Action and Appearance

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PHansen_FM_Final.indd ii 3/10/2011 10:58:51 AM
 ACTION AND
APPEARANCE
Ethics and the Politics of Writing
in Hannah Arendt
by
Anna Yeatman
Phillip Hansen
Magdalena Zolkos
Charles Barbour

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 2011

The Continuum International Publishing Group

80 Maiden Lane, New York NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

© Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos and Charles Barbour, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Action and appearance : ethics and the politics of writing in Hannah Arendt / edited by
Anna Yeatman . . . et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-8680-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-4411-0173-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975–Political and social views. 2. Political science–Philosophy.
I. Yeatman, Anna. II. Title.

JC251.A74A818 2011
320.5–dc22
2010031502

EISBN: 978-1-4411-3031-0

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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 Contents

Contributors vii
Acknowledgements x

Chapter 1 Action and Appearance: An Introduction 1

Charles Barbour and Magdalena Zolkos
Chapter 2 Recalling Arendt on Thinking 10
Robert Burch
Chapter 3 Politics and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt 25
Michael Janover
Chapter 4 The Space of Appearance and the Space of Truth 39
Andrew Brennan and Jeff Malpas
Chapter 5 Daimon Appearances and the Heideggerian Influence in Arendt’s
Account of Political Action 53
Trevor Tchir
Chapter 6 Individuality and Politics: Thinking with and
beyond Hannah Arendt 69
Anna Yeatman
Chapter 7 The Saving Power of Social Action: Arendt between Weber and
Foucault 87
Thomas M. Kemple
Chapter 8 On Action: The Appearance of the Law 103
Peg Birmingham
Chapter 9 Ethics and the Vocation of Politics 117
Steve Buckler
Chapter 10 Individual Responsibility and Political Authority: Hannah Arendt
at the Intersection of Moral and Political Philosophy 134
Phillip Hansen

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 VI CONTENTS

Chapter 11 The Miraculous Power of Forgiveness and the Promise 150

Marguerite La Caze
Chapter 12 Hannah Arendt’s ‘Comedy’: Antisemitism as Synecdoche
in The Origins of Totalitarianism 166
Karyn Ball
Chapter 13 ‘Never Seek to Tell Thy Love’: Hannah Arendt and the Secret 184
Charles Barbour
Chapter 14 Arendt’s Metamorphic Figurations in ‘The Jew as Pariah’ 197
Magdalena Zolkos

Index 215

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 Contributors

Karyn Ball is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studies specializing in

literary and cultural theory at the University of Alberta. Her articles have appeared
in Cultural Critique, Women in German Yearbook, Research in Political Economy,
Differences and English Studies in Canada. She guest-edited a special issue of Cultural
Critique on ‘Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects’ (2000) and a special issue of
Parallax (2005) on the concept of ‘visceral reason’. She also co-edited an issue of
Cultural Critique on ‘Cultures of Finance’ (2007) with Susanne Soederberg of Queen’s
University. Recent publications include ‘Primal Revenge and Other Anthropomorphic
Projections for Literary History’, New Literary History 39 (2008), ‘Melancholy in the
Humanities: Lamenting the “Ruins” of Academic Time between Bill Readings and
Augustine’,Alif 29 (2009), an edited collection entitled Traumatizing Theory: The
Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (Other Press, 2007) and
Disciplining the Holocaust (State University of New York Press, 2008).

Charles Barbour is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, and

a member of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy. Along with a number of
book chapters, he has published in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society,
Educational Philosophy and Theory, The Journal of Classical Sociology, Philosophy
and Social Criticism, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Telos and Parallax.

Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. She is

the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (Indiana University Press, 2006)
and co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and
Politics (Koros 1995). She teaches and conducts research in the areas of political
thought, ethics and feminist theory. She is particularly interested in modern and
contemporary political thought, emphasizing the texts of Hobbes, Rousseau, Arendt,
Heidegger, Kristeva and Foucault. She is currently working on a manuscript tenta-
tively titled ‘A Lying World Order: Deception as a Philosophical and Political
Problem’.

Andrew Brennan was professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Western
Australia from 1992 until 2006, when he moved to La Trobe University, Melbourne,

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 VIII CONTRIBUTORS

to take over the chair of philosophy there. In the last decade, he has also served
as visiting professor at the University of Oslo and the City University of Hong
Kong. His recent co-authored books have been on Logic (Continuum, 2005) and
Understanding Environmental Philosophy (Acumen, 2010). As well as writing on eth-
ics and environmental policy, he has also recently published work on comparative
history and the philosophy of science.

Steve Buckler teaches political theory in the Department of Political Science and
International Studies at the University of Birmingham, U.K. He has published widely
in the areas of modern political theory, political ethics and the relationship between
theory, ideology and political practice. He is co-editor of the European Journal of
Political Theory.

Robert Burch is Associate Professor and former Acting Chair in the Department
of Philosophy, University of Alberta. Edmonton (Canada). He is the editor (with
M. Verdicchio) of Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing/Rhythm/History
(Continuum, 2002), and has published articles and reviews on a wide range of topics
and figures in Continental philosophy from Kant to the present.

Phillip Hansen is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Regina,

Regina, Saskatchewan. He is the author of Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and
Citizenship (Stanford University Press 1993), Taxing Illusions: Taxation, Democracy
and Embedded Political Theory (Fernwood 2003), and, with Harold Chorney, Toward
a Humanist Political Economy (Black Rose, 1992). He has published journal articles
in Contemporary Political Theory; Studies in Political Economy; The Canadian Review
of Sociology and Anthropology and The Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory.

Michael Janover teaches political theory and the history of political thought in the
School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. His current
research focuses on images and interpretations of the Athenian polis in the work of
Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Thomas M. Kemple is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British

Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Since the publication of his Reading Marx Writing:
Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (Stanford, 1995), his work on the inter-
sections of classical and contemporary social theory has appeared in Theory, Culture
& Society, Telos, Journal of Classical Sociology, Max Weber Studies, and Marxism
Today. He is currently working on a study of Georg Simmel’s sociological metaphys-
ics and completing a book manuscript titled ‘Voicing Weber: Sociological Allegory
and the Vocations of Modernity’.

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 CONTRIBUTORS IX

Marguerite La Caze is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of

Queensland. She has research interests and numerous publications in European phi-
losophy, especially on the work of Kant, Arendt, Sartre and Derrida, and feminist
philosophy, particularly the work of Beauvoir, Michèle Le Dœuff, Iris Marion Young
and Luce Irigaray. Her publications include The Analytic Imaginary (Cornell, 2002)
and Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (Ashgate,
2003) , as well as articles in Hypatia, Philosophy Today, Political Theory, Contemporary
Political Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism and other journals and book
collections.

Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at the
University of Tasmania, Tasmania, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe
University, Victoria, Australia. Among recent works, he is the author of Heidegger’s
Topology (2006) and co-editor of Perspectives on Human Dignity (2006) and
Consequences of Hermeneutics (2010).

Trevor Tchir is a lecturer in Political Theory and Canadian Politics at the University
of Alberta. He is co-editor of Declensions of the Self: A Bestiary of Modernity (CSP,
2008), and is currently preparing a monograph on Hannah Arendt’s theory of politi-
cal action. His past research focused on Charles Taylor’s Best Account Principle and
his distinction between designative and expressive language.

Anna Yeatman took up appointment as professor and foundation director of the

Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney in
mid-2008. Before this she was a Canada Research Chair in Political Science at the
University of Alberta for five years, prior to which she was the Chair of Sociology at
Macquarie University for ten years. An interdisciplinary political theorist, Anna
engages in both political theory and its applications. Her book Individualization and
the Delivery of Welfare Services was published by Palgrave in 2009. Her current
research project is a set of essays on individuality and politics.

Magdalena Zolkos is Research Fellow in Political Theory at the Centre for Citizenship
and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney. She is the author of Reconciling
Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the
Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kértesz (New York: Continuum, 2010). Her current
research is focused on the post-foundational theorizing of political community,
solidarity and affect.

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 Acknowledgements

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

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 CHAPTER 1

Action and Appearance: An Introduction

Charles Barbour and Magdalena Zolkos

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

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 2 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ACTION AND APPEARANCE: AN INTRODUCTION 3

It would be difficult to discuss Arendt’s work for any length of time, or with any
sincerity, without suspecting that, strangely or enigmatically, her thought and her
concepts have a bearing on the structure and the operation of that very discussion.
We cannot speak publicly about Arendt’s theory of action, for example, without won-
dering whether or not, in doing so, we are acting in her sense. We cannot seek to
explain what she means by a ‘who’ without asking ourselves whether or not, in that
very act of explanation, we are revealing our ‘who-ness’, or disclosing who we are to
our immediate interlocutors. Thus there is a sense in which Arendt provides her own
commentary on every commentary on her, or a sense in which she reads us even as
we read her, and every act of interpretation also animates the text. Perhaps this is the
experience that, since medieval times, hermeneuts have described as the ‘spirit’
rather than the ‘letter’ of the text – or, to recall Arendt’s version of the same distinc-
tion, the ‘living spirit’ as opposed to the ‘dead letter’. In any case, it is the spirit in
which these essays are presented here, and the one through which, by appearing
in this form, their authors seek to act.

***

Robert Burch begins his contribution to Action and Appearance, as well as the book
as a whole, by calling our attention to the paradoxical mixture of hesitancy and
urgency that accompanied Arendt’s preparation for her Gifford Lectures on “The
Life of the Mind” – the hesitancy of someone who was suspicious of philosophy, or at
least uncomfortable in the role of ‘professional thinker’, but the urgency of one who
feared a decline in our ability to think, and who believed that nothing other than
thought could prevent the spread of the worst evil imaginable. Placing in brackets the
familiar question of the relationship between theory and practice, and refusing to
provide easy instrumental applications for her approach, Arendt risked a rare reflec-
tion on what Burch calls ‘the thinking experience itself’, or a kind of phenomenology
of thought as such. Here, Burch suggests, The Life of the Mind is in many ways an
example of what it states, or an example of what thought might look like in the wake
of metaphysics and tradition, and the peculiar combination of hesitancy and urgency
found in The Life of the Mind is strangely characteristic of the life of the mind.
What Burch implies, Janover makes explicit: Arendt’s ‘thinking’ – and especially
her thinking about ‘the world’ – is ‘set between philosophical discourse and artistic
evocation’.It entails ‘an element’ of what, in a different context, Adorno called ‘das
Gedichtete’ or ‘the poetized’. For Arendt, as we already mentioned above, a world
both relates and separates us. It brings us together even as it holds us apart. In this
sense, and as Janover explains, a world can consist of objects or images, nature or
culture, facts or values. Wherever things come in-between humans, wherever things
hold our common interest (in the precise etymological sense of Inter-esse), there is a
world. Conversely, where such things disappear, where humans are pushed so far
apart or so close together that nothing can properly be said to interest them, the

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 4 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

world disappears as well. We become, as Arendt liked to say, ‘worldless’. We experi-

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

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 ACTION AND APPEARANCE: AN INTRODUCTION 5

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

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 6 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ACTION AND APPEARANCE: AN INTRODUCTION 7

we develop a ‘richer’ understanding of both. What defines the mutual orientation of

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

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 8 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

figurations in that the Origins become testimony to Arendt’s repeated engagements

in ‘ “immanentist” identification with her object’.
In his chapter, Barbour explores the category of secrecy across a wide range of
Arendt’s texts, and the texts to which she refers. Like Ball, he draws the reader’s atten-
tion to the complexities of the rhetorical performances in Arendt’s writing, and
approaches his task from a post-structuralist linguistic perspective. Organizing
his interpretation around a quotation from William Blake’s poem ‘Love’s Secret’ (one
that Arendt surreptitiously, or secretively, incorporates into her reflections on the
non-public character of love in The Human Condition), Barbour proposes that the
secret both exceeds and makes possible Arendt’s familiar distinction between private
and public. It is needed for both, Barbour states, but it is contained by neither.
Moreover, Barbour proposes that, inasmuch as she is a writer, Arendt cannot help but
acknowledge this same point, albeit in the margins of her texts, and the shadows of
her own more recognized, canonized assertions. For all writing traverses the
borders between private and public life, and involves a secrecy that remains both
irreducible and absolute.
Zolkos concludes Action and Appearance with an analysis of the figure of the
‘conscious pariah’ in Arendt’s work – a term Arendt borrowed from Max Weber and
Bernard Lazare, and that came to occupy a salient presence in many of her writings.
According to Zolkos, Arendt’s texts on the pariah bring together her preoccupations
with the political peripherality of Jewish populations in modern European states and
some of the key concepts of her political theory: rebellion, political action and politi-
cal equality. While contemporary Arendtian scholarship has offered a thorough
investigation of the historical and philosophical aspects of her pariah construct,
Zolkos argues that its rhetorical and figurative dimensions have been neglected. To
remedy this situation, Zolkos reads Arendt’s essay ‘The Jew as Pariah’ as a kind of
allegory. More specifically, she suggests that Arendt allegorizes the conscious pariah
as a subject that undergoes metamorphic transformation. Here, metamorphosis
codes the impossibility of containment – of a body within its boundaries, or an
appearance within its species. It also brings about transformative and emancipative
political possibilities. This reading of Arendt’s pariah concept redefines political
marginality, refuting a spatial idiom of location (being far away from the centre) in
favour of a transformative movement, and a public display of metamorphic capaci-
ties against interpellations and institutionalizations of inequality.

