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1	Action, Politics, Genealogy

Hannah Arendt’s theory of action has both inspired and perplexed her readers. Its revival of the ancient idea of publicly performed freedom reintroduced a lost dimension into political theory, one that insisted that free human action, at its highest level, was more than merely doing as one pleases in private life. Authentic action, according to Arendt, was something visible in the public realm, carrying a genuine potency capable of changing the world. Given its centrality to her thought and its radical character, it has, not surprisingly, been a target of significant critique. In this chapter, I want to attempt to turn aside some of the more serious criticism of Arendt by offering a new interpretation of her theory of action. I believe that a great deal of the criticism of her thought originates in a misunderstanding of the role and meaning of her theory of action, especially her attempt to revive the ancient ideal of noninstrumental political action. Though it may come as a surprise, I believe this criticism is rooted in a failure to understand Arendt’s long-standing concern over the problem of history and her unique practice of historiography.

There are at least two misunderstandings of Arendt that I believe the account of Arendtian action offered here can resolve. First, many critics have interpreted Arendt’s attempt to revive the noninstrumental ideal of political action as a deliberative, participatory, and performative activity, which situates politics from a kind of quasi-aesthetic perspective. They argue that Arendt—drawing strongly on the logic of Aristotle’s assertion that praxis, as the highest human activity, cannot have a telos beyond itself, but is a-telos, an “end in itself”—believed that any instrumental or teleological activity must therefore be kept out of politics. As a result, readers have often understood her as suggesting a dichotomous relationship between political action and instrumental activity, with the implication that social concerns such as poverty or discrimination cannot be a concern of genuine politics. Politics should instead be free to engage in a deliberative and performative disclosive activity of individual identity.¹ Readers have often found the idea that there could ever be such a sharp separation established between social concerns and the political odd and possibly unintelligible. Even Mary McCarthy, her close friend, editor, and literary executor, once told Arendt, “I have always asked myself: ‘What is somebody supposed to do on the public stage, in the public space, if he does not concern himself with the social? That is, what’s left?’”² A second misunderstanding concerns her theory of judgment. Some critics have argued that there is a contradiction in her accounts of judgment, and indeed that this contradiction is so fundamental that the only conclusion one might draw is that she must have had two different theories of judgment.³ These critics assert that her texts indicate that there was an earlier, more political and practical account of judgment in such places as the Between Past and Future essays, and a later much more contemplative and historical account offered in texts such as The Life of the Mind.⁴

But suppose Arendt understood politics and history to be much more closely related than these critics think? Might it be possible that Arendt was simply viewing judgment from two different perspectives: one from the side of politics and the vita activa, and the other from the side of history and the vita contemplativa? I argue here that Arendt’s political and historiographic concerns were in fact intimately linked, and it was the recognition of this link that prompted her to develop a unique genealogical approach. There were a set of long-standing modern conflations about the nature of politics and history that Arendt hoped to deconstruct, and her first step in doing this was through reconceiving the very nature of historical reflection. Thus, while it is no doubt true that her work was primarily focused on politics, we will see in this chapter that it was her concerns over history both as a political problem and as a methodological problem that originally prompted that concern with politics. In her work, she would seek to reassert the primary place of human agency in history, and when the implications of this project are adequately appreciated, many misunderstandings of her thought, I believe, are cleared up. On the account I propose, what defined political agency for Arendt had much more to do with the historical significance of a specific deed or event, and little to do with whether instrumental activity was involved in the deed. As for the notion that there is a conflict in Arendt between political judgment and historical reflection, her approach shows that she understood history and politics to be coterminous. Thus, what appears to be a conflict turns out merely to be a shift in perspective.

What results from this assertion of the primordial place of human action in history is an incredibly strong notion of human agency—stronger even than many readers already familiar with her work may realize. The difficulty understanding Arendt’s approach presents, however, is that she never explicitly formulated it, and therefore it must be gleaned from a number of disparate texts. As a result, the argument of this chapter must inevitably be somewhat long and dialectical. Pivotal will be understanding the central role her teacher and mentor Martin Heidegger played in the development of her approach, whose ideas she adopted but also heavily revised. It will therefore be necessary to discuss Heidegger’s contributions to Arendt’s ideas in some depth, before turning to her departures from him and their consequences. First, however, it will be helpful to have a sense of Arendt’s basic genealogical approach.

The Problem of Origins

A genealogy is a narrative that seeks to comprehend and explain a historic occurrence or circumstance by uncovering its origins or fundamental causes. This, of course, is an extraordinarily perplexing endeavor. How does one, after all, find these sources? What are the criteria for judging their relevance? On what authority does the genealogist make her claims? Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Arendt is often accused of contradicting herself or engaging in a mode of theorizing that was overly messy. This was to be expected: the chief goal of a genealogist is to pursue what Heidegger called aletheia, the fundamental experiences that lay at origins of history. Arendt was much more concerned with capturing those experiences adequately than she was with conceptual and logical consistency, which ultimately is more a consequence of the simplicity of our articulations of concepts than the authenticity of our explorations of lived experience.

The problem of genealogy seems to have been forced on Arendt by her analysis of the modern situation, and specifically what she felt was the complete failure of the tradition of political thought to cope with that situation. The tradition’s “moral, legal, theoretical, and practical standards,” she claimed, “together with its political institutions and forms of government, broke down spectacularly” in the first part of the twentieth century.⁵ As a result, we now lived in an era without a “testament,” or tradition, which “selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is.”⁶ She believed Tocqueville captured the historical moment best when he wrote that “since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”⁷ As a result, we are “confronted anew … by the elementary problems of human living-together.”⁸ The elemental nature of such problems must present unique difficulties for historical reflection. If tradition has failed, there is no authority to appeal to in order to establish the validity of historical claims and the significance of events. As a result, a historian in this era ultimately has nothing to guide her but her own judgment. This, to say the least, is a daunting prospect, and Arendt recognized the almost unavoidable presumptuousness in this era of the kind of historical reflections she pursued. She called this activity “thinking without a banister.”⁹ It was her way of indicating that the practice of genealogy was the only place genuine historical reflection could begin in our era. The historian must go back to the primordial experiences that preceded the tradition and awaken those experiences in order to make history intelligible again.

One of Arendt’s earliest discussions of her approach came in her reply to Eric Voegelin’s review of The Origins of Totalitarianism.¹⁰ Voegelin criticized her for incorporating value judgments too deeply into her analyses of totalitarianism, arguing that the “morally abhorrent and the emotionally existing will overshadow the essential.”¹¹ Arendt rejected this criticism. She insisted that this qualitative aspect of the analysis formed “an integral part of it. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or moralizing, although, of course, either can become a pitfall for the author. If I moralized or became sentimental, I simply did not do well what I was supposed to do, namely, to describe the totalitarian phenomenon as occurring, not on the moon, but in the midst of human society.” She argued that, for instance, her use of “the image of Hell” to describe the Nazi death camps was not meant “allegorically, but literally … a description of the camps as Hell on earth is more ‘objective,’ that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.”¹² For Arendt, in other words, descriptions of historical phenomena cannot be separated from their qualitative context.¹³

She was significantly influenced in this approach by the “critical interpretation of the past” done by Heidegger and her close friend Walter Benjamin.¹⁴ Heidegger and Benjamin showed Arendt a mode of genealogical practice that could bring the original meaning of vital words in our language back to life through thought and imagination. They had argued that words carried behind them authentic experiences that often are lost with passage of time. These experiences could be revived and used to shed light on the past and, consequentially, also on the present world where tradition can no longer illuminate the most important aspects of lives.¹⁵ She called this mode of genealogy “pearl diving”:¹⁶

[Pearl diving] 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, the pearls and coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past.… What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization … 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.¹⁷

For Arendt, the break in tradition meant that there was no longer an “Ariadne thread” that connected our political language to our commonsense experiences.¹⁸ Our political words were “empty shells,”¹⁹ which, because they had lost their moorings in authentic experiences, could be redefined at will so long as they served to support some “functionalized” theory.²⁰ While pearl diving could not “retie the broken thread of tradition,” it could perhaps “discover the real origins of traditional concepts in order to distill from them anew their original spirit.”²¹

However, what distinguished Arendt was a determination to anchor her genealogical studies in an unprecedented assertion of the role of human agency in history. Arendt first articulated this agency-based approach in The Human Condition, arguing that historical “events,” which for her always involved the “deeds” of acting human beings, were “sui generis”²² and characterized by “absolute, objective novelty.”²³ It is in the nature of events and deeds “to break through 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.”²⁴ Arendt believed that the invention of the telescope was one such event. While many of the elements of the modern scientific outlook, such as the development of nominalist ontologies, the idea of an Archimedean thought experiment, and skepticism about the veracity of the senses preceded the telescope’s invention, it required an act of pure human natality—the uniquely human capacity to begin something new—to turn these disparate elements into a potent historical “event.” In other words, according to Arendt, there must be an act of sheer human spontaneous natality at the heart of all historical trends and processes. Such acts must appear from the viewpoint of historical causality as “miraculous.”²⁵

Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a “miracle”—that is, something which could not be expected.… History, in contradistinction to nature, is full of events; here the miracle of accident and infinite improbability occurs so frequently that it seems strange to speak of miracles at all. But the reason for this frequency is merely that historical processes are created and constantly interrupted by human initiative, by the initium man is insofar as he is a human being.²⁶

To assert this strong objectivity on behalf of the deeds and events of historical phenomena—an objectivity anchored in a powerful assertion of spontaneous human agency and initiative—Arendt clearly must have had an alternate conception of the meaning of historiographic “truth.” This historiography was drawn from Heidegger’s philosophy, but it would involve a series of highly original and imaginative critiques and revisions of that philosophy.

