratic polities, in the formation of new ones, and in specific instances such as agreements on nuclear deterrence. Promises are also linked to progress in politics. One way of understanding progress in politics is as the increasing recognition of the equality of others, for example through the feminist movement and anti-racist movements. Perhaps, on Arendt’s account, because she sees contracts and treaties as promises, a more inclusive public sphere is one where the promise is extended. When we promise others, we respect them and treat them as part of the community. Shunning, excluding and subordinating are all ways of not respecting other human beings. By Arendt’s account, these could all be interpreted as ways of not being willing to make promises to others. Breaking promises also shows a lack of respect. Arendt’s delineation of these two forms of moral action is tremendously fruitful and has many implications. The basic principles of foregoing revenge and of being willing to make promises could have a profoundly beneficial effect on political life. The moral code of forgiveness and the promise is one that goes beyond mores and is reliant on goodwill (1998: 245). Arendt herself notes that goodwill is an unreliable source of political stability ‘even presuming the best will on all sides, which as we know does not work in politics, since no goodwill today is any sort of guarantee of goodwill tomorrow” (2005a: 111). The faith that Arendt mentions is based on the possibility of new beginnings. In ‘The Vita Activa and the Modern Age’, she claims that the spirit of faith is undermined by ‘the spirit of distrust and suspicion of the modern age’ (1998: 319). This spirit of distrust is one that needs to be overcome for promising and forgiveness to flourish, and their practice may also help to overcome it.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Anna Yeatman for inviting me to be a participant in the ‘Arendt on/ in Action’ workshop at the University of Western Sydney, and the participants in the workshop for their generous comments, especially Lucy Tatman and Magdalena Zolkos; four anonymous reviewers for their helpful reports; the audience at the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy conference for probing questions; and Damian Cox for supportive feedback and encouragement. 2 Natural science and technology have taken irreversibility and unpredictability into the natural realm, where there are no remedies for them (Arendt, 1998: 238). 3 Jacques Taminiuax emphasizes this ‘ambiguous and paradoxical nature of action’ for Arendt (Villa 2000: 169). 4 In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says we should be forgiving and renounce revenge (1996: 6, 461).


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5 Laplanche and Pontalis distinguish between normal acts of ‘limiting or negating the meaning, force or consequences of an act’ and pathological cases wherein ‘Undoing . . . is directed at the act’s very reality, and the aim is to suppress it absolutely, as though time were reversible’ (1973: 477). Arendt’s account of forgiveness is closer to the normal acts of undoing mentioned. 6 This may be why Arendt did not find Eichmann forgivable, even though she claims that he “merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing” (1994: 237). 7 The view Arendt expresses here can be contrasted with Sartre’s view that human beings are defined by what they have done (Sartre 1996: 29–30). 8 The view Arendt expresses here can be contrasted with Sartre’s view that human beings are defined by what they have done (Sartre 1996: 29–30). 9 See Bell (2008) for an argument that an offender’s moral transformation, or experience of shame over his or her character flaws, furnishes reasons for forgiveness. 10 See Mary Dietz for her interpretation of the self-revelatory character of the ‘who’ in Arendt’s concept of action (Villa 2000: 99–102). 11 See Haddad (2007). Derrida (2001) suggests that forgiveness without sovereignty is impossible, whereas for Arendt, this is not difficult at all, as she defines sovereignty more strongly as a sense of not having the need for others, rather than as a condition of identity. 12 Arendt seems to have forgotten about forgiveness. 13 I discuss this point in more detail in ‘The Judgement of the Statesperson’ (forthcoming 2010). 14 I argued in (2006b) that respect is not sufficient for forgiveness. 15 Elizabeth Spelman (1997) criticizes Arendt’s view that concerns over the suffering of others should have no role in the public and political realm. 16 Kateb emphasizes the role that wonder can play in affirming existence and human stature, Arendt’s ‘deepest philosophical passions’ (Villa 2000: 147).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1965. On revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. 1968. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. New York: The Viking Press. (2nd edn). —. 1976. The origins of totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. —. 1994. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin. —. 1995. Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. —. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2nd edn). —. 2003. Responsibility and judgment. Ed. J. Kohn. New York: Schocken. —. 2005a. The promise of politics. Ed. J. Kohn. New York: Schocken. —. 2005b. Essays in understanding 19301954: Formation, exile, and totalitarianism. Ed. J. Kohn, 2nd edn.. New York: Schocken. Bell, Macalester. 2008. Forgiving someone for who they are. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 77 (3): 625–658. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. Trans. M. Dooley and M. Hughes. London: Routledge. Haddad, Samir. 2007. Arendt, Derrida, and the inheritance of forgiveness. Philosophy Today 51 (4): 416–426. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Practical philosophy. Trans. M.J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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La Caze, Marguerite. 2006a. The asymmetry between apology and forgiveness. Feature Article: Theory and Practice. Contemporary Political Theory 5 (4): 447–468. —. 2006b. Should radical evil be forgiven? In Forensic psychiatry: Influences of evil. Ed. T. Mason, 273–293. Totowa: Humana. —. 2010. The judgement of the statesperson. In Hannah Arendt and the dilemmas of humanism. Ed. D. Celermajer, V. Karalis and A. Schaap, 71–87. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. (Forthcoming). Laplanche, Jean. and J.B. Pontalis. 1973. The language of psychoanalysis. Trans. D. Nicholson Smith. London: The Hogarth Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. On the genealogy of morality. Trans. C. Diethe. Ed. K. Ansell-Pearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1996. L’existentialisme est un humanism. Paris: Gallimard. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1997. The heady political life of compassion. In Fruits of sorrow: Framing our attention to suffering, 59–89. Boston; Beacon. Villa, Dana. Ed. 2000. The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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CHAPTER 12

Hannah Arendt’s ‘Comedy’: Antisemitism as Synecdoche in The Origins of Totalitarianism Karyn Ball

In a famous exchange with Hannah Arendt in The Review of Politics, Eric Voegelin concedes at the outset that the ‘positivistic destruction of political science is not yet overcome; and the great obstacle to an adequate treatment of totalitarianism is still the insufficiency of theoretical instruments’ (1953: 68). Despite the ‘admirable detachment’of an analysis that ‘abounds with brilliant formulations and profound insights’, he nevertheless reproaches Arendt for exhibiting the very processes she seeks to diagnose in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a performative contradiction that undermines her ‘immanentist’ approach and leads her to posit an improper concept of human nature (1953: 71, 59). In defending her method, Arendt underlines the ‘special nature of [her] subject, and the personal experience which is necessarily involved in an historical investigation that employs imagination consciously as an important tool of cognition’ (1953: 79). She invites Voegelin to revisit her warning in the preface to Origins against a predilection for viewing ‘the concepts of Progress and of Doom as “two sides of the same medal” as well as against any attempt at “deducing the unprecedented from precedents.” ’ These ‘tendencies are the progeny of those who collapse liberalism and totalitarianism into ‘ “ the putrefaction of Western civilization” ’ (1953, 79–80; citing Arendt 1951, vii–viii and Voegelin 1953a: 68). In Arendt’s view, Voegelin and his ilk treat the differences between totalitarianism and other ‘trends in Occidental political or intellectual history’ as merely ‘minor outgrowths of some “essential sameness” of a doctrinal nature’ (Arendt 1953: 80). However, when totalitarianism is ‘discovered in all kinds of tyrannies or forms of collective communities’, then ‘everything distinct disappears and everything that is new and shocking is (not explained but) explained away either through drawing analogies or reducing it to a previously known chain of causes and influences’ (ibid., 83). To counter this ‘hallmark of the modern historical and political sciences’, Arendt would, instead, specify ‘the distinct quality of what was actually happening’. ‘What is unprecedented in totalitarianism’ for Arendt ‘is not primarily its ideological content, but the event of totalitarian


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domination itself. This’, she argues, ‘can be seen clearly if we have to admit that the deeds of its considered policies have exploded our traditional categories of political thought (totalitarian domination is unlike all forms of tyranny and despotism we know of) and the standards of our moral judgement (totalitarian crimes are very inadequately described as “murder” and totalitarian criminals can hardly be punished as “murderers”)’ (ibid., 80). It is striking that Arendt’s response to Voegelin underscores the importance of imagination for the cognition of the unprecedented, while defending her antidisciplinary method as a testament to the challenges of writing about totalitarian terror. Hayden White’s critique of historiography offers a means of drawing out the rhetorical content of the tripartite form of Arendt’s Origins as a narrative configuration of ‘Antisemitism’, ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Totalitarianism’. In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), White defines irony, metonymy and synecdoche as avatars of metaphor distinguished by the ‘reductions or integrations they effect on the literal level’ and by the ‘illuminations they aim at on the figurative level’. For White, then, ‘Metaphor is essentially representational, Metonymy is reductionist, Synecdoche is integrative, and Irony is negational” (1973: 34). While it is sometimes treated as a form of metonymy whereby the name of a part substitutes for the name of the whole, synecdoche, in White’s taxonomy, permits a phenomenon to ‘be characterized by using the part to symbolize some quality presumed to inhere in the totality, as in the expression “He is all heart” ’ (1973: 34). In her preface to the first edition, Arendt presents Origins as an endeavor to face up to reality by writing theory from the ground up against a background of ‘both reckless optimism and reckless despair’ without falling prey to positivist assumptions (1976: vii).1 Borrowing White’s taxonomy, I argue that synecdoche provides Arendt with an integrative strategy that allows her, potentially, to sidestep the deterministic tendencies of conventionally ‘causal’ historical explanations. The following analysis dwells on the ‘Antisemitism’ section in Origins where Arendt pursues an agenda to recuperate a fraught agency for Jews as a corrective to histories that present them as ‘eternal’ victims.2 My contention is that Arendt’s strategic deployment of synecdoche in this section opens up the transfigurative dimensions of the events that fomented antisemitic structures of feeling; however, while her critics might denounce this strategy as a symptom of ‘Jewish self-hatred’, my aim is to shed light on Arendt’s ambivalent relationship to ‘the Jews’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who failed to mount a political solution to their collective situation before it was too late.

Arendt’s Figural Realism It was really as if an abyss had opened. Because we had the idea that amends could somehow be made for everything else, as amends can be made for just about everything at some point in politics. But not for this. This ought not to have happened. And I don’t mean just the number


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of victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses and so on – I don’t need to go into that. This should not have happened. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can. (Arendt 1994: 14)

To peruse the early reception of Origins is to recall how its stylistic intensity and bold approach befuddled political scientists and historians. Currin V. Shields (1951) lambasts the project’s ‘neat, tripartite division’, which ‘is not reflected in a comparable scheme of disquisitional organization. Just what the relation is between antisemitism and imperialism and totalitarianism the author never makes clear to the reader.” Shields also scolds Arendt for providing ‘an inadequate examination of an inadequate sample’ and for ‘generalizing about a vast and bewildering complexity of phenomena’ while ‘[indulging] in poetic locution when her subject cries out for cogent and precise discussion’ (Shields 1951: 501; my emphasis).3 Werner Baer (1952) echoes Shields’s assessment that readers ‘will not find a consistent theory either of the meaning of “totalitarianism” or the causes for the growth of totalitarian societies in the recent past.’ In Baer’s view, ‘Dr. Arendt uses the term “totalitarianism” as a literary cliché, without an analytical investigation of its meaning and content’ (Baer 1952: 437; my emphasis).4 To be sure, Origins does not shy away from dramatic imagery, yet Shields and Baer deride the book’s literariness as a ‘failing’ specific to Arendt rather than reflecting on the stylistic challenges taken on by any writer who confronts the traumatic import of totalitarianism. While responding to criticisms that the project lacks consistency, Arendt confesses that writing a history of totalitarianism is particularly challenging because she would, by her own admission, rather destroy this evil than conserve it in keeping with her delineation of historiography and its goals. The aim of conservation nonetheless propels her endeavor to ‘discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms’ (1953: 77–8). She therefore admits that her book ‘does not really deal with the “origins” of totalitarianism – as its title unfortunately claims – but gives a historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism’ followed by ‘an analysis of the elemental structure of totalitarian movements and domination itself’. This crystallization of elements thus constitutes ‘the hidden structure of the book while its more apparent unity is provided by certain fundamental concepts which run like red threads through the whole’ (ibid., 78; my emphasis). Arendt concludes the general preface to the 1951 edition of Origins by proclaiming that ‘Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) – one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee.’ Such a guarantee ‘can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities’. Ultimately, then, ‘[w]e can no longer afford to take that which was


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good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion’, Arendt declares. ‘The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are in vain’ (1976: ix; my emphasis). The ‘subterranean stream’ figure conjoins the general preface with the Preface to Part One, where Arendt apprises us that a ‘comprehensive history of antisemitism remains still to be written and is beyond the scope of this book.’ She emphasizes that ‘what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon.’ These elements were scarcely noticed, Arendt explains, because they ‘belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence’ (1976: xv; my emphasis). The same figures recur immediately in the first sentence of the next paragraph: ‘Since only the final crystallizing catastrophe brought these subterranean trends into the open and to public notice’, Arendt writes, ‘there has been a tendency to simply equate totalitarianism with its elements and origins – as though every outburst of antisemitism or racism or imperialism could be identified as “totalitarianism” ’ (xv; my emphasis). Arendt disclaims this reductive tendency in the Preface to Part Two: ‘Before the imperialist era, there was no such thing as world politics and without it, the totalitarian claim to global rule would not have made sense’ (xxi). The tripartite structure of Origins juxtaposes antisemitism and imperialism as elements that eventually ‘crystallized’ into a totalitarian whole; it thereby configures antisemitism as an indispensable yet partial component of totalitarianism rather than its sufficient cause. With respect to this aim, Arendt’s recourse to the figures of ‘crystallization’ and ‘subterranean streams’ distinguishes her historiography on at least two counts. First, it suggests that Arendt’s heuristic will disinter ideological latencies from the circumstances she narrates. Second, the idea of ‘subterranean streams’ that fail to ‘surface’ under causal-linear lenses indicates a genetic emplotment: totalitarianism integrates and cumulatively expresses the historical and political forces through which antisemitic ideology emerged and coalesced with the racist and expansionist justifications for imperialism. Pursuing this genetic coincidence, Origins’ plot must begin with antisemitism so that Arendt can isolate its undercurrents before tracing the ruthless extensivity they assume once intermingled with imperialism. 5 It is this ‘elemental’ interaction that gives rise to the ‘novel’ amalgam called totalitarianism as a genocidal imperialism that consummated long-term trends of European history. To amplify the connotations of her genetic figures, I would like to reconsider Arendt’s admission cited above that personal experience ‘is necessarily involved in


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an historical investigation that employs imagination consciously as an important tool of cognition’ (Arendt, 1953: 79). Annabel Herzog (2000) reviews Arendt’s invocation of imagination in the 1953 exchange with Voegelin in light of her Kant seminar seventeen years later. As the ‘ “faculty of having present what is absent” through an image’, Kant’s conception of imagination (Einbildungskraft) is ‘more comprehensive than memory’, which relates solely to the past; imagination, in contrast, ‘ “can make present at will whatever it chooses” ’. Arendt, as Herzog notes, aligns this faculty with the Greek nous to infer that ‘imagination allows us to discover the truth of things, which lies beyond the appearances’. In Kant’s schematism, ‘imagination provides the link between sensibility and understanding, and offers a ‘kind of “intuition” of something that is never present’ (Herzog 2000: 17; citing Arendt 1982: 79). Insofar as ‘imagination is the source of all experiences’ for Kant, the faculty of Einbildungskraft in Arendt’s interpretation fulfills the function Walter Benjamin assigns to remembrance; as Herzog observes, both obtain a ‘redemptive power’ in ‘[connecting] the historian to particular facts and [making] present as experience what is absolutely absent to perception, that is, the truth of these facts’ (Herzog 2000:18). Arendt’s growing friendship with Benjamin in Paris between 1936 and 1938, when he was writing ‘The Storyteller’, is well known. Herzog reminds us that he entrusted his last manuscripts, including ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, to her and Heinrich Blücher to deliver to Adorno in New York, before fleeing to the Spanish border, where he committed suicide (Herzog 2000: 2; see also Feldman 2007: lxxv, n83). Their intimacy prompts Herzog to speculate that Arendt and Benjamin shared the belief ‘that the past is fragmented and that only fragmented writing, mainly in the form of “stories”, can be faithful to its dead and its “ruins” ’ (Herzog 2000: 3). The purpose of history for both Arendt and Benjamin was ‘not to commemorate the defeated and the dead, but to write from their standpoint and, hence, to display their absence, their invisibility’ (ibid.). Like Benjamin, Arendt ‘sought to recover the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary spirit’ in spontaneous and ‘fleeting moments of tangible freedom’ that accounts of progressive development suppress (Bernstein 1996: 105). In this respect, both placed faith in the capacity of stories ‘to save the world’ (Herzog 2000: 3).6 According to Richard J. Bernstein (1996), Arendt shared Benjamin’s vigilance against an ideology of history that would write it as ‘the progressive development of “victorious” causes’, a suspicion she translates into the figure of crystallization to emphasize an event’s potential to reveal its own past (1996: 105, 51). Arendt, as Bernstein tells us, ‘strongly opposed’ the premise that totalitarianism was a ‘historically inevitable outcome of forces and trends set in motion in the modern age’ (ibid., 52). Her agenda was, instead, to recover an image of the chance to save that was missed, or, in Bernstein’s words, of ‘the real political possibility of preventing [totalitarianism’s] emergence’ (ibid., 54). Both Bernstein and Herzog draw upon Lisa Disch (1993 and 1994), whose reading of Arendt highlights Kant’s recourse to crystallization as a metaphor for the contingent formation of objects through a sudden