***

Anyone who intends to add another volume to the already considerable secondary
literature on Hannah Arendt risks being accused of redundancy. Could there really
be that much more to say about her work or her career? Are we all not, by now, well
versed in her basic themes and insights, and aware of the possibilities and the limits
inherent to her approach? There is no reason not to address these questions head on.
Every contributor to Action and Appearance clearly believes, not only that Arendt’s

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 ACTION AND APPEARANCE: AN INTRODUCTION 9

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

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

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 CHAPTER 2

Recalling Arendt on Thinking

Robert Burch

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

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 RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING 11

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

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 12 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING 13

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

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 14 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

possessed a representative significance in reality which only needed some purifica-

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

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 RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING 15

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

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

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 16 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING 17

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

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 18 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING 19

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

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 20 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING 21

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

Yet, the story to which Arendt appeals is not just any pearl of wisdom, but a story
about the very origin of the world ‘philosopher’ (philosophos), which in the ‘process
of crystallization’ may reveal something ‘rich and strange’ about the essence and
origin of philosophy itself. There is more than one version of the story, but in her
Gifford Lectures Arendt quotes Diogenes Laertius:

When Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked Pythagoras who he was, he said, ‘a philosopher’
[philosophos] and that he compared life to the Great Games, where some went to compete
for the prize and others went with wares to sell, but the best went as spectators [theatai];
for similarly, in life, the slavish hunt for fame [doxa] and gain [pleonexia], the philosopher
for truth. (1925: II. 327–8)

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

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 22 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 RECALLING ARENDT ON THINKING 23

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

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 CHAPTER 3

Politics and Worldliness in the Thought of

Hannah Arendt

Michael Janover

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

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

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 26 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 POLITICS AND WORLDLINESS IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT 27

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

Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural sur-
roundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is
meant to outlast and to transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.
(Arendt 1970: 7)

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

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 28 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

labor again is ceaseless. Work, on the other hand, begins in the planning or the first
step of creation of an article of use or of beauty, and ends in the completion of the
act of fabrication. In The Human Condition, her most systematic book and an attempt
at providing a phenomenology of the three central human activities of labor, work
and action, Arendt points out that work is unique in this creation to an end. It lends
to the craftsman, man as homo faber, a proximity to our imaginings of divine crea-
tion through the masterfulness in work that neither laborers nor actors can share in
their pursuits.

To have a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end is the mark of fabrication . . .
Labour caught in the cyclical movement of the body’s life process has neither a beginning
nor an end. Action, though it may have a definite beginning never . . . has a predictable
end. (Arendt 1970: 144)

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

This worldlessness which the Jewish people suffered in being dispersed and which – as
with all peoples who are pariahs – generated a special warmth among those who belonged,
changed when the state of Israel was founded. (Arendt 1994: 17)

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

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 POLITICS AND WORLDLINESS IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT 29

both historically and personally upon the conditions of the German Jews before 1933.
She remarks that ‘the specifically Jewish humanity signified by their worldlessness
was something very beautiful’ (Arendt: 1994, 17).3 Beautiful, and profoundly sad;
for Arendt, the beauty and warmth of that fraternal humanity is now a haunting
memory of an irrecoverable epoch and a moment of melancholic remembrance for a
people (her own people) almost entirely destroyed though the genocide of the Nazis.
But she refuses to romanticize the memory of the specific humanity and intimacy of
pariahdom. What she called the ‘great privilege of pariah peoples’ is itself finally
lamentable in her account. It is a consoling privilege but one (too) dearly paid for
by way of the ‘radical loss of the world’ that underlies it (Arendt 1973: 21).
Worldlessness thus appears to do double duty, carrying two meanings in
Arendt’s writings. On the one side it refers to the loss of sensibility or experience of
the built world, the world of fabricated things. Insofar as Arendt defines worldliness
as simply ‘the capacity to fabricate and create a world’ (Arendt 1977: 209), then work
and worldliness tend to run together: ‘The human condition of work is worldliness’
(Arendt: 1970, 7). Worldlessness is then the loss of the capacity or the occasion to
work in the mode of fabrication or craft. Or, viewed from the side of our living in
the world, worldlessness consists of a lost connection to the durable, lasting quality
of things, an alienation from their ‘tangible worldly realities’ (Arendt 1977: 208).
In Arendt’s eyes, works of art are ‘the most intensely worldly of all tangible things’
because they can achieve a shining permanence across the ages suggesting the glori-
ous possibility of a kind of immortality opened up by mortal, human hands (Arendt
1970: 167). In her conception of art’s radiant permanence we might hear echoes of
Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’.
Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in
force.

To be a work means to set up a world . . . The world is not the mere collection of the count-
able or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a
merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of given things. The
world worlds and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which
we believe ourselves to be at home. (Heidegger 2001: 43; Heidegger’s emphasis)

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

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 30 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

somewhat intangible quality’ (Arendt 1970: 183). In the philosophical anthropology

that Arendt elaborates in The Human Condition, labor is strictly worldless (Arendt
1970: 115, 118).4 Work builds a world of things, but only action and speech can dis-
close the world, by constituting the shared space of meanings, memories and stories.
It is this human world of speech and action that Arendt is most concerned can dwin-
dle away under the behavioral impact and regularisation of mass societies, or yet
more fearfully may be deliberately expunged by totalitarian regimes.
Her account of mass society argues that there is a predominance of structure over
agency and of automatic processes over spontaneous or deliberate action in late
modernity. Arendt describes the emergence of societies governed by laws, processes
and forces that exceed or escape the grasp of their inhabitants, either as matters of
understanding or as items susceptible to consistent and predictable influence by
human actions and powers. In these societies – the technological societies of late
modernity that more and more become the norm – people live, according to Arendt,
‘without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, [and they
live] either . . . in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass”
(Arendt 1977: 89–90).
Arendt repeats the same phrasing on numerous occasions in her accounts of
world alienation. It is always a matter of losing, or losing touch with, the simultane-
ous relation to and separation from other people. Whether the balance swings to the
pole of anomic individualism and compulsive disaggregation from other people, or
to compacted crowds, anxiety outside of the group and generalized conformism, the
result is the same loss of capacity to act and to judge for oneself and in relation to
others.

To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who
have it in common . . . the world like every in-between, relates and separates men at the
same time.
The public realm as the common world gathers us together and yet prevents our fall-
ing over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the
number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between
them has lost its power to gather them together to relate and to separate them. (Arendt
1970: 52–3)

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

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 POLITICS AND WORLDLINESS IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT 31

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

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 32 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

for an Archimedean point from which men can ‘handle nature from a point outside
the earth’ (Arendt 1970: 262) and with Descartes’s universal doubt, itself symbolic of
the modern loss of the self-evidence of reason and the senses (Arendt 1970: 275–76).
But ‘the modern world’, by contrast, ‘was born with the first atomic explosions’
(Arendt 1970: 6). It dates back to the moment, in the twentieth century, when human
beings intervened in the constituents of matter, unlocking hitherto unimagined
energies and forces.
This importation of cosmic processes into nature Arendt often calls ‘acting into
nature’ (Arendt 1970: 231; 1977: 61–2), a phrase with which she suggests both the
godlike powers that mankind takes on in its delving into the fundamental nuclear
processes and the ultimate unpredictability of such powers and interventions. It is
notable that when writing of human beings acting into nature, through techno-
scientific processes, Arendt emphasizes the hazardous unpredictability, the risky
uncertainty, of action, whereas when writing of action as the quintessential political
faculty, unpredictability is twinned, and largely subordinated, to the creative sponta-
neity of action. Her affirmation of the human capacity for action is really an affirm-
ing of action joined to speech. At the outset of her most sustained discussion of action
in The Human Condition, Arendt argues that speech and action are necessarily inter-
twined. Together they reveal the uniqueness of individual human personality within
the plurality of humanity:

Without the accompaniment of speech . . . action would not only lose its revelatory
character, but, by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men
but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incompre-
hensible. (Arendt 1970: 178)

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

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 POLITICS AND WORLDLINESS IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT 33

thinking is replaced by the accumulation of know-how. Action as the activity that

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

[A]utomatism is inherent in all processes no matter what their origin might be . . . It is in

the nature of automatic processes to which man is subject, but against which he can assert
himself through action, that they can only spell ruin to human life. (Arendt 1977: 168)

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

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 34 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the
force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontane-
ous human action. (Arendt 1972: 465)

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 POLITICS AND WORLDLINESS IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT 35

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

In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elemen-
tary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world,
capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time. (Arendt 1972: 477)

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

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 36 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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

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 POLITICS AND WORLDLINESS IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT 37

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

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

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 38 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 CHAPTER 4

The Space of Appearance and the Space of Truth

Andrew Brennan and Jeff Malpas

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

Introduction: Arendt and Philosophy

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

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 40 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

Eternity and Change

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

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 THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND THE SPACE OF TRUTH 41

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

Process and Truth

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

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 42 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

thinking in that work and elsewhere. The shift in relation to truth parallels the dif-
ference just noted between some ancient approaches to the question of change and
some early modern ones. If the ultimate truth of the world is something stable and
changeless, then that truth is best found when the thinker’s mind also enters a state
of stability and rest. So stillness – for Plato and the medieval schoolmen – is indis-
pensable for coming at the truth (Arendt 1998: 15). Once found, the truth reveals
something changeless and eternal, not some fictionalized unity, not some imagined
organization, but something forever there, behind the changing seasons and flux of
the world. By the time of Locke and Hume, however, all this had changed. For the
flux of the world means that the search for scientific truth resists the contemplative
observational style, but requires active engagement between the scientist and the
matters being studied. That engagement is aided, abetted and even driven by the
technology that emerged in the early modern period as part of the indispensable
apparatus of astronomy, physics, optics and the other rapidly developing sciences of
nature. Arendt puts it like this: ‘The central concept of the two entirely new sciences
of the modern age, natural science no less than historical, is the concept of process,
and the actual human experience underlying it is action’ (Arendt 1998: 232). She goes
on: ‘Only because we are capable of acting, of starting processes of our own, can we
conceive of both nature and history as systems of processes’ (Arendt 1998: 232).
The change from truth conceived as what is eternal and graspable through
stillness and contemplation, to truth understood as itself provisional and in need of
various technologies and activities for its investigation, poses a problem for moder-
nity that spreads from history, the sciences and other areas of experimental human
activity into ethics, politics and the family. The lack of stability and fixity in meta-
physics and science is mirrored in a lack of fixed points in the moral sphere. While
revealed religions in forms such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism provide an
Archimedean point outside of human and planetary life, one that provides a crite-
rion of the ethical, or the moral, that is independent of human agents, the attempt to
provide something stable or certain in secular morality has met with little success.
Having failed to find a definitive secular account of right and wrong, good and bad,
in Kant, Arendt concludes somewhat gloomily:

In the unlikely case that someone should come and tell us that he would prefer Bluebeard
for company, and hence take him as his example, the only thing we could do is to make
sure that he never comes near us. But the likelihood that someone would come and tell us
that he does not mind and that any company will be good enough for him is, I fear, by far
greater. Morally and even politically speaking, this indifference, though common enough,
is the greatest danger. And connected to this, only a bit less dangerous, is another very
common modern phenomenon, the widespread tendency to refuse to judge at all. (Arendt
2003: 146)