Arendt’s Heideggerian Foundation

The relationship of Arendt’s thought to Heidegger²⁷ has been dealt with elsewhere by writers such as Seyla Benhabib, Lewis and Sandra Hinchman, Jacques Taminiaux, and Dana Villa.²⁸ While I have learned a great deal from this work, in my view none of them sufficiently addresses my specific purpose here. I want to examine how Arendt appropriated and revised Heidegger in order to show that politics and history were intimately connected and that her interest in this connection was grounded in her determination to reassert human agency in history. Heidegger’s abiding and formative impact on Arendt is, at this point, one of the most easily established relations of influence between significant intellectual figures available. To see how extensively and avidly Arendt read Heidegger’s work, one can consult Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Collection, which provides online copies of marginalia from her personal library showing that she took notes in at least twenty-five of Heidegger’s works.²⁹ Consulting her papers at the Library of Congress shows that in the early 1950s Arendt taught courses on Heidegger and was regularly consulted by his translators. Heidegger was arguably the key figure in her philosophical training; she attended some of his most famous and important courses and had an intermittent romantic relationship with him through much of the mid to late 1920s.³⁰ Indeed, while Karl Jaspers supervised her dissertation, Young-Bruehl notes that “both the way in which Arendt wove Jaspers’s orientations though her work and the language in which she expressed her ideas owe a much greater debt to Heidegger.”³¹ In a letter from the 1950s, which described the project that would become The Human Condition and which attests to the crucial impact of Heidegger’s classes and philosophical tutelage on her own thought, she told Heidegger that “I would not be able to do this … without what I learned from you in my youth.”³² Arendt, moreover, attests to the extraordinarily influential nature of the early Heidegger courses she attended in a celebratory essay for Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, noting that “Heidegger’s ‘fame’ predates by about eight years the publication of Sein und Zeit … indeed it is open to question whether the unusual success of this book … would have been possible if it had not been preceded by the teacher’s reputation among the students, in whose opinion, at any rate, the book’s success merely confirmed what they had known for many years.”³³

Heidegger pioneered an approach to philosophical argumentation that used phenomenological analysis to establish transcendental arguments about the nature of human existence, a mode of phenomenology Arendt directly appropriated in her own approach.³⁴ In its most basic sense, phenomenology is simply the attempt to describe human experience as authentically as possible. Heidegger’s innovation was to link this descriptive procedure to the establishment of competing explanations. Certain phenomena may have popular explanations attached to them. Phenomenology can be used to describe an experience or phenomenon in such a way that the more popular explanation is somehow undermined and an alternative explanation—typically one the phenomenologist is advocating for—is presented in a more convincing light.³⁵ When Arendt, for instance, asserted that “Hell on earth” is a more objective description of the Nazi death camps than any mode of description based on scientific methodology could provide, she was utilizing just such a phenomenological argument.

Heidegger’s use of this phenomenological approach was extremely ambitious in scope. He proposed to “raise anew the question of the meaning of Being,”³⁶ arguing that this question had been put aside long ago in ancient Greece and given an answer that has remained fundamentally the same throughout the history of Western philosophy.³⁷ To someone unfamiliar with metaphysical philosophy, this may seem like an outlandishly elementary proposition. Being, after all, seems self-evidently to be whatever there is. On the other hand, to metaphysical philosophers, Heidegger would seem to be making no sense at all, since a variety of different answers to the question of what Being is have been given: for Plato, Being was the eternal forms; for Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, it was God; for Nietzsche, it was the will to power. The problem with this objection, Heidegger argued, is that metaphysics is answering a different question than he is asking about Being. The metaphysicians had answered the question of what Being is, while Heidegger proposed to raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. The attempt to say what Being is treats Being as if it is some sort of entity. But Heidegger points out that Being is no thing, but a quality that all things possess. The problem with attempting, as metaphysics had, to say “what Being is” is that it begs the question. When we attempt to articulate what something means, we attempt to explain it in terms of more simplistic and basic experiences and concepts. But if Being is the most basic quality of all things, if it is already present in everything, then any attempt to explain it cannot appeal to anything more basic. As a result, attempts to answer the question of what Being is already presuppose an understanding of Being. Thus, any “theoretical” approach to the question will come up short, because in attempting to conceptualize Being, modern science and metaphysical philosophy are attempting to define Being as a thing, rather than as the most basic quality of things.

In Being and Time, Heidegger sought to approach the question of the meaning of Being phenomenologically: because Being is always already presupposed in all human existence, he proposed to examine how it shows itself in human experience. What is significant in this proposition for understanding Arendt’s account of politics and history is that Heidegger has rejected as yet another version of metaphysics the idea that the physical universe, its matter and forces, can adequately describe Being. Metaphysics had always defined Being as what persists through all contingent changes, and thus, to the extent modern science defines matter and forces as what is present through all change, modern science has a metaphysical conception of Being. Heidegger argued that before this assertion can be justified, we must examine Being as it appears in human experience, for that is where our understanding of the meaning of Being is drawn from. If, as Heidegger proposed to do, we examine the way Being manifests itself in human experience, he believed the naturalistic metaphysic of modern science will reveal itself to be inadequate. The consequence of this for Arendt is that her grounds for claiming a kind of objectivity for historical phenomena, deeds, and events that falls outside naturalistic ontology are greatly strengthened, because in the context of human experience Being, according Heidegger, encompasses both nature and history as exclusive ontological domains.

In order to show that our understanding of Being can only be grasped through the phenomenological analysis of human experience, Heidegger developed powerful philosophical arguments concerning the nature of human experience and the beings that human beings are. His most significant argument was his observation that human beings are essentially contextual.³⁸ This is a fundamental commitment Arendt adopted from Heidegger, and she provided one of the most concise and penetrating formulations of Heidegger’s perspective in the opening chapter of The Human Condition. In these opening pages, Arendt appeared to be continuing her exchange with Voegelin. Voegelin had attacked an offhand statement Arendt had made that “human nature as such is at stake” in his review of Origins, arguing that this was nonsensical, since human nature could never be changed. In her reply, Arendt challenged the very idea that there existed such a thing as a human nature in Voegelin’s Platonic sense.³⁹ Her reasoning had to do with the nature of the existential threat she believed totalitarianism posed to human beings. If there was such a thing as an unchanging human nature, then the threat of totalitarianism was greatly diminished, since human nature could never fundamentally be altered or diminished. The essential capacities of human beings would only have to wait for a set of historical circumstances that allowed them to express their freedom again. Arendt suggested that we do not know if there is such a thing as human nature, and, furthermore, we have no grounds for believing the essential characteristics of human beings could not be altered in a fundamental way. As she remarked, “Historically we know of man’s nature only insofar as it has existence, and no realm of eternal essences will ever console us if man loses his essential capabilities.”⁴⁰

Arendt expanded on this argument in the opening moments of The Human Condition. “The problem of human nature,” she writes, “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—this would be like jumping over our own shadows.”⁴¹ At first blush, this statement of the impossibility of comprehending human nature by drawing an analogy to “shadow jumping” seems like nothing more than a literary flourish. Yet, seen against the background of Arendt’s existentialism, it turns out to be a penetrating formulation of Heidegger’s thought: “nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence 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, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what.’ The perplexity is that the modes of human cognition applicable to things with ‘natural’ qualities … fail us when we raise the question: And who are we?”⁴² Thus, in Arendt’s words, human beings, “no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings,”⁴³ by which she means that the only certain statement that can be made about human nature is the fact that it always draws on, is dependent upon, and indeed is unintelligible without a context that transcends and gives meaning to it. A rock would always be rock, whether it had a context or not; but if a human being, however, could somehow exist without a context—if perhaps she was born and lived alone, somehow, in the vacuum of deep space—she could never truly be a human being.

Heidegger’s most well-known formulation of this idea comes in his characterization of humans as “Being-in-the-world.”⁴⁴ Humans cannot be the sort of beings they are unless they always already find themselves in a meaningful context. There is virtually no doubt that Arendt drew this concept directly from Heidegger’s Being and Time when she formulated her own concepts of worldliness and common sense. The Bard College collection shows that Arendt’s German copy of Being and Time was heavily used.⁴⁵ Moreover, in an article critically engaging Heidegger’s account of human action written around the time she formulated the ideas that would result in The Human Condition—her book dealing most extensively with worldliness—she raises the key critique of the tradition of political thought that is found in The Human Condition. The problem with the tradition of political thought, in her view, was that it has always sought to deal with human beings in the singular, while politics is essentially concerned with the condition of human plurality, the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth.”⁴⁶ Foreshadowing the central role that worldliness would play in The Human Condition, Arendt writes in this article that “it may be—but I shall only hint at this—that Heidegger’s concept of ‘world,’ which in many respects stands at the center of his philosophy, constitutes a step out of this difficulty.”⁴⁷

According to Heidegger, there could be no particular objects, no things at all, unless they were conditioned by a meaningful world that provides a background of intelligibility to them.⁴⁸ This worldly background, which we only become aware of indirectly, is not a thing in itself but somehow a condition of things. The idea of “world” seems to be constitutive of many intuitive experiences. When we say things like this or that would mean “the end of the world,” typically we don’t have in mind the total annihilation of the planet. Often this phrase might be limited to the end of our particular civilization or even our personal lifestyle or long-term goals. The “world” means more to us than objects that surround us: it involves all our human meanings and involvements, things that cannot be reified into objects but somehow seem to be attached to objects from out of our world. Heidegger would occasionally use the German phrase es weltet to describe this experience, which literally translates as “it worlds,” that is, that the world worlds at us and around us.⁴⁹