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solidification rather than a gradual process of evolution (Bernstein 1996: 69; Disch 1993: 683). These discussions suggest that Arendt’s method conjoins Kant’s figuration of contingency with Benjamin’s view that the essence of historical writing consists in recounting the ‘shock of crystallization’ as the past and present collide or intersperse (Herzog 2000: 7). In effect, Arendt finesses an anti-positivist conception of history by structuring Origins as a constellation: it does not advance a conventionally linear narrative as an apologetics for progress or as an ‘eternal image of the past’, but operates explosively from within catastrophe to illuminate the dynamic present of the political repressed. Shields was, for this reason, naive to rebuke Arendt for her indulgence in ‘poetic locution’, since her configuration of Origins is overtly literary, if not precisely modernist: it derives persuasive force from the defamiliarizing shock it detonates in the reader. Pertinent here is White’s invocation of the term figurative realism to reorient a debate about the moral and factual limits of narrating the Holocaust.7 White’s intervention breaks down a historically reductive opposition between realist and modernist modes of representation in order to make a case for the latter’s potential ‘to take account of experiences that are unique to our century and for which the older modes of representation have proven to be inadequate’ (White 1999: 41–42). Arendt’s concern with the shortfalls of realist historiography translates into self-consciously traumatic reverberations in her own text. The style of Origins testifies to the unprecedented status and shocking effect of the totalitarian ‘hell’ she symbolizes. In this vein, she makes a point of disagreeing with Voegelin’s contention ‘that the “morally abhorrent and the emotionally existing will overshadow the essential”, because [she] believe[s] them to form an integral part of it’ (Arendt 1953: 78). Though she does not call herself a modernist in this context,8 Arendt’s rejoinder to Voegelin affirms her need for what White might call a ‘figurative realist’ approach that permits the form of history to reflect its traumatic impact. ‘To describe the concentration camps sine ira is not to be “objective” ’, Arendt insists, ‘but to condone them; and such condoning cannot be changed by a condemnation which the author may feel duty bound to add but which remains unrelated to the description itself’ (ibid., 79). Arendt’s ‘figurative realist’ emphasis on the crucial role of the imagination in the comprehension of the unprecedented recalls Hegel’s definition of the ‘critical type’ of ‘reflective’ historiography. As White paraphrases it, the critical type is inspired by conflicting visions of the historical process, which facilitate ‘the rise of consciousness of the possible ideality of the whole through reflection in the mode of Synecdoche’ (White 1973: 92). Yet, as White later notes, the ‘mythos of Synecdoche’ is the ‘dream of Comedy’: it conveys ‘the apprehension of a world in which all struggle, strife, and conflict are dissolved in the realization of a perfect harmony, in the attainment of a condition in which all crime, vice, and folly are finally revealed as the means to the establishment of the social order which is finally achieved at the end of the play’ (ibid., 190).9 White delimits two forms of comic emplotment: the ‘Comedy of Desire’, whereby the protagonist triumphs over ‘the society which blocks his progression toward


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a goal’ and the ‘Comedy of Duty and Obligation’, whereby a collectivity reasserts its rights ‘over the individual who has risen up to challenge it as the definitive form of community’. The recourse to these forms by the nineteenth-century ‘realist’ historians Jules Michelet and Leopold von Ranke indicates their shared conviction that ‘the simple description of the historical process in all its particularity and variety will figure forth a drama of consummation, fulfillment, and ideal order in such a way as to make the telling of the tale an explanation of why it happened as it did.’ An accurate description would therefore result ‘not in an image of chaos, but in a vision of a formal coherence which neither science nor philosophy is capable of apprehending’ (ibid., 190). Though Arendt’s ‘immanentist’ identification with her object should not translate into a linear synthesis of events, in extending White’s assessment of Michelet and Ranke to Arendt, I want to suggest that the genetic motifs of ‘crystallization’ and ‘hidden structure’ help her to stage a Comedy of Duty and Obligation that portrays certain actors as threats to collective political visions. In this connection, it is worth reiterating J. F. Brown’s 1951 criticism that Arendt proposes ‘a completely unrealizable, impractical antidote: Without showing how it might be achieved, the author hopes for a new morality, a morality again somehow based on humanism and a mutual respect among all men’ (Brown 1951: 273). My contention is that the unrealizable ‘hope for a new morality’ that Brown disparages is the ‘content’ of Arendt’s comic resolution. The question is how this emplotment morally categorizes the ‘collectivity’ that will recuperate its rights from a ‘villainous’ individual ‘who has risen up to challenge it as the definitive form of community’.

The ‘Comedy’ of Antisemitism There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion. Such discrepancies between cause and effect outrage our common sense. (Arendt 1976: 3)

Before I embark on a formal analysis of the tensions between the denotative and connotative levels of Arendt’s style in the first section of Origins, it will be useful to review her statements about her agenda from the preface to ‘Antisemitism’. Though Arendt contends that history should conserve the persecution and genocide of the Jews for memory, she would nevertheless take issue with a historiography that represents them exclusively as victims. The first sentences of the preface firmly distinguish between antisemitism as a ‘secular nineteenth-century ideology’ that ‘was unknown before the 1870s’ and ‘religious Jew-hatred, inspired by the mutually hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds’. Arendt also questions ‘the extent to which the former derives its arguments and emotional appeal from the latter’ (1976: xi). Since the rise of secular antisemitism in the nineteenth century, Arendt writes, ‘It has


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been the common fallacy of Jewish and non-Jewish historiography – though mostly for opposite reasons – to isolate the hostile elements in Christian and Jewish sources and to stress the series of catastrophes, expulsions, and massacres that have punctuated Jewish history just as armed and unarmed conflicts, war, famine, and pestilence have punctuated the history of Europe’ (ibid., xii). Countering the conventional wisdom of Jewish historiography, which emphasized the Christian hatred of Jews, Arendt notes that anti-Semites recorded Jewish antipathy toward Christians, which, in consonance with the record from ancient Jewish authorities, suggests that hostilities were not unilateral, since Jews largely chose to segregate themselves from gentiles based on religious and other grounds. Arendt stresses that ‘[w]hen this tradition of Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Gentiles came to light, “the general Jewish public was not only outraged but genuinely astonished”, so well had its spokesmen succeeded in convincing themselves and everybody else of the non-fact that Jewish separateness was due exclusively to Gentile hostility and lack of enlightenment’ (xii; citing Katz 1961: 196). A requisite iconoclast, Arendt also interrogates the eternal scapegoat thesis that shores up the ‘self-deceiving’ supremacist belief that Jews were more tolerant than Christians. She discounts ‘the belief that the Jewish people had always been the passive, suffering object of Christian persecutions’, which in her mind, ‘actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness and was bound to end in new and often very complicated practices of separation, destined to uphold the ancient dichotomy’. Indeed, ‘if Jews [of the mid- to latenineteenth century] had anything in common with their non-Jewish neighbors to support their newly proclaimed equality, it was precisely a religiously predetermined, mutually hostile past that was as rich in cultural achievement on the highest level as it was abundant in fanaticism and crude superstitions on the level of the uneducated masses’ (Arendt 1976: xiii). The ‘Antisemitism’ section of Origins reflects Arendt’s hard-won conviction that European Jews ‘were completely unprepared for what happened to them in the twentieth century’ because they never grasped the possibility of claiming rights for themselves as Jews and they ‘never assumed responsibility for [their] own destiny’ (Bernstein 1996: 10, 25). Her agenda to represent European Jews not only as sufferers but also as agents of history (ibid., 56) has spurred Richard Wolin to denounce Arendt for blaming the victims – a symptom of her alleged ‘problem with her own Jewish identity’ (2001: 99). He locates the emergence of Arendt’s ‘Jewish problem’ in the late 1920s when a more perniciously racializing anti-Semitic climate developed. During this period, assimilated German Jews were compelled to abandon the core illusion ‘that they were as German as any of their non-Jewish fellow citizens’ in the eyes of their German acquaintances. Wolin speculates that this disillusionment must have been ‘particularly bitter for well-educated Jews’ such as Arendt ‘who labored under the delusion that the German culture or Bildung was the great equalizer, their “entry ticket” to the privileges of Germany society’ (Wolin, 102); it nonetheless seems that even those ‘who avidly pursued Bildung never shed their taint as social climbers or


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parvenus’ (ibid., 103). Arendt was deeply pained when her fellow intellectuals ‘betrayed her, turning against her almost overnight, in solidarity with the new regime. The Nazis were her declared enemies’, Wolin writes, ‘[b]ut her philosophical intimates – Germany’s spiritual elite, those steeped in the virtues of inwardness, the cultured heirs of Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke – were the ones from whom she least expected betrayal’ (108). Wolin mostly agrees with the acrimonious condemnations of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), where Arendt assesses Israel’s accountability to international law for kidnapping Eichmann,10 questions the theatrics of his trial and criticizes the Jewish Councils for collaborating with deportations from the ghettos.11 In Wolin’s view, Arendt’s acute attention to Jewish agency in Origins equivocates between perpetrators and victims by faulting the Jews ‘for being an apolitical people – as if that were a lot they had opted for by choice’. The book thus foreshadows her ‘hard-hearted’ assessments of the Councils twelve years later and thereby provides Wolin with evidence for Arendt’s position that, ‘in many instances, the Jews had foolishly brought historical persecution upon themselves’ (2001: 99). Wolin’s allegations about Arendt’s ‘Jewish self-hatred’ crudely preempt the prospect that she engages in a self-critical mode of Jewish identification, as Bernstein (1996) and Judith Butler (2007) have suggested.12 While taking issue with Wolin, I suspect that a wounding sense of betrayal haunts Arendt’s slippages between singular Jews and ‘the Jews’ in general, which mark the first section of Origins on the history of European antisemitism. It is in this context, as Bernstein argues, that Arendt works out her position on the self-defeating consequences of social assimilation and the urgent necessity of political emancipation (1996: 25). Ron H. Feldman (2007) notes that Arendt identified with the dissidence of Bernard Lazare, ‘the French– Jewish author and lawyer who was the first to publicize the innocence of Captain Dreyfus’ and the first, according to Arendt, ‘to translate the Jews’ social status as a pariah people into terms of political significance by making it a tool for political analysis and the basis for political action’ (Feldman 2007: lv). Arendt adopts Lazare’s disdain for ‘privileged wealthy strata of Jews who were constantly tempted by parvenu aspirations’ as they ‘sought accommodation to, and acceptance by, society’, but who would nevertheless be ‘blamed as the power behind the power’ when ‘different social groups came into conflict with the state’ (Bernstein 1996: 31, 64). She also mimics Lazare’s vilification of parvenus for ‘[using] their elbows to raise themselves above their fellow Jews into the “respectable” world of gentiles’ in contrast to ‘conscious pariahs’ who ‘voluntarily [spurn] society’s insidious gifts’ (Feldman 2007: xliii) while seeking ‘to fight for the political justice and equality of the Jewish people’ (Bernstein 1996: 31). Arendt minces no words: ‘However much the Jewish pariah might be, from the historical viewpoint, the product of an unjust dispensation . . . politically speaking’, she insists, ‘every pariah who refused to be a rebel was partly responsible for his own position and therewith for the blot on mankind which it represented’ (Arendt 2007: 284–5). As I shall demonstrate, Arendt’s adaptation of


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Lazare’s typology inflects her comic emplotment of the Jews’ failure to seize political rights for themselves as a ‘pariah people’. The ‘Antisemitism’ section enacts the following synecdochic integrations. First, the privileges granted to certain Jewish exceptions, so-called ‘Court Jews’, for example, rendered them more conspicuous in the eyes of the have-nots and this resentment extended to the Jews as a whole. Second, the Rothschilds’ multifarious influence as clandestine advisors and financiers across Europe reinforced the stereotype that Jews are congenitally wily, which enables them, treacherously, to pull money out of thin air (without actual labor). In addition, the Rothschilds’ network of activities confirmed the notion that Jews covertly manipulate the purse strings of government on a national and international scale. Third, the acceptance of Jewish ‘parvenus’ among French bohemian circles depended on their willingness to embody an ‘exotic’ human type in a frothy sea of vice and iniquity. In England, as Arendt argues, Benjamin Disraeli magisterially performed the Jewish charlatan type while launching an extraordinary career as an English imperialist and a Jewish chauvinist. His tactical ability to play the quintessential parvenu rendered his political success emblematic of Jewish mystique and ulterior power.13 Fourth, Arendt’s framing of the Dreyfus Affair as a conspiracy between the French Jesuits and the Catholic military against socially mobile Jews genetically prefigures a totalitarian climax by illustrating the political potential of antisemitism to consolidate anti-democratic and antiliberal interests at a time when emergent racial ideologies were cementing the rationalizations for European imperialism. As the one-time prisoner in the French internment camp at Gurs bitterly remarks: ‘Certainly it was not in France that the true sequel to the affair was to be found, but the reason why France fell an easy prey to Nazi aggression is not far to seek’ (Arendt 1976: 93). In Arendt’s narration, the Dreyfus Affair focalized a desire for vengeance incited by the Panama Company scandal against the figure of the ‘treacherous Jew’ who is not what he pretends to be. Under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal, the Panama Company raised ‘no less than 1,335,538,454 francs in private loans’ between 1880 and 1888. Because the Canal’s construction ‘was generally regarded as a public and national service rather than a private enterprise’, Parliament backed its public loans and the company succeeded despite its ineptitude. Its bankruptcy, which preceded such guarantees by several years, damaged the republic’s foreign policy, as Arendt informs us, and brought about ‘the ruination of some half-million middle-class Frenchmen’. The most scandalous aspect of this situation was that de Lesseps relied on middlemen who commanded exorbitant commissions ‘to bribe the press, half of Parliament, and all of the higher officials’, thereby converting the government’s sanction of the company’s loans ‘into a colossal racket’ (ibid., 95). Arendt reports that ‘[t]here were no Jews either among the bribed members of Parliament or on the board of the company’ (1976: 95), yet French wrath nevertheless concentrated upon the German-born Jacques Reinach, who had received an Italian barony before being naturalized in France (ibid., 98, n28). Reinach was the ‘secret


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financial counselor of the government’ who ‘handled its relations with the Panama Company’ (ibid., 95–6). His service as Reinach’s liaison with the radical wings of Parliament empowered Cornélius Herz to blackmail his boss about the extensive corruption. Before committing suicide, Reinach took a dastardly step with profound consequences for French Jewry, in Arendt’s interpretation: He provided Edouard Drumont’s anti-Semitic daily La Libre Parole with ‘his list of suborned members of Parliament, the so-called “remittance men”, imposing as the sole condition that the paper should cover up for him personally when it published its exposure’. By publishing the list in installments, Drumont’s journal ‘transformed overnight into one of the most influential papers in the country’. Reinach thereby helped the ‘entire antisemitic press and movement’ to emerge ‘as a dangerous force in the Third Republic’ (Arendt 1976: 96). By rendering ‘the invisible visible’, as Drumont phrased it, the Panama scandal ‘brought with it two revelations’, which Arendt recounts: ‘First, it disclosed that members of Parliament and civil servants had become businessmen. Secondly, it showed that the intermediaries between private enterprise (in this case, the company) and the machinery of state were almost exclusively Jews’ (ibid.). With a mordant tone, Arendt tells us how the ‘shady transactions of Reinach and his confederates’ managed to ‘shroud in even deeper darkness the mysterious and scandalous relations between business and politics’. Their role in this scandal consequently precipitated a sense of betrayal among the lower middle-class and petty bourgeoisie who had been devastated by disastrous investments in the bankrupt company (ibid., 98–9). Yet Arendt’s oddly redundant phrasing compromises the detachment of her omniscient third-person narration by appearing to channel anti-Semitic reactions. ‘Throughout her writings’, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb observes, ‘Arendt enters into the voices of those about whom she speaks’ (2003: 30). In this ‘ventriloquist’ mode, Arendt sometimes leaves off scare quotation marks when the context seems to call for them. She writes: ‘[t]hese parasites upon a corrupt body served to provide a thoroughly decadent society with an exceedingly dangerous alibi. Since they were Jews it was possible to make scapegoats of them when public indignation had to be allayed.’ Arendt subsequently observes, ‘[t]he antisemites could at once point to the Jewish parasites on a corrupt society in order to “prove” that all Jews everywhere were nothing but termites in the otherwise healthy body of the people’ and, naturally, it ‘did not matter to [the antisemites] that the corruption of the body politic started without the help of Jews’. It is impossible to discern whether Arendt shares the anti-Semitic figuration of Reinach and his ilk as ‘parasites on a corrupt body’, since the circular and potentially sarcastic reiteration of this image also dissembles it. She nonetheless holds Reinach and his blackmailer accountable for stoking patriotic Anti-Semitism— ‘that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others’ (Arendt 1976: 99; my emphasis). Arendt’s portrayal of the Panama Scandal compounds fraught slippages between singular Jews and ‘the Jews’ as an undifferentiated whole who, regardless of class, fall under the shadow of the opportunists’ perfidy. While setting the scene of the Dreyfus


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Affair, Arendt records how, up to the establishment of the Third Republic, the Rothschilds monopolized the management of state finances and were even powerful enough in 1882 to bankrupt the Catholic Union Générale, which strove to ruin Jewish bankers (1976: 97).14 During the ‘dissolution of state machinery’ after the Panama controversy, the increasingly reactionary Rothschilds entered the ‘circles of antisemitic aristocracy’. Meanwhile, ‘[t]he fashionable set of Faubourg Saint-Germain opened its doors not only to a few ennobled Jews, but their baptized sycophants, the antisemitic Jews, were also suffered to drift in as well as complete newcomers’ (103). Arendt’s staging of this scene charts an egress of assimilating wealthy Jews that predicates ‘baptized sycophants’ upon ‘antisemitic Jews’ and juxtaposes the Jewish ‘plutocrats’ with ‘the Jews’ in general. This chain damns all of the elements in the list through association, while reinforcing the paradigmatic status of the first: the series commences with the Rothschilds’ entry into ‘the circles of the antisemitic aristocracy’ in order to deride the instrumental Dreyfus family, shifty baptized Jews and Jewish plutocrats, before reverting once again to loose references to ‘the Jews’. Arendt’s syntax moves too quickly between conniving ‘parvenus’ and ‘the Jews’ as a whole; thus, without ever exercising any actual agency, all Jews syntactically share responsibility for their striving brethren’s schemes. In this vein, we are told that the Dreyfus family ‘belonged to that section of French Jewry which sought to assimilate by adopting its own brand of antisemitism. This adjustment to the French aristocracy had one inevitable result”. As Arendt indicates: ‘the Jews tried to launch their sons upon the same higher military careers as were pursued by those of their new-found friends’. It was here ‘that the first cause of friction arose’. Until this point, ‘the admission of the Jews into high society had been relatively peaceful’, since the monarchist upper classes ‘were a politically spineless lot and did not bother unduly one way or the other’. However, ‘when the Jews began seeking equality in the army, they came face to face with the determined opposition of the Jesuits who were not prepared to tolerate the existence of officers immune to the influence of the confessional’ (1976: 103; my emphasis).15 Alfred Dreyfus ‘was the first Jew to find a post on the General Staff and under existing conditions this could only have aroused not merely annoyance but positive fury and consternation’ (ibid., 104). In her scathing characterizations of the ‘dramatis personae’, however, the unfortunate Captain plays a parvenu who ‘continually [boasts] to his colleagues of his family fortune which he spent on women’, while his equally pathetic brothers offered ‘their entire fortune, and then [reduced] the offer to 150,000 francs, for the release of their kinsman’ (ibid., 91). Dreyfus hereby takes on the clownish haplessness of the Schlemiel, a stock figure from Yiddish folk tales who produces a conventionally comic effect.16 Arendt reports that while the Dreyfus scandal unfolded, the state was dissolving into factions, which ‘disrupted the closed society of the Jews, but did not force them into a vacuum in which they could go on vegetating outside of state and society. For that,’ Arendt explains, ‘the Jews were too rich and, at a time when money was one of the salient requisites of power, too powerful’. ‘On the contrary’, Arendt insists, ‘they maintained certain relations with the state machine and continued, albeit in