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

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 THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND THE SPACE OF TRUTH 43

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

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 44 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

Truth and Communication

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

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 THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND THE SPACE OF TRUTH 45

of the first conception mentioned here, and so as essentially tied to communication

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

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 46 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND THE SPACE OF TRUTH 47

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

The Space of Appearance

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

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 48 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

understanding itself to be linguistically mediated, but always sees language itself

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

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 THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND THE SPACE OF TRUTH 49

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

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 50 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

communicative, remain within a certain form of the ontology of stillness. In this

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

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

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 THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE AND THE SPACE OF TRUTH 51

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

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

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

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 CHAPTER 5

Daimon Appearances and the Heideggerian

Influence in Arendt’s Account of Political Action

Trevor Tchir

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

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 54 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

Action’s Decentered Disclosure of the Who

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

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 DAIMON APPEARANCES AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN INFLUENCE 55

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

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

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

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 DAIMON APPEARANCES AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN INFLUENCE 57

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

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 58 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

to Dasein as self-evident, which is itself a form of concealment. Guignon explains

that epochs of the history of Being are brought about by events that disclose possibili-
ties for a historical people, while concealing others. Humans may fall under the illu-
sion that nothing is hidden, that what appears is the final truth about reality. Nothing
remains a challenge or a new possibility, as the world presents itself like a collection
of items for use, and everything is leveled to the sphere of the familiar. What is
forgotten, in a second-order concealment, is that this epoch actually emerged out of
concealment and that it itself conceals other human possibilities (Guignon 2006: 19).
The self-evidence of tradition blocks access to its own sources, so that Dasein
cannot go back and make them its own through what Arendt would call an act of
augmentation. For Arendt, a disclosive deed serves to undo an order of forgetfulness.
It breaks through the familiar and reveals new historical possibilities or augments
possibilities that have lain dormant.
Heidegger explains the daimon in the context of the Greek experience of man’s
ecstatic or decentered role in the unconcealment of Being. Man is eudaimon if he is
properly attuned to Being. The divine, or daimon, looks out into the ordinary, points
and gives signs to man (Heidegger 1992: 117). It makes a claim on man as the bearer
of logos and mythos, as he who is historically destined to help clear the way for Being
to appear: “Where the daimonion, the divine which enters into unconcealedness, the
uncanny, must be said explicitly, there the saying is legend, a mythos” (117). Arendt’s
references to the daimon also portray the who as an ecstatic discloser of Being or
transcendence. This is apparent especially if we read her account of action along with
the Myth of Er, which was, for Heidegger, a primordial myth, one of the central leg-
ends of the Occidental tradition.
The myth of Er is told in the final chapter of Plato’s Republic. It relates what
becomes of souls between one life and the next, and the relative roles that necessity
and choice play in determining man’s destiny. According to the myth, souls spend
ten times the length of their last human life in the underworld or in the heavens,
where they receive punishment or reward for their deeds. Then souls return to a
meadow where they encounter the three Fates, the daughters of Necessity: Lachesis
(who sings of the past), Clotho (who sings of the present), and Atropos (who sings of
the future). Lachesis throws lots into the crowd of souls, determining the order in
which each then chooses from a collection of sample lives. An intermediary declares:

No deity will be assigned to you: you will pick your own deities. The order of gaining
tokens decides the order of choosing lives, which will be irrevocably yours. Goodness
makes its own rules: each of you will be good to the extent that you value it. Responsibility
lies with the chooser, not with God. (Plato 1998: 375)

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

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 DAIMON APPEARANCES AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN INFLUENCE 59

Necessity, thus fixing their chosen destinies. The souls then travel to the Plain of
Oblivion, or Lethe. Here they camp by the River of Neglect (or Carelessness), from
which they are all required to drink a certain amount, before being thrown back to
Earth, like shooting stars, to be born again.
This myth serves to illuminate many dimensions of Arendt’s account of disclosive
action. Here, the daimon is described as the soul’s birth attendant, a connection to
the Arendtian phenomenon of natality and beginning. Further, it articulates one’s
fateful ‘thrownness’ into a situational context of action, the impossibility of fully
controlling who one discloses. In the story, the order of tokens is assigned from with-
out. But, on the other hand, the souls choose their own accompanying daimon. There
is a degree of self-election after the order of choice is assigned. One can decide how
one will act given one’s situation. Thus, the myth expresses the essential contradic-
tion between thrownness and freedom at the root of disclosive action, as Arendt
describes it. We may read the myth of Er as an account of Heidegger’s uncanny call
of Being coming from both inside and outside the actor. This call is to act and speak
in ways that reveal truth, that undo the forgetfulness imposed, according to the
myth, on the Plain of Lethe.

Aristotelian Praxis and Poiesis, Phronesis and Techne

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

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finished work, is no longer the object of poiesis. Since the finished ergon is the telos
of poiesis, the telos also resides outside of the maker, once the activity of poiesis is
complete. Techne possesses the ergon as an object of its mode of aletheia only as long
as the ergon is not yet finished; techne is only concerned with beings insofar as they
are in the process of becoming. When it is finished, the ergon escapes the dominion
of techne and becomes the object of use. As Taminiaux suggests, Aristotle sees poiesis
as inferior to praxis partly because, once realized, the end of poiesis becomes a mere
means relative to other ends (1997: 37). The ergon has a relation to something else,
not an end in itself, but for further use. In techne the arche is, in a sense, not available
(Heidegger 1997: 15, 28–29).
The Heideggerian and Arendtian difference between what and who comes
directly from the Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis, as Taminiaux
explains:

Poiesis aims at a product that is external to it, in which it reaches its term, and shares its
reproducibility with those general aptitudes required to produce it. Praxis has no external
product that may be generalized. What action introduces into the world is the uniqueness
of someone: not the initiative he or she has of making something, but the initiative open to
the individual for being somebody. (1997: 86)

Dasein usually understands Being in an improper mode, according to everyday

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

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 DAIMON APPEARANCES AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN INFLUENCE 61

well-known idea of the self-contained dignity of the performative disclosure, action

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

Authentic Dasein and Doxai

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

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 62 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 DAIMON APPEARANCES AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN INFLUENCE 63

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

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

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 DAIMON APPEARANCES AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN INFLUENCE 65

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

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

Performing the Two-In-One

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

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 DAIMON APPEARANCES AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN INFLUENCE 67

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

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

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 68 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 CHAPTER 6

Individuality and Politics: Thinking with and

beyond Hannah Arendt

Anna Yeatman

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

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

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 70 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 71

activity of thinking (Taminiaux 1997: 47), an intentional turning away from human
plurality.2 Arendt agrees that the activity of thinking requires a human being to
withdraw from immersion in worldly practice and relationships – thereby creating a
space within which to think undisturbed by worldly ties – but not only does she insist
that such withdrawal is only relative and partial, she refuses to accept the proposition
that it is in the process of inner retreat that a person finds his own true being, his
individuality.
Thus Arendt refuses to ground the worldly appearance of individuality in some-
thing that is said to already inhere within the individual. While this secures her
ability to offer an account of individuality, there is also something defensive about
her refusal to engage with psychoanalytic thinking about the self. Arendt insists on
the chaotic darkness of one’s inner life, an unintelligibility that deserves protection,
for it is this that harbors the unpredictability and spontaneity of individuality.
Disclosure or appearance is integrally tied to what such disclosure hides. Arendt is
closer than she may have wished to psychoanalysis, in a statement such as this:

I shall now focus more closely on the principle of presence in absence and absence in
presence, a concept that lies at the heart of the Freudian conception of the dialectically
constituted/decentered subject. This principle subtends the dialectical movement between
mutually negating and preserving dimensions of experience. Presence [consider here
Arendt’s term ‘appearance’] is continually negated by what it is not, while all the time
alluding to what is lacking in itself. That which is absent is always present in the lack that
it presents. (Ogden 1996: 20–21)

Arendt’s insistence on the chaotic and ever-changing character of the internal

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

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 72 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

of a sense of self bring out how the spectator role – adopted by those who receive and
make sense of the appearance of the individual – is a form of action requiring some-
thing more than just being present as witnesses or spectators. This something more
is an invitation to the individual to seek appearance.
Arendt offers a conception of individuality, especially in The Life of the Mind, that
resonates with Winnicott’s idea of ‘the true self.’ wherein individuality ‘means
little more than the summation of sensori-motor aliveness’ (Winnicott 1990: 149).
Winnicott provides an account of how, depending on the availability of a facilitating
environment, the infant achieves unit status or a degree of internal organization that
permits her to experience herself as the centre of her subjective experience. Arendt
seems to fear that if she concedes the existence of an interiority that is organized as
a self, she may concede too much to the tradition she has set herself against. Thus,
when in The Life of the Mind she draws on the work of the Swiss philosophical bio-
logist Adolf Portmann, she does so selectively. She takes up only one of two charac-
teristics Portmann attributes to living things – Selbstdarstellung, which she translates
as self-display, a dynamic activity associated with a desire to appear to others. She
ignores the other characteristic – Weltbeziehung durch Innerlichkeit, an activity of
relating to the world that arises out of an organized interiority. Marjorie Grene (1974:
269–70) explains this second characteristic:

‘Display’, however, is not simply color, sound, smell, as such, but the exhibition to the senses
of animals of perceptible forms and patterns characteristic of other animals, whether of
their own or other species. It is a display of – what? Living things are not mere surfaces, nor
are they, as used to be said, simply ‘sacks full of functions’. Just as their superficies, their
appearances to one another, form a significant, indeed essential, aspect of their nature, so
does what very broadly speaking one can call their ‘inner life’. A second essential character
of living things, in other words, inseparably allied to but contrasted with display, consists
in the fact that organisms are centers of perceptions, drives, and actions. (Grene 1974: 270;
emphases in the original)

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 73

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

‘The paradoxical plurality of unique beings’

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

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 74 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

unique being. More than this: the relationship has to be such that it offers or, at least,
presupposes a fundamental acceptance of the simple existence, the existence as
such, of the individual as this distinct being. Birmingham (2006: Chapter 3) suggests
that here we find in Arendt’s thought the principle of givenness: ‘It is our being-to-
ward-birth that allows for whatever unity and wholeness marks human existence:
being-toward-birth is accompanied by gratitude for our very givenness’ (Birmingham
2006: 80). Our birth is the condition of our capacity for freedom, understood in
the Arendtian sense, as the capacity for beginning. Here is Peg Birmingham on this
important point:

. . . being in the world precedes any explicit love of the world; it is what gives rise to desire
and love. One’s gratitude at finding oneself in the world predates any activity in the world.
Arendt suggests that our capacity for initium, for beginning, is dependent upon a prior
givenness. This priority of gratitude and affirmation is also true of my relation to my
neighbor: ‘It is not love that discloses to me my neighbor’s being. What I owe him has
been decided beforehand according to an order that love follows but has not established.’
(Birmingham 2006: 80; the citation is from Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine)

In relation to the other, Arendt takes from Augustine the phrase vol ut sis (I want you
to be), an idea of love as an unqualified and welcoming acceptance of the existence of
the other, however she presents/appears:

This mysterious existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and
which includes the shapes of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately
dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great
and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Vol ut sis (I want you to be)’
without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable
affirmation. (Arendt 1979: 301)

Love as an orientation to the other that is governed by a simple acceptance of the

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 75

self-appearance that involves an element of deliberation as to what to display to

others. Her awareness of the complexity of mind is indicated by her suggestion that
what one is willing to reveal is simultaneously the hiding of what one is not willing
to reveal – thus the surface, which can be known, is betrayed by a depth to which it
alludes but which remains elusive:

In addition to the urge to self-display by which living things fit themselves into a world
of appearances, men also present themselves in word and deed and thus indicate how
they wish to appear, what in their opinion is fit to be seen and what is not. This element
of deliberate choice in what to show and what to hide seems specifically human. (Arendt
1978: 34; emphases in the original)