If this is true, it would then present modern scientific epistemology with serious complications. It implies that there will never be any truly “theoretical” position—no final Archimedean point, in Arendt’s words—for no matter what methodological and experimental precautions are adopted, they will always be rooted and have their origin in some kind of human worldly background. Moreover, it would also suggest that the whole framework of “value thinking”—which Arendt and her teachers were so critical of—would become untenable. Since meaning comes out of a world that always conditions our activities and reflections from an ever present background, there is in principle no way to ever give a satisfactory account of any particular “value.” Whatever we label a “value,” such as justice, beauty, goodness, or greatness, proceeds out of the meaningful background and never fully captures what that background implies. The attempt to objectify a meaning by labeling it a “value” only guarantees that it will lose its power to illuminate why we do and think the things we do in our lives.⁵⁰

Heidegger deals with the framework of being-in-the-world primarily in the first division of Being and Time. While there are seemingly endless phenomenological refinements Heidegger carefully adds to the notion of being-in-the-world, for my purposes, I will focus on only two such specifics Heidegger develops, both of which clearly influenced Arendt’s thought: what Heidegger calls our “thrownness,” and what he calls “being-in.” Thrownness is the “factical” life situation in which human beings find themselves in their unique social, political, historical, and relational circumstances.⁵¹ Heidegger uses the word “factical,” as distinct from “factual,” in order to emphasize that the concrete facts of our lives are not just objective circumstances that have only a contingent bearing on us; they are, as Arendt emphasizes, conditions of our existence. We are, existentially speaking, thrown into the particular world we inhabit, thrown into who we are and what possibilities we have available to us. Arendt adopts this notion in her account of worldliness. A world is not merely a community; it also includes the structures and concrete conditions of our civilization.

Our ability to engage with the worldly situation we are thrown in is what Heidegger calls “being-in.”⁵² Being-in seems clearly to have been a primary source for Arendt’s idea of “common sense,” which she refers to as the sixth sense, which fits our five senses into the common world. Since it is clear that Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world is the source of Arendt’s fundamental political category of worldliness, there can be little doubt that “being-in” and “common sense” for all intents and purposes refer to the same basic existential structure, particularly since Heidegger devotes so much of Being and Time to “being-in.”⁵³ Heidegger articulates being-in as our ability to be and feel at home in our concrete worldly surroundings. Being-in has the sense of “inhabiting,” “residing,” “dwelling,” “to be accustomed to,” and “to be familiar with.”⁵⁴ As we will see later, Arendt believed that being-in, or common sense, has atrophied in the modern era, and that the modern attempt to replace it with what she called “common sense reasoning,” an orientation based on the basic structure of the human mind and body, is what would ultimately lead to a variety of modern political pathologies. In Chapter 5, we will see Arendt attempt in her theory of judgment to theorize the possibility of reestablishing some form of common sense.

While the first division of Being and Time was thus clearly of great importance to Arendt, the second division is arguably even more so. As we will see, it is from the second division that Arendt makes her most distinctive departures from Heidegger. Being and Time was famously intended by Heidegger to have four more divisions. Heidegger eventually abandoned the project’s more ambitious objective, which would have required the final four divisions. This ultimate objective had been to work out the meaning of Being by appealing to the experience of Time.⁵⁵ Heidegger had proposed to do this by examining first the being that already has an understanding of Being—however vague that understanding may be—what Heidegger calls Dasein, his word for human beings.⁵⁶ In Being and Time, Heidegger approached human beings and their experience of Being in two steps: in the first division he looks at the basic existential structures of human experience, while in the second division he articulates the new qualities these structures take on when they are reinterpreted from the perspective of what he called “ecstatic temporality,” his term for how time manifests itself in human experience.⁵⁷ While the existential structures of our being-in-the-world provide the background conditions that allow us to start to bring the meaning of Being into focus, Heidegger believed that it is only after we reinterpret these background conditions from our primordial experience of time as “temporality” that we finally come into genuine contact with Being. He argued that the common way of thinking about time as a linear progression or sequence of events actually drew on a primordial experience of time that we always already have before developing this more theoretical notion of time. This temporality is “ecstatic” because in each element of this experience of time (past, present, or future) we “stand out” from our worldliness and “into the truth of Being,”⁵⁸ that is, we somehow exist in an existential position that is removed from our worldliness, because it brings into focus the limits or “horizons” of that worldliness.⁵⁹ Heidegger believed that when we can confront our primordial temporality, it will allow us to experience Being in its authentic meaning. This confrontation with Being will give insight, depth, and authenticity to our worldly involvements.

According to Heidegger, the past, as an aspect of temporality, is rooted in our existence as essentially historical beings, what he calls our “historicity.”⁶⁰ By saying we are “historical,” Heidegger is not simply asserting that there were a sequence of well-known events that our civilization’s historians have documented and placed in bound narratives. He means that our lives are always grasped as narratives that stretch out from birth to death.⁶¹ It is these unique stories that allow us to have an identity—to become a “who” rather than a “what.”⁶² The history books written by historians are only possible because we first and foremost originally experience our own individual lives as narratives.⁶³ However, the ability to grasp ourselves as a “who” with a unique life story requires a direct confrontation with our ecstatic temporality.⁶⁴ This is crucial for understanding Arendt’s account of historical methodology: there is an essential link between our existence as narratively structured agents and the histories we produce. Our histories are narrative because we ourselves are narratives.

But while our past plays an important role in providing a traditional and cultural background or “heritage,”⁶⁵ it is only by confronting our future that we truly experience Being in its immediacy, in such a way that our story becomes truly our own unique story. This primordial future is not our goals and plans in life. We only confront Being when we confront the absolute limit of our own being-in-the-world: death. Recall that Heidegger had argued that Being is not a thing but the most basic and fundamental quality of all things. Being is therefore literally nothing: “no-thing.”⁶⁶ In other words, Being is that mysterious aspect of all things that is both its ground—the source from which it all came—but also completely opaque and mysterious, beyond human comprehension because it is the fundamental condition of all such comprehension. As a result, it cannot be thought, but only left in question, as the mysterious groundless ground, the nothing, of all things. This nothingness underlying all things can only be confronted when we confront our absolute mortality, the fundamental nothingness that awaits all of us in death.⁶⁷ When we do this, we receive a “moment of vision”⁶⁸ that allows us to fully live in our present by resolutely choosing the life we were originally thoughtlessly channeled into by the patterns of our worldly possibilities.⁶⁹ This ability to choose what we have already been, in terms of both our own lives and our civilization’s heritage occurs in the mode of what Heidegger calls “resoluteness.”⁷⁰ Resoluteness allows the moment of vision to take some kind of articulate form in what Heidegger had called “discourse,” the linguistic and communicative element of our being-in. After we have faced up to our death and placed this moment of vision in some kind of articulate and expressive form or “discourse,” we come to have what he calls “primordial truth” or “disclosedness,” and later, after Being and Time, aletheia, the word for truth he borrows from the Greeks, which meant truth as “uncoveredness” or “unconcealment.”⁷¹

For Heidegger, since all truth is conditioned by an existential point of view, all truth always reveals only certain facets of Being.⁷² One might take for example an artwork such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream. From a scientific point of view, it would be a “correct” statement about the being of The Scream to define it as canvas with dried paint on it. In that sense, science has indeed “revealed” something about the painting. Yet, at the same time, it has concealed something about the painting; indeed, it might be argued that it has concealed much more than it has revealed. Consider the way the world is revealed or disclosed in The Scream. Munch captures in its bizarre surreality and strangeness the way the world “worlds” when we experience moments of horror. In these unforgettable moments, the “worlding” of the world seems to slow down to a crawl in an odd slow-motion effect, making people around us become shadowy figures, little more than part of the landscape, doing utterly meaningless things. Thus, it may indeed be scientifically “correct” that The Scream is only a canvas with dried paint on it, but its aletheia, what it reveals or opens up—its essential truth about its being—is also much more than that.

But while art may provide an exemplary instance of Heideggerian aletheia, Heidegger believed aletheia went far beyond art, leading ultimately to a confrontation with the meaning of Being itself, which he believed was the source of human freedom and could only be approached through what he called “thinking.” It is a well-established fact of twentieth-century philosophical history that both Heidegger’s and Arendt’s projects were inspired by and responding to Aristotle’s practical philosophy, especially as it was articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics in Heidegger’s case, while it appears Arendt drew broadly on the Ethics, the Politics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics.⁷³ It is by now clear that Being and Time should be interpreted as an attempt to establish the priority of Aristotle’s account of action, or praxis, as the fundament of human existence.⁷⁴ The first division of Being and Time seems clearly intended to establish this assertion. Yet, free human action is never achieved in the first division. The closest we come to action is in the context of technical activities, Aristotle’s poiesis, what Arendt would eventually call “work.” All human activity in the first division, while certainly inescapable and fundamental, is still essentially thoughtless and inauthentic, at best employing theoretical or technical means/ends thinking, because it does not reflect on the essentially mysterious grounds of our being-in-the-world.⁷⁵ It is only in the second division, after phronēsis, or what Heidegger would later come to call authentic “thinking,” has been faced up to through a confrontation with mortality that our practical activity takes on the quality of action, or praxis.