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a crucially different form, to manipulate the business of the state’ (1976: 99; my emphasis). Her identifications become disturbingly vague as she refers to ‘the Jews’ who were ‘too rich’, or to some ‘they’ who manipulated state business. It is as if Arendt’s narration has internalized the gaze of anti-Semites who slide unwittingly in their own references from the Rothschilds to ‘the Jews’. For their part, ‘[t]he Jews failed to see that what was involved was an organized fight against them on a political front. They therefore resisted the co-operation of men [like Georges Clemenceau] who were prepared to meet the challenge on this basis” (118; my emphasis). Even Clemenceau’s heroism provides Arendt with an occasion to register her scorn for self-aggrandizing Jews. ‘The antisemite tends to see in the Jewish parvenu an upstart pariah’, she writes; ‘consequently in every huckster he fears a Rothschild and in every schnorrer a parvenu. But Clemenceau, in his consuming passion for justice, still saw the Rothschilds as members of a downtrodden people’ (Arendt 1976: 118). Arendt’s parallelism enunciates the treachery Clemenceau faced as ‘the national misfortune of France opened his eyes and his heart even to those “unfortunates, who pose as leaders of their people and promptly leave them in the lurch”, to those cowed and subdued elements who, in their ignorance, weakness and fear, have been so much bedazzled by admiration of the stronger as to exclude them from partnership in any active struggle and who are able to “rush to the aid of the winner” only when the battle has been won’ (118–19).17 In Arendt’s multilayered condemnations of ‘those unfortunates’, I detect a hint of self-recrimination against a young pre-War student Arendt, ‘bedazzled by admiration’ for German philosophy and Martin Heidegger, in particular, among other intellectuals who turned their backs on Jewish friends and colleagues.18 As these examples illustrate, Arendt foregrounds the actions of Jewish parvenus in circumstances that rendered them conspicuous in typically economic roles that provoked resentment against them. On a denotative level, this strategy reanimates the negated agency of Jewish financial and international mediators who reprehensively guarded private privileges rather than demanding genuine political power. In this regard, Arendt’s use of synecdoche should subtend the essentialization of ‘the Jews’ as transhistorical scapegoats who bear no responsibility for their circumstances while showing that Jewish exceptionalism was co-constituted between Jews and gentiles. In keeping with the comic curvature of Arendt’s plot, however, opportunist exceptions also function formally as villains who thwarted the universal aspirations of Jewish emancipation that might have hedged the supra-legal conspiracies that emboldened European collaboration with mass murder. The form connotes that circumstances might have transpired differently if such Jews had bound together to redress their difficulties on a political level. Instead, the few who broke out of social if not actual ghettoization not only remained distressingly (and fatally) ‘apolitical’, but also became actively complicit in fueling anti-Semitic ire. The comic form thus insinuates a causal explanation for antisemitism as an ‘element’ of totalitarianism. Arendt writes: ‘Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of


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common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind has divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives’ (1976: vii). If, as Bernstein contends, Origins can be read ‘as an all-important stage in Arendt’s quest for the meaning of politics’ (Bernstein 1996: 70), then Arendt’s comic emplotment of antisemitism configures this quest with apparently cross purposes: If addressed to readers who count themselves among the powerless, this emplotment could regenerate buried images of Jewish political agency before ‘the Jews’ became ‘the murdered Jews of Europe’; it could thereby redeem an essential ability to launch a beginning (natality) and renew faith in the plurality at the crux of action from ‘the forces that look like sheer insanity’.19 However, an ambiguous oscillation between particular and general Jews belies this agenda in seeming to collude with an anti-Semitic imaginary. This imaginary caricatures ‘the Jews’ as a malignant ‘impediment’ that, in accordance with a comic resolution, must be neutralized to restore collective priorities. The spectre of such a resolution refracts the very processes Arendt targets by formally corroborating the scapegoat thesis she seeks to divest in order to safeguard a flexible view of human nature. The integrative ambition of synecdoche thus betrays the inherent ambivalence of her task: to hold individual Jews responsible for avoiding political initiative without blaming the victims.

Notes 1 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (2003) points out that, ‘[t]hroughout the many changes that the Origins underwent, Arendt preserves the original preface “in order to indicate the mood of those years” ’ (xxiv), and thus to indicate that, for better or worse, moods may change’ (p. 66). 2 Even though ‘Arendt devotes only a short section to the problem of statelessness’, this issue functions, as Young-ah Gottlieb contends, as a synecdoche for the Origins as well as ‘for her entire political thought’ (2003: 34). Though I will not have the space to develop it here, I am making a parallel claim that the synecdochic mode not only organizes the ‘Antisemitism’ section, but also links it to her examination in the third section of the selection procedures carried out in the camps as a strategy for domination. 3 According to Shields, Origins ‘is academic in the worst sense, a fault emphasized by a turgid and prolix style’ (1951: 501). J. F. Brown concurs: ‘This is academic scholarship in both the best and worst senses of the word. Painstakingly as one analyzes it, it offers neither dynamic understanding of the events described nor any practical recommendations for a solution of the problem’ (1951: 273). 4 To redress this alleged lack in Arendt’s analysis, Baer supplies a definition: ‘Political scientists call a government “authoritarian” if no legal means are provided by which the rulers can be replaced at the wish of a popular majority. A society is usually referred to as “totalitarian” if (1) government is authoritarian, and, in addition (2) the rulers claim infallibility, (3) political criticism from outside the ruling group is not permitted, (4) government


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5 6 7

8 9

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extends its sphere of action to all fields of human activity, including the regulation of personal habits, beliefs, and associations, and (5) due process of law is not assured to all citizens’ (1952: 437). This is to overturn J.F. Brown’s chief criticism of Origins “that it is descriptive or phenotypic rather than dynamic or genotypic” (1951, 273). For an eloquent essay on the importance of narrative for Arendt, see Julia Kristeva (2001). White’s essay, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation’ was initially delivered as a keynote at the ‘Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” ’ Conference at UCLA in 1990 and published with the proceedings (Friedländer 1992: 37–53). See Seyla Benhabib (1996). According to White, this mythos clouds Hegel’s philosophical history insofar as it ‘was meant to explicate the presuppositions and forms of thought by which the essentially poetic insights of the historian can be gathered into consciousness and transformed into a Comic vision of the whole process’. In White’s view, however, ‘this is the philosopher of history’s task, not the historian’s.’ Citing Thucydides, White asserts that ‘the historian must remain closer to the poetic mode’ in metaphorically identifying with the object of inquiry. At the same time, a historian ‘must be self-critical, more aware of the modalities of comprehension used to transform a poetic insight into the content of a more rational knowledge’ (White 1973: 92). Shoshana Felman counters the prevalent misconception (most famously articulated by Gershom Scholem in 1963) that Eichmann in Jerusalem is ‘anti-Zionist’. Felman insists that Arendt is, by her own testimony, ‘pro-Zionist – but at the outset critical of Israeli law and critical of Israeli government’ (2001: 207). Not only does Arendt defend ‘Israel’s right both to try Eichmann and to execute him’, according to Felman, she also ‘wholeheartedly’ affirms both the verdict as well as the justice of the punishment, and, ultimately, condones his abduction as the ‘sole realistic (if illegal) means to bring Eichmann to justice’ (Ibid., n10). On Eichmann in Jerusalem, see also Richard J. Bernstein (1996), Seyla Benhabib (2000), Benjamin Robinson (2003), and Anson Rabinbach (2004). Believing they were making desperate compromises to save some Jews (if possible), even in the face of mounting evidence that the Nazis would annihilate them all, the Jewish Councils decided who among their community would board the incoming trains to the death camps. According to Wolin, Arendt implies that the Council officials’ conduct ‘was on par with that of the Nazi executioners’ (2001: 111), a parallel that exposes her over-reliance on Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. This ‘pathbreaking’ account pioneered functionalist approaches to the Holocaust, but ‘relied primarily on non-Jewish sources that often portrayed Jews according to the basest of anti-Semitic stereotypes: Jews were pliable and servile, easily compromised by appeals to self-interest’ (Wolin 2001:111–12). Yet even Hilberg was offended by her reduction of Eichmann to a paradigmatic case of the ‘banality of evil’. In Hilberg’s words: ‘She did not discern the pathways that Eichmann had found in the thicket of the German administrative machine for his unprecedented actions. She did not grasp the dimensions of his deed. There was no “banality” in this “evil” ’ (Wolin 2001: 114; citing Hilberg 1996: 149–50). On the role of the Jewish Councils, see Isaiah Trunk (1972) and Dan Diner (1992). Judith Butler (2007) reassesses Arendt’s oft-maligned sense of Jewishness and her attitude toward Zionism in a review of The Jewish Writings in The London Review of Books.


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In differentiating between assimilationism and secularism, Arendt defined herself as ‘a secular Jew, but secularity did not eclipse her Jewishness as much as define it historically’. Following her experiences with Nazism, internment at Gurs in France, and forced emigration to the United States, Arendt ‘lived, as she put it, in the wake of a certain lost faith’ (5). Butler’s review of Arendt’s various reflections on Zionism thus finds her embracing ‘a diasporic politics, centered not on a Jewish homeland but on the rights of the stateless’ (10). On Arendt’s critical and shifting relationship with Zionism, see also Bernstein (1996) and Feldman (2007). According to Arendt, Disraeli delighted in power-sharing tactics with the English branch of the Rothschilds and scorned the Rights of Man for the rights of an Englishman, while ignoring ‘the actual situation in which privileges for the few had been substituted for rights for all’ (1976: 70). Arendt acidly notes that politicians ‘fell in love’ with this darkeyed and olive-skinned ‘charlatan’ who ‘transformed boring business transactions into dreams with an oriental flavor’ (72), but whose admiration for all things Jewish ‘was matched only by his ignorance of them’ (70). If ‘Disraeli’s shrewd dealings’ seemed to exude ‘an aroma of black magic’ (72), then it is no surprise that Arendt finds him personifying ‘the entire set of theories about Jewish influence and organization that we usually find in the most vicious forms of antisemitism’ (71). On Jewish exceptionalism and its strategic deployment by Disraeli among others, see also Young-ah Gottlieb (2003: 38–44). The spokesman for this Union was Arthur Meyer, a publisher of the Gaulois and a baptized Jew who sided with ‘the most virulent section of the anti-Dreyfusards’ (Arendt 1976: 97, n26). Arendt cites Wilhelm Herzog’s encapsulation of the situation as a ‘ “struggle between two rivals”, in which the “higher Jesuit clergy and the Jewish plutocracy stood facing one another in the middle of France like two invisible lines of battle” ’ (Arendt 1976: 103, citing Herzog 1933: 35). Arendt agrees with Herzog that ‘the Jews found in the Jesuits their first unappeasable foes, while the latter promptly came to realize how powerful a weapon antisemitism could be.’ This point is significant because the conspiracy against Dreyfus ‘was the first attempt and the only one prior to Hitler to exploit the “major political concept” of antisemitism on a Pan-European scale’ (Arendt 1976: 103–04). Yet Herzog’s description is also ‘palpably false’ in Arendt’s view insofar as ‘[t]he Jews sought no higher degree of power than was being wielded by any of the other cliques into which the republic had split. All they desired at the time was sufficient influence to pursue their social and business interests’ (104; my emphasis). Please see Magdalena Zolkos’ analysis of the figures of the parvenu and the Schlemiel in this volume. Arendt (1976) cites Georges Clemenceau’s articles ‘Le Spectacle du jour’, ‘Et les Juifs’, ‘La Farce du syndicat’, and ‘Encore les juifs!’ in l’Iniquité (1899). On Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger, see Michael Jones (1998), Anson Rabinbach (2001), Dana Villa (1996), and Richard Wolin (2001). Margaret Canovan writes: ‘The lesson totalitarianism teaches is the vital importance of politics as the arena of initiatives and agreements among plural human beings and the space in which the unique individuality denied by totalitarianism can appear’ (2000: 36). Arendt’s preoccupation with recovering essential capabilities also comes to the fore in Mary Dietz’s reading of the Holocaust as ‘the monumental theme that Arendt is holding at bay’ (2000: 194) in The Human Condition. Dietz argues that Arendt’s task in


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Origins and Eichmann in Jerusalem was to face up to the ‘factual territory’ of the Nazi crimes, whereas by recuperating the self-disclosing potential of action in The Human Condition, she responds ‘to the trauma of survival that faced Europeans, and especially the Germans and the Jews, in the wake of the overwhelming deadliness of Nazism and the burning darkness of the extermination camps. In the aftermath of this ultimate evil’, Dietz writes, ‘Arendt creates a powerful iridescent image that counters the “reality of persecution” that had annihilated the Jews and in its aftermath robbed the Germans of “all spontaneous speech and comprehension, so that now . . . they are speechless, incapable of articulating thoughts and adequately expressing their feelings” ’ (2002: 189–90; citing Arendt 1983: 17, and Arendt 1994: 253).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. —. 1953. A reply (to Eric Voegelin). The Review of Politics 15 (1): 76–84. —. 1976. The origins of totalitarianism. San Diego and New York: Harcourt, Inc. —. 1977a. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin. —. 1977b. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Ed. Ronald Beiner. Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press. —. 1983. Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940. In Men in dark times. Trans. Harry Zohn, 153–206. New York and San Diego: Harcourt Brace. —. 1994a. The aftermath of Nazi rule: Report from Germany. In Essays in understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, exile, totalitarianism. Ed J. Kohn, 248–69. New York: Schocken. —. 1994b. ‘What remains? The language of remains’: A conversation with Günter Gaus. In Essays in understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, exile, totalitarianism. Ed. J. Kohn, 1–23. New York: Schocken. —. 2007. The Jew as pariah: A hidden tradition. In The Jewish writings. Ed. J. Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, 275–97. New York: Schocken. Baer, Werner. 1952. The origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. The American Economic Review 42 (3): 437–38. Benjamin, Walter. 1968a. The storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. Illuminations: Essays and reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt, 83–109. New York: Harcourt Brace. —. 1968b. Theses on the philosophy of history. In Illuminations: Essays and reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt, 253–64. New York: Harcourt Brace. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. —. 2000. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. Dana Villa, 65–85. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish question. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, J. F. 1951. The origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 277: 272–73. Butler, Judith. 2007. ‘I merely belong to them.’ London Review of Books, 29 (May 10): 26–28. Canovan, Margaret. 2000. Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism: A reassessment. In The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. Dana Villa, 25–43. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dietz, Mary G. 2002. Turning operations: Feminism, Arendt, and politics. New York: Routledge. Diner, Dan. 1992. Historical understanding and counterrationality: the Judenrat as epistemological vantage. In Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Ed. Saul Friedländer, 128–42. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Disch, Lisa J. 1993. More truth than fact. Political Theory 21: 665–94. —. 1994. Hannah Arendt and the limits of philosophy. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.


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Feldman, Ron H. 2007. Introduction: The Jew as pariah: the case of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). In The Jewish writings. Ed. J. Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, xli–lxxvi. New York: Schocken. Felman, Shoshana. 2001. Theaters of justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann trial, and the redefinition of legal meaning in the wake of the Holocaust. Critical Inquiry 27: 201–38. Friedländer, Saul. Ed. 1992. Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herzog, Annabel. 2000. Illuminating inheritance: Benjamin’s influence on Arendt’s political storytelling. Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (5): 1–27. Herzog, Wilhelm. 1933. Der Kampf einer Republik. Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg. Hilberg, Raul. 1996. The politics of memory: The journal of a Holocaust historian. Chicago: Ivan Dee. Jones, Michael. 1988. Heidegger the fox: Hannah Arendt’s hidden dialogue. New German Critique 73 (special issue on Heiner Müller): 164–92. Katz, Jacob. 1961. Exclusiveness and tolerance. Jewish–Gentile relations in medieval and modern times. New York: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2001. Hannah Arendt: Life is a narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lazare, Bernard. 1949. Job’s dungheap. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Rabinbach, Anson. 2001. In the shadow of catastrophe: German intellectuals between apocalypse and enlightenment. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. —. 2004. Eichmann in New York: The New York intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt controversy. October 108: 97–111. Robinson, Benjamin. 2003. The Specialist on the Eichmann Precedent: Morality, law, and military sovereignty. Critical Inquiry 30: 63–97. Shields, Currin V. 1951. The origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. The Western Political Quarterly 4 (3): 501–02. Trunk, Isaiah. 1972. Judenrat: The Jewish councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation. New York: Macmillan. Villa, Dana. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger: The fate of the political. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Voegelin, Eric. 1953a. The origins of totalitarianism. The Review of Politics 15 (1): 68–76. —. 1953b. Concluding remark. The Review of Politics. 15 (1): 84–85. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 1999. Figural realism: Studies in the mimesis effect. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Wolin, Richard. 2001. The Hannah Arendt situation. New England Review 22 (2): 97–125. Young-ah Gottlieb, Susannah. 2003. Regions of sorrow: Anxiety and messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.