Appearance inherently involves a relationship between two terms – the individual

who appears and those to whom she appears – and it usually, though not necessarily,
involves a third term: ‘some worldly objective reality’ which constitutes a common
interest or concern for these individuals. Thus, ‘most action and speech is concerned
with this in-between’ (Arendt 1958: 182), which as it is addressed and spoken about
comes into being or ‘appears’ as an object of common reference. In this way ‘the
world’ that individuals share is a phenomenal reality; it comes into being only
through their orientation in speech and action to it as something they share and by
which it is constituted in its specificity.
Speech and action, then, are communal activities; they make sense only with ref-
erence to sharing a relationship by which each is constituted both as singular and as
sharing a world. Speech enunciates the meaning of the deed, what it is the actor
thinks he is doing and why, how it relates to what it is that he and others have done
before, and what it is he and they might or should do now:

The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be
perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes
relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announc-
ing what he does, has done, and intends to do. (Arendt 1958: 179)

How actors engage with meaning – disclosing it, interpreting it and seeking to under-
stand it – constitutes what Arendt calls a ‘subjective in-between’ that adds the layer
of meaning to the objective worldly reality that they share:

Since this disclosure of the subject is an integral part of all, even the most ‘objective’ inter-
course, the physical, worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were,
overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and
owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another. (Arendt
1958, 182–3; emphasis in the original)

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

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 76 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

complexly entwined in-betweens, implying as they do different kinds of connection

between human beings in their appearance to each other as distinct beings.
‘Plurality’ is the term for the kind of community that arises between human
beings when they appear to each other as individuals who share a specific historical–
worldly reality. By the nature of the human condition, human beings are already in
some sense together. The question of the political concerns the mode of this togeth-
erness. The political denotes that mode of being together that is plurality:

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city–state in its physical location; it is the organi-
zation of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space
lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.
(Arendt 1958: 198)

Arendt’s emphasis is on a form of commonality that welcomes and works with differ-
ence, where the most elementary difference is that of the distinctness of the individ-
ual living being. As she declares at the beginning of the section ‘What is Politics?’ in
‘Introduction into Politics’, ‘Politics is based on the fact of human plurality,’ and
‘Politics deals with the coexistence and association of different men’ (Arendt 2005b;
93, emphasis in the original).
Contrary to her proposition that ‘human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of
unique beings’ (Arendt 1958: 176), really there is nothing paradoxical about it, for it
is the only form of community that is possible if human uniqueness is to be accorded
a space within which to appear. Arendt is self-conscious about a paradoxical harness-
ing of plurality and uniqueness because she is so aware of working against the grain
of an entire tradition of understanding of what it is to be an individual, one in which
individuality is understood as possible only through the act of withdrawing from
one’s worldly communal existence into a solitary, interior space.
By The Life of the Mind, Arendt seems to have reconsidered her position. Now
she thinks that a withdrawal into thinking is never complete, not just because the
philosopher still has to eat, work, etc., but because thinking ‘remains geared to
appearance’:

. . . when the philosopher takes leave of the world given to our senses and does a
turnabout . . . to the life of the mind, he takes his clue from the former, looking for some-
thing to be revealed to him that would explain its underlying truth. This truth – a-letheia,
that which is disclosed (Heidegger)—can be conceived only as another ‘appearance’,
another phenomenon originally hidden but of a supposedly higher order, thus signifying
the lasting predominance of appearance. Our mental apparatus, though it can withdraw
from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance. (Arendt 1978: 23–24)

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 77

argues against the Stoic understanding of freedom as something that can be found
in one’s internal life even if one is a slave in the world shared with others, an idea
that relies upon the assumption that the individual is able to establish a mastery or
sovereignty over his own being. Not only does she refuse the proposition that such
self-mastery is freedom because, as she insists, it involves the self’s use of its capacity
to will to tyrannize itself (Arendt 1977: 163), she also proposes that Epictetus, the
first Stoic philosopher, could not have imagined freedom if he had not already known
it as a worldly phenomenon:

According to ancient understanding, man could liberate himself from necessity only
through power over other men, and he could be free only if he owned a place, a home
in the world. Epictetus transposed those worldly relationships into relationships within
man’s own self, whereby he discovered that no power is so absolute as that which man
yields over himself, and that the inward space where man struggles and subdues himself is
more entirely his own, namely, more securely shielded from outside interference, than any
worldly home could be. (Arendt 1977: 148)

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

The Connection between Worldly and Inner Plurality

Arendt never sought explicitly to theorize about the connection she makes between
a worldly plurality and an inner plurality that renders thinking as an internal con-
versation possible: ‘Men not only exist in the plural as do all earthly beings, but have
an indication of this plurality within themselves’ (Arendt 2005a: 22). If we are to be
capable of thinking of a kind and quality that permit us to give an account of our
thoughts to our fellows, thus moving away from our inward focus back into the world
of human affairs, then it is because we want to sustain an orientation to plurality.
In other words, thinking will not divorce itself from plurality unless the individual
discounts it. Arendt offers Lessing and Socrates as examples of thinkers who built
into their conceptions of thinking an orientation to plurality:

The fermenta cognitionis which Lessing scattered into the world were not intended to
communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for
no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers. Lessing’s thought is
not the (Platonic) silent dialogue between me and myself, but an anticipated dialogue with
others, and this is the reason that it is essentially polemical. (Arendt 1970a: 10)
[Socrates’ ‘art of midwifery’ or maieutic] had its significance in a twofold conviction: every
man has his own doxa, his own opening to the world, and Socrates therefore must always

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 78 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

In her reflections on ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, Arendt argues that

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 79

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

The Historical Provocation of Arendt’s Individualism:

The Concentration Camps
Rosa Luxemburg’s milieu was familiar to Arendt; it probably also described that of
her mother, a great admirer of Rosa Luxemburg. In all likelihood Selbstdenken was
something Arendt imbibed from her own formative milieu, and would have used her
philosophical training to cultivate in herself even if she had not been historically
provoked by the experience of totalitarianism to explicitly reflect on it. As Richard
Bernstein (1996: 3) suggests, one of the reasons her work continues to attract so
much interest is ‘her steadfast independence . . . [which] is so luminous.’ Here
Bernstein echoes Arendt in her essay on Karl Jaspers where the tropes of luminosity,
illumination, lighting up and clarity are repeated in relation to how his extraordi-
nary sense of personal responsibility, his world-embracing independence of mind
and his ‘inviolability’ in the face of Nazi dictatorship, entered into the clarity and
quality of his thinking: ‘Because his existence was governed by the passion for light
itself, he was able to be a light in the darkness glowing from some hidden source
of luminosity’ (Arendt 1970c: 76). Again Arendt remarks on the significance of his
formative milieu as one that conduced to Jaspers’s inviolability: “His father and
mother were still closely linked to the high-spirited and strong-minded Frisian peas-
antry who possessed a sense of independence quite uncommon in Germany’ (Arendt
1970c: 77). She suggests that, while forced into defensive isolation in the Nazi period,
Jaspers was not alone, for his ‘good fortune’ was to enjoy a marriage that ‘has never
been merely a private thing’ (Arendt 1970c: 78). This marriage was conducted as an
‘interspace’ between individuals in which Jaspers’s wife’s Jewishness was central to
its conditions of possibility (the idea of interspace features in the essay on Lessing,
Arendt 1970a: 13.

[This marriage] has proved that two people of different origins—Jaspers’s wife is Jewish –
could create between them a world of their own. And from this world in miniature he has
learned, as from a model, what is essential for the whole realm of human affairs. Within
this small world, he unfolded and practiced his incomparable faculty for dialogue, the
splendid precision of his way of listening, the constant readiness to give a candid account

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 80 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

A number of commentators, Margaret Canovan and Richard Bernstein especially,

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 81

mourn and memorialize her on the occasion of her death. In The Life of the Mind,
Arendt states her conception of individuality as the bios that is marked out as the
interval between birth and death:

To be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s
departure. On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance, as they follow
upon each other, are the primordial events, which as such mark out time, the time span
between birth and death. (Arendt 1978: 20)

It is the hallmark of the destruction of individuality in the concentration camps that

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

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 82 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

the sense of being the subject of one’s own inner experience, someone whose birth
was welcomed and whose death was marked; and someone whose aliveness is mani-
fest as spontaneity, initiative and the freedom to begin something new, to discover
or express something that was not there before. Thus the concentration camp as
the limiting case of the space of appearance indicates the essential conditions for
individuality. Individuality, both when it is invited to be/appear and when it is
subject to destruction, is a quintessentially political phenomenon. The implications
of this, of course, are far-reaching.
Arendt’s phenomenology of the concentration camps is incomplete because she
focuses on the experience of the victim as it is evoked by the institutional design of
the camps. She does not open up the other side of the relationship – what is it that
conduces to and develops a desire to destroy individuality, spontaneity and anima-
tion in people? This is something other than the inability to think for himself that
Arendt ascribes to Eichmann, surely? Canovan (2000) suggests that Arendt attempted
to answer this question in her reflections on the modern experience of superfluous-
ness and the scientific–technological substitution of making for action. Here is a
summary passage:

[On one line of interpretation that Arendt offers] totalitarianism represents not so much
a conscious project as the set of grooves into which people are likely to find themselves
sliding if they come to politics with certain sorts of aims, experiences, and deficiencies, all
of them characteristic of modernity. Foremost among the aims is a quest for omnipotence
fuelled by the belief that anything is possible and by ‘modern man’s deep-rooted suspicion
of everything he did not make himself’. The central experience is loneliness – that experi-
ence of ‘uprootedness and superfluousness’ that make people cling to movements and to
ideological logicality as a substitute for the lost world of common sense and reality. The
key deficiency is the loss of the world itself, the stable human world of civilization that
anchors human beings in a common experience of reality and hedges a space of free action
with necessary limits and laws. (Canovan 2000: 38; emphases in the original)

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 83

Individuality as Both Aliveness and the Principle of Beginning

Who-ness is the idea Arendt introduces in The Human Condition: ‘Action and speech
are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the
same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are
you?” ’ (Arendt 1958: 178). It is in action that the individual discloses his who-ness to
others. This is not something he has control over because it is the manifestation of
the principle of beginning, a principle that inheres in his birth, his given status as a
newcomer, as this appearance is received and responded to by a spectator: “Nothing
and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not propose a spectator”
(Arendt 1978: 19; emphasis in the original).
The nature of action is ‘initiative’ – the bringing into existence of something
that was not there before: it is the disclosure of hitherto unknown possibility. The
human individual’s capacity to initiate follows upon his status as a beginner:
‘Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners, by virtue of birth, men take
initiative, are prompted into action’ (Arendt 1958: 177). Nikolas Kompridis (2006)
explains the significance of ‘the idea of a new beginning’ to democratic politics. The
frontispiece quotation for his (2006) collection is from Dewey: ‘Each individual that
comes into the world is a new beginning: the universe itself is, as it were, taking a
fresh start in him and trying to do something, even if on a small scale, that it has
never done before.’
The disclosure of possibility heretofore unknown is always contextually specific
because it is a creative engagement with ‘specific historical conditions’ (Kompridis
2006: 48). It is in such disclosure of possibility for new beginnings that the possibili-
ties of humanitas itself are revealed:

Personality . . . is very hard to grasp and perhaps most closely resembles the Greek
daimon, the guardian spirit which accompanies every man throughout his life, but is
always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by
everyone a man meets than by himself. This daimon – which has nothing demonic about
it – this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space exists; that is
the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we ordinarily
mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm, there
is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas. By that they meant something that
was the very height of humanness because it was valid without being objective. (Arendt
1970c: 73)

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

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 84 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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

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

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

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 INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICS 85

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

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abused children. East Sussex and New York: Brunner-Routledge.

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

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 CHAPTER 7

The Saving Power of Social Action: Arendt between

Weber and Foucault

Thomas M. Kemple

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

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 88 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 THE SAVING POWER OF SOCIAL ACTION 89

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

Foucault problematizes the traditional assumption of a contractual distribution of

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

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 90 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

as a persistent threat to the experience of individual autonomy and collective

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

Society between Sovereignty and Discipline

Toward the end of his 1978 lecture course, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault
(2007: 276) states that his aim is not actually to provide a history or genealogy of
the modern state, but more modestly to examine some of the refracted sides of
‘the reflexive prism’ through which the state came to appear in the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In the fourth of these lectures, the influential discussion pre-
viously published under the title ‘Governmentality’, he suggests a kind of Polybian
scheme which projects three contrasting images of how the social sphere may be
constituted and ruled:

(1) according to a repertoire of disciplines for normalizing individuals;

(2) through an assemblage of technologies for regulating populations; and
(3) by appealing to a set of ritualized procedures for legitimizing authority.