A crucial upshot of this—one that Arendt will relentlessly attack—is that Heidegger believes that free human action has less to do with the specific choices, activities, or concrete courses of action we choose to take, and more to do with how our everyday activities, which are thoughtless and conformist in nature, can be transfigured and take on a deep and profound quality—a quality that makes it truly free action—only when we reflect on and confront the meaning of Being. Michael Allen Gillespie argues: “In this respect, this phronetic moment of vision looks more like a conversion experience than a deliberative judgment. Heidegger reads Aristotle more through Paul, Augustine, Eckhart, and Luther than through the Aristotelian ethical tradition.… This phronetic moment of vision brings about not merely a transformation of the world but first and foremost a transformation or conversion of Dasein itself.”⁷⁶ As we will see, this conception of human freedom as an essentially reflective or contemplative endeavor is what ties Heidegger most closely to the philosophical tradition and is the fundamental point of departure for Arendt. Of course, from Heidegger’s perspective this is still ultimately a practical philosophy—indeed, all philosophy is ultimately practical, in Heidegger’s very broad, existentialist sense. But Arendt, for her part, rejects this claim: she will go on to argue that contemplation and action are two very different activities, and their relationship—if indeed there is one at all—is extremely obscure. In her critique of Heidegger in the “Willing” volume of The Life of the Mind, she characterizes Heidegger’s notion of action as “a kind of ‘acting’ (handeln) which is polemically understood as the opposite of the ‘loud’ and visible actions of public life.… This acting is silent, a ‘letting one’s own self act in its indebtedness,’ and this entirely inner ‘action’ in which man opens himself to the authentic actuality of being thrown, can exist only in the activity of thinking.”⁷⁷

It is true that Heidegger’s work in the 1930s seems to suggest a more activist and political stance, but there is no evidence that work from this period had any direct philosophical influence on Arendt, and Heidegger himself soon seemed to move on from it. By the end of the 1930s, Heidegger’s conception of praxis and phronēsis would, more than ever before, become increasingly more contemplative and quasi-religious. Heidegger would continue to articulate human freedom as having less to do with concrete acting in the world, and more to do with how we can establish an authentic relationship to Being through what he called “thinking.” Thus, in the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger continues to argue that true action only occurs in the authentic thinking of Being, saying that such thinking is a mode of action that is “the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man.”⁷⁸

A Political Critique of Heidegger

Arendt’s approach would be based on a number of politically inspired appropriations and revisions of Heidegger, one that I will argue has far-reaching consequences for how we think about history, politics, and human agency in general. For Heidegger, the public structures of our existence—our world, history, civilization, public realm—represent sources of conformity and inauthenticity. These are the things we have in common with others, and we therefore naturally become inauthentic when we thoughtlessly take over these conditions. We get lost in “what one does.” To the extent we become differentiated from our existential history by establishing our unique identity in a confrontation with mortality, action is therefore only realized in contemplation. In this contemplative conception of agency, Heidegger has thus essentially collapsed the distinction between thought and action: action is ultimately only our ability to think Being. The resulting theory of history this conception of historicity leads to is one that gives little potency and significance to concrete human deeds, emphasizing instead general trends or “sendings from Being,” as Heidegger called them, which in many ways determine and give meaning to the specific acts of human beings.

Arendt, by turns, would seek to challenge each of these propositions. In her critique of Heidegger, she sought to reintroduce human agency, and in turn politics, back into historical reflection, articulating an account of history and politics that would return genuine potency and meaning to the concrete deeds of human agents. In her view, Heidegger’s existentialism had failed in its attempt to escape metaphysics, for even though it left many of the fundamental metaphysical categories behind, it nevertheless remained bound in a more primordial way by the philosophical tradition’s prejudices denigrating human action. This point has relevance to one of the key interpretative questions Arendt scholars have confronted: explaining the relationship between The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. Seyla Benhabib, Margaret Canovan, Michael H. McCarthy, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, and Dana Villa have all dealt with this question at length.⁷⁹ These two books seem in many ways to be related to each other in only the broadest thematic ways. What led Arendt to write a book so different in so many ways from the earlier book? I will argue in the following that, while there is no doubt that politics was the fundamental concern of Arendt’s work by the time of The Human Condition, it was originally her concern over the political and methodological problems of history raised by her work in Origins that instigated her turn to politics. Arendt’s political thought, in other words, was her to solution to what she believed was a problematic tendency of modern history to denigrate and largely ignore human agency.

As we will see in Chapter 4, a nexus of political and historiographic problems confronted Arendt after Origins, involving the relationship between totalitarianism, revolutionary politics, and modern conceptions of the philosophy of history. Arendt had recognized that totalitarian political movements invariably arose with revolutionary aspirations and were typically animated by what she called an “ideology,” by which she meant a conception of historical necessity or law.⁸⁰ Much of her critique of modernity involved deconstructing the notion of ideology as a politics of historical movement: she would insist that history was located not in dialectical trends but in concrete human deeds. But this critique of modern historical thinking carried historiographic implications: any historiography she employed would have to reflect this emphasis on human agency and to eschew historical explanations originating from grand historical trends. As we will see, she was able to achieve this through her critique of Heidegger.

Arendt departed from Heidegger on two fundamental points. First, adopting Heidegger’s concept of worldliness, she wrote, as I noted earlier, that “the problem that has plagued political philosophy almost throughout its history … [was that philosophy has always dealt] with man in the singular, whereas politics could not even be conceived of if man did not exist in the plural.… It may be—but I shall only hint at this—that Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’ … constitutes a step out of this difficulty.”⁸¹ But Arendt was unhappy with the significance Heidegger gave the world, arguing that, contra Heidegger, worldliness was not a source of inauthenticity and conformity, but instead a realm where human beings can truly realize their identity in free human action.⁸² “Thus we find the old hostility of the philosopher toward the polis in Heidegger’s analyses of average everyday life … in which the public realm has the function of hiding reality.”⁸³ Second, she argued that, while Heidegger’s concept of historicity—the narrative agency of human beings—was true, his conception of action as an essentially contemplative activity was profoundly flawed. She writes that Heidegger’s conception of historicity “shares with the older concept of history the fact that … it never reaches but always misses the center of politics—man as an acting being.”⁸⁴

Arendt and Heidegger have, in essence, diametrically opposed accounts of how human beings become “whos”—how they come to have unique life stories. For Heidegger, human beings only come to have authentic life stories when they resolutely confront their ultimate groundlessness in death. Historicity, in other words, is for him rooted in the condition of mortality.⁸⁵ Though certainly unimaginable without a recognition of the condition of mortality, Arendt nevertheless finds historicity to be rooted in a condition that is diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s account: in birth, or what Arendt calls the condition of natality.⁸⁶ Arendt equates human natality, the ability to be born, with the human capacity for action, which she defines as the ability to begin something new:⁸⁷ “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world.… The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.”⁸⁸ In other words, it is this capacity to act and to begin that Arendt believes forms the content of our life stories. Our lives are made up of a series of unique happenings—events and deeds that constitute our “whoness.” While, like Heidegger, this relationship between action and historicity becomes the condition of history for Arendt, it affords a very different sensibility than Heidegger gave it. In Arendt’s words: “But the reason why each human life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind … is that both are the outcome of action.”⁸⁹ And as a result, because Heidegger’s conception of history deals not merely at a psychological but instead at an ontological level, Arendt’s account of action carries extraordinary potency, in a way Heidegger’s contemplative notion of action probably never could, offering unique potential to radically alter our existing circumstances every time we perform an act.⁹⁰

Arendt believed that part of the reason Heidegger arrived at these conclusions was that, especially in Being and Time, Heidegger drew his phenomenological conclusions from modern society and politics, a context that in her view greatly resisted potent human agency. In The Human Condition, Arendt set out to use Heidegger’s “pearl diving” approach against him, attempting to unearth authentic experiences of historically potent human political agency that had been lost in the past. What she discovered was that Heidegger’s view of the public realm and common world remained deeply bound to the philosophical tradition’s historical prejudices against it. This refusal to leave those prejudices behind meant that while his existentialism may have successfully escaped the metaphysics of presence, his philosophy could not truly achieve an understanding of authentic human agency and, as a result, could never truly ground historical reflection.

Arendt’s only significant published discussion of her theory of history comes in her essay “The Concept of History.” While the essay contains a clear indication that politics was essentially related to history, Arendt makes much more explicit statements about the relationship in her 1969 lecture course “Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?”; in what follows, I want to use the 1969 course to supplement “The Concept of History” in order to better understand how she related politics and history. In the 1969 course, Arendt suggested that a fundamental tension exists in each human being between the faculty for thought and the faculty for action. It is, of course, relatively common in the modern era to understand there to be a gap of sorts between theory and practice, which must be bridged or reconciled. The idea that there is an essential tension between them is much more perplexing. However, Arendt argued this was not a flaw in humanity; in her view, it made human beings intensely interesting creatures, capable of combining faculties and engaging in activities that, from a phenomenological perspective, appear to have almost nothing in common.

This tension between thought and action arises out of their respective predominance in two fundamentally distinct and mutually exclusive spheres of experience. While action’s sphere of experience was our engaged activity in the world, thought’s sphere of experience took place in a mysterious gap in time between past and future that was utterly and existentially withdrawn from the common world. These spheres of experience gave rise to two authentic ways of life, each directed toward the realization of either thought or action. The vita activa sought to actualize action, and the activity it developed to do this was politics. The vita contemplativa sought to actualize thought, and the activity it developed was philosophy. These pursuits were anchored in competing conceptions of the Greeks’ highest aspiration, captured in the mysterious Greek word athanatizein. In the 1969 course, Arendt notes that athanatizein was virtually impossible to adequately translate, as it was open to multivocal interpretations and took in a variety of disparate practices, but settles for rendering it as “to immortalize.”⁹¹ “The common root of politics and philosophy is immortality … not in the sense that the philosophers finally defined it, but only in the sense that both endeavors spring from the same desire of mortals to become or, since that is impossible, to partake in immortality, to get their share of it.”⁹²

Arendt asserts that a kind of competition developed among the Greeks over the best path to athanatizein.⁹³ For the philosophers, athanatizein meant contemplation, “to dwell in the neighborhood of those things which are forever.”⁹⁴ Philosophy was oriented by the condition of mortality, since it pursued the things that exist beyond human life and its world, “the things which are eternal.”⁹⁵ This philosophical orientation, she claimed, begins as far back as Plato’s argument in the Phaedo for the immortality of the soul. Since death was the separation of the soul and body, and the philosophers pursued the eternal, the philosophers were therefore in love with death: “the philosopher qua philosopher will wish to die … those who hold fast to philosophy will pursue only dying and having died.”⁹⁶ According to Arendt, the philosophers sought to live their lives in this gap between past and future and to realize the activities of the gap without reference to human affairs. And from out of this pursuit of immortality, the philosophers found a kind freedom all their own, a “philosophical freedom,”⁹⁷ which was elevated far beyond the activities of the world of acting women and men. Thus, in this respect Heidegger’s contemplative account of human action and identity, far from distancing him from the philosophical tradition, was what bound him most closely to it.⁹⁸

In competition with the philosophers, the Greek political actors pursued a very different kind of athanatizein. The tradition of political thought was formulated and structured by the philosophers, and Arendt therefore believed that their contemplative approach to immortalizing had in one way or another framed Western political theories. The problem with this, she argued, was that politics had its own unique and foundational practice of athanatizein, which had nothing to do with contemplation, but instead had to do with action, with free activity in the concrete circumstances of the human world.⁹⁹ Political actors did not strive to immortalize themselves through contemplation but instead through the performance of great deeds in a public realm where their peers could judge the acts, deciding whether those deeds deserved to become the content of history.¹⁰⁰ Thus, the essential characteristic of political action was its concern with the specific kind of immortality that comes from historical greatness in the human world.