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CHAPTER 13

‘Never Seek to Tell Thy Love’: Hannah Arendt and the Secret Charles Barbour

Introduction: ‘Silently, Invisibly’ In a section of The Human Condition titled ‘The Public Realm: The Common’, Hannah Arendt makes a fleeting, seemingly inconsequential reference to a poem by William Blake called ‘Love’s Secret’. Discussing what she believes to be the essentially private, fragile character of love, or the sense in which love must be protected from the ‘implacable, bright light of the public scene’, Arendt directly quotes the poem’s first two lines. ‘Love’, she submits, ‘in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public (“Never seek to tell thy love/Love that never told can be”). Because of its inherent worldlessness,’ she continues, ‘love can only become false or perverted when it is used for political purposes’ (Arendt 1998: 52–3). On face value, Arendt’s point here borders on the prosaic: Whereas friendship is a public phenomenon, having a tendency to strengthen and grow when observed by others, love, or some aspect of love, must remain private in order to survive. In a deeper sense, this passage provides insight into a theory of love, and of its relationship with politics, that Arendt explored periodically throughout her career, from her dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine to her late work on The Life of the Mind. For Arendt, politics relies on the construction of an artificial world, or a ‘world of things’ that simultaneously collects humans together and holds them apart – as when we sit around a table, and thus share in common the very object that keeps us distinct. Love, on the other hand, is ‘worldless’ or ‘unworldly’ because it ruins all such constructed forms of division, effectively collapsing the lovers together. ‘Love destroys the in-between which relates us and separates us from others’, Arendt declares. And in this sense, love is ‘antipolitical’. Indeed, for Arendt, love is ‘perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces’ (Arendt 1998: 242), for it involves neither a relation with others, nor a separation from them, but a ‘supreme and unsurpassable affirmation’ of one’s beloved – an affirmation that gives no reasons for itself, but speaks only the words Arendt liked to attribute to Augustine: “ ‘Volo ut sis (I want


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you to be)’ ” (Arendt 1978b: 301). In politics, Arendt proposes, an institutional framework is erected as a guarantee of formal equality, and this formal equality then serves as the basis for debate, or the expression of a plurality of opinions. In love, all such frameworks vanish, and one simply affirms the other in his or her innate difference, or what Arendt calls ‘mere existence’. Political love would therefore constitute the end of the political as such, or, in more apocalyptic tones, the end of the world (which helps explains why political philosophies founded on love, such as politicized versions of Christianity, tend to be apocalyptic as well). And so, Arendt concludes, for the sake of both love and politics, love cannot be a public virtue, but must remain a private good. ‘Never seek to tell thy love,’ one might say, ‘Love that . . . never told can be’. Or can one say such a thing? Does it make sense to cite Blake in this context, and in defence of such a theory of love and the political? Or does this particular passage from ‘Love’s Secret’ secretly undermine key elements of Arendt’s position? Is this example also an exception to the rule Arendt is attempting to establish? Appearing suddenly, in parentheses and without any reference to either the text or its author, Arendt’s quotation from ‘Love’s Secret’ is itself curiously secretive – as though she were speaking to a closed group of initiates. But even if we do not know the poem by heart, the first of the two lines Arendt provides is sufficiently ambiguous to elicit more than one interpretation. For, standing alone, the words ‘Never seek to tell thy love’ include what Roman Jakobson would call a ‘shifter’, or an indexical term the meaning of which is never fixed, but alters with the context in which it is uttered (Jacobson 1971: 132). In this case, the shifter is the archaic pronoun ‘thy’. Thus ‘thy love’ might refer to the love one feels, but it might also refer to the person one loves. The difference – although it might seem slight – is absolutely crucial to the meaning of Blake’s dictum, and to the lesson Arendt wants to draw from it. When we read ‘Never seek to tell thy love/Love that never told can be’, are we being advised not to speak publicly about the love we share with another? Or is the injunction never privately to tell one’s beloved that you love him or her? Is ‘love’s secret’ something that two lovers must keep from all others? Or is it something that one lover must suffer in abject solitude – a secret to be hidden, not only from the public gaze, but first of all from the very person they love? As it is situated in ‘The Public Realm: The Common’, Arendt’s use of ‘Love’s Secret’ suggests the former. But the poem itself suggests the latter: Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind doth move Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart, Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears. Ah! She did depart!


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Soon after she was gone from me, A traveler came by, Silently, invisibly: He took her with a sigh.

It would seem, then, that Blake is referring to a secrecy that precedes any intimacy between two or more individuals, or a secrecy that remains irreducible to privacy, and to the distinction between the private and the public. This paper is about just such a secrecy, and about the manner in which the secret, perhaps even love’s secret, haunts all of Arendt’s writing – being, at one and the same time, nearly absent from it, but everywhere present in it.

Love’s Secret For reasons that I hope will become apparent, I want to find my way into the larger question of the secret in Arendt by way of this one, furtive reference to ‘Love’s Secret’ in The Human Condition. I want to use this incidental, passing quotation as a hidden passageway into a number of secret worlds. There is, of course, no way of knowing for certain whether Arendt intended to keep the full meaning of Blake’s poem a secret. We cannot know whether she was being deceitful (that is, lying), or simply mistaken when she cited ‘Love’s Secret’ (and this impossibility of knowing for certain whether someone is lying is itself indicative of a secrecy that exceeds privacy). Regardless, either way Arendt could surely have produced good reasons for misrepresenting ‘Love’s Secret’ in this fashion. In her eponymous essay on Walter Benjamin, Arendt discusses her former friend’s response to the sudden and irreversible collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of what was once called ‘tradition’. In Benjamin’s hands, Arendt maintains, ‘the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability’. The historian is thus analogous to ‘a pearl diver, who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange’, and one cites the past ‘not in order to resuscitate it the way it was’ but in order to ‘bring [it] up into the world of the living’ (Arendt 1983: 193). But if Arendt was citing Blake so as to bring his work up into the world of the living, in order to make it speak again in a new manner, there is also a sense in which everything that Arendt left behind, or everything that remained on the ocean floor, can also be retrieved, and shown to inflect the words that Arendt picked out in equally new and unpredictable ways. In the case of ‘Love’s Secret’, what Arendt ‘left behind’ – that is to say, the rest of the poem – is precisely a cluster of irresolvable secrets. What, for example, is the ‘love that never told can be’? Who experiences such a love, and why does its mere mention cause such ‘ghastly fears’ in the beloved? What is the ‘gentle wind’? Who is the enigmatic ‘traveler’? And how does she or he take the object of the speaker’s desire ‘with a sigh’? This poem about secrets, and about the dangers of confessing a secret, is itself riddled with secrets. ‘Silently, invisibly’, ‘Love’s


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Secret’ keeps its secrets. Indeed, one could go so far as to suggest that the only thing clearly not kept a secret in ‘Love’s Secret’ is just who should hide ‘love’s secret’. For there is little doubt that Blake is concerned, not with two lovers who must protect their love from all others, as Arendt would have us believe, but with the secret kept – or rather, not kept – by one who loves or desires another in vain. At the risk of seeming arcane and hermetic, or interested in what is hidden for no reason other than its having been hidden, it has to be noted that secrets continue to multiply the deeper we go into Arendt’s reference to Blake. For the truth of the matter is that Blake never wrote a poem called ‘Love’s Secret’. The lines above were first published under that title in 1863 (36 years after Blake’s death) in the second volume of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake. This volume consisted of a compilation of Blake’s poetry selected and edited by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who included ‘Love’s Secret’ under the heading ‘Poems Hitherto Unpublished’. Rossetti only had access to these ‘hitherto unpublished’ works because, 16 years earlier, in 1847, he had purchased one of Blake’s personal notebooks for ten shillings from William Palmer, brother of the landscape painter Samuel Palmer and an attendant in the Antique Gallery of the British Museum. Originally, and much earlier, the notebook was possessed by Blake’s own less famous sibling Robert, who used it to sketch a handful of ‘great moments’ in British history. When Robert died of tuberculosis in 1787, at the age of 24, it became the property of William Blake, who filled its pages with drawings and diagrams, emblems and scribbles, poems, epigrams and remarks. Some of these images and texts were later revised and published by Blake. Others, including the work now known as ‘Love’s Secret’, remained unfinished and buried in the manuscript. When Blake himself died in 1827, the notebook was passed down to his widow Catherine, who in turn gave it to William Palmer. After acquiring the item, Rossetti undertook to recopy, and generously edit, what he thought to be the best of its poetic contents. He then appended his handwritten pages to the original. Among other changes, Rossetti provided ‘Love’s Secret’ with its title. He also rejected two of Blake’s alterations of the initial version: one amended the first line to read ‘Never pain’ as opposed to ‘Never seek to tell thy love’, and another crossed out the entire first stanza. While one cannot convincingly attribute this to Blake’s influence upon him, the agony of love and secrecy and the romance of the personal manuscript were themes Rossetti actively cultivated in his life. The year before the publication of ‘Love’s Secret’, in 1862, Rossetti’s wife and muse Elizabeth Siddal died tragically. Distraught, and exercising a penchant for the dramatic, Rossetti buried along with Siddal’s body the only extant copy of a manuscript for a book that was to be called Dante at Verona. Seven years later, while composing his Poems, Rossetti began to regret this earlier gesture. On the evening of October 5, 1869, in the misery of a London autumn, he and a small group of friends made their way to Highgate Cemetery, where they proceeded to exhume Siddal’s grave and retrieve the manuscript. Referring to a group of thinkers who first responded to the ‘break with tradition’ that began to take shape during the nineteenth century, and culminated in the


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totalitarian experiences of the twentieth (Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche), Arendt once said that, because we now know what horrors a taste for extremes can foster, ‘we’ today ‘can hardly listen any longer to the overloud, “pathetic” style of their writing’ (Arendt: 1993: 27). Rossetti, who was more or less of the same generation as the thinkers Arendt mentions, certainly had a ‘pathetic’ side, although he also took a different approach to the end of traditional authority. Rather than bombastically heralding the new, Rossetti preferred to approach the past as something deeply personal (as opposed to officially sanctioned and public), highly affected (as opposed to rational or transparently communicable), and often darkly secretive and obscure. This, no doubt, accounts in part for his interest in manuscripts, and his fascination with esoterica, writing and death. And, in keeping with this mood, it would be hard to imagine a more literal illustration of the familiar conceit that poetic language is encrypted, and that writing conceals hidden meanings, than the story of Rossetti’s buried notebook. Perhaps it would be equally difficult to imagine someone less likely to adopt this attitude than Hannah Arendt, who quite famously proclaimed that ‘[n]othing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator’ and ‘nothing that is [. . .] exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody’ (Arendt 1978a: 19). At the same time, one of Arendt’s first publications dealt with precisely such literary encryption. In 1930, Arendt coauthored with her then husband Günter Stern a paper on Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The work, which was published in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau – a periodical that, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin praised as ‘one of the most respectable journals around’ (Benjamin 1994: 335) – drew its inspiration from the powerful apostrophe of the poem’s first lines: ‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/Ordnungen?’ For Arendt and Stern, Rilke’s elegies, or songs for the dead, involve a voice without an audience, or a voice that speaks despite ‘the absence of an echo’. They combine a ‘conscious renunciation of the demand to be heard’, a ‘despair at not being able to be heard’, and a ‘need to speak even without an answer’. ‘The fundamental question arising out of a poetry that remains so fully estranged from communication’, Arendt and Stern maintain, ‘is the extent to which it wants to be understood’ and ‘the extent to which interpretation is allowed’ (Arendt and Stern 2007: 1). While their interpretation is surely allowed, I would nonetheless like to propose that Arendt’s writings, arguably all writings and all language, are in some sense encrypted, clandestine or ‘estranged from communication’. Indeed, it may be just such a condition of encryption or estrangement from communication that renders interpretation, not only allowed, but possible in the first place. That is to say, the act of interpretation would be neither possible nor necessary were it not for the fact that language involves an opacity that no specific interpretation can eliminate. For Arendt, no doubt, language concerns the realm of appearances, or what appears to someone other than the speaker. At the same time, that realm is never rendered perfectly transparent or fully illuminated to anyone inhabiting it. It is structured by


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something that cannot be exposed. It involves a secrecy, even an absolute secrecy, that cannot even be comprehended in terms of the opposition between revelation and concealment, or shadows and illumination. It always entails that which remains hidden – as mysterious and furtive as the secret of death, as uncertain and dangerous as that of love.

Open Letters To the best of my knowledge, Arendt’s most perspicuous formulation of her theory of love and the political can be found in an exchange of ‘open letters’ that she shared with Gershom Scholem in the midst of the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy – the sequence of notoriously vicious polemics that followed the publication of Arendt’s ‘report’ on the Eichmann trial. In one of his missives, Scholem condemned what he took to be the ‘heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious tone’ of Arendt’s book, and accused her of being deficient in ‘Ahabath Israel: “Love of the Jewish people.” ’ Arendt’s response was unswerving and unhesitant. ‘You are quite right’, she retaliated, ‘I am not moved by any “love” of this sort [. . .]. I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of the sort. I indeed “love” only my friends, and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons’ (Arendt and Scholem 1964: 51–6). For Arendt, then, love means the love of an individual, or someone who has been set apart from all forms of communitarian belonging, and affirmed in their unique singularity. To claim to love a people or a collective is to confuse the domain of intimacy with that of political commitment, and in doing so to risk forfeiting both. While convincing in many respects, there is a sense in which the form of Arendt’s argument belies some of its content. For surely the genre of the open letter, or the publication of an ostensibly personal correspondence, operates by confusing precisely the boundary between the private and the public or the intimate and the political that Arendt is attempting to establish. Thus, by adopting this generic conceit, does Arendt not break her own rules and break them in the very act of attempting to make them? It hardly seems incidental that, following this exchange of open letters, Arendt’s and Scholem’s friendship came to an abrupt end. But despite this unfortunate consequence, maybe the episode tells us something about writing in general. In a sense, all writing is an open letter, in that all writing traverses the public/private divide. We write in private. But we write for a public. In fact, writing is akin to what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘vanishing mediator’ (Jameson 1998: 25) between private and public. It catalyzes the two sides of the distinction, but it also disappears behind the distinction. Thus writing is both private and public. But in private, it seems to vanish behind thought, or what Arendt calls ‘two-in-one’. While in public, it is covered over by speech, which Arendt associates with action. To write, then, is both to be alone and to be with others, yet not quite either of the two as well.


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For someone who must have spent a great deal of her life engaged with texts, huddled over a desk reading and writing in solitude, Arendt has relatively little to say about the written word. What she does say, however, becomes more complex the more we consider it. In Arendt’s exploration of the human condition, writing would be classified as a kind of work, or an instrumental means to an end, whereas speech is the very paradigm for action, or a genuinely free end in itself. The practice of writing is aimed at the production of a text, and is therefore subordinate to its future goal. Speech, on the other hand, leaves behind no objective remains, but exhausts itself in its expression. In speech, as in free action more generally, ‘the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in the end product’ (Arendt 1993: 153). Similarly, and like all workers, the writer is essentially alone, producing a textual object in private, while the speaker is unmistakably public, assuming the existence of an audience who might remember and judge his or her words. Thus, in a sense, the difference between writing and speech exemplifies the difference between work and action and between private and public. At the same time, this example can also be shown to overdetermine the distinction it explains. The central section of The Human Condition – arriving at the end of the chapter on ‘Work’ and just prior to the one on ‘Action’ – is called ‘The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art’. And at the very center of this section, constituting a kind of hinge on which the whole book pivots, is a brief but compelling discussion of poetry –specifically the difference between the poetic voice and the poetic text. The voice, Arendt maintains, is like a ‘living spirit’, and carries its animating intention with it. The text, on the other hand, is a ‘dead letter’. Arendt proceeds to play with the slightly macabre imagery of ghosts and graves, suggesting that reading or interpreting texts involves a ‘resurrection of the dead’, or a conjuration of the living spirit out of the dead letter. Arendt concludes, however, this reanimated creature ‘shares with all living things that it, too, will die (Arendt 1998: 169). In short, then, neither the poetic voice nor the poetic text is an embodied life. The first is a ‘spirit’, thus not embodied, while the second is ‘dead’, thus not alive. Only the reading or the interpretation has the status of a ‘living thing’ that can also die. Or, to employ Arendt’s terminology, it is only in the judgement and the memory of an audience that either the voice or the text assumes substantial existence. The meaning and the effect of a discourse – be it spoken or written – are the retroactive inventions of its interpretation. None of this takes away from the secrecy that haunts writing and language. For the secret is something that cannot be reduced to either meaning or effect. It is, to recall Arendt’s youthful essay on Rilke, ‘estranged from communication’ (Arendt and Stern 2007: 1). Here we cannot help but be reminded of another writer Arendt admired, and often discussed in her work, namely Herman Melville, and of his character Bartleby the Scrivener, whose monotone ‘I would prefer not to’ is also very nearly ‘estranged from communication’, and who, according to the narrator of his story, first developed his implacable, stoic attitude while working in a ‘dead letter’ office, surrounded by a mountain of correspondence that would never be delivered,


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or messages sent but never received. Perhaps there is an aspect of language here that cannot be understood in terms of its communicative function, whether in private or in public, and that does not contribute to the ‘enlarged mentality’ that Arendt associated with judgement and what she dubbed ‘representative thinking’ (Arendt 1993: 241). Prior to our capacity to elaborate an opinion of our own, to utter the phrase ‘it seems to me’ (dokei moi), and as a result to imagine the world from a plurality of alternative perspectives as well, there is in any encounter with another, and even with oneself, a kind of pledge or promise, or an unspoken trust, that cannot be contained within meaning, but that makes all meaning possible. No doubt this a priori trust – this agreement to believe the other, despite the fact that the other may be lying, or keeping secrets, and that we can never know for certain whether everything they say is true – is related to the phrase Arendt attributes to Augustine: ‘ “Volo ut sis (I want you to be)” ’ (Arendt 1978b: 301). Even when this trust is betrayed, it must first of all exist. Strangely, Arendt’s use of the phrase ‘Volo ut sis’ is a case in point. For, despite Arendt’s suggestion to the contrary, these words do not appear anywhere in Augustine’s entire corpus. They do, however, appear in a letter that Martin Heidegger wrote to Arendt on 13 May 1925, in the midst of their now infamous (but at the time and for both of the participant’s lives) secret affair. ‘Do you know this is the most difficult thing a human is given to endure?’ Heidegger writes. ‘For everything else, there are methods, aids, limits, and understanding – here alone everything means: to be in one’s love’ or ‘to be forced into one’s innermost existence. Amo means volo, ut sis, Augustine once said: I love you – I want you to be what you are’ (Arendt and Heidegger 2004: 21). Was Heidegger lying? Was Arendt aware of the error? Or were both simply mistaken? The secret – a version of which might be said to condition all language –remains irresolvable and absolute.