In the first instance, disciplinary techniques tend to operate ‘centripetally’ on the

bodies and minds of citizens by isolating and enclosing, segmenting and concentrating

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 THE SAVING POWER OF SOCIAL ACTION 91

individuals in the spaces where they live, work and die, ultimately in the interests of
maximizing their health, longevity and productivity. On a larger scale, regulatory
controls are ‘centrifugually’ deployed in order to secure social order and sustain a
balance of social forces, as in the development of the military–diplomatic apparatus
of nation–states abroad or the operation of a police apparatus at home. Finally, these
coordinated procedures for exercising power and securing order support the general
framework of political sovereignty, as expressed in the idea that ‘the king reigns but
does not govern’. While these strategies for maintaining social order may coexist in
different combinations and contexts, they do not necessarily form a historical
sequence:

So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of

discipline, and then of a society of discipline by, say, of government. In fact, we have a
triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population
as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism. (Foucault 2007:
107–8)

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

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 92 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 THE SAVING POWER OF SOCIAL ACTION 93

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

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 94 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

Roman conception of authority to the myth-making act of its foundation upon a

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

From Revolutionary Action to Social Foundation

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

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 THE SAVING POWER OF SOCIAL ACTION 95

secure law and order within a modern civil society, though Machiavelli himself did
not imagine a split between the status of citizens and the actions of social members.
Arendt (1961: 140) nevertheless insists that Machiavelli’s thought does mark the
inaugural moment of the modern worldview with its call to establish a new social
foundation through a radically political act of revolution. Like the Americans and
French who invoked him, Machiavelli was inspired by the Roman passion for foun-
dation and, more specifically, by the will to repair the trinity of religion, tradition
and authority which had been broken by the challenge to papal and monarchical
rule accompanying the rise of a market society. In On Revolution, Arendt (1963: 37)
elaborates on this argument with reference to the breaking point of revolution, which
Machiavelli viewed as a necessary act of civic solidarity even when it involved
sacrificing eternal salvation.

In other words, the specific revolutionary pathos of the absolutely new, of a beginning
which would justify starting to count time in the year of the revolutionary event, was
entirely alien to him. Yet, even in this respect he was not so far removed from his succes-
sors as in the eighteenth century as it may seem . . . It was in more than one respect that
Robespierre was right when he asserted that ‘the plan of the French Revolution was written
large in the books of Machiavelli’; for he could have easily have added: We too ‘love our
country more than the safety of our soul’ . . . The question, as Machiavelli saw it, was not
whether one loved God more than the world, but whether one was capable of loving the
world more than oneself.

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

‘The love that we bear, magnificent Signori, for our fatherland [patria] first made us
gather and now makes us come to you to reason about [ragionare] the evil that one sees
already great and yet keeps growing in this republic of ours, and to offer ourselves ready to

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 96 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

The fictional aspect of Machiavelli’s rhetorical presentation here is remarkable for

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

Again and again the interdict was imposed on Florence . . . and yet the citizens [Bürger]
of Florence fought against the Holy See [Kirchenstaat]. Machiavelli had such situations
in mind when, in a beautiful passage in his Florentine Histories (if my memory does not
deceive me), he has one of his heroes praise those citizens who placed the greatness of their
native city [Vaterstadt] above the salvation [das Heil] of their souls. (Weber 1994: 366)

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

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 THE SAVING POWER OF SOCIAL ACTION 97

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

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 98 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

The Saving Grace of Social Life

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

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 THE SAVING POWER OF SOCIAL ACTION 99

does not shy away from religious vocabulary in her description of the ‘miracle’ of
political beginnings as a presupposition for secular social and cultural projects. In
her lectures on the ‘introduction into politics’, for example, Arendt (2005: 111–12)
acknowledges that the way “leading into” (Einführung) political life is often experi-
enced as a kind of ‘infinite improbability’ or ‘ultimately unexpected occurrence’,
though not necessarily as a supernatural event or a superhuman feat. In the later
lectures that make up Security, Territory, Population, Foucault also ponders over
the social and political dimension of religious thought in his attempt to recover the
‘subjugated knowledges’ of pastoral techniques of care and vigilance from the theo-
logical–dogmatic writings of the early Christian era (2007: 196). Here the physical
security and spiritual well-being of all and each (omnes et singulatim) become as
much the concern of the sovereign leader who acts as a kind of ‘shepherd of men
and souls’ as of any individual member of the ‘flock’ of believers and followers.
This corpus of learned commentary on the Biblical narratives of servitude and
exile thus projects a counter-history to authoritative accounts of the foundation of
Roman imperial sovereignty, and prefigures the thought, language and conduct
which later came to inspire the Protestant reformers and political rebels of the early
modern era.
Weber’s celebrated thesis picks up this argument at a later stage of occidental his-
tory by pointing out, among other things, that the Protestant appeal to the sacred
character of the inner life and personal conscience of individual members of a com-
munity of belief also inspired natural law theorists to articulate the immanent char-
acter and teleological legitimacy of positive or ‘enacted’ law: ‘After religious revelation
and the authoritarian sacredness of a tradition and its bearers have lost their force,
[n]atural law [becomes] the specific form of legitimacy of a revolutionarily created
order’ (Weber 1978: 867). This secular, rational and even sacred reverence for social
order can be understood to constitute the last stand and highest achievement of
‘charisma’, that divine gift of grace which first began to exert its influence in the
early Christian community whom Saint Paul proselytised in his epistles:

This charismatic glorification of ‘Reason’, which found characteristic expression in its

apotheosis by Robespierre, is the final form that charisma has adopted in its fateful histori-
cal course. It is clear that these postulates of formal legal equality and economic mobility
paved the way for the destruction of all patrimonial and feudal law in favour of abstract
norms and hence indirectly of bureaucratization. It is also clear that they facilitated the
expansion of capitalism. The basic Rights of Man made it possible for the capitalist to use
things and men freely, just as the this-worldly asceticism – adopted with some dogmatic
variations – and the specific discipline of the sects bred the capitalist spirit and the rational
‘professional [Berufsmensch]’ who was needed by capitalism. (Weber 1978: 1209–10)

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

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 100 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

or occupation (all meanings connoted in German through the Lutheran conception

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

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 THE SAVING POWER OF SOCIAL ACTION 101

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

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Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 1961. Between past and future. New York: The Viking Press.
—. 1963. On revolution. London: Penguin Books.
—. 1970. On violence. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
—. 1969 [1951]. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.
—. 2005. The promise of politics. Ed. J. Kohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Baehr, P. 2008. Caesarism, charisma and fate: Historical sources and modern resonances in the work of
Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Benjamin, Walter. 1978. Critique of violence [1921]. In Reflections. Trans. E Jephcott, 277–300.
New York: Schocken Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
—. 1997 [1976]. ‘Society must be defended.’ Ed. M. Snellart; trans. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
—. 2007 [1978]. Security, territory, population. Ed. M Snellart; trans. G Burchell. New York: Palgrave
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—. 2008 [1979]. The birth of biopolitics. Ed. M Snellart; trans. G Burchell. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Gierke, Otto von. 1987 [1881]. Political theories of the Middle Ages. Trans. F. W. Matiland. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kemple, T. M. 2007. Allosociality: An introduction to Simmel’s social theory of the limit. Theory, Culture
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Machiavelli, N. 1988 [ca. 1525]. Florentine histories, Trans. L. F Banfield and H.C Mansfield. Princeton:
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Mansfield, H. C. Jr. 1983. On the impersonality of the modern state: A comment on Machiavelli’s use of
state. American Political Science Review 77(4): 849–57.
Negri, A. 1999. Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state. Trans. M Bosckagl. Minneapolis:
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O’Neill, J. 1972. Authority, knowledge, and the body politic. In Sociology as a skin trade: Essays toward a
reflexive sociology, 68–80. New York: Harper & Row.
—. 2008. Ecce Homo: The political theology of good and evil. (Unpublished essay).
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Wallimann, I., N. Tatsis and G. V. Zito. 1977. On Max Weber’s definition of power. Australia and
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Weber, M. 1978 [1910–1914/1918–1920]. Economy and society. Vols 1 and 2. Ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich.
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Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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 CHAPTER 8

On Action: The Appearance of the Law

Peg Birmingham

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

Sovereign Power, Violence and the Law

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

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 104 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ON ACTION: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LAW 105

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

Arendt and Benjamin: On Violence

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

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conception of law” ’ (Arendt 1970: 39). In this framework, violence is linked to power
understood as domination and force; further, it is always instrumental. Violence is
the means by which authority enforces the law. Arendt points out that the problem
with this is that ultimately the most extreme means can be used to justify political
ends: ‘The very substance of violent action is ruled by the means–end category, whose
chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in
danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed
to reach it’ (Arendt 1970: 4).
As I suggested before, Arendt’s understanding of violence as instrumental force is
very close to Benjamin’s notion of mythical violence. Recall that Benjamin (1986)
opens his essay by claiming first that a critique of violence is always in the context of
justice and the law. The critique of violence, then, is always carried out in a moral
context. Moreover, he claims that in the legal realm violence is a means to an end. If
violence is a means to an end, then is it not then the task of critique to establish the
criteria for just and unjust ends? Benjamin answers no. The task of critique (and here
he follows his definition of critique in Elective Affinities) is to consider whether ‘vio-
lence, as a principle, could be a moral means even to just ends’ (Benjamin 1986: 277).
In other words, the task of critique is to question the violent means themselves, ‘with-
out regard to the ends they serve’ (Benjamin 1986: 277). Following his definition of
critique in Elective Affinities, Benjamin goes on to argue that one type of means,
mythical violence, is a law-making and law-preserving violence that will use all
means for the sake of the sole end of preserving itself. Mythical violence, very close
to Arendt’s understanding of instrumental violence, is a calculating and coercive
violence in the name of the law. Moreover, both Benjamin and Arendt argue that
instrumental violence, however justified, is always bloody and tied to biological life,
understood as ‘mere life’ (Benjamin 1986: 297). Benjamin argues that mythical vio-
lence, always in the service of establishing new law (and here it is apparent that he
has in mind something like Schmitt’s sovereign decision), is the ‘exercise of violence
over life and death’ where ‘blood is the symbol of mere life’ (Benjamin 1986: 277).
This bloody violence reveals ‘something rotten in the law’ (1986: 286). Arendt goes so
far as to argue that coercive, justified violence is always framed in terms of biological
justifications, positing that there is a long tradition of ‘organic thought in political
matters by which power and violence are interpreted in biological terms’ (Arendt
1970: 75). Indeed, she argues that if we continue to think of the political in biological
terms, then it is true ‘that destruction and creation are two sides of the natural proc-
ess, so that collective violent action, quite apart from its inherent attraction, may
appear as natural a prerequisite for the collective life of mankind as the struggle for
survival and violent death for continuing life in the animal kingdom’ (Arendt 1970:
75). Both Arendt and Benjamin argue that instrumental and coercive violence is not
animated by living spirit, but instead is a sovereign law that exalts itself, through
death, above natural and biological life. And again, bloodshed is the mark of this
violence which is always exercised in the name of destiny and fate against which no
living action is deemed possible. Benjamin and Arendt agree that justified (mythical)

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 ON ACTION: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LAW 107

violence must be rejected; both issue an injunction against instrumental calculation –

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

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

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 ON ACTION: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LAW 109

of salvation’ (Arendt 1963: 20). Significantly, Arendt’s claims regarding an ‘original

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

The Condition of Action: The Miracle of Natality

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

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

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 ON ACTION: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LAW 111