However, the historical problem with this uniquely political form of athanatizein was that those who actually lived and took part in this activity—the “men of action,” as she called them—rarely took the time to theorize about it. As a result, most of Western political thought was done by philosophers who disdained the political form of immortalizing and the activities of the men of action.¹⁰¹ Philosophers could not grasp the actors’ obsession with fame and power, since in their view it was “absurd” to think that humans could ever live up to what was highest in the cosmos,¹⁰² and came to view political theory, in the words of Pascal, as like “laying down rules for a lunatic asylum.”¹⁰³ “Hence,” she writes, “the old paradox was resolved by the philosophers by denying to man not the capacity to ‘immortalize,’ but the capacity of measuring himself and his own deeds against the everlasting greatness of the cosmos.”¹⁰⁴ Arendt’s political writings were an attempt to provide the fullest articulation yet given of what the Western men of action had actually been doing in their pursuit of immortality.¹⁰⁵ To do this, she focused on what she believed were the three originary attempts to achieve political athanatizein in Western politics: the Greeks, the Romans, and the modern revolutionaries.¹⁰⁶ Each instance displayed a unique version of political action, contributing formative elements and ideals to Western politics and culture that continue on in our political language.¹⁰⁷ Chapter 2 will examine these three different instances of political action. Presently, however, I want to provide a general account of what Arendt understood this political version of athanatizein to involve.

Politics and the Human Condition

What does it mean to be a narrative—to live a life as a story? If humans are “whos” and not “whats,” they can therefore never be given labels, never meaningfully be placed in conceptual boxes. They are too interesting, too dynamic. Unlike the animals, who remain members of species that revolve eternally in the cycle of the cosmos, humans are “‘the mortals,’” according to Arendt, “the only mortal things there are … individual life, a bios with a recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life … [and] is distinguished from other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movements of biological life.”¹⁰⁸ The only way of coming to terms with the “whoness” of a human being is by learning their story, which always transcends any definition that we use to try to capture them with.

Any narrative must have a setting. When we read a novel, we take the setting as simply given: the setting is the condition of the novel. Human life is narrative because it enters a setting that is simply given: just like the stories we tell that derive from it, human experience can describe the setting—the human condition—but it cannot ever get beyond that condition, for we are not gods who live eternally but beings whose existence unfolds in time as a story. As we have seen, Arendt’s claim about the narrative character of human existence grows out of her understanding of the conditioned nature of human beings. To say that humans are essentially conditioned beings means that they are creatures who have limits, and that these limits are essential to what and who they are. Humans can never get beyond them, just like they cannot jump over their own shadows. What we can do is articulate those limits, try to take their measure, and attempt to understand how they structure and condition our experience. Human life is conditioned by such existential structures as temporality, mortality, embodiment, scarcity, language, natality, plurality, earth-boundedness, historicality, and even its own technology.¹⁰⁹ These are not objective facts, in the conventional sense. They are conditions of our consciousness, and we can only understand them by understanding how they structure our consciousness. There is, so to speak, no transcendental subject of knowledge. Even when Arendt moves farthest away from the human condition in her account of the thinking activity, this activity is still “conditioned,” in this case by what Heidegger had called “temporality,” and what Arendt calls the “gap between past and future.”

In The Human Condition, Arendt proposed to pursue these questions by first making a number of distinctions between the various types of activities humans perform in their worldly conditions. It will be necessary to bracket for the moment the question of the vita contemplativa, where many other activities are performed outside our worldly conditions. In Chapter 3, when we turn to examine the philosophical way of life, thinking and contemplating will be of primary importance, but even in the context of worldliness it is not really possible to escape the relevance of the activities of the mind. For Arendt insists that the life stories humans construct out of the events of their lives would be impossible without the ability to reflect about the meaning of those events with the activity of thought, thus recognizing that Heidegger was at least half right: humans are both mortal and natal, both acting and thinking beings.

Arendt begins her discussion of the worldly activities in the prologue to The Human Condition with the at first blush strange proposal: “What I propose … is very simple: to think what we are doing.”¹¹⁰ This, of course, implies a rather odd proposition: that we somehow do not know what we are doing. Arendt immediately begins making a series distinctions between various human activities. She argues that there are three fundamental conditions to which human beings, as conditioned beings, are subject: the natural necessity of the life process, the worldly human artifice, and the condition of plurality. Corresponding to each of these conditions are, respectively, the three essential human activities: labor, work, and action.¹¹¹

Labor is the activity humans perform in order to survive the driving necessity of natural metabolism. “[Labor] corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process.… The human condition of labor is life itself.”¹¹² Unlike the other activities, labor is cyclical and endless, like nature itself, making it the activity we share with animals, and thus when humans exist as laboring beings she calls them animal laborans.¹¹³ “Of all human activities,” she writes, “only labor … is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.”¹¹⁴

Work, on the other hand, establishes a “bulwark” against natural necessity. It creates a space for humans to escape labor by providing “an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.”¹¹⁵ At the most abstract level, Arendt distinguishes work by the fact that it has a definite beginning and ending, and this ending is always characterized by a finished product. As the only human activity that employs the teleological means/end category, it thus involves a form of specialized knowledge that can be taught and reproduced.¹¹⁶ As an “artificial” teleological activity, its process always involves doing violence to what is naturally given in order to bring about a worldly space to block out natural necessity.

Finally, action “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.”¹¹⁷ Labor and work find their significance and meaning in the activity of action, which redeems these activities from futility by producing stories that give them meaning.¹¹⁸ Action is able to accomplish this as a result of several unique qualities it possesses. In its purest sense, action is the human capacity to begin a new process or chain of events within the human world.¹¹⁹ It is by far the rarest of the human activities—vanishingly rare, in fact. In contrast to work, action is ateleological, an activity that is not done in order to produce something beyond it, but is instead an end in itself.¹²⁰ Each action is sui generis: it always has a meaning that is completely distinct from any act that has come before it.¹²¹ Each action discloses the “who” rather than the “what” of the actor.¹²² This is because each human being is unique and unlike any other that has come before. The stories created by the deeds of actors disclose this unique “whoness.” By its nature, action produces and establishes relationships among humans, and this results in a “web of human relations.”¹²³ As a result of these qualities, action inevitably is boundless and unpredictable: each course of action undertaken will impact the other individuals in the web of relationships, eventually coming to have a meaning far exceeding anything the actor could have imagined or foreseen.¹²⁴ Arendt therefore argues that action has a process character: while we are bound to the natural world through labor by the processes of natural necessity, through action we begin new processes in the web of human relations.¹²⁵ Arendt asserts that the “web of human relations” established by action exists as a kind of overgrowth on the worldly human artifice: together the two constitute what she calls the “common world.” Arendt claims that the objective world produced by work gives stability to the web of human relations—which by nature is ephemeral and unstable—and allows the deeds done by actors to have lasting significance and, potentially, immortality.¹²⁶

Arendt argues that action is essentially conditioned by speech, claiming that without speech action would be meaningless. They are like two sides of a coin: action creates new realities, and speech discloses those new realities.¹²⁷ She writes that action “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.”¹²⁸ Readers often find this fundamental association of speech and action odd, since clearly labor and work can involve the use of speech. What Arendt appears to mean by this is that action is the activity humans possess to create stories, and thus meaning. Storytelling would be inconceivable without speech, while the products of work and the abundance of labor seem not necessarily so.¹²⁹ Arendt refers to them as essentially speechless because, in her view, while work and labor may use speech in contingent circumstances, each could be performed without speech and would still maintain its same essential character.¹³⁰ These distinctions should not be interpreted too literally, however, as if there is necessarily a strict dichotomy between instances of work and action: there is no reason the same act may not be both a moment of work and a moment of action. The distinction between the two activities does not occur at a logical level, but instead at an essential and ontological level. To take a relatively recent example, the invention the personal computer, for instance, demonstrates characteristics of both work and action.

The only other activity that Arendt believes is essentially conditioned by speech is thought, which she argues takes place in the “two-in-one” dialogue of the thinking ego, and which we use to frame and make sense of the events of our life stories.¹³¹ Arendt recognized this essential relation of thought and action to speech as far back as her first manuscript in 1954, which confronted the question of the relation of thought and action, saying that to partake in thought and action “meant to be aware of being human in an articulate, specific sense. Action without speech was violence; since it could not disclose its meaning in words, it remained senseless and meaningless. Thought, on the other hand, [could be so little conceived as proceeding without] speech that one single word, logos, was used for both ‘word’ and ‘thought or argument.’”¹³² Arendt, in other words, came to believe that human freedom and the capacity for speech—whether expressed in the context of the philosophical freedom of thought or in the performance of great actions in the human world—were so essentially related that it was literally impossible to comprehend one without the other.