Telling Lies ‘No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other’, Arendt begins her celebrated reflections on ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues’ (Arendt 1993: 227). No doubt something similar could be said about Arendt’s chosen profession. For, while it would be a stretch to claim that ‘no one’ has ever believed otherwise, it also seems clear that truth and writing are on ‘bad terms’, and that honesty is rarely included among the more redeeming characteristics of an author. Even in a parochial sense, writing is associated with fiction as often as it is with the truth. And, inasmuch as it installs a distance between an author and a referent or intention on one side, and a reader and his or her interpretation on the other, writing always entails at least the possibility of deception, counterfeit or fraud. We can never be certain if a speaker tells the truth. But, because the speaker is present before us, we can at least imagine verifying her or his meaning, and speaking back to her or him in turn. A writer, on the other hand, is absent by definition – dead to us, one might say,


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no matter what his or her biological status might be. Conversely, a writer can never be sure that her or his readers will approach what he or she has written in good faith, or control the dissemination of meaning that her or his text sets in motion. Both reading and writing involve risking the truth, or tarrying with mendacity. With these lines of thought in mind, Jacques Derrida spent much of the early part of his career exploring the manner in which our entire philosophical tradition has tended to subordinate writing to speech, and to treat the former as a ‘dangerous supplement’ (Derrida 1998: 141) for the latter. At the same time, Derrida proposes, this ostensible supplement or addition to language and experience – this omnipresent possibility of the lie – is also a necessary condition of all language and experience. When it comes to specifically political language and specifically political experience, Arendt would be inclined to agree. ‘Seen from the viewpoint of politics’, she writes, ‘truth has a despotic character’. For ‘truth [. . .] precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life’ (Arendt 1993: 241). Indeed, insofar as politics is concerned with action, it is more a domain of lies than it is one of truth. The liar, Arendt claims, is ‘an actor by nature’, in that s/he seeks to change rather than merely describe the world. Thus ‘our ability to lie – but not necessarily our ability to tell the truth – belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirm human freedom’ (ibid., 250). For Arendt, then, politics, action, freedom and deception or mendacity are intertwined phenomena. But even as Arendt makes these points about the proximity of lying and action, she insists on the stabilizing function of both factual and moral truth. She merely claims that truth is grounded on what she calls a ‘standpoint outside of the political realm’ (ibid., 259). While politics itself is concerned with opinions and even lies rather than truth, without some recourse to the truth, we would merely ‘adjust images and stories to ever-changing circumstances’ and thus be left adrift amidst ‘the wideopen horizon of potentiality’ and ‘experience [. . .] a terribly wobbling motion of everything we rely on’ (Arendt 1993: 257–58). It is therefore necessary, from Arendt’s perspective, to preserve at all costs a ‘standpoint outside of the political realm’, which also means ‘outside of the community to which we belong and the company of our peers’. And this external standpoint, this exception on which every stable political order is tacitly founded, amounts, for Arendt, to ‘being alone’ (ibid., 259). That is to say, according to Arendt, politics will always involve lies and deception. And the only bulwark against the domination of the political lie – the kind of lying that characterizes totalitarianism – is the solitary self, and more specifically thought, which constitutes what, in another text, Arendt calls ‘a kind of emergency measure’ that has political relevance only ‘in times of crisis’ or ‘in exceptional circumstances’ (Arendt 2003: 104). In ‘Truth and Politics’ Arendt associates this capacity for truth, not with any individual whatsoever, but with a collection of very particular social occupations. The truth, she proposes, or the truthful exception that exceeds and yet stabilizes every political order, is represented by ‘the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality of the historian and the judge, and the


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independence of the fact-finder, the witness, and the reporter’ (Arendt 1993: 259–60). The final example in this series secretly directs the others, for, as Arendt admits in a footnote appended to its first page, ‘Truth and Politics’ was written in response to the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, and to what Arendt calls the ‘amazing amount of lies’ spread as a result of it – ‘about what I had written, on the one hand, and about the facts I reported, on the other’ (ibid., 257). That is to say, despite everything she says about the incompatibility of truth and politics, and the proximity of deception and action, Arendt wants to preserve for her own discourse on the Eichmann trial a ‘standpoint outside of the political realm’, or a claim on truth pure and simple. This truth, she maintains, is ‘powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be’. However, while it is the case that ‘[p]ersuasion and violence can destroy truth’, it is also the case that ‘they cannot replace it’ (ibid., 259). Arendt attempts, then, to portray her ‘report’ on the Eichmann trial as a fairly transparent communication of the truth and the facts. At the same time, one could say that the text of Eichmann in Jerusalem betrays Arendt’s later defence of it, and does so from its very first page. For this ‘Report on the Banality of Evil’ starts almost immediately with a description of the various mediating and reporting technologies operative in the courtroom itself. Thus, before discussing anything else, Arendt sets the entire scene for her report by noting the ‘innumerable books and more than fifteen hundred documents’ that pile up on a table in front of the judges as the case unfolds, the ‘court stenographers’ who dutifully record each detail of the trial, and the phalanx of ‘translators’ located ‘[d]irectly below the judges’, whose labor allows ‘almost everyone’ present to ‘follow [. . .] the Hebrew proceedings through simultaneous radio transmission’ in what Arendt calls “excellent” French, “bearable” English, but “frequently incomprehensible” German’ (Arendt 1994: 3). From the moment we begin, then, we are already in the world, not of facts, but of technologies and translations, mediations and interpretations. It is therefore hardly surprising to discover that Arendt goes on to explore the theatrical framing of the events, and arguably of every act of jurisprudence. ‘Whoever planned this auditorium’, Arendt observes with respect to the architecture of the court, ‘had theatre in mind, complete with orchestra and gallery, with proscenium and stage, and with side doors for the actors’ entrance’. But while she is plainly critical of the, as she puts it, ‘show trial’ Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion attempts to stage-manage from behind the scenes, Arendt is certainly not interested in tearing away the theatrical façade so as to reveal some more fundamental truth. On the contrary, for Arendt, law can only work insofar as each person who enters into a legal proceeding performs a scripted role. Of ‘the many political metaphors derived from theatre’, Arendt states in a different text, perhaps none is more significant than that of the ‘persona’, or the mask that both disguises an actor’s face and, by way of a reed installed near the mouth, augments his voice. In Roman law, Arendt suggests, to be allowed to appear before the law, or to be a citizen rather than a slave, was to have the right both to hide one’s private life from public view and, in doing so, to amplify one’s public voice. It was to possess what


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Arendt calls a ‘legal personality’ (Arendt 1990: 106–07). In short, there would be no law without dramatic staging. Long before there is any truth or fact, then, much less an accurate or perfectly transparent ‘report’ on such things, there is already a framing, a staging, an arrangement, and hence a distortion, or something on the order of a lie. No doubt this a priori distortion would be the case, not just for juridical discourse, but for language and discourse as such. Always already, and from the very beginning, language would only ‘work’, it would only be capable of performing acts or communicating intentions, if it were also incapable of presenting ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. It would only work if, along with being the vehicle of appearances in Arendt’s sense, it were also structured by that which does not and perhaps cannot appear, or what disappears in each instance of appearance. To come to terms with the world of appearances, or the appearance of ‘truth’, then, one must consider the far murkier realm of lying, and the possibility of a secret that remains forever hidden from view.

Conclusion: ‘Being Alone’ While she is typically read as the modern proponent of the public realm, one of Arendt’s greatest insights is undoubtedly her account of solitude, or ‘being alone’. Using language that is curiously reminiscent of her discussion of love in The Human Condition, Arendt concludes The Origins of Totalitarianism with a consideration of the ‘total terror’ that this novel form of government unleashes. ‘By pressing men against each other’, Arendt states, ‘total terror destroys the space between them’ (Arendt 1978b: 466). In destroying the space between humans, totalitarianism also destroys the prerequisites for freedom and motion. ‘In a perfect totalitarian government’, Arendt continues, ‘all men have become One Man’ (ibid., 467). And in this sense, one experience that totalitarianism deprives us of is what Arendt calls ‘solitude’, or our capacity to be alone with ourselves, which is also our capacity for thought. It is here that Arendt introduces her rich and complex taxonomy of being alone. There are, she suggests, essentially three experiences of being alone: (1) Isolation, which involves leaving the public sphere, or the world of action, and entering into that of production, or transforming nature and making objects. ‘Man insofar as he is homo faber tends to isolate himself with his work, that is to leave temporarily the realm of politics.’ Tyrannical governments can certainly isolate humans, or exclude them from the political order. But, Arendt suggests, only totalitarianism leaves them lonely. (2) ‘While isolation concerns only the political realm of life’, Arendt writes, ‘loneliness concerns human life as a whole’ (Arendt 1978b: 475). If isolation involves forfeiting one’s political relations with others, loneliness involves forfeiting all relations with others, including the other residing within oneself. And this is where the third term in Arendt’s phenomenology of being along – namely solitude – arrives.


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(3) ‘Loneliness is not solitude’, Arendt continues. ‘Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.’ That is to say, one can be completely lonely when moving about among others. Loneliness is not a physical state of being, but a lack of common sense or any experience of belonging. On the other hand, solitude involves a very clear relation with another, specifically the other inside me. ‘All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself’, Arendt maintains,, ‘but this dialogue of the twoin-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought’. If solitude involves becoming the two-in-one, then, paradoxically, I can only be identical with myself, indeed I can only be a self in any meaningful way, or an ‘unchangeable individual whose identity can never be mistaken for that of any other’ (Arendt 1978b: 476), insofar as I return to the world of relations with others, or the world of public life. Notwithstanding its incredible explanatory powers, perhaps what is missing from this discussion of being alone, and of the differences between isolation, loneliness and solitude, is precisely the secret. For secrecy does not involve isolation and work, nor is it a kind of loneliness or lack of common sense. At the same time, it cannot really be captured by the notion of the two-in-one, or the ability to carry on a silent dialogue with oneself, and to be in one’s own company. Is there not a secrecy, and even what Derrida calls ‘an unconditional right to the secret’ (Derrida 2002: 63) that precedes every relation to the other, and even the relation to the other in oneself? Is there not an ‘inner’ experience that cannot be reduced to discourse or dialogue, commerce or exchange in a political community, but that is also not merely a matter of private concerns or the instrumental management of the oikos? And does this secrecy perhaps represent a limit, not only to the political order and the realm of opinions and lies, but also to the self, or the ‘standpoint’ of moral and factual truth that exists ‘outside of the political realm’? Is it not the case, finally, that a political philosophy and fundamental ontology grounded in the assumption that humans exist only insofar as they appear, and appear to others within some either intimate or political space, must not only overlook, but actively suppress, what we are calling ‘the secret’? Does Arendt’s ontology of appearances, despite everything she does to avoid and even challenge this conclusion, ultimately risk fostering rather than blocking the absolute politicization of life and the res publica – the politicization that Arendt herself described as one of the key features of modern totalitarianism, and the modern eruption of ideology and lies? If it is the case that ‘[n]othing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator’ and ‘nothing that is [. . .] exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody’ (Arendt 1978a: 19), then would not the entire experience of being alone, in the last analysis, amount to one more scene of surveillance and observation, or one more spectacle for the scrutiny of others? In this sense, ‘Love’s Secret’ might be said to contain advice for Arendt herself, and for those who wish to follow her today. The preservation of a personal, internal,


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incommunicable and incommensurable secrecy, and of the right to such a secrecy, could very well be central to the composition of a modern democratic and republican political arrangement. It could very well constitute the external limit or exception around which every political and juridical order will have to circulate, without ever comprehending, or, at long last, exposing this secret in its entirety to the ‘implacable, bright light of the public scene’ (Arendt 1998: 52).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1978a. The life of the mind. Orlando: Harcourt Books. —. 1978b. The origins of totalitarianism. Orlando: Harcourt Books. —. 1983. Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940. Trans. H. Zohn. In Men in dark times, 153–206. Orlando: Harcourt Books. —. 1990. On revolution. New York: Penguin. —. 1993. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. New York: Penguin. —. 1994. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin. —. 1996. Love and Saint Augustine. Trans. J. Vecchiarelli Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 2003. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken. Arendt, Hannah and Martin Heidegger. 2004. Letters 1925–1975. Trans. A. Shields. Ed. U. Ludz. Orlando: Harcourt. Arendt, Hannah and Gershom Scholem. 1964. “Eichmann in Jerusalem”: An exchange of letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt. Encounter 22 (January): 51–6. Arendt, Hannah. and G. Stern. 2007. Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In Reflections on literature and culture. Ed. S. Young-ah Gottleib, 1–23. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1994. The correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. Trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Of grammatology. Trans. G. Spivak. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 2002. History of the lie: Prolegomena. In Without alibi. Trans. P. Kamuf, 28–70. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jakobson, R. 1971. Shifters, verbal categories and the Russian verb. In Selected writings: Word and language, 131–47. The Hague: Mouton. Jameson, F. 1988. The vanishing mediator: Or, Max Weber as storyteller. In Syntax of history. Vol 2 of The ideologies of theory: Essays 1971–1986, 3–34. New York: Routledge.


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CHAPTER 14

Arendt’s Metamorphic Figurations in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ Magdalena Zolkos

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed Into different bodies I summon the supernatural beings Who first contrived The transmogrifications In the stuff of life – Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Ted Hughes

Introduction1 The pariah figure has had a distinctive and salient presence in Hannah Arendt’s writings. These include, inter alia, her early study of the life of Rahel Varnhagen (1997) and the essays grouped in The Jewish Writings (2007). Importantly, this thematic thread running through Arendt’s work intimates her continuing intellectual and political preoccupation with questions of (in)equality, social peripherality and rebellious action. What is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualization of the pariah is that it has taken place at the interstices of, on the one hand, her descriptions of the peripheral subject position of Jews in modern European societies, and, on the other hand, her theoretical inquiry into the rebellious dimension of political action. For Arendt, therefore, the ethical and political dilemmas of a resistive or remonstrant public act have surfaced poignantly in the individual action undertaken from a historically specific subject position, which Arendt has called, following Max Weber and Bernard Lazare, the ‘conscious pariah’.2 While the pariah’s peripherality indicates that some dynamics of societal disempowerment are in place, for Arendt pariahdom does not define an inadequate inclusion in society sensu stricto. Importantly, pariahdom concerns the political situation of inequality, rather than of non-belonging or exclusion.3 As such, the pariah subject position concurs with the emergence of unique possibilities of individual action. In Bernstein’s words (2000: 278), these are possibilities for the ‘assert[ion] of [. . .]


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independence and [. . .] freedom’. From a historical perspective, Arendt’s writings on the pariah figure coincide with the recognition that some of the dominant models of Jewish coexistence with the non-Jewish populations in Western Europe had been impossible. No longer was the pariah Jew able to ‘retreat into quiet corners [. . .] to preserve the illusion of liberty and unchallenged humanity’ and enjoy the ‘untouchability of outcasts’ (Arendt 2007 [1944]: 296). As Judith Shklar (1983) has pointed out, it was Arendt’s witnessing of the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, the support it gained from the German public, and the experience of statelessness and exile in France and America that prompted her recognition of how delusive the safety of the outcast position was – and of the necessity for resistive political action in ‘dark times’. Consequently, Arendt constitutes conscious pariahdom as a site of rebellion, not against social exclusion, but in terms of a more complex, non-binary and primarily political category of marginality. Building upon these recognitions, this paper asks how the pariah appears in Arendt’s essay ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’ (2007 [1944]). What modes of figurative (self-)display does the pariah embody and engender in her texts? What way(s) of being-in-the-world does the pariah encode? What does its appearance reveal, and what does it hide for the reader (spectator)? While the historical, conceptual and philosophical significance of the pariah figure for Arendt’s political theoretical project has been repeatedly pointed out by in-depth analyses,4 it is the claim of this paper that its rhetorical and figurative dimensions have been undeservedly neglected. In this paper therefore I offer a reading of Arendt’s figurations of the pariah in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ as a mode of allegorical writing. As a form of extended metaphor, allegory is engaged in the communication of the meaning of objects, or persons or actions, located outside their narrative per se. To construct an interpretation of ‘The Jew as Pariah’, which privileges the allegorical narrative components of this essay, is therefore to approach it as a ‘folded’ narrative structure, where the pariah figure is ‘trapped, [or] captured by the [allegorical] trope, “possessed” by the vehicle’ (Clarke 1995: 16). More specifically, what emerges out of that interpretative privileging of the allegorical aspects of Arendt’s writing is figuration of the pariah as a subject of bodily metamorphosis. In turn, the focus on pariah metamorphosis redefines the idea of political marginality in Arendt’s writing. In ‘The Jew as Pariah’ marginality is thus operative not as a spatial idiom of location (far away from the centre) where the subject’s actions and articulations take place. Rather, marginality becomes operative as the pariah subject’s transformative movement and a (public) display of metamorphic capacities against interpellative institutions of inequality. The notion of a ‘metamorphic movement’ connotes here such figurative subject transformations that indicate forming or shaping different in kind from what has preceded it. Metamorphosis marks a certain impossibility of containment – of a body within its boundaries, or of an appearance within its specie – and as such is also an articulation of a transcending fantasy. Bodily metamorphosis is a performance that marks both continuity and discontinuity of the subject insofar as it allows for a co-appearance of two moments: the ‘breaking of a hitherto enduring form and the


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substituting for it of another [. . .]’ and ‘partial persistence of the discarded initial “identity” ’ (Tymieniecka 2004: xi). Further, in Pictures of the Body (1999: 26), James Elkins structures an opposition between a body in pain and a body in metamorphosis, in that the latter connotes an ‘effortless’ and ‘painless’ change. In that sense, Ovid’s Metamorphoses appears as ‘a poem of escapes, of demonstrations that transcendence is painless and dazzling’. This paper suggests that pariah marginality is in Arendt’s essay not a spatial figure of being-at-the-border, but a capacity, or a possibility, of the crossing-of-the-border. Just as for Ovid acts of metamorphosis are never straightforwardly punishing or saving, in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ metamorphosis marks ‘enabling moments’ (Byatt in Bragg: 2000). At play in Arendt’s pariah figurations are thus politics of ‘painless rearrangement’ – a possibility of ‘escape’ – and a fantasy of a ‘painless and dazzling [transcendence]’ (Elkins 1999: 26).