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

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

Action at the Borders: The Appearance of New Worlds

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

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 ON ACTION: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LAW 113

both those memorable deeds and the names of the memorable men who performed
them and thus can pass them on to posterity over generations. This city, which offers
a permanent abode for mortal men and their transient deeds and words, is the polis”
(Arendt 2005: 123). Greek law constitutes the city; it is productive, originating in a
theological framework – that is, it originates from Zeus, ‘the guardian of borders and
border stones’. What matters is the marking of borders. Arendt writes, ‘The law is, so
to speak, something by which the polis enters into its continuing life, something it
cannot abolish without losing its identity. And the law is not valid outside the polis;
its binding power applies only to the space that it encloses and delimits’ (Arendt
2005: 181). At the same time, she argues, the Greeks had no foreign policy: ‘they [the
Greeks] likewise believed that whenever the polis dealt with other states, it no longer
actually needed to proceed politically, but could instead use force – whether that was
because its continuation was threatened by the power of another community or
because it wished to make others subservient to it’ (Arendt 2005: 129). For the Greeks,
the law is not a bridge between one political community and another; instead it is
a wall and the site of mythical violence. Most importantly in Arendt’s reading, the
Greeks ‘became themselves’ through the law that establishes the border between the
citizen and the barbarian. Moreover, the law preserves the identity of the Greek
citizen, which Arendt argues is first gained in battle. Greek political identity is for
Arendt initially gained in the violence of war and then established legally in the
internal borderland between free citizen and slave.
By contrast, Arendt argues, Roman politics begins as foreign policy. The descend-
ants of Troy, annihilated, do not return home. Instead, they arrive on Italian soil
where there is a concern for ‘full justice for the defeated’. I quote the text at some
length:

. . . with the Romans, politics grew not between citizens of equal rank within a city, but
rather between alien and unequally matched peoples who first came together in battle.
It is true that, as we noted, struggle, and with it war, marked the beginning of politi-
cal existence for the Greeks as well, but only insofar as they became themselves through
conflict and then came together to preserve their own nature. For the Romans, this same
struggle became the means by which they recognized both themselves and their oppo-
nents. Thus, when the battle was over, they did not retreat inside their walls, to be with
themselves and their glory. On the contrary, they gained something new, a new political
arena, secured in a peace treaty according to which yesterday’s enemies became tomorrow’s
allies. (Arendt 2005: 178)

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

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 114 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ON ACTION: THE APPEARANCE OF THE LAW 115

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

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

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

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 116 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

—. 1970. On violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich.

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

PHansen_08_Final.indd 116 3/10/2011 10:57:16 AM

 CHAPTER 9

Ethics and the Vocation of Politics

Steve Buckler

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

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 118 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

Politics and Morality

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

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 ETHICS AND THE VOCATION OF POLITICS 119

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

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

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 ETHICS AND THE VOCATION OF POLITICS 121

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

Moral Faculties in Politics: Promising and Forgiveness

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

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 122 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ETHICS AND THE VOCATION OF POLITICS 123

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

Perlocutionary Conditions: The Context of Appearance

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

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 124 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

standpoints of a universal spectatorship. This, she suggests, makes it a basis for a

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

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 ETHICS AND THE VOCATION OF POLITICS 125

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

Ambition and Constraint

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

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 126 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ETHICS AND THE VOCATION OF POLITICS 127

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

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

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 128 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ETHICS AND THE VOCATION OF POLITICS 129

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

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

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 130 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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

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 ETHICS AND THE VOCATION OF POLITICS 131

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

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

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 132 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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—. 1968. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harvester.

—. 1972. Crises of the republic. New York: Harcourt Brace.
—. 1973. On revolution. London: Penguin.
—. 1977. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. London: Penguin.
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—. 1996. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. London: Sage.
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 CHAPTER 10

Individual Responsibility and Political Authority:

Hannah Arendt at the Intersection of Moral
and Political Philosophy1

Phillip Hansen

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

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 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY 135

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

The Dilemmas of Morality and Moral Philosophy: Freedom,

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

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 136 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

circumstances of totalitarianism, having moral standards and a conscience seemed

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

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 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY 137

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

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 138 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

The intersection of political and moral philosophy in Arendt’s work, in my view,

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

The Dilemmas of Morality and Moral Philosophy: Force,

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

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 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY 139

otherwise continue unabated, can in fact be brought to a humanly acceptable

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

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 140 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY 141

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

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 142 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

The Human Condition and Human Agency: Human Nature,

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

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 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY 143

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

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 144 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY 145

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

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 146 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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

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 INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY 147

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

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 148 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

(existence) or a “what” (presence-at-hand in the broadest sense)’ (Heidegger 1962: 71).

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

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

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

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 CHAPTER 11

The Miraculous Power of Forgiveness

and the Promise

Marguerite La Caze

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

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 THE MIRACULOUS POWER OF FORGIVENESS AND THE PROMISE 151

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

What Does Arendt Mean by ‘miracle’?

In the context of a discussion of what would be needed for a decisive change for the
better in political life, “Introduction into Politics,” Arendt characterizes miracles.
I will quote her at length:

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

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

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 152 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

Forgiveness and ‘Unknowing’ Wrongs

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

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 THE MIRACULOUS POWER OF FORGIVENESS AND THE PROMISE 153

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

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

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 154 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

One might view punishment as different from both forgiveness and revenge
in being neutral; it doesn’t exhibit the initiatory character of forgiveness, but nor
does it show the destructive and automatic aspects of revenge. One might think
that one cannot both punish and forgive, on this understanding, as punishment
is considered an alternative to forgiveness. Because Arendt links them, however,
one could argue that some wrongs may both be punished, say by the state, and for-
given by the victim(s), or the state may punish and forgive by punishing very lightly.
This point will become clearer if we look more closely at what Arendt means by
forgiveness.

Forgiveness as Personal
By the ‘redemption’ of forgiveness Arendt means that, if we are forgiven, we have the
possibility of starting anew rather than being defined by the wrong we have commit-
ted. Furthermore, she believes that forgiveness is essentially personal, although not
necessarily private and individual, because we forgive a person for what they have
done for their sake, for who they are (1998: 241). Arendt declares, ‘To put it another
way, in granting pardon, it is the person and not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless
evil there is no person left whom one could ever forgive’ (2003: 95).6 My interpreta-
tion of this idea is that when we forgive, we always forgive a person, a who and his/
her actions, and we may do this in a public or collective way. Thus Arendt’s view
involves ceremonial forgiveness and forgiveness by a group or representative of a
group of an individual, but does not seem to include forgiveness of groups, as these
would not constitute the proper who.
Human beings are distinguished from objects, plants and animals by being
unique (1998: 176). It is this uniqueness, which is revealed through speech and action,
that renders them possible candidates for forgiveness. Arendt explains:

This disclosure of the ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities,

gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide—is implicit in everything
somebody says or does. . . . it is more than likely that the ‘who’, which appears so clearly
and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimōn in
Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his
shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.7 (1998: 17980)8

This explanation is obscure since, while an obvious understanding of the ‘who’ is as

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

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 THE MIRACULOUS POWER OF FORGIVENESS AND THE PROMISE 155

of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the
unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable
grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without
being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable
affirmation’(1976: 301). The reference to talents suggests the ‘who’ isn’t the subject
here, yet the other references to friendship and love link back to the ‘who’, as does
Arendt’s further claim that this aspect of the person is ‘single, unique, unchangeable’
(another miracle). Our ethnicity is one example she gives.
Elsewhere Arendt distinguishes between our persona or role and ‘something
else’, ‘something entirely idiosyncratic and undefinable and still unmistakably
identifiable’ that manifests or comes through even when we change roles (2003: 13).
Thus we forgive a person due to the individuality that is disclosed in action.10 Another
hint Arendt gives concerning what she means by the ‘who’ is that it is revealed in
the story or biography of someone’s life, so that forgiveness could only come from
knowing that person’s whole story (1998: 186). Each person is unique and so every-
one has the potential to be forgiven.

Self-Forgiveness
Arendt argues that we cannot forgive ourselves as we do not appear to ourselves and
cannot be both the subject and object of forgiveness. We are dependent on others to
forgive us. Without forgiving, we would be defined by a deed from which we could
not recover. Without promises, we would not be able to keep our identities. (I will
discuss this point further on.) Therefore, both faculties depend on plurality: ‘For no
one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to him-
self; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality
and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self’ (1998: 237). For Arendt,
this is the deepest reason we can’t forgive ourselves because we don’t appear as a who
to ourselves in any distinctness. This is an interesting idea, that we are more of a
what to ourselves, that we see ourselves (more than we see others or than other see
us) in terms of our achievements and failings. While Arendt might concede that we
can go through processes of being less hard on ourselves for something we have done,
or even forgo revenge on and punishment of ourselves, any understanding of these
processes is parasitic on the forgiveness of others.
Arendt’s position here seems to contrast with her often expressed view that we
have to live with ourselves and her account of thinking as a kind of conversation
with ourselves. Shouldn’t this plurality within the self allow for the possibility of self-
forgiveness? Arendt clarifies this point in ‘Thinking and moral considerations’, by
noting that ‘in a sense I also am for myself though I hardly appear to me” (1998: 183).
She means that we are conscious of ourselves but we don’t appear to ourselves as
we appear to others. In that sense we cannot perceive the ‘who’ on the basis of which
to forgive. We could aim, however, to create a harmony with ourselves after wrong-
doing, a kind of reconciliation with the self, if not self-forgiveness. In the following
two sections, I will examine the features of the promise.

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

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suggestion is that the early American colonists invented a new political idiom based
on the promise. She believes they stumbled on the idea that people’s worst faults can
be kept in check by joining together with others.
Furthermore, Arendt argues, the promise is fundamentally connected to the
power of action, as it links people together so that they have power. Thus, the prom-
ise involves our world-building capacity in its concern for the future. She sums up:
‘The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands a plural-
ity of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which
applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related,
combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and keeping of promises,
which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty’ (1965: 171).12
This power, Arendt implies, is what enabled the colonists to defeat England in the
War of Independence. Moreover, a series of promises, combined with common delib-
eration, provided the republican principles on which the American Revolution was
based (1965: 214). Against a tradition that views revolutions as the violent founding
of a new states, Arendt sees the best revolution (the American one) as formed by a
series of linked promises.
In ‘What is Freedom?’ Arendt expands the reach of the promise even further,
writing, “All political business is, and always has been, transacted within an elabo-
rate framework of ties and bonds for the future such as laws and constitutions, trea-
ties and alliances all of which derive in the last instance from the faculty to promise
and to keep promises in the face of the essential uncertainties of the future’ (1968
164). Thus the promise underlies not only the founding of states but also their con-
tinuation and day-to-day organization.
Further understanding of Arendt’s idea of the importance of the promise can be
found through her approving reference to Nietzsche, when she says that ‘Nietzsche
saw with unequalled clarity the connection between human sovereignty and the
faculty of making promises, which led him to a unique insight into the relatedness
of human pride and human conscience’ (1998: 245). For Nietzsche, memory is what
links the original promise or act of will with the action and so he calls it the will’s
memory. He writes, ‘someone making a promise is . . . answerable for his own future!”
(2000: II, 1). The ability to make a promise is a sign of pride in one’s own freedom.
Promises should be made made ‘ponderously, seldom, slowly’ (2000: II¸2), and the
awareness of the responsibility that flows from freedom becomes conscience. It is
unfortunate, Arendt remarks, that these insights had no effect on his concept of the
will to power. Promises, like forgiveness, are tied to our relations to others rather
than our relation to ourselves.

Promises to Ourselves
Arendt’s account of the promise parallels that of forgiveness in linking the promise
to plurality and making promises to ourselves dependent on promises to others.
Promises have a special role in establishing our identities. She writes: ‘Without being

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 158 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

Morality and Politics

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

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

The Passions and Political life

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

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

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

The Moral Code of Forgiveness and the Promise

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

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

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

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

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 164 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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

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

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 CHAPTER 12

Hannah Arendt’s ‘Comedy’: Antisemitism as

Synecdoche in The Origins of Totalitarianism

Karyn Ball

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

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 HANNAH ARENDT’S ‘COMEDY’ 167

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

Arendt’s Figural Realism

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

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

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

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 HANNAH ARENDT’S ‘COMEDY’ 169

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

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 170 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

an historical investigation that employs imagination consciously as an important

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

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 HANNAH ARENDT’S ‘COMEDY’ 171

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

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 172 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

The ‘Comedy’ of Antisemitism

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

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

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 HANNAH ARENDT’S ‘COMEDY’ 173

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

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 174 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 HANNAH ARENDT’S ‘COMEDY’ 175

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

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 176 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 HANNAH ARENDT’S ‘COMEDY’ 177

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

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 178 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 HANNAH ARENDT’S ‘COMEDY’ 179

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

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

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 180 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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In differentiating between assimilationism and secularism, Arendt defined herself as ‘a

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

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

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Kristeva, Julia. 2001. Hannah Arendt: Life is a narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Lazare, Bernard. 1949. Job’s dungheap. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken.
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 CHAPTER 13

‘Never Seek to Tell Thy Love’: Hannah Arendt

and the Secret

Charles Barbour

Introduction: ‘Silently, Invisibly’

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

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 ‘NEVER SEEK TO TELL THY LOVE’ 185

you to be)’ ” (Arendt 1978b: 301). In politics, Arendt proposes, an institutional

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

Never seek to tell thy love,

Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,

I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah! She did depart!