Excursus: The Concept of Non-Sovereign Agency

This essential relationship between human agency and speech led Arendt to attack one of the central pillars of traditional political thought: the concept of sovereignty. The notion of non-sovereign freedom takes its bearings from Arendt’s insight that political action is misconceived when it is articulated in terms of the sovereign engagement of a unified and unconditioned will.¹³³ She insisted that this understanding of political action inevitably leads to the identification of political action with violence, since, in her view, only violence could unilaterally enact the intentions of a unified will.¹³⁴ It was this sovereign understanding of action that led to the tradition of political thought’s fabricative model of political judgment, which imagines the relationship between thought and action to involve the execution by those who are ruled of a preconceived idea produced by a ruler. Arendt believed that the moment action is conceived in unilateral terms of willful execution, it has lost contact with the phenomenal evidence associated with action, which always involves the creation of new realities and moves within a human web of relationships that responds to and creates a new, unintended set of circumstances other than what the actor intended. Arendt’s insights into the non-sovereign conditions of human agency have inspired recent scholarship by Joan Cocks, Sharon Krause, Patchen Markell, Dana Villa, and Linda Zerilli.¹³⁵ These scholars have sought to explore how agency must be reconceived when such conditions as its essential relation to speech, plurality, worldliness, relational relativity, and unpredictability are taken into account. I want now to pause and explore this notion of non-sovereign agency, paying special attention to the unique insights I believe Arendt can offer it.

It is vitally important to understand that—based as it is on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology—Arendtian action is not merely epiphenomenal. Each act of human agency carries tremendous potency. Arendtian agency asserts that action is not retroactively achieved through contemplative reflection or located outside phenomenal reality in a noumenal realm, but instead has the potential to monumentally impact the concrete human world. As such, action is incredibly rare, happening at best only a few times in any given human life. As the subject matter of the narrative of a human life, action forms the content—the acts, deeds, events—their stories recount. It is the specific, concrete, and sui generis actions an actor undertakes that reveals the “whoness” of the actor, their unique identity. Only that actor and that actor alone would have summoned up that unique, particular response to the circumstances that were presented to them in the world. The action is something completely original to the actor, something that could never have been predicted on the basis of antecedent causes. Arendt argues that action is exclusively characterized by its extraordinariness, and thus human historical reality is the story of events enacted by human agents.¹³⁶

Arendt’s notion of action has both inspired and perplexed her readers. Many struggle with how her account of human agency can be intelligible once our ability to predict the outcome of our acts becomes so ambiguous. If we have no control over the outcome of our actions, does this not render our agency moot? I want to argue here that this is not necessarily so. Instead, it only significantly attenuates and complicates it, that the actor’s agency involves trying to, in Arendt’s words, “force things into a certain direction.”¹³⁷ Because action is something that is essentially intersubjective, it appears as if any description of the causality of action could never be characterized in terms of a simplistic cause/effect logic.¹³⁸ Thus, the first presumption that has to be abandoned is any easy understanding of the causality occurring in human agency in terms of fabrication—of an effect achieved by our acts that is the result of an antecedent mechanical or efficient cause.

If human ontology truly is at its basis a narrative or story that conditions our epistemological and historical frameworks in the way Heidegger suggests, then the sense of causality associated with it has to be reconceived in a much more sophisticated manner. Contemporary philosophers such as Charles Taylor, for instance, have noted the likely impossibility of ever performing a complete reduction of historical phenomena to physical mechanism.¹³⁹ But even beyond the metaphysically contested nature of causality, our phenomenal conception of causality has always been marked by much more sophistication than the mechanistic conception of cause and effect. Aristotle, for instance, famously theorized a fourfold phenomenology of causality, none of which—not even causa efficiens—coheres exactly with the modern mechanistic conception of causality. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger embraced this conception of causality, arguing that authentic human causality is never sovereign causality: it recognizes that human action never truly enacts its will, but instead has the sense of cultivating and abetting that which proceeds out of physis or Being, for example, in parenting, advising, or farming.¹⁴⁰ Arendt, however, developed a more dynamic notion of the causality of human agency. Unlike Heidegger and Aristotle, Arendtian action does not just abet what is already proceeding out of Being; it is itself natal. It is the beginning of something new.

In order to conceptualize this dynamic conception of causality, we might preliminarily refer to Kant’s discussions of causality in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant understood mechanism (cause and effect) to be only one category of a threefold categorical account that included both “substantia et accidens” and what he calls “community” or “interaction.”¹⁴¹ This last category of interaction is much closer to the kind of causality Arendt understands human action to have, although her version is much more dynamic and potent. Kant refers to it as the notion of “a dynamic community,” that is, the fact that within a given community of phenomena they all are reciprocally interacting and determining each other and this interaction has to be understood dynamically and not successively.¹⁴² Kant illustrates the idea by pointing to gravitation, the fact that it makes no sense to understand the relation between the earth and the moon solely in terms of the earth exerting a force on the moon or vice versa; rather, they interact by exerting a common force on each other. In other words, the notion of causality involved here is, as Kant says, “not successive but instantaneous.”¹⁴³ The notion of causality that I believe Arendt had in mind in her notion of non-sovereign action should be understood much more in terms of this sort of dynamic interaction than in the fabricative (i.e., sovereign) conception of cause and effect that arises out of causality’s mechanistic aspect.

It is easy to find examples of dynamic causality in human life. Team sports are an obvious case of dynamic causality. A good quarterback or point guard can never sovereignly and unilaterally enact his will. Rather, his leadership and decision-making abilities in fluid situations enable the team to execute together. There is an interaction and dynamism among the players that seems impossible to reduce to cause and effect. Another example is found in the art of persuasion. People in sales often point out that skilled salespeople know when to stop selling their customers; they have to find the right moment to let customers choose for themselves to buy the product. These are, of course, necessarily simplistic examples geared toward illustration, but the basic idea is easily applied to our relationships in general. The point is that relationships are dynamic: any action requires a very subtle comprehension of the state of affairs the act will bring about between individuals affected by the action. When I relate to another person through action, I do not enact my will on them. Arendt insists throughout her work that the only effect action has is to establish relationships;¹⁴⁴ in other words, the moment I act in relation to another person, that person simultaneously reacts to me. What results is not an effect, but a new dynamic state of affairs. Something arises between us, a relationship, that is fundamentally dynamic—what Arendt calls “a space of appearance” that separates and relates us—whose ultimate meaning I could never have exactly predicted and whose outcome I can never be certain of. And that ultimate meaning can only be revealed by the story of the relationship. This is why, as we will see later, Arendt’s conception of practical reason in analogy to artistic judgment is so apposite. In a similar way to great art, the actor can never be completely certain of what their actions will ultimately mean. Yet, it is indicative of a skillful actor—an actor with what Machiavelli called virtù—to be capable of deliberating on a course of action that will end in a meaningful story, a story that reveals the actor’s “whoness,” just as skillful artists will almost always find their work meaning something other than they intended at the beginning.

In truth, Arendt’s articulations of human agency are much closer to phenomenal reality than anything produced in traditional accounts. An action can be the most exhilarating experience of one’s life. For younger people, first dates can be exhilarating and nerve-racking because each one possesses a clear potential for action: the events of the night may set off a life-defining chain of events. Action, in fact, constitutes those rare moments in life—weddings, births, career choices, interventions, conversion experiences—where we know we are “laying it all on the line,” so to speak, risking our life as we currently know it in order to initiate a course of action that expresses our “whoness,” our unique identity, in a richer and deeper way than how our lives existed before. Action is certainly not equivalent to our capacity for free choice:¹⁴⁵ whether or not I choose to spend my Sunday morning working out, sleeping in, or going to church is far from an instance of action. Indeed, it is not even clear if there is an unambiguous moment of choice involved in a particular action. Arendt notes that, while action clearly involves some kind of initiation on the part of the actor, it also has to be “carried through,” and this carrying through is just as much a part of the act or event.¹⁴⁶ When a recent college graduate acts in undertaking to go to graduate school or decides to start his own business, it is not clear that there was ever one specific moment of choice or initiation; rather, there might be a series of progressive choices and courses of action undertaken that when taken together amount to an action. What matters is not the specific instances, but rather whether there is a self-defining act that the actor can recount in the story of his or her life.