The Conflict of ‘Life’ and ‘Freedom’ in Arendt’s Ideas of Action and Pariahdom ‘The Jew as Pariah’ provides a rich exposition of what Arendt calls a subterranean tradition of conceptualizing (and practicing) public action by European Jewry vis-àvis the dilemmas of coexistence with non-Jewish people, state discrimination and the development of modern anti-Semitism. This hidden pariah tradition rejects the template of coeval residence provided by the ‘parvenu’ model (cf. Weber: 1952). Through her/his assimilationist ambitions, the parvenu is engaged in simultaneously renouncing and romanticizing of Jewish belonging. Parvenus are ‘arriviste[s]’, ‘victims and heroes of modernity’, who have already (but never quite) arrived at the destination of their aspired societal belonging (Bauman 1997: 72). Derived from the French parvenir, the word ‘parvenu’ has meant ‘to arrive at a destination’, ‘to arrive at a desired outcome’, and, subsequently, ‘to rise to an influential social position’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Parvenu is ‘already in, but not quite of, the place’ – an aspiring ‘resident without a residence permit’, who reminds ‘the older tenants of the past which they want to forget and the future they would rather wish away’ (Bauman 1997: 72). If, therefore, the pariah encodes metamorphic movement of the subject, parvenu connotes the end of movement, the desire of becoming motionless. Arendt structures the narrative of her essay through a dialectical, rather than oppositional, relation between the pariah and the parvenu. Her text is at this point indebted to the Weberian concept of the pariah, who ‘self-consciously brings his Jewish existence into the Gentile, unsympathetic world in which he lives, he neither denies nor idealizes his Jewish heritage, while the parvenu does either’ (Momigliano 1987: 231). Weber’s pariah people ‘accept their position as inferiors in an alien social system, and work out their own salvation through this acceptance’ (Ibid.). Arendt thus builds further upon Weber’s point from Ancient Judaism (1952), that the ‘confessional and ethical segregation [of the Jews]’ has been ‘substituted [for their] “political separation” as a guest people (Gastvolk)’ (Rabinbach 1997: 611).


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In contrast to the collective associations of Weber’s concept of Pariavolk, Arendt individualizes her pariah. However, as Parvikko (1996, 2004) has argued, Arendt’s study is also indebted to the Weberian methodology of the “ideal-type.”5 In ‘The Jew as Pariah’ Arendt offers a multifaceted and mosaic-like mapping of four different marginal figures – four pariah ‘typifications’ – Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazare, Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka.6 The consecutive serial presentation of these different pariah figures has no cumulative effect, but offers a kaleidoscopic unfolding of pariahdom. The pariahs share no unqualified common identity – not even their alleged Jewishness.7 They do not add up to one ‘template’, nor do they simply represent different aspects of pariahdom. Rather, Arendt’s pariahs are woven into each other’s narrative appearances in ways that indicate simultaneous disclosure and concealment. When the pariahs take their place in the kaleidoscopic series, they reveal something about the others – explain something about the situation of pariahdom that the others have failed to elucidate – and yet, at the same time, they complicate pariahdom in new ways, render it inexplicable, or secretive, or undermine something in the narratives about the others.8 Freddy Rafaël has suggested that the Weberian category of Pariavolk constitutes a non-pejorative qualifier, or a value-neutral heuristic instrument. Others, however, have repeatedly pointed out the extent to which Weber has incorporated in his work the Nietzschean insights of ressentiment (Abraham1992; Parvikko 1996; Swedberg and Agevall 2005). And thus, Weber has argued that for the pariah redemptive hopes and ‘ethics of compensation’ constitute a disguised, or suppressed, ‘conscious or unconscious desire for vengeance’ (quoted in Abraham 1992: 250). Ferenc Fehér (1986: 15) has argued that Arendt’s writings on the pariah are demonstrative of her interest in the exceptional and ‘the politically anomalous’. As such, Fehér saw these writings as indebted, via Weber, to ‘Nietzsche’s myth of the “religion of resentment” ’. Weber re-produced that myth within those of his sociological studies that became particularly important for Arendt. The myth concerns the ‘absence of political community in the long history of the Jewish pariah in the Diaspora with a concomitant lack of political self-consciousness and, until it was too late, a [. . .] disinterest in the political affairs of [their] environment’ (Fehér 1986: 16). Thus, the emergence of the modern figure of a conscious and rebellious pariah is a testimony to the transformation of the ‘mystical aim [of existence]’ into a ‘this-worldly’ one. The legacy of that transformation is to be found in the emancipatory conception of pariahdom, with its emphasis on political, rather than ‘social’ or ‘human’ liberty, and with its nonorganic and non-existentialist understanding of political community. Furthermore, for Fehér (1986: 17), Arendt’s writing on the modern pariah, which has emerged at the conjunction of her insights into the inequality of Jews in Western European societies (and the nature of modern anti-Semitism) and her theory of political action, bears an unavoidable tension, which Fehér calls a conflict between ‘freedom’ and ‘life’. Any concept of the pariah’s political action remains oriented towards liberty and political rights. But, Fehér argues (1986: 17), for this to occur, the ‘Christian or pseudo-Christian “politics of life”, which is by the same token a politics


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of need and necessity, not that of freedom, has to be relegated to the background’, as, otherwise, the result would be ‘a pariah existence for all’. Fehér’s rather bold claim is that this conflict between ‘freedom’ and ‘life’, insofar as it also corroborates the ‘trichotomy’ of the private, the social and the public in Arendt’s theory of action, has been constitutive for the differentiation between the pariah and the citizen. Thus, pariah marginality necessarily implicates a modus operandi, which is relegated to a non-public space. While this essay recognizes the significant (and constitutive) tension between ‘freedom’ and ‘life’ in Arendt’s conceptualization of pariahdom (and, more broadly, in her political theory of action), it also suggests that the spatial imaginary that underpins Fehér’s argument offers a somewhat reductive reading of Arendt’s pariah(s). Insofar as Fehér equates marginality with a peripheral location of the subject, he is not able to problematize bodily figurations of the pariah in Arendt’s writing. In other words, if it is forms of allegorical embodiment that are marginal, and not the social placement of a subject, then the tension between ‘freedom’ and ‘life’ must be redescribed as internal to the modes of rhetorical and allegorical appearance of Arendt’s pariah subject.

Allegory and Metamorphosis in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ Heinrich Heine’s Pariah/Schlemiel/Poet ‘The Jew as Pariah’ starts with a discussion of Heinrich Heine’s Hebräische Melodien. Arendt invokes Heine’s image of a dog (from the poem ‘Prinzessin Sabbat’), which metaphorizes the Jewish people as a bewitched prince who undergoes cyclic transformations from the human into the canine form of life. In contrast, the poet (as if, Arendt writes, ‘by a stroke of fortune’) escapes the fate of the people and enjoys a ‘[S] abbath-like existence’ (2007 [1944]: 276). For Arendt, Heine’s dog is a ‘figure of ridicule’ (Parvikko 1996: 97). However, it also asserts a powerful figurative presence in the light of Nazism’s subsequent völkisch racial idea of the demonized other (the Jew) as if belonging to a different biological species (see, for example, Sax: 2006). Heine’s pariah is a schlemiel-like figure, who combines comic and rebellious characteristics. The schlemiel indicates an ‘essential kinship’ between the pariah subject and the poet (2007 [1944]: 283). The schlemiel is a type of literary motif of a jester, “variations of innocent fool, one who is without self-serving motivation and thus does not easily recognize cause and effect [in the behavior of others]” (Shatzky 1998: 388). More specifically, in Hebräische Melodien, Heine adopts the Talmudic interpretation of the schlemiel’s origins in the character of Shelumiel ben Zurishaddai, briefly mentioned in Bəmidbar (The Book of Numbers). The Talmudic reading constructs Shelumiel as a ‘hapless victim’ (Wisse 1971: 126) and a ‘morbidly humorous’ figure (Steinmetz 2005: 156). It also institutes a fraternal relation between Shelumiel and a law-breaking Simeonite prince, Zimri ben Salu. In the Talmudic tradition Zimri’s character has been associated with violations of the divine prohibition of sexual


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contacts with polytheistic peoples during Israel’s period of wanderings. Zimri takes a Midianite lover, for which he is punished by one of the priests, Phinehas. In the course of their amorous act, Zimri’s and his Midianite lover’s connected bodies are speared through. In the story, this moment of love thus becomes inseparable from the moment of dying. This is not only in the sense of their co-appearance, but as suggestive of a closer association between the two: the act of love, as a violation of the divine prohibition, begets killing of the disobedient subject. It is particularly interesting that Arendt introduces into her reading of Heine’s pariah an apocryphal element of the story of Zimri’s killing. She makes an enigmatic remark that Shelumiel was present at the site of punishment and was ‘killed accidentally [because he was] standing too close to his brother’ (Arendt 2007 [1944]: 277; emphasis mine). Arendt leaves unsaid the reason for Shelumiel’s proximity to the act of love (and to the subsequent act of killing) and thus institutes an unresolved ambiguity in the text. Was Shelumiel’s presence due to his secretive voyeurism? Or was his physical proximity a code for a substitutive presence – Shelumiel’s metamorphic transformation into the gendered object of the prohibition and a veiled reference to homosexual and incestuous desires? The trope that enables here the substitution of signifiers is passivity of a victimized and nameless Midianite woman, and of an unfortunate bystander; both die by coincidence. The suggestion is that in Arendt’s essay on Heine’s pariah the schlemiel figure comes to signify the idea of a coincidental death. As such, this figure is marked by a double loss: not only the loss of life, but also of the possibility of heroic death. In other words, Shelumiel dies his brother’s death. Thus, rather than being simply a quintessential example of ‘bad luck’, the schlemiel figure creates thereby a possibility of thinking of coincidental death, or, by extension, of thinking of death as coincidence. Shelumiel’s death is not intended or pursued by an antagonist, or demanded by law. It thus cannot bring about the same deterrent or reparative work for the community as Zimri’s death. This allegorical writing, which projects coincidental death upon (and confines it to) Shelumiel’s body, retains subversive potential. It is disruptive, or dangerous, to the extent that it blurs the distinction between coincidental dying and innocent death. For Arendt, importantly, innocence is ‘the hallmark of the schlemiel’ (2007 [1944]: 278). However, the pariah’s innocence is not constituted through the semantics of purity and/or separateness from the community. Neither does it demarcate the ‘non-noxious’ (‘in-nocent’) presence of the pariah figure. Schlemihldom is associated with (but also different from) the figure of a sacrificial lamb (Parvikko 1996: 97). The difference is that, while the lamb is ‘sacrificed on purpose’, Shelumiel ‘is sacrificed by accident’. The consequence is that ‘sacrificing him does not suffice; the chieftain Zimri also [has to be] killed’. Finally, not only does Shelumiel die his brother’s death, but in some Talmudic interpretations he sometimes also undergoes a metamorphic transformation into Zimri. Steinmetz (2005: 156) notes that, while occasionally Shelumiel has been presented as Zimri’s brother, at other times he becomes Zimri. This metamorphic


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quality of Shelumiel’s figure creates the possibility of making a ‘veiled reference to the Simeonite prince’. Thus, Shelumiel’s metamorphosis simultaneously determines a ‘complete effacement’ and a ‘spectacular display (Clarke 1995: 63) of the Oedipal fantasy of challenging the authority of the divine law. Shelumiel becomes ‘quite innocently, a substitute for the lecherous Zimri’ (Steinmetz 2005: 156). ‘The Jew as Pariah’ presents marginality as a metamorphic boundary-crossing between what might at first appear as two autonomous subjects (Shelumiel and Zimri, or Shelumiel and Zimri’s lover), or between two separate ontic conditions (the human and the canine). These metamorphic allegories bear the mark of ‘a circuitous play of indetermination and intermediation positioned as proper [versus] improper, primary [versus] secondary’ (human/beasts, or males/females) (Clarke 1995: 18). Subsequently, Arendt brings into her interpretation another schlemiel, the Greek god Apollo, who, as Ovid’s readers learn, pursues the nymph Daphne after being struck by Eros’s arrow. Once Apollo has reached for Daphne to satisfy his sexual desire, she is transformed, at his touch, into a laurel bush, or ‘a crown of laurels [on his forehead]’ (Arendt 2007 [1944]: 278). Arendt emphasizes in particular Heine’s retelling of the nymph’s metamorphosis in ‘The God Apollo’, which is triggered by the Apollonian schlemiel’s touch. Interestingly, Heine’s poem operates upon the myth’s reversal (it is as if poetic writing itself becomes subject to metamorphic movement). This time, it is Apollo who is pursued by a desiring woman. He appears to her in the transformed body of a Dutch Jew, Rabbi Faibusch, a ‘common man’, the ‘holder of the humblest office among the humblest of people’ (Ibid. 278). Importantly, Arendt associates that retelling with Heine’s (allegorized) critique of the assimilative impulse. For her, Heine appears as a metamorphic pariah subject par excellence in how he shifts between, and connects, German and Jewish identity. Heine’s poet–pariah has a ‘worldly’ quality, which indicates his ‘basic affinity [. . .] to the people’ (Ibid., 279). Arendt emphasizes the contrast between equality found in the ‘natural order of things’ and inequalities of the ‘fabricated order of society’ (Ibid., 279). By virtue of his jester-like capacities, the pariah ‘hold[s] up a mirror to the political world’ and resituates his own comic appearance so that it is now ‘those who live in ordered ranks of society and who have exchanged the generous gifts of nature for the idols of social privilege and prejudice’ who appear ridiculous (Ibid., 279). The pariah subject (schlemiel) has a transformative effect on the world through poetic intervention, which testifies to the poet’s care for and connection to the world. This is in spite of the fact that he is ‘excluded from society and never quite at home in this world’ (Ibid., 283).9 The poet’s connection to and care for the world – apparent in the intervention that the poetic speech makes in the world – is captured metaphorically as the metamorphosis of the Apollonian touch. It comes therefore (as Apollo’s loving desire for Daphne) from the site of passion, and it has a bearing upon the world, making a claim on the lives of ‘the slaves and tyrants’ alike (Ibid. 280). The metamorphic powers of the poet’s touch illuminate the nature of the prohibition of the pariah’s touch. It is thus because the creativity and intervention of the poetic speech are


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represented as metamorphic operations that the ‘political nonexistence and unreality of the pariah [is transformed] into the effective basis of a world of art’ (Ibid., 280–81). Bernard Lazare’s Conscious Pariah Arendt credits Bernard Lazare with imbuing the concept of pariah with the political meaning of an insubordinate and rebellious action. A French Sephardic Jew, a political journalist and literary critic, Lazare was a controversial figure in his time, not least because of his insinuated anti-Semitism (see Wilson 1978; for a critique, see Parvikko 1996: 115–18). In ‘The Jew as Pariah’ Arendt suggests that Lazare’s idea of a ‘conscious’ pariahdom was coextensive with affirmation of the subject position of a rebel. The rebel is a ‘double-pariah’ (Parvikko 1996: 121) since the rebellious pariah subject is formed in an antagonistic relation to both ‘the hostile elements of his environment’, and ‘his own “highly placed brethren” ’ (Arendt 2007: 284). For Lazare, pariah rebellion consists in the very act of naming and resisting those societal operations that hinge upon demonization of the individuals found at its margins –in other words, the construction of the pariah as the social abject, or what Bauman (1997: 17) calls the ‘making [and unmaking] of strangers’. Further, Lazare conflates the idea of a conscious pariah with the questions of responsibility for one’s own fate and for the world. The emergence of the idea of ‘conscious pariahdom’ is thus directly related to Lazare’s rejection of the position of ‘political and religious [. . .] exclusivism’ and of the ‘irresponsible irreality stemming from the state of worldlessness of traditional schlemihldom’ (Parvikko 1996: 128). Lazare endorses political community, rather than ‘a community of Schlemihls’ (Parvikko 1996: 118). Arendt notes that Lazare’s main preoccupation is the pariah’s refusal to adopt a rebellious subject position. The pariah’s ‘refus[al] to become a rebel’ generates another transformative movement in the text. This time, the pariah who fails to rebel metamorphoses into a schnorrer: a beggar, who has ‘mortgaged himself to the parvenu, protecting the latter’s position in society and [who] in turn [is] protected by him’ (2007: 285). For Arendt, the schnorrer is the pariah’s metamorphosis into the inanimate, or the lifeless: ‘one of the props which hold up a social order from which [the pariah] is himself excluded’ (ibid). That schnorrer–pariah is thus ‘worth nothing, not because he is poor and begs, but because he begs from those he ought to fight, and because he appraises his poverty by the standards of those who have caused it’ (ibid). Again, as with Heine’s secondary or subordinate metamorphic forms, the schnorrer’s main characteristic is passivity. There is an interesting resonance between ‘The Jew as Pariah’ and the section of The Origins of Totalitarianism where Arendt (1958: 120) wrote about Lazare’s unpopularity and his pariah position in French fin-de-siècle society. She has partly related it to Lazare’s insistence on legal impartiality both in the Dreyfus affair and in the debate on the legal status of religious associations in France. The price that Lazare has paid for his pariah rebellion – for the rejection of schnorrer passivity – is an