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 186 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

Soon after she was gone from me,

A traveler came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.

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

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

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 ‘NEVER SEEK TO TELL THY LOVE’ 187

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

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 188 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

totalitarian experiences of the twentieth (Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche), Arendt

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

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 ‘NEVER SEEK TO TELL THY LOVE’ 189

something that cannot be exposed. It involves a secrecy, even an absolute secrecy,

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

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

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 190 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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 ‘NEVER SEEK TO TELL THY LOVE’ 191

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

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

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

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 ‘NEVER SEEK TO TELL THY LOVE’ 193

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

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 194 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

Conclusion: ‘Being Alone’

While she is typically read as the modern proponent of the public realm, one of
Arendt’s greatest insights is undoubtedly her account of solitude, or ‘being alone’.
Using language that is curiously reminiscent of her discussion of love in The Human
Condition, Arendt concludes The Origins of Totalitarianism with a consideration of
the ‘total terror’ that this novel form of government unleashes. ‘By pressing men
against each other’, Arendt states, ‘total terror destroys the space between them’
(Arendt 1978b: 466). In destroying the space between humans, totalitarianism also
destroys the prerequisites for freedom and motion. ‘In a perfect totalitarian govern-
ment’, Arendt continues, ‘all men have become One Man’ (ibid., 467). And in this
sense, one experience that totalitarianism deprives us of is what Arendt calls ‘soli-
tude’, or our capacity to be alone with ourselves, which is also our capacity for
thought. It is here that Arendt introduces her rich and complex taxonomy of being
alone. There are, she suggests, essentially three experiences of being alone:

(1) Isolation, which involves leaving the public sphere, or the world of action, and
entering into that of production, or transforming nature and making objects. ‘Man
insofar as he is homo faber tends to isolate himself with his work, that is to leave tem-
porarily the realm of politics.’ Tyrannical governments can certainly isolate humans,
or exclude them from the political order. But, Arendt suggests, only totalitarianism
leaves them lonely.
(2) ‘While isolation concerns only the political realm of life’, Arendt writes, ‘loneli-
ness concerns human life as a whole’ (Arendt 1978b: 475). If isolation involves forfeit-
ing one’s political relations with others, loneliness involves forfeiting all relations
with others, including the other residing within oneself. And this is where the third
term in Arendt’s phenomenology of being along – namely solitude – arrives.

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 ‘NEVER SEEK TO TELL THY LOVE’ 195

(3) ‘Loneliness is not solitude’, Arendt continues. ‘Solitude requires being alone
whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.’ That is to say,
one can be completely lonely when moving about among others. Loneliness is not a
physical state of being, but a lack of common sense or any experience of belonging.
On the other hand, solitude involves a very clear relation with another, specifically
the other inside me. ‘All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a
dialogue between me and myself’, Arendt maintains,, ‘but this dialogue of the two-
in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow men because they are repre-
sented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought’. If solitude involves
becoming the two-in-one, then, paradoxically, I can only be identical with myself,
indeed I can only be a self in any meaningful way, or an ‘unchangeable individual
whose identity can never be mistaken for that of any other’ (Arendt 1978b: 476), inso-
far as I return to the world of relations with others, or the world of public life.

Notwithstanding its incredible explanatory powers, perhaps what is missing from

this discussion of being alone, and of the differences between isolation, loneliness
and solitude, is precisely the secret. For secrecy does not involve isolation and work,
nor is it a kind of loneliness or lack of common sense. At the same time, it cannot
really be captured by the notion of the two-in-one, or the ability to carry on a silent
dialogue with oneself, and to be in one’s own company. Is there not a secrecy, and
even what Derrida calls ‘an unconditional right to the secret’ (Derrida 2002: 63) that
precedes every relation to the other, and even the relation to the other in oneself?
Is there not an ‘inner’ experience that cannot be reduced to discourse or dialogue,
commerce or exchange in a political community, but that is also not merely a matter
of private concerns or the instrumental management of the oikos? And does this
secrecy perhaps represent a limit, not only to the political order and the realm of
opinions and lies, but also to the self, or the ‘standpoint’ of moral and factual truth
that exists ‘outside of the political realm’?
Is it not the case, finally, that a political philosophy and fundamental ontology
grounded in the assumption that humans exist only insofar as they appear, and
appear to others within some either intimate or political space, must not only over-
look, but actively suppress, what we are calling ‘the secret’? Does Arendt’s ontology
of appearances, despite everything she does to avoid and even challenge this conclu-
sion, ultimately risk fostering rather than blocking the absolute politicization of life
and the res publica – the politicization that Arendt herself described as one of the key
features of modern totalitarianism, and the modern eruption of ideology and lies? If
it is the case that ‘[n]othing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does
not presuppose a spectator’ and ‘nothing that is [. . .] exists in the singular; everything
that is is meant to be perceived by somebody’ (Arendt 1978a: 19), then would not the
entire experience of being alone, in the last analysis, amount to one more scene of
surveillance and observation, or one more spectacle for the scrutiny of others?
In this sense, ‘Love’s Secret’ might be said to contain advice for Arendt herself,
and for those who wish to follow her today. The preservation of a personal, internal,

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 196 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

incommunicable and incommensurable secrecy, and of the right to such a secrecy,

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

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

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 CHAPTER 14

Arendt’s Metamorphic Figurations

in ‘The Jew as Pariah’

Magdalena Zolkos

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed

Into different bodies
I summon the supernatural beings
Who first contrived
The transmogrifications
In the stuff of life
– Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Ted Hughes

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

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 198 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

independence and [. . .] freedom’. From a historical perspective, Arendt’s writings on

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

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 ARENDT’S METAMORPHIC FIGURATIONS IN ‘THE JEW AS PARIAH’ 199

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

The Conflict of ‘Life’ and ‘Freedom’ in Arendt’s Ideas of

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

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 200 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

In contrast to the collective associations of Weber’s concept of Pariavolk, Arendt

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

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 ARENDT’S METAMORPHIC FIGURATIONS IN ‘THE JEW AS PARIAH’ 201

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

Allegory and Metamorphosis in ‘The Jew as Pariah’

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

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 202 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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

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quality of Shelumiel’s figure creates the possibility of making a ‘veiled reference to

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

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represented as metamorphic operations that the ‘political nonexistence and unreal-

ity of the pariah [is transformed] into the effective basis of a world of art’ (Ibid.,
280–81).

Bernard Lazare’s Conscious Pariah

Arendt credits Bernard Lazare with imbuing the concept of pariah with the political
meaning of an insubordinate and rebellious action. A French Sephardic Jew, a
political journalist and literary critic, Lazare was a controversial figure in his time,
not least because of his insinuated anti-Semitism (see Wilson 1978; for a critique, see
Parvikko 1996: 115–18). In ‘The Jew as Pariah’ Arendt suggests that Lazare’s idea of
a ‘conscious’ pariahdom was coextensive with affirmation of the subject position of
a rebel. The rebel is a ‘double-pariah’ (Parvikko 1996: 121) since the rebellious pariah
subject is formed in an antagonistic relation to both ‘the hostile elements of his envi-
ronment’, and ‘his own “highly placed brethren” ’ (Arendt 2007: 284).
For Lazare, pariah rebellion consists in the very act of naming and resisting those
societal operations that hinge upon demonization of the individuals found at its
margins –in other words, the construction of the pariah as the social abject, or what
Bauman (1997: 17) calls the ‘making [and unmaking] of strangers’. Further, Lazare
conflates the idea of a conscious pariah with the questions of responsibility for one’s
own fate and for the world. The emergence of the idea of ‘conscious pariahdom’ is
thus directly related to Lazare’s rejection of the position of ‘political and religious
[. . .] exclusivism’ and of the ‘irresponsible irreality stemming from the state of
worldlessness of traditional schlemihldom’ (Parvikko 1996: 128). Lazare endorses
political community, rather than ‘a community of Schlemihls’ (Parvikko 1996: 118).
Arendt notes that Lazare’s main preoccupation is the pariah’s refusal to adopt
a rebellious subject position. The pariah’s ‘refus[al] to become a rebel’ generates
another transformative movement in the text. This time, the pariah who fails to rebel
metamorphoses into a schnorrer: a beggar, who has ‘mortgaged himself to the
parvenu, protecting the latter’s position in society and [who] in turn [is] protected by
him’ (2007: 285). For Arendt, the schnorrer is the pariah’s metamorphosis into the
inanimate, or the lifeless: ‘one of the props which hold up a social order from which
[the pariah] is himself excluded’ (ibid). That schnorrer–pariah is thus ‘worth noth-
ing, not because he is poor and begs, but because he begs from those he ought to
fight, and because he appraises his poverty by the standards of those who have caused
it’ (ibid). Again, as with Heine’s secondary or subordinate metamorphic forms, the
schnorrer’s main characteristic is passivity.
There is an interesting resonance between ‘The Jew as Pariah’ and the section
of The Origins of Totalitarianism where Arendt (1958: 120) wrote about Lazare’s
unpopularity and his pariah position in French fin-de-siècle society. She has partly
related it to Lazare’s insistence on legal impartiality both in the Dreyfus affair and in
the debate on the legal status of religious associations in France. The price that Lazare
has paid for his pariah rebellion – for the rejection of schnorrer passivity – is an

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‘isolat[ated] death’ (1958: 120) and that of being forgotten. Arendt (2007 [1944]: 286)
concludes: ‘of all Lazare’s efforts – unique as they were – to forge the peculiar situa-
tion of his people into a vital and significant political factor, nothing now remains.
Even his memory has faded.’

Charlie Chaplin’s Pariah – Tramp

Charlie Chaplin’s filmic creation – the tramp – is included in the pariah series as
someone who is ‘always and everywhere [. . .] under suspicion’ (Arendt 2007: 287).
Arendt argues that Chaplin’s pariah is thus closely linked to the tramp as law’s
suspect. His pariah status is sustained by the anxious and apprehensive expectation
on the part of the community of the tramp’s harmful, or noxious, social presence.
The tramp is defined through the condition of homelessness and the status of being
a ‘perpetual outcast’ in the community that he (never quite) inhabits. For Arendt, he
also comes to embody the conflict between ‘the desire to be accepted by the society’
and the ‘inability to accept society’s restrictions on his autonomy’ (1998: 131).
The schlemiel’s homelessness has been interpreted in the light of Adalbert von
Chamisso’s novel from 1813, Peter Schlemihl, where the protagonist exchanges his
shadow for material benefits. As Wisse (1971: 125–6) suggests, ‘Peter Schlemihl is
subconsciously modeled on the figure of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, and [. . .] the
lack of the shadow (which all other men possess) is the closest metaphorical equiva-
lent for a lack of a homeland (which all other men possess).” It is thus in the light of
Chamisso’s novel that the schlemiel comes to designate no longer a ‘simple bungler’,
but ‘the man fated to be different, homeless, alien, and Jewish’ (Wisse 1971: 126).
For Arendt, Chaplin’s pariah–tramp is a schlemiel figure rather than a Promethean
rebel. This schlemiel, however, has greater affinity with the protagonist of Chamisso’s
novel, Peter Schlemihl, a homeless wanderer who strips himself of his own shadow,
than with Heine’s Apollo. This is because, Arendt argues, Chaplin’s tramp remains
connected to ‘worldly’ affairs to a far greater extent than Heine’s poet–pariah.
Chaplin’s tramp inhabits the ‘world of the earth [. . .] from which neither nature
nor art can provide escape’ (2007: 286–7). His affective attachments are those of
‘common people’.
It is especially the way in which Chaplin’s tramp falls in love – always at first
sight—that confirms his affinity with the world. It is a proletarian ‘kind of love –
however rare [love] it may be’ (ibid., 287). Chaplin’s falling in love – always with the
same naïveté, devotedness and defencelessness – attests to the singularity of the love-
event in his filmic creations. Furthermore, Chaplin’s tramp in love affirms again
the metamorphic trope in Arendt’s essay. The tramp is transformed, or ‘touched’, by
love. For Arendt, this ‘loving pariah’ is at once a comic figure and ‘the idol of the
masses’. Chaplin’s pariah has thus a transformative power to the extent that he has
already proven to be susceptible and vulnerable to the metamorphic agency of love.
Arendt suggests that Chaplin’s schlemiel is a prototypical refugee figure insofar
as he provides a powerful illustration of a dependent existence. His survival hinges