Moreover, while this “carrying through” of the action can be performed by the actor to a certain extent, it can probably never be done completely alone: other actors must also help see the action through with that actor. Since action always occurs in what Arendt calls the “web of human relationships,” the meaning and thus the final outcome of the act is never up to the actor alone—who can at best force events in a particular direction—but probably even more so to other actors with whom he or she interacts.¹⁴⁷ Consider the recovery movement. Very often, the fact that addicts or trauma victims were able to transcend their history and begin establishing a meaningful life for themselves and their family could never have been predicted on the basis of existing antecedent causes. In fact, very often those who know them best have long since given up hope that they will ever change. The recovery movement illustrates the profoundly intersubjective nature of action that Arendt continually points to: Addicts are the initiators of the act, they take the first step; but in many ways it is the support—the “carrying through,” as it were—that they receive from their peers in the movement that allows them to, if not overcome completely, at least gain some kind of power over their addictions or traumas.¹⁴⁸

But all this does not mean that Arendt understood action to be an unadulterated good—far from it, in fact. Arendt was quite aware that action has dark and dangerous elements: suicide or abandonment, after all, are certainly moments of action.¹⁴⁹ Action is often the source of the greatest tragedies of our lives, moments where something precious is lost or destroyed. Indeed, in a variety of places, including The Human Condition, Arendt also points to the burdensome character of action.¹⁵⁰ Her polemically laudatory comments in The Human Condition and elsewhere at times obscure the fact that action undertaken in the wrong spirit can be a profoundly dark activity, whose results may be both dangerous and immoral (Hitler’s “final solution,” after all, was no doubt an action).¹⁵¹ Arendt believed humans were generally ambivalent about their freedom, often experiencing it as heartbreaking and overwhelming,¹⁵² and in modernity this has led to a “flight into impotency, a desperate desire to be relieved entirely of the ability to act.”¹⁵³

There in fact seems to be an essential element of the tragic in Arendt’s conception of human agency. The victories achieved in our life stories only have meaning against the experience of failure; moments of joy have a bittersweet depth drawn from the knowledge of griefs that preceded them and that inevitably await us. The heroism and elitism that Arendtian action is often simplistically interpreted with are, in fact, leavened by a recognition of the persistence of sorrow and defeat in a world of profoundly flawed and mortal human beings. It seems that what animated Arendt’s reflections on the limits of the human condition was a desire to give the full scope of human agency its due, to reckon with the fact that it is our sadness and disappointments as much as our accomplishments and moments of joy that make us fully human and thus capable of appreciating others with the courage to act.

This essentially tragic element of human action was the basis for Arendt’s challenge to the modern understanding of politics as sovereignty and its fundamental objective: success. Arendt believed there was something inhuman in the modern obsession with the idea that success defined the fundamental criteria of action. Because of its essential conditioning by speech, the defining characteristic of action can never be the sovereignty of success, but instead non-sovereign political categories such as historical greatness and commitment to the preservation of the common world. This, of course, does not mean that success is not a factor in actors’ deliberations concerning courses of action. But it does imply that success cannot be the fundamental criterion of political judgment, for success can never redeem action. A successful course of action—genocide, for instance—may successfully achieve the short-term intentions of the actors, but it will never be redeemable in speech. The judgment of (authentic) history will inevitably come to view it as despicable. To illustrate this, Arendt often quoted a favorite line from Cato: “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated cause pleased Cato.”¹⁵⁴ What she means by this is that, in the course of history, tragedy and defeat may be as world disclosing and world preserving as any victory. “Man,” she writes,

cannot defend himself against the blows of fate, against the chicanery of the gods, but he can resist them in speech and respond to them, and though the response changes nothing … such words belong to the event as such. If words are of equal rank with the event, if, as is said at the end of Antigone, “great words” answer and requite “great blows struck from on high,” then what happens is itself something great and worthy of remembrance and fame … our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish.¹⁵⁵

If we consider defining political moments of recent memory, it is indeed evident that success or failure is not what defines the significance and meaning of the event itself and its consequences for our world. The election of Barack Obama may have been a moment of success in American race relations, but it was not merely the success of the endeavor that bore its meaning: it was what the event disclosed to and about American politics at that moment. Yet historically, certain moments of defeat in American race relations were at least as world defining: the violence done to the peaceful protesters of the civil rights movement or the assassination of Martin Luther King probably did more to force American politics to consistently recognize the question of race than anything Barack Obama will ever do. This, of course, does not mean that success is not often a necessity; it does, however, mean that success could never be the essential criterion of human agency.

Political Athanatizein

I turn now to how Arendt reintroduced human agency back into historical reflection, a project that centered on reviving political athanatizein. Benjamin Constant famously drew the distinction between the liberty of the moderns and the liberty of the ancients. The liberty of the moderns, perhaps best exemplified by Rawls currently, is a private liberty that politics protects through the guarantee of certain basic rights and liberties and, increasingly, on certain baseline conditions of social equality. Arendt remains the most prominent modern proponent of the liberty of the ancients, which located the arena of free human action not in a private sphere made secure by politics but in the arena of politics itself. According to Arendt, political action had once afforded a much more profound, meaningful, and consequential realm of human freedom than modern private liberty, which, having located freedom in private life, in her view rendered freedom impotent and insignificant and therefore unremarkable.

Many readings of Arendt’s political thought focus on what she calls the “condition of plurality”: her current Wikipedia page (ca. 2015), for instance, characterizes her political thought by pointing to her statement of the “conditio per quam … of all political life”: the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”¹⁵⁶ Though broadly accurate, I argue here that focusing on plurality does not capture the full meaning of what Arendt had in mind by the notion of the political, that the political for her was better described as an articulation of the conditions of political athanatizein. The condition of plurality is based on the fact of the narrative agency of human beings and expresses the fact that the world is filled with a plurality of unique life stories. As we’ve seen, like Heidegger, Arendt believed this narrative ontology of human beings was the primordial source of history: “That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with a beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end.”¹⁵⁷ The deep question this condition poses is how these stories, which in her view are so distinctive that they are literally sui generis,¹⁵⁸ can escape the isolation and solipsism this absolute individualism implies and be related to each other in a way that could afford the possibility of historical immortality. She sought to do this by articulating the activity, action, that humans perform to provide the content of these stories and by defending the ability of a common world and public realm to provide an intersubjective space of reality where actors can enact their life stories before their peers. I argue in the following that only action performed in a public realm, political action, is capable of achieving historical greatness, that is, political athanatizein.

The interpretation of Arendtian political action offered here implicitly takes a position on a point that has been somewhat ambiguous in the literature on Arendt: to wit, whether there could be any kind of action performed in the private realm, that is, nonpolitical action. I believe the notion that Arendt thought action could only take place in the political arena is largely based on a lack of precision in her writing in The Human Condition, imprecisions she clarifies elsewhere. In The Human Condition, Arendt draws a sharp distinction between the public and the private realm. Because of her interest in reasserting the significance of the public realm, she is often thought to have taken a dim view of the private realm. This notion is reinforced by the fact that when she initially discusses the public realm in The Human Condition she seems to identify it with the idea of the “common world.” ¹⁵⁹ The “common world” is the general concept Arendt develops to explain how the absolute plurality of individual “whos” can be related to each other. The common world, in Arendt’s words, has the power “to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.”¹⁶⁰ Thus, if the common world is indeed identical to the public realm, then it seems true that there could be no action in the private sphere. However, there is good reason to believe that this section of the book was either not fully thought through or simply badly written.

To begin with, Arendt is not nearly as contemptuous of the private realm in The Human Condition as is often thought. Her concern, rather, was that the distinction between the public and private realms had become muddled in the modern era, and it was this “social realm” to which she directed her contempt. She believed, in fact, that the private realm was a sacred space withdrawn from the world that humans needed desperately, a realm that sheltered them from the cold light of the public realm, and indeed it was the role of politics to protect this realm as much as it was to protect the public realm.¹⁶¹ She believed one of the tragedies of modern capitalism was the redefining of private property away from the idea of a “privately held place within the world” and toward the idea of capital accumulation.¹⁶² Moreover, in later writings she clearly distinguishes between “the [common] world and its public space,”¹⁶³ and repeatedly indicates the existence of action in the private realm. In her lecture course, “Some Questions Concerning Moral Philosophy,” written a few years after The Human Condition, she explicitly indicates the existence of “nonpolitical action, which does not take place in public.”¹⁶⁴ And even in The Human Condition there are indications suggesting the existence of this kind of action in privately situated settings, such as when she states of “action and speech” that the modern era has “banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private.”¹⁶⁵ Thus, the common world is better understood as including both our public and private relationships. While it is probably the case that truly private action is impossible—since action necessarily must be performed with and before others—it is likely that most action is of a kind of quasi-public nature. Most of our relationships probably involve some kind of informal public realm or space of appearance.¹⁶⁶ In “Introduction into Politics,” Arendt states that “wherever human beings come together—be it in private or social, be it in public or politically—a space is generated that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another.… Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-between space that all human affairs are conducted.”¹⁶⁷

This is most clearly evident in how Arendt describes the idea of a “space of appearance.” Arendt identifies a space of appearance with reality as such: a space between the actors where phenomena can intersubjectively appear to them.¹⁶⁸ This space of appearance is a broad phenomenon and can appear wherever people act and speak together: “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.… Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.”¹⁶⁹ The space of appearance is therefore not necessarily a formal phenomenon, but instead “its true space lies between people living together for this purpose [of acting and speaking together], no matter where they happen to be.… Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere.”¹⁷⁰ Thus, any formally instituted public realm is based on a more original, primordial, and informal public realm that precedes it and enables its continuation in the world. In other words, while action in the public arena is the raison d’être of politics, other less elevated and significant forms of action can occur in private relationships characterized by more informal spaces of appearance.

The language Arendt uses can often be overly mysterious, but the idea of a space of appearance simply seems to be her way of capturing the nature of relationships. The notion of a space of appearance indicates that relationships can exist among an indeterminate number of individuals: it can arise between two friends, in a family, a group (churches, companies, political movements), or even a nation. Something arises between the individuals involved in any kind of relationship, something they never fully control, that separates and relates them to each other. A space of appearance is incredibly significant to human beings because action can only appear, and therefore exist, within it. The significant events of our lives only have meaning if there are other people who occupy a common space of appearance with us, who have a relationship to us, who can see and appreciate those events. Action needs a space of appearance to illuminate it; it provides a kind of intersubjectively constituted spotlight for our actions.¹⁷¹ At the same time, Arendt also argues that only action can bring a space of appearance into being: “Action, moreover, no matter what its specific content, always establishes relationships.”¹⁷² Thus, relationships are somehow the result of action, but also the only place where action can occur.¹⁷³ There seems therefore to be a kind of reciprocal and dynamic causality to the relationship between action and the space of appearance, where each brings the other into being.