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‘isolat[ated] death’ (1958: 120) and that of being forgotten. Arendt (2007 [1944]: 286) concludes: ‘of all Lazare’s efforts – unique as they were – to forge the peculiar situation of his people into a vital and significant political factor, nothing now remains. Even his memory has faded.’ Charlie Chaplin’s Pariah – Tramp Charlie Chaplin’s filmic creation – the tramp – is included in the pariah series as someone who is ‘always and everywhere [. . .] under suspicion’ (Arendt 2007: 287). Arendt argues that Chaplin’s pariah is thus closely linked to the tramp as law’s suspect. His pariah status is sustained by the anxious and apprehensive expectation on the part of the community of the tramp’s harmful, or noxious, social presence. The tramp is defined through the condition of homelessness and the status of being a ‘perpetual outcast’ in the community that he (never quite) inhabits. For Arendt, he also comes to embody the conflict between ‘the desire to be accepted by the society’ and the ‘inability to accept society’s restrictions on his autonomy’ (1998: 131). The schlemiel’s homelessness has been interpreted in the light of Adalbert von Chamisso’s novel from 1813, Peter Schlemihl, where the protagonist exchanges his shadow for material benefits. As Wisse (1971: 125–6) suggests, ‘Peter Schlemihl is subconsciously modeled on the figure of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, and [. . .] the lack of the shadow (which all other men possess) is the closest metaphorical equivalent for a lack of a homeland (which all other men possess).” It is thus in the light of Chamisso’s novel that the schlemiel comes to designate no longer a ‘simple bungler’, but ‘the man fated to be different, homeless, alien, and Jewish’ (Wisse 1971: 126). For Arendt, Chaplin’s pariah–tramp is a schlemiel figure rather than a Promethean rebel. This schlemiel, however, has greater affinity with the protagonist of Chamisso’s novel, Peter Schlemihl, a homeless wanderer who strips himself of his own shadow, than with Heine’s Apollo. This is because, Arendt argues, Chaplin’s tramp remains connected to ‘worldly’ affairs to a far greater extent than Heine’s poet–pariah. Chaplin’s tramp inhabits the ‘world of the earth [. . .] from which neither nature nor art can provide escape’ (2007: 286–7). His affective attachments are those of ‘common people’. It is especially the way in which Chaplin’s tramp falls in love – always at first sight—that confirms his affinity with the world. It is a proletarian ‘kind of love – however rare [love] it may be’ (ibid., 287). Chaplin’s falling in love – always with the same naïveté, devotedness and defencelessness – attests to the singularity of the loveevent in his filmic creations. Furthermore, Chaplin’s tramp in love affirms again the metamorphic trope in Arendt’s essay. The tramp is transformed, or ‘touched’, by love. For Arendt, this ‘loving pariah’ is at once a comic figure and ‘the idol of the masses’. Chaplin’s pariah has thus a transformative power to the extent that he has already proven to be susceptible and vulnerable to the metamorphic agency of love. Arendt suggests that Chaplin’s schlemiel is a prototypical refugee figure insofar as he provides a powerful illustration of a dependent existence. His survival hinges


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upon his personal skills and the ‘kindness of others’ (ibid). The tramp retains an irreverent and distrustful relation to state order and the law – he represents not ‘the divine effrontery of the poet’, but a ‘worried [and] careworn impudence’ of the “little Yid” ’. Describing Chaplin’s pariah, Arendt again mentions the pariah’s innocence. However, innocence is not understood as a ‘trait of character’ (ibid). It does not animate fantasies of a pure and flawless character because ‘Chaplin’s heroes are not paragons of virtue, but little men with a thousand and one little failings, forever clashing with the law’ (ibid). Rather, I suggest that the tramp’s innocence describes the pariah’s encounter with the law. It is ‘an expression of the dangerous incompatibility of general laws with [his] individual misdeeds’ Arendt hints at the endemic inadequacy of the law, revealed in law’s ruling of the pariah subject (a failure that she finds both tragic and comic). In its ‘sublime indifference’, law fails to determine the tramp’s guilt because it has always– already placed him under suspicion. There is thus no correspondence between what the pariah ‘does and does not do and the punishment which overtakes him’ (2007: 287). Here, Arendt’s analysis of the pariah–tramp operates upon an interesting paradox. It is precisely because the pariah subject has come into existence as a suspect, always and already expectant of having a harmful or noxious (‘nocent’) presence in the community, that the law proves to be impotent in its attempts at interpellating or incriminating him. The tramp is ‘always being “nabbed” for things he never did, yet somehow he can always slip through the toils of the law, where other men would be caught in them’ (ibid). Thus, since the pariah–tramp cannot be found inculpable, since he is always under suspicion, neither can he be found guilty. In other words, to eliminate the possibility of the subject’s inculpability is also to eliminate the possibility of guilt. The innocence of Chaplin’s pariah is thus closely connected to the condition of being suspect – and, consequently, to the transformative range and transgressive possibilities of a rebellious action. Insofar as the pariah both fears and distrusts the law, ‘as if it were an inexorable natural force’, he retains a ‘familiar, ironic impudence in the face of [the law’s] minions’ (ibid). Chaplin’s pariah–tramp is thus not only an outsider who is standing ‘beyond the pale’, but another metamorphic figure in Arendt’s series of pariah ‘typification[s]’ (2007: 287, 289). I have already suggested that the metamorphic movement of Chaplin’s pariah figure is connected to the tramp’s vulnerability to the touch of love. Numerous examples include not only the tramp’s romantic/erotic encounters – with the blind girl in City Lights, the little equestrienne in The Circus, and others – but, famously, Charlie’s affective relation with his uncanny double: the Kid.10 Arendt concludes with a discussion of The Great Dictator, which she sees as the most seminal transformative pariah event when ‘the little man decide[s] to be a big one [. . .], not [longer] Chaplin, but a Superman’ (2007: 287). Rather than signify abandonment of the pariah subject position, this event constitutes a crossing-over (a moment of indistinction) between Chaplin’s representation of the pariah and his pariah life (cf. Zolkos 2007). This metamorphic crossing-over


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frames Arendt’s political interpretation of the pariah–tramp. Arendt neither dramatizes nor romanticizes rebellious action, but, instead, sketches the pariah–tramp as a non-redemptive figure. Chaplin’s duplicitous presence in The Great Dictator (his first sound film) emphasizes not only the contrast between the ‘little man’ and the ‘big shot’, but also, in the comic switch, the tramp’s own metamorphosis (Arendt: 288). Towards the end of the movie, Chaplin-the-Jewish-barber takes the place of Chaplin-the-dictator-Hynkel, and makes a surprising speech. Instead of the expected declaration of invasion of Austerlich, he makes a ‘moving and impassioned plea’ for peace and fraternity. In this speech, Arendt argues, Chaplin ‘stepped out of character, and sought, in his own name, to reaffirm and vindicate the simple wisdom and philosophy of the “little man” ’ (ibid.). The public and critical reactions to Chaplin’s ‘stepping out’ of the jester role were either misunderstanding or lack of response (see, for example, McDonald et al. 1965: 208–10). This has enforced blurring of the distinctions between the tramp’s and Chaplin’s own pariah embodiments. Here Arendt (288) suggests, again rather enigmatically, that Chaplin’s popularity ‘began rapidly to wane, not because of any mounting antisemitism, but because his underlying humanity had lost its meaning’. In contrast to Heine’s poet–pariah – whose marginality enables transformative and rebellious possibilities of the (prohibited) touch – it is when the pariah–tramp is stripped of his comic and sentimental effects, that Chaplin provides his most powerful representation of the pariah figure. Franz Kafka’s Goodwill Pariah Arendt finds her final pariah ‘typification’ in two of Franz Kafka’s texts, ‘Description of a Struggle’ (1983) and The Castle (1969). What makes Kafka’s heroes pariah-like figures, is, Arendt argues (2007: 290), their involvement in ‘situations and perplexities distinctive of Jewish life’. In the ‘Description of a Struggle’ one of the protagonists, a supplicant, attends an event, where his attempts at social engagement with others are utterly unsuccessful. The point is not, simply, that he is being excluded from or mistreated by others. Rather, Arendt argues, the ‘reality and validity of his own existence’ is put in doubt. He is reduced ‘to a status of nonentity’ (ibid., 289). He remains perplexed and uncertain about the reality, and consequentiality, of his social presence, and about the ‘living actuality’ of being recognized by others (ibid., 290). For Arendt, Kafka’s pariah cannot seek refuge in the community of pariahs – just as the subject position of pariahdom can no longer guarantee any commonality of standpoint. The pariah cannot compensate for that denied sociopolitical reality of his existence through an ‘overwhelming preoccupation with the world of beauty’ (ibid., 289). For Kafka’s pariah, it is no longer ‘the freedom of the schlemiel and poet’, ‘the innocence of the suspect’, or ‘the escape into nature and art’, but thinking – ‘the use of contemplative faculty’ – that provides an ‘instrument of self-preservation’ and a space of rebellious action (Arendt 2007: 290). Kafka’s pariah does not exhibit the


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schlemiel pretences of innocence or irony, but rather approaches the world with ‘an attitude of outspoken aggression’ (ibid.). In contrast to the suggestions that Kafka’s texts ‘resist [mono]thematic interpretations’ (Bennett 1991: 73), Arendt interprets The Castle as Kafka’s Jewish novel. In Arendt’s reading, K. is a quintessential stranger. He is defined by the non-belonging to either the order of the village or of the castle. Also, K.’s is a ‘superfluous’ and dispensable existence; he is ‘tolerated’ only through the virtue of ‘a mysterious act of grace’ of the Castle (ibid., 291). In a letter from the castle official Klamm, K. is given a choice either of becoming a villager with professional but insubstantial connections to the Castle, or of establishing substantive relations with the Castle at the cost of retaining a merely ostensible connection to the village. That alternative, Arendt suggests, encapsulates ‘the entire dilemma of the modern would-be assimilationist Jew’, for whom the question of status and communal attachment are reducible to two options. These are either to ‘belong ostensibly to the people, but really to the rulers – as their creature and tool – or utterly and forever to renounce their protection and seek his fortune with the masses’ (ibid.). K. follows an ‘ “ideal” [assimilationist] course’, and becomes submerged in, it seems, parvenu practices of renunciation and accession, as if he were a participant in an uncanny experiment. In his efforts to ‘become “indistinguishable” ’, K. is ‘interested only in universals, in things that are common to all mankind, [h]is desires are directed [. . .] toward those things to which all men have a natural right’ (Ibid., 292). Kafka’s pariah is a ‘man of goodwill’. He desires to determine his own fate, rather than accept favors and privileges granted by the Castle. However, K.’s encounter with the ill fate of Barnabas’s family brings about the realization that assimilationist achievements provide no guarantee of citizenship, understood as an access to the ‘right to work, the right to be useful, the right to found a home’ (Arendt 2007: 293). Here Arendt quotes an anecdote about Gustave Flaubert, which Kafka allegedly frequently repeated, and which, accidentally, is also recalled by Thomas Mann in his Preface to the 1969 edition of The Castle (xi). It describes Flaubert’s encounter with a ‘simple, happy family of many children’, of whom Flaubert exclaimed, ‘ils sont dans le vrai, “those folk are right” ’ (ibid., 295). In this phrase, writes Mann (1969: xi), Kafka saw Flaubert’s ‘complete abandonment of his whole position, from the lips of the master whose creed had been the denial of life for the sake of art – this phrase had been Kafka’s favorite quotation’. In this context, Arendt makes another connection between the pariah existence and the idioms of ‘worldly’ living, as opposed to imaginaries of ‘exceptional’ and detached, or ‘vacuous’ life. It is also in textual proximity to the ideas of worldliness that Arendt (2007: 295) situates Kafka’s interest in Zionism. For Arendt, Kafka’s Zionism was an attempt to demystify the Jewish European presence by abolishing its isolated and ‘ “abnormal” position’, and served as ‘an instrument [of becoming] “a people like other peoples” ’. K.’s pariah is at the centre of Arendt’s negotiation of that space of the worldly, where she imbues the ‘goodwill men’ with power to break the dichotomy of either ‘saints’ or ‘madmen’. The stranger K. is also a metamorphic figure.


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He carves out the transformative and transgressive space in the realm of a ‘simple, decent life’ (ibid., 296). In contrast with other pariahs, however, K. fails to complete his metamorphosis. Arendt’s interpretation of K. as a goodwill pariah also relates him to the schlemiel tradition. K.’s actions in the village bring about a series of jester-like disclosures of how ridiculous and groundless the belief in the Castle’s ‘divine law’ and its tyrannies are. Even though K. deepens his commitment to ordinary life in the village, and, as the school janitor, ‘takes his share in the misery and distress of the villagers’, his strangeness remains unchanged. This is because, Arendt suggests, K. does not share the villagers’ fear of the Castle, even though they ‘take pains to invest this fear’ [in K. through their stories] (Arendt 2007: 294). K.’s attempt to become an ‘indistinguishable’ citizen of the village fails because he does not share that ‘baseless [and] groundless [. . .] fear, which seems by some magic to possess the entire village’, and from which ‘nothing whatever materializes’ (ibid., 295). Through his prosaic death from exhaustion, K. becomes another non-redemptive pariah figure who nevertheless exerts a certain messianic presence among the villagers. They say: “[h]ow lucky are we that you came to us!” (ibid.) However, K. as a messianic figure makes no promise of deliverance from the power of the Castle’s law and order. Rather, his exhausted (dying) body testifies to the ethical–political action of resistance. That body, however, is also a testimony to the limitations of this action. The rebellious act comes from the subject’s contemplative disposition, or what Arendt calls ‘thinking’. She relates the pariah’s contemplative disposition to K’s refusal to abandon the ‘distinction between right and wrong’, and thus to his refusal to give in to the ‘haunting fear’ of the (Castle’s) law.

Conclusions Arendt’s allegoric writing in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ highlights two further aspects of her pariah concept. First, throughout this essay Arendt seems to be engaged in a backand-forth movement between (a) discussing her four protagonists’ writings on, or creative formations of, the pariah figure, and (b) their own subjective practices and embodiments of pariahdom. Some of these movements make for rather obvious textual turns – for example, when Arendt shifts from the discussion of Lazare’s idea of ‘conscious pariahdom’ to the sketch of Lazare’s undesirable and disruptive presence in the Third Republic. Others of these textual turns are curiously woven into the essayistic fabric of the text. The performance of Arendt’s writing bespeaks the close connection between acting as a pariah on the one hand and creating a representation of, or contemplating, the pariah on the other hand. That connection reflects Arendt’s wider ideas about the close association between acting in the world and thinking, as dialogical and dialectic related. An additional effect of the back- and-forth movement that Arendt performs in her writing about the pariah is that she institutes an element of non-negotiable undecidability in the text. In other words, it appears necessary for Arendt to retain


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a certain ambiguity about whether, for instance, in the ‘typification’ of the pariah as a suspect, she is addressing Chaplin’s filmic creation (the tramp at odds with the law), or the actual Chaplin, with his disruptive and suspicious presence in McCarthy’s America; the scandalous existence of a foreigner who remained unyielding in the face of the puritan and anti-communist paranoid fixation on the expulsion of strangers. The other quite remarkable characteristic of Arendt’s essayistic writing about the pariah is the peculiar temporal operation of the pariah subject. It is as if the pariah had no future, but only the present moment in which to act. The pariah has no future in the sense that what comes after the act of the pariah’s rebellion seems always to take the form of societal dismissal and repudiation. Heine’s fate becomes that of aspersion and disrepute (Arendt 2007: 282); Lazare’s – undesirable public presence and forgetting (ibid., 286); Chaplin’s—the loss of fame and popularity (ibid., 288), and Kafka’s – misunderstanding (ibid., 295–96). That peculiar temporal imagining of the pariah’s rebellion as always and only in the present indicates that at issue is not a strategy enacted for the purpose of bringing about some (future) emancipative situation, or condition, but rather that the pariah’s rebellion is an end in itself. This is further indicative of the Arendtian ‘politics of the mortals’, as ‘the non-elitist dream of modern man and woman about immortalizing themselves in the politics of freedom’ in the political here and now (Fehér 1986: 28). This theorizing of the pariah’s rebellion as ‘politics of the mortals’ substantiates further a non-redemptive theorizing of the pariah subject, who, through rebellious political action, enters ‘a new realm of freedom’, and is raised ‘to the level of the citizen’ (ibid., 29). I have argued that in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ Arendt has constructed the idea of the pariah’s rebellion (rupturing and emancipative at the same time) as a political action par excellence that is enabled by the trope of the metamorphic movement of the pariah (or what could even be called the pariah’s metamorphic subjectivity). Arendt’s pariahs exhibit a wide ‘transformational range and transgressive possibilities of the human metamorph: from beast to man to god and return’ (Kimmel 2004: 2; my paraphrase). Arendt’s kaleidoscopic series of pariah metamorphic ‘typifications’ point thus to a more complex understanding of marginality than the spatial or locational. Rather, marginality codes the transformative and transgressive (rebellious) possibilities of the pariah subject. These appear for Arendt as inseparable from the subject’s immanent capacities for action. The rupturing and emancipative force of the pariah action has little to do with crossing the outside-inside boundary, but rather indicates doing the (previously) undoable, unfeasible or unthinkable.

Notes 1 Many thanks to Lucy Tatman for her extensive and thoughtful engagement with this text, and to Karyn Ball, Charles Barbour, Peg Birmingham, Phillip Hansen, Thomas Kemple, Marguerite La Caze and Anna Yeatman for their suggestions and comments. 2 Parvikko (1996: 23) has argued that Arendt ‘never spoke of pariahdom [. . .] “in abstract” on the phenomenal level but always approached it “in concrete”, combining phenomenal discussions with analyses of concrete individuals and their situations’.