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

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frames Arendt’s political interpretation of the pariah–tramp. Arendt neither drama-

tizes nor romanticizes rebellious action, but, instead, sketches the pariah–tramp as
a non-redemptive figure. Chaplin’s duplicitous presence in The Great Dictator (his
first sound film) emphasizes not only the contrast between the ‘little man’ and the
‘big shot’, but also, in the comic switch, the tramp’s own metamorphosis (Arendt:
288). Towards the end of the movie, Chaplin-the-Jewish-barber takes the place of
Chaplin-the-dictator-Hynkel, and makes a surprising speech. Instead of the expected
declaration of invasion of Austerlich, he makes a ‘moving and impassioned plea’
for peace and fraternity. In this speech, Arendt argues, Chaplin ‘stepped out of char-
acter, and sought, in his own name, to reaffirm and vindicate the simple wisdom and
philosophy of the “little man” ’ (ibid.).
The public and critical reactions to Chaplin’s ‘stepping out’ of the jester role were
either misunderstanding or lack of response (see, for example, McDonald et al. 1965:
208–10). This has enforced blurring of the distinctions between the tramp’s and
Chaplin’s own pariah embodiments. Here Arendt (288) suggests, again rather enig-
matically, that Chaplin’s popularity ‘began rapidly to wane, not because of any
mounting antisemitism, but because his underlying humanity had lost its meaning’.
In contrast to Heine’s poet–pariah – whose marginality enables transformative and
rebellious possibilities of the (prohibited) touch – it is when the pariah–tramp is
stripped of his comic and sentimental effects, that Chaplin provides his most power-
ful representation of the pariah figure.

Franz Kafka’s Goodwill Pariah

Arendt finds her final pariah ‘typification’ in two of Franz Kafka’s texts, ‘Description
of a Struggle’ (1983) and The Castle (1969). What makes Kafka’s heroes pariah-like
figures, is, Arendt argues (2007: 290), their involvement in ‘situations and perplexi-
ties distinctive of Jewish life’. In the ‘Description of a Struggle’ one of the protago-
nists, a supplicant, attends an event, where his attempts at social engagement with
others are utterly unsuccessful. The point is not, simply, that he is being excluded
from or mistreated by others. Rather, Arendt argues, the ‘reality and validity of
his own existence’ is put in doubt. He is reduced ‘to a status of nonentity’ (ibid., 289).
He remains perplexed and uncertain about the reality, and consequentiality, of
his social presence, and about the ‘living actuality’ of being recognized by others
(ibid., 290).
For Arendt, Kafka’s pariah cannot seek refuge in the community of pariahs – just
as the subject position of pariahdom can no longer guarantee any commonality of
standpoint. The pariah cannot compensate for that denied sociopolitical reality
of his existence through an ‘overwhelming preoccupation with the world of beauty’
(ibid., 289). For Kafka’s pariah, it is no longer ‘the freedom of the schlemiel and poet’,
‘the innocence of the suspect’, or ‘the escape into nature and art’, but thinking – ‘the
use of contemplative faculty’ – that provides an ‘instrument of self-preservation’ and
a space of rebellious action (Arendt 2007: 290). Kafka’s pariah does not exhibit the

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

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

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

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

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

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 ARENDT’S METAMORPHIC FIGURATIONS IN ‘THE JEW AS PARIAH’ 211

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

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 212 ACTION AND APPEARANCE

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 Index

Adorno, Theodor 3, 25, 31, 170 civil disobedience 6, 114–5, 142

aesthetics 120, 158, 161 cognition 10, 18–20, 136, 166–7, 170
aletheia 4, 47, 54, 56–7, 59–60, 76 see also common sense 18, 61, 82, 124, 126, 130,
truth; disclosure; unconcealment 172, 179, 195
alienation see world alienation communication 45–7, 64–5, 188, 190, 193,
alterity 19, 49, 67 198
America, United States of 156, 198, 210 communitarian 4, 6, 120–1, 135, 189
annihilation 31, 103, 105, 112, 128 community see political community
antisemitism 7, 167–9, 172–9, 207 concealment 57–8, 128, 189, 200
Aristotle 15–18, 20, 22, 46, 53, 59–65, 73 conformity 11, 140, 143
associations 76, 97, 100, 200, 204 conscience 81, 97, 99–100, 119, 132, 135–6,
audience 1, 4, 125, 188, 190 139–41, 143, 157–9
Augustine of Hippo 74, 109–10, 155, 184, 191 call of 63–4, 66–7
authenticity 65, 79, 129, 158 consent 4, 135, 138, 156
authoritarianism 98–100 contemplative life 15–16, 44, 65
authority 21, 90, 100, 104, 118, 122, 130,
156, 188 dasein 4, 23, 54–67
and law 106, 111 Derrida, Jacques 192, 195
political 98, 134–8 Descartes, René 32
relationship to power and violence 92–3, Diogenes Laertius 21–2
106–8 disclosure 4, 31–3, 46, 53–66, 69, 71–2, 75,
Roman conception of 94–5 83–4, 123, 126, 130, 154, 200, 209
Weber and 88, 92 self- 6, 63, 117, 125, 127
Disraeli, Benjamin 7, 175
beginnings 28, 150 doxa 4, 13, 21–2, 53–4, 61, 64–6, 77–8
and birth 63–4, 74, 83 Dreyfus Affair 7, 174–7, 204
new 83–4, 95, 104, 136, 151, 163 duty 11, 118, 121, 135, 139
political 5, 99, 105, 113
see also natality; revolution, and Eichmann, Adolf 6, 138–43, 145, 174, 189, 193
beginnings; revolutionary, beginnings, England 157, 175
violence, originary or original Epictetus 77
belonging 35, 189, 195, 199, 201 ethical 21, 42, 44, 50, 134
non- 197, 208 code 78, 125
Benjamin, Walter 5, 98, 105–9, 111, 170–1, considerations 6, 117, 119, 124–5, 127,
186, 188 129, 131
Blake, William 184–7 constraints 6, 117–18, 120–1, 123, 127–30
Bollas, Christopher 73 principles 124, 159
ethics 6–7, 42–4, 50, 121, 150–1, 159
Chaplin, Charlie 205–7 Kantian 120, 128, 159
citizenship 15, 135, 208 political 6, 117–20, 124, 130
city-state 76, 107 see also polis and Weber 97, 200

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 216 INDEX

evil 2, 3, 107, 119, 134–7, 139–40, 152–4, 168 inter-esse 3, 87, 111
commission of 135, 137, 140, 143 interest 10, 13, 48, 87, 122, 129
good and – 11, 127, 135, 139 common 3, 75, 111
Machiavelli 95, 98, 127 self- 143–4, 179
problem of 5, 13–14 interiority 5, 47, 55, 69, 72–3
intersubjective 4, 45, 62, 64, 72–3, 123–4
fear 5, 110, 141, 178, 206, 209 see also terror intuition 18, 65, 170
forgetfulness 57–9, 152–3 Israel 28, 174, 202
forgetting 14–15, 46, 62, 85, 151, 199,
205, 210 Jameson, Fredric 189
Foucault, Michel 5, 88–94, 97–101 Jaspers, Karl 39, 54, 66, 79
France 108, 175, 178, 198, 204 judgement 120, 123–7, 129–31, 136–8,
Frankfurt School 31, 92 140–1, 144, 157–8, 191
friendship 7, 74, 155, 159, 160, 184, 189 of spectators/audience 1, 4, 6, 9, 63–4, 66,
125, 190
Gadamer Hans-Georg 4, 40, 47–50, 53 see also under Kant
genocide 29, 172 justice 106, 134, 146, 174
Germany 35, 53, 79–80, 138, 141, 143, 173–4
glory 112–13, 117, 125–7, 129 Kafka, Franz 207–9
honour and 21, 97, 161 Kant, Immanuel 9, 13, 42, 137, 158–9, 170
see also greatness imagination 171
goodwill 151, 162–3, 208–9 judgement 120, 123, 127–8, 158
governmentality 90, 92 knowledge 18, 20, 22
greatness 96, 117, 119–20, 125–6 on philosophers 10–11
guilt 64, 107, 139–40, 145, 206 Kierkegaard, Sǿren 9, 188
collective 143, 145 knowledge 11–14, 16–22, 32, 94, 99, 136
self- 14, 16
happiness 15–17 Kristeva, Julia 66
public 126, 161
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 19, 31, 171 Lazare, Bernard 8, 174–5, 197, 200, 204–5,
Heidegger, Martin 2, 4, 20, 23, 29, 39–40, 209–10
45, 47–50, 53–67, 70, 191 Lessing, Gotthold 77–8, 79–80
Heine, Heinrich 201–4 liberalism 4, 84, 91, 166
Heraclitus 40, 54 linguistics 18, 45, 47–8, 61 see also speech
Hobbes, Thomas 88, 94, 111, 141 acts
Holderlin 25, 174 Locke, John 41–2
holocaust 28, 31, 36, 80, 171 logos 20, 57–8, 65, 111
Auschwitz 138–9 love 74, 95, 100, 155, 191, 194, 202, 205–6
concentration camps 35, 79–82, 139, 181 antipolitical 184–7, 189
death camps 31, 34–5 forgiveness 7, 159–61
human nature 11, 17, 142–3, 145, 166, 179 of knowledge 21–2
Hume, David 41–2 non-public 8, 159
of the world 97–8
illusion 18, 41, 44, 58, 80, 173, 198 Luxemburg, Rosa 78–9, 115
imperialism 7, 167–9, 175 lying 6, 128, 186, 191–2, 194
individuality 4–5, 26, 31, 33, 69–73, 76,
80–4, 155 Machiavelli, Nicollò 5, 90, 94–8, 127
individuation 4, 62–4, 66, 70, 73 marginality 8, 198–201, 203, 207, 210

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 INDEX 217

Marx, Karl 14, 27, 31, 78, 188 conceptions of 15, 87, 90, 98, 200
mass society 27, 30, 33–4, 144 conditions of 5, 162
masses 96, 173, 179, 205, 208 disclosive 53, 64
mastery 5, 31, 77, 156 and law 103–5, 107–9, 115, 118
memory 29, 35, 41, 93, 153, 157, 170, 172, life 15, 45, 83, 87–8, 99, 130, 132, 137, 151,
190, 205 see also remembrance 153, 158, 160–3, 192 see also public, life;
Merleau-Ponty 12, 18 vita activa
modernity 3–33, 40, 42, 82, 87–8, 98, 199 order 5, 17, 90, 100, 139, 192, 194–5
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 5, organization 108–9, 129
110, 124, 161 resistive 198, 210
morality 42, 44, 79, 81, 144–6, 150, 159, 172 space 5, 103–5, 110–13, 162, 195
and politics 5–7, 43, 118, 120, 130, 134–7, Portmann, Adolf 72
142, 158, 162 praxis 59–60, 62, 64, 66, 109, 114–15
moral philosophy 130, 134–6, 138–9, 159 psycholanalysis 5, 71
public
natality 5, 59, 63–4, 101, 109–10, 150–1, 179 action 111, 127, 199
National Socialism 198 life 2, 4, 8, 78, 118, 140, 159–61, 195
Nazis 29, 80 see also political, life; vita activa
regime of 78–9, 136, 139 opinion 62, 65
nation-state 91–2, 100 perception 128
necessity 16, 26, 58–9, 62, 162, 201 realm 4, 30, 35, 48, 50, 54, 64–6, 83,
Negri, Antonio 96 118–30, 134, 137, 144–5, 158, 194
Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 14, 16–17, 23, 31, 44, space 43, 49–50, 83