There are therefore a number of essential distinctions that need to be recognized when coming to terms with what Arendt means by the common world. The common world as a whole is an amalgam of two human conditions. The first is the web of human relationships that is almost infinite in its relativity and instability and is constituted by an almost endless variety of shifting and multidimensional relationships or “spaces of appearance.” The second is the human artifice: our laws, institutions, technology, scientific and historical documentation and literature, and works of art that provide a civilizing bulwark against natural necessity and without which human life descends into savagery.¹⁷⁴ Contra the simplistic view sometimes attributed to her, work for Arendt entails much more meaningful endeavors than is typically implied by the mundane idea of a “production process.” It is difficult to overstate the value Arendt attributes to these products of work: these “islands of stability” are literally the primordial wellspring of human civilization. Action, though guided by goals and intentions, could never properly be thought predictable, and even when careful plans are worked out they quickly become irrelevant, since action never produces a finished product but rather sets off a chain of events in the web of human relationships. One might think of the endless shifting alliances in the television show Survivor as an example of what would become of our culture without the human artifice: human culture with no products of work to stabilize it quickly degrades into tribalism and endless infighting.

Arendt’s “Common World”

	Web of Human Relationships	Human Artifice
Private Realm	Family, friends, etc.	Homes, possessions, etc.
Public Realm	Political actors and citizens	Laws and institutions, historical documentation, public infrastructure

Arendt’s sharp distinction between the public and the private has been attacked from the standpoint of social justice in variety of ways; in particular, feminist critics point out that the assertion of a private sphere has been used as a cloak for various kinds of barbaric practices and domestic abuse.¹⁷⁵ Essential as the public realm is to the political activities of judging and acting, Arendt also recognized the political relevance of the private realm. This political relevance comes from another faculty involved in historical reflection: the faculty of thought, which, as we will see later, Arendt insists can only be performed in private, in withdrawal from our worldly entanglements. This emphasis on freedom of thought partly explains her determination to maintain the distinction between the two realms. While it is arguably true that Arendt did not take these objections seriously enough, one doubts she would have altered her view significantly. She believed that how and where various communities draw the distinction between the public and private is a matter those communities’ own citizens should judge over.¹⁷⁶ But perhaps even more significant, one thing her research on totalitarianism appeared to have taught her was that this distinction must be drawn: while feminist critics in particular level a powerful critique, one must wonder if the idea that “the personal is political” is a dangerously slippery slope.

There is no doubt, however, that Arendt saw the revival of an authentic public realm to be the most urgent purpose of her work. While the private realm seems to be constituted by a wide variety of different informal relationships or spaces of appearance, the public realm is a formally articulated and institutionalized space of appearance, giving unusual stability and endurance to that space.¹⁷⁷ While The Human Condition generally focused on the Greeks’ experience of their public realm, how the public realm is organized and articulated often differs from society to society. In “Introduction into Politics,” the book she attempted to write in 1958–1959 about the broad relationship between thought and action, Arendt outlined a number of forms the public realm can take. Her ideal is what she calls a “political public realm.”¹⁷⁸ As Chapter 2 will discuss in more depth, Arendt believed there were three original instances of political public realms: the ancient Greeks, the republican Romans, and (for brief periods) modern revolutionary actors. These public realms were “political” because their citizens were primordially involved in the maintenance of their public realms. Historically, however, most public realms have been nonpolitical public realms. The church in the Christian era afforded a kind of public realm, though because of Christian theology it was a much less authentically political space.¹⁷⁹ The same was true for the early modern era of emerging capitalist expansion, which found its own public realm in the exchange market.¹⁸⁰ As we will see later, the public realm of the modern world is generally what Arendt calls the social realm. The social realm is a form of public realm where the distinction between the public and the private has lost its meaning, and, as a result, many of the activities that historically were thought to belong in the private realm have been allowed into the public realm.¹⁸¹ The social realm is a space of appearance, no doubt, but one that has lost the original political capacity to memorialize and disclose the “who” of the actors and instead has become a place of conformity, hypocrisy, and corruption.¹⁸²

While clearly most action thus probably occurs in private life, Arendt understood political action to be the highest kind of action. The most direct and unequivocal definition of political action she ever gave came at the conclusion of her 1963 lecture course “Introduction into Politics,” where she stated simply that “action [is] political if performed in the public realm.”¹⁸³ What is so special about performing action in the public realm? In “What Is Freedom?” she tells us: “[The public realm] is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about and remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.”¹⁸⁴ In other words, what makes the public realm special is that only by acting within it is it possible to achieve the kind of athanatizein specific to politics: the immortalization of history.

However, it seems clear that this was only a partial definition. Merely to act on the public stage is not enough to achieve historical greatness: it also matters what one achieves and why. Understanding how and why this is can clarify the problem with more aesthetic interpretations of Arendtian political action discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The problem that seems to infect these interpretations is that they seem determined to assume a strict dichotomy between activities that are telos and a-telos, between an activity performed for some higher goal or purpose and an activity that was an end in itself. Of course, this is to some extent understandable: Arendt, after all, had clearly distinguished between work, which operates under conditions of means and ends, and action, which has no finished product, but is an end in itself. Thus, the logic runs that any instrumental or teleological activity occurring in politics must, according to Arendt, have an activity outside it that “redeems” it, and this redeeming activity is what true political action must therefore be. All elements of instrumentality should thus be kept out of political activity. The implication seems to be that most of what we consider to be the concrete concerns of politics, such as public policy or social justice, must be relegated merely to administration, so that politics can be free to engage in a deliberative and performative-disclosive activity of individual identity. This dichotomous understanding of the relationship between action and instrumentality is based on the fundamental assumption that there are only two, mutually exclusive ways of conceiving of activities, that is, they are either telos or a-telos.

However, it is possible there is a third option, an option suggested by none other than Plato himself. At the beginning of book 2 of the Republic, Plato proposes a sophisticated, threefold division of human goods.¹⁸⁵ He has Glaucon suggest that there are things that are good for their own sake, such as joy; things that are only good for their consequences, such as physical training; and things that are both good for their consequences and good for their own sake, one of which, Glaucon suspects, might be justice. This third option, in other words, was an activity that was both telos and a-telos. In essence, I suggest that this distinction between action and work should be understood not on a logical level but instead at an ontological level. Mirroring their dynamic versus instrumental modes of causality, action and work should not necessarily be seen as mutually exclusive activities, but instead could potentially be the very same activity grasped at two distinct ontological levels. Does Arendt ever provide examples of political actions that are ontologically both telos and a-telos? There are in fact a number of such examples, but the clearest might be her acknowledgment, as Patchen Markell has argued elsewhere,¹⁸⁶ that instances of work, which are teleologically governed by means/ends logic and always involving doing violence to something given, can also at the same time be instances of action. In “The Concept of History,” she points out that “insofar as the end product of fabrication is incorporated into the human world … its use and eventual ‘history’ can never be predicted.… This means only that man is never exclusively homo faber, that even the fabricator remains at the same time an acting being.”¹⁸⁷ The most well-known instance of this is given in The Human Condition, when she pointed to the invention of the telescope, clearly an instance of the activity of work, as an exemplary “event”: an action whose unforeseeable consequences established a new state of affairs in the world, altering the Western world irrevocably and ushering in modernity through its initiation of modern science.¹⁸⁸ In other words, I would argue that what Arendtian political action might involve in concrete terms is much broader than has often been assumed. Since fabrication is her fundamental category for dealing with the question of violence, it is then evident that she did not reject all instances of violence as possible instances of political action. After all, she repeatedly points to the French Resistance as an exemplary political action, which obviously involved quite a lot of violent activities,¹⁸⁹ not to mention, as we will see in Chapter 2, the empire-building activities of Romans.

When we understand the special sense in which Arendtian political action is ateleological, the occasional accusation that it is aestheticized or narcissistic evaporates. Arendt continually noted that political action is essentially always concerned with maintaining and preserving the world.¹⁹⁰ In the 1963 “Introduction into Politics” course, she refers to political action as having amor mundi, and writes, “What do I mean by ‘politically minded’? … Very generally, I mean by it to care more for the world, which was before we appeared and which will be after we disappear, than for ourselves, for our immediate interests and for our life.”¹⁹¹ Only political action is capable of changing the world, and it therefore is the only kind of action that is capable of preserving and maintaining the world when necessary.¹⁹² She writes that “the world … is irrevocably delivered up to the ruin of time unless human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to create what is new.… Because the world is made by mortals, it wears out, and because it continuously changes its inhabitants it runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world … it must be constantly set right anew.”¹⁹³ Political action, in other words, has to somehow change the world by beginning new initiatives, and yet it also must affirm and maintain that same world. This is why Arendt argues that politics is never concerned with our individual interests: to act politically is always to act for the sake of a common world that separates and relates the individual actors within it, always with the goal of preserving and affirming that world while also changing it in the hope that our action will leave behind a mark of some kind in that world.

True political actors, then are always acting both for the opportunity to achieve immortality and to maintain and preserve the common world.¹⁹⁴ In Arendt’s view, only action geared toward caring for the world was action worthy of political athanatizein. Some of Arendt’s most articulate discussions of this dual-natured sense of the ateleology of political action come in a 1955 set of lectures on Machiavelli. Given that these lectures occur during the same time she was researching The Human Condition and anticipate many themes discussed in later essays such as “What Is Freedom?” we can be sure that the ideas in the Machiavelli lectures were foundational for her more apparently “aesthetic” account of political action in The Human Condition. Consider this passage:

[The] greatness of this world is constituted through virtù and fortuna. Fortuna is a constellation in the world which is visible only for virtù; fortuna is the appearing of the world, the shining up of the world, the smiling of the world. It invites man to show his excellence.… World and man are bound together like man and wife: action fits man into the world like eyes fit us to see the sun.… Action shows the world’s fortuna and man’s virtù at one and the same time.¹⁹⁵