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3 I am grateful to Anna Yeatman and Charles Barbour for making this distinction. See Botstein (1983a) for the discussion of the differentiation between the socio-economic and political marginalization in Arendt’s notion of the pariah. 4 See, for example, Botstein 1983a; Fehér 1986; Parvikko 1996; Rabinbach 1997; Ring 1991; Shklar 1983. 5 Arendt follows a ‘practical’ and model-type construction, which hinges upon the possibility of making evaluative and normative articulations about the pariah status. This contrasts with the demonstratively non-normative statements, which dominated Weber’s sociological study of Judaism. The ‘model-type’ allowed Arendt to avoid constructing ‘any rigid and ahistorical human types’, and to emphasize rather ‘what was possible in a given situation and how well an individual pariah succeeded in exploiting opportunities available in this situation’ (Parvikko 1996: 59). Her heuristic tools were tailored to bring together exploratory and evaluative objectives. 6 For a discussion of other pariah figures by Arendt – Sholem Aleichem or Rahel Varnhagen – see 1997 and 2007: 274. For discussions in secondary literature see CuttingGray 1991: 229–45; Bernstein 1996: 16–21; and Parvikko 1996: 61–113. 7 The inclusion of Charlie Chaplin in the group of Arendt’s pariahs is important because, due to his Gypsy and Irish descent, Charlie Chaplin undermines any attempts of understanding that grouping in homological terms as ‘Jews’. Arendt writes in an endnote to ‘The Jew as Pariah’ (2007: 297) that Chaplin’s inclusion in her analysis was because ‘he has epitomized in an artistic form a character born of the Jewish pariah mentality’. It is interesting that Ruth Wisse, in her study The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971: 101), explicitly excludes Charlie Chaplin – at least his Great Dictator – from the schlemiel category because she argues that Chaplin ‘divides the alternatives of civilization too sharply between innocence and guilt to be an authentic part of the genre’. However, it seems that the question of Chaplin’s Jewishness is a far more complex one, and irreducible either to the ancestry of his (possibly) Jewish grandmother, the important presence of his brother in Chaplin’s life, who was a Jew, or Chaplin’s own speculations later on in life on his father’s Jewish connections. In John McCabe’s biography of Chaplin (1978: 158) one finds a mention of Chaplin’s attempts to receive the lead role of Jesus Christ in afilm adaptation of Papini’s Life of Christ in 1924. Chaplin reportedly argued, ‘ “I’m a logical choice, [. . .] I look the part, I’m a Jew, I’m a comedian [and] I’m an atheist.” ’ The contradictions surrounding the question of Jewishness arose because Chaplin refused publicly to contradict anyone who named Chaplin a Jew, which fed both on the ‘chameleon-like’ persona of Chaplin (Bercovici, quoted in McCabe 1978: 199), and Chaplin’s fantasies of Jewish belonging. 8 For a lucid discussion of how the notion of a ‘secret’ becomes operative in Arendt’s writing, see Charles Barbour’s contribution to this volume. 9 Cf. a confession by Adalbert von Chamisso, the author of Peter Schlemihl, in a letter to Madame de Staël: ‘I am nowhere at home. I am a Frenchman in Germany and a German in France. A Catholic among Protestants, a Protestant among Catholics, a Jacobin among aristocrats, an aristocrat among democrats’ (quoted in Wisse 1971: 15). 10 Monika Zolkos (2007) has written about the urban, working-class sceneries of Chaplin’s movies as saturated with his childhood memories. She has suggested that the kid is not only Charlie’s inseparable companion, but, in fact, his mirror reflection, or his double. The age separation between them is blurred: while the grown-up Charlie appears infantile, the kid is strikingly serious and mature, which has the additional effect of collapsing their identities into each other. Through the kid, Charlie encounters, as if, himself as a child and gapes into the horror of his childhood trauma.


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Parvikko, Tuija. 1996. The responsibility of the pariah: The impact of Bernard Lazare on Arendt’s conception of political action and judgement in extreme situations. Jyväskylä: Publications of Social and Political Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä. —. 2004. A note on Max Weber’s impact on Hannah Arendt’s thought. Max Weber Studies 4 (2): 233–50. Rabinbach, Anson. 1997. 1944: Hannah Arendt writes ‘The Jew as pariah: A hidden tradition’, in which she describes the forgotten tradition of Jewish ‘conscious pariahs’. In The Yale Companion to Jewish writing. Ed. Sanders Gilman and Jack Zipes, 605–13. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ring, Jennifer. 1991. The pariah as a hero. Hannah Arendt’s political actor. Political Theory 19 (3): 433–52. Sax, Boria. 2000. Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, scapegoats, and the holocaust. New York: Continuum. Shatzky, Joel. 1998. Schlemiels and schlimazels. In Fools and jesters in literature, art, and history: A biobibliographical sourcebook. Ed. Vicki K. Janik and Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, 388–98. Westport: Greenwood. Shklar, Judith N. 1983. Hannah Arendt as pariah. Partisan Review 50 (1): 64–77. Steinmetz, Sol. 2005. Dictionary of Jewish usage: A guide to the use of Jewish terms. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Swedberg, Richard, and Ola Agevall. 2005. The Max Weber dictionary: Key words and central concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 2004. The theme: Metamorphosis as a magical device of creative imagination. In Metamorphosis. Creative imagination in fine arts between life-projects and human aesthetic aspirations. Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, xi-xvi. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Weber, Max. 1952. Ancient Judaism. Glencoe: Free Press. Wilson, Nelly. 1978. Bernard Lazare. Antisemitism and the problem of Jewish identity in late nineteenthcentury France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wisse, Ruth R. 1971. The schlemiel as modern hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zolkos, Monika. 2007. Kantor w lustrze Chaplina. Teatr 5, 63–68.


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Index

Adorno, Theodor 3, 25, 31, 170 aesthetics 120, 158, 161 aletheia 4, 47, 54, 56–7, 59–60, 76 see also truth; disclosure; unconcealment alienation see world alienation alterity 19, 49, 67 America, United States of 156, 198, 210 annihilation 31, 103, 105, 112, 128 antisemitism 7, 167–9, 172–9, 207 Aristotle 15–18, 20, 22, 46, 53, 59–65, 73 associations 76, 97, 100, 200, 204 audience 1, 4, 125, 188, 190 Augustine of Hippo 74, 109–10, 155, 184, 191 authenticity 65, 79, 129, 158 authoritarianism 98–100 authority 21, 90, 100, 104, 118, 122, 130, 156, 188 and law 106, 111 political 98, 134–8 relationship to power and violence 92–3, 106–8 Roman conception of 94–5 Weber and 88, 92 beginnings 28, 150 and birth 63–4, 74, 83 new 83–4, 95, 104, 136, 151, 163 political 5, 99, 105, 113 see also natality; revolution, and beginnings; revolutionary, beginnings, violence, originary or original belonging 35, 189, 195, 199, 201 non- 197, 208 Benjamin, Walter 5, 98, 105–9, 111, 170–1, 186, 188 Blake, William 184–7 Bollas, Christopher 73 Chaplin, Charlie 205–7 citizenship 15, 135, 208 city-state 76, 107 see also polis

PHansen_Index_Final.indd 215

civil disobedience 6, 114–5, 142 cognition 10, 18–20, 136, 166–7, 170 common sense 18, 61, 82, 124, 126, 130, 172, 179, 195 communication 45–7, 64–5, 188, 190, 193, 198 communitarian 4, 6, 120–1, 135, 189 community see political community concealment 57–8, 128, 189, 200 conformity 11, 140, 143 conscience 81, 97, 99–100, 119, 132, 135–6, 139–41, 143, 157–9 call of 63–4, 66–7 consent 4, 135, 138, 156 contemplative life 15–16, 44, 65 dasein 4, 23, 54–67 Derrida, Jacques 192, 195 Descartes, René 32 Diogenes Laertius 21–2 disclosure 4, 31–3, 46, 53–66, 69, 71–2, 75, 83–4, 123, 126, 130, 154, 200, 209 self- 6, 63, 117, 125, 127 Disraeli, Benjamin 7, 175 doxa 4, 13, 21–2, 53–4, 61, 64–6, 77–8 Dreyfus Affair 7, 174–7, 204 duty 11, 118, 121, 135, 139 Eichmann, Adolf 6, 138–43, 145, 174, 189, 193 England 157, 175 Epictetus 77 ethical 21, 42, 44, 50, 134 code 78, 125 considerations 6, 117, 119, 124–5, 127, 129, 131 constraints 6, 117–18, 120–1, 123, 127–30 principles 124, 159 ethics 6–7, 42–4, 50, 121, 150–1, 159 Kantian 120, 128, 159 political 6, 117–20, 124, 130 and Weber 97, 200

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216

INDEX

evil 2, 3, 107, 119, 134–7, 139–40, 152–4, 168 commission of 135, 137, 140, 143 good and – 11, 127, 135, 139 Machiavelli 95, 98, 127 problem of 5, 13–14 fear 5, 110, 141, 178, 206, 209 see also terror forgetfulness 57–9, 152–3 forgetting 14–15, 46, 62, 85, 151, 199, 205, 210 Foucault, Michel 5, 88–94, 97–101 France 108, 175, 178, 198, 204 Frankfurt School 31, 92 friendship 7, 74, 155, 159, 160, 184, 189 Gadamer Hans-Georg 4, 40, 47–50, 53 genocide 29, 172 Germany 35, 53, 79–80, 138, 141, 143, 173–4 glory 112–13, 117, 125–7, 129 honour and 21, 97, 161 see also greatness goodwill 151, 162–3, 208–9 governmentality 90, 92 greatness 96, 117, 119–20, 125–6 guilt 64, 107, 139–40, 145, 206 collective 143, 145 happiness 15–17 public 126, 161 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 19, 31, 171 Heidegger, Martin 2, 4, 20, 23, 29, 39–40, 45, 47–50, 53–67, 70, 191 Heine, Heinrich 201–4 Heraclitus 40, 54 Hobbes, Thomas 88, 94, 111, 141 Holderlin 25, 174 holocaust 28, 31, 36, 80, 171 Auschwitz 138–9 concentration camps 35, 79–82, 139, 181 death camps 31, 34–5 human nature 11, 17, 142–3, 145, 166, 179 Hume, David 41–2 illusion 18, 41, 44, 58, 80, 173, 198 imperialism 7, 167–9, 175 individuality 4–5, 26, 31, 33, 69–73, 76, 80–4, 155 individuation 4, 62–4, 66, 70, 73


inter-esse 3, 87, 111 interest 10, 13, 48, 87, 122, 129 common 3, 75, 111 self- 143–4, 179 interiority 5, 47, 55, 69, 72–3 intersubjective 4, 45, 62, 64, 72–3, 123–4 intuition 18, 65, 170 Israel 28, 174, 202 Jameson, Fredric 189 Jaspers, Karl 39, 54, 66, 79 judgement 120, 123–7, 129–31, 136–8, 140–1, 144, 157–8, 191 of spectators/audience 1, 4, 6, 9, 63–4, 66, 125, 190 see also under Kant justice 106, 134, 146, 174 Kafka, Franz 207–9 Kant, Immanuel 9, 13, 42, 137, 158–9, 170 imagination 171 judgement 120, 123, 127–8, 158 knowledge 18, 20, 22 on philosophers 10–11 Kierkegaard, Sǿren 9, 188 knowledge 11–14, 16–22, 32, 94, 99, 136 self- 14, 16 Kristeva, Julia 66 Lazare, Bernard 8, 174–5, 197, 200, 204–5, 209–10 Lessing, Gotthold 77–8, 79–80 liberalism 4, 84, 91, 166 linguistics 18, 45, 47–8, 61 see also speech acts Locke, John 41–2 logos 20, 57–8, 65, 111 love 74, 95, 100, 155, 191, 194, 202, 205–6 antipolitical 184–7, 189 forgiveness 7, 159–61 of knowledge 21–2 non-public 8, 159 of the world 97–8 Luxemburg, Rosa 78–9, 115 lying 6, 128, 186, 191–2, 194 Machiavelli, Nicollò 5, 90, 94–8, 127 marginality 8, 198–201, 203, 207, 210

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INDEX

Marx, Karl 14, 27, 31, 78, 188 mass society 27, 30, 33–4, 144 masses 96, 173, 179, 205, 208 mastery 5, 31, 77, 156 memory 29, 35, 41, 93, 153, 157, 170, 172, 190, 205 see also remembrance Merleau-Ponty 12, 18 modernity 3–33, 40, 42, 82, 87–8, 98, 199 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 5, 110, 124, 161 morality 42, 44, 79, 81, 144–6, 150, 159, 172 and politics 5–7, 43, 118, 120, 130, 134–7, 142, 158, 162 moral philosophy 130, 134–6, 138–9, 159 natality 5, 59, 63–4, 101, 109–10, 150–1, 179 National Socialism 198 Nazis 29, 80 regime of 78–9, 136, 139 nation-state 91–2, 100 necessity 16, 26, 58–9, 62, 162, 201 Negri, Antonio 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 14, 16–17, 23, 31, 44, 152–3, 157, 188, 200 obedience 92–3, 107, 114, 134, 138–9, 141–2 objectivity 43, 54 obligation 88, 136 ontology 50, 56, 57, 142–4, 195 opinion 4, 9, 13, 43, 75, 137, 185, 191–2, 195 and doxa 22, 53–4, 65, 78 realm of 4, 159 of spectators 62, 64–5, 123, 125–6 see also public, opinion parvenu 173–5, 177–8, 199, 204, 208 peace 67, 112, 140, 207 -treaty 113 perception 16–18, 41, 65, 72, 170 perspectivism 4, 43 Plato 14, 17, 21–2, 39–40, 42, 44, 53–4, 56–8, 63, 65, 67, 78, 114 polis 49, 65, 76, 112–14, 129 see also city-state political action 15, 87–90, 100, 122, 128–9, 134, 174, 197, 209 community 15, 113, 136, 195, 200, 204


217

conceptions of 15, 87, 90, 98, 200 conditions of 5, 162 disclosive 53, 64 and law 103–5, 107–9, 115, 118 life 15, 45, 83, 87–8, 99, 130, 132, 137, 151, 153, 158, 160–3, 192 see also public, life; vita activa order 5, 17, 90, 100, 139, 192, 194–5 organization 108–9, 129 resistive 198, 210 space 5, 103–5, 110–13, 162, 195 Portmann, Adolf 72 praxis 59–60, 62, 64, 66, 109, 114–15 psycholanalysis 5, 71 public action 111, 127, 199 life 2, 4, 8, 78, 118, 140, 159–61, 195 see also political, life; vita activa opinion 62, 65 perception 128 realm 4, 30, 35, 48, 50, 54, 64–6, 83, 118–30, 134, 137, 144–5, 158, 194 space 43, 49–50, 83, 112, 122 sphere 4, 43, 84, 89–90, 159–61, 163, 194 punishment 7, 58, 139, 153–5, 202, 206 Pythagoras 13, 21–2 reason 31–2, 59, 119–21, 126, 135 charisma of 99–100 instrumental 31, 55 and truth 10–13, 18–20 reason of state 158–9 rebellion 8, 78, 142, 198, 204, 210 rebellious action 200–1, 204–7, 209–10 relativism 4, 43–5, 50 remembering 1, 94, 97 remembrance 12, 29, 162, 170 resistance 92, 108, 142, 209 respect 7, 79, 92, 159–61, 163, 172 responsibility 58, 78, 96–7, 108, 129, 144, 157, 173, 177–8, 204 collective 145 individual 135, 138 moral 118, 139 revolution 78, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 104, 115, 157 American 100, 156–7 Atomic 27

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218

INDEX

revolution (Cont’d) and beginnings 95, 97, 100 French 95, 98, 100, 160 revolutionary act 90, 97, 100 action 5, 94, 97–8, 103 beginnings 5, 95, 100 movements 87–9, 99 power 103, 107–9 spirit 78, 170 rights 88–9, 91, 99–101, 140, 208 claiming 156, 172–3 human 134–5, 142–3 political 175, 200 secrecy 195–6 Rilke, Rainer Maria 174, 188, 190 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 187–8 Schmitt, Carl 98, 101, 103–4, 106, 109, 111–12 Scholem, Gershom 25, 180, 188–9 secrecy 8, 186–7, 189–90, 195–6 state 128 self-interest see under interest socialism 27, 96 Socrates 13–14, 22, 44, 54, 66–7, 77–8, 114, 139, 159 solidarity 95, 121, 135, 161, 174 solitude 155, 185, 190, 192, 194–5 sovereign 53, 88, 90–1, 93, 96–7, 99, 104, 106 decision 103–6, 109, 111–12, 114–15 power 88, 93, 98, 103–4 and violence 88, 111, 115 sovereignty 88–92, 98, 100, 114, 136–7, 156–7 and freedom 53, 90–1, 100, 136 individual 77, 100, 156 state 88, 104, 111 spectators 1, 6, 21–3, 53–5, 57, 67, 69, 72, 74, 83, 123, 188, 195, 198 see also under judgement; opinion spectatorship 74, 124–5 speech acts 6, 97, 122–3, 126–7 state 88–94, 97–8, 101, 104, 128, 141–3, 154, 174, 176–8, 199, 206


stateless 28, 134, 198 subjective 17, 56, 72, 75, 77, 83, 124, 209 superfluity 81 superfluous, human beings as 34, 153, 208 techne 55, 59–60 terror 31, 34–6, 81, 167, 194 totalitarian 26, 31, 34–5, 134, 142–5, 166–9, 175 government 35, 194 regimes 30, 34, 48, 159 totalitarianism 6–7, 31, 34–6, 79–80, 82, 118, 128, 134, 136–43, 159, 166–70, 178, 192, 194–5 experience of 31, 35–6, 79, 82, 118, 128, 138–40, 142, 145, 188, 194 truth 4, 39–50, 78, 105, 128, 137, 158, 170 concealment and disclosure of 65–6, 76 moral 135, 195 political 4, 191–3 see also aletheia; reason unconcealment- 47, 56–8 see also aletheia un-forgetting 54, 56 see also aletheia violence 2, 5–6, 35, 43, 88, 90, 92–4, 97–8, 103–9, 111–15, 128, 153, 193 instrumental 105–7 originary or original 104–5, 108–9, 111–12 of war 112–15 virtue 14, 15–17, 59, 65, 95–7, 110, 118, 127, 159, 161, 185 political 4, 121, 127–8, 138, 141, 191 vitaactiva 43–4, 56, 93, 98, 136, 163 see also public, life; political, life. vitacontemplativa see contemplative life Voegelin, Eric 166–7, 170–1 war 93, 95, 101, 103, 105, 112–15, 173 -crimes 143 Weber, Max 5, 8, 31, 88–90, 92–4, 96–100, 105, 118, 127, 197, 199–200 White, Hayden 167, 171–2 will 5, 54–6, 77, 82, 84, 88–90, 92, 108, 122, 135–8, 156–7, 162, 170 and evil 152–3

3/10/2011 11:00:13 AM

INDEX

free 95, 100 to power 157, 161 Winnicott, Donald 71–2, 83–4 world alienation 4, 26, 28–31, 33–6, 137, 144


219

worldlessness 7, 25–36, 48, 144, 159, 184, 204 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 10, 14, 145–6

3/10/2011 11:00:13 AM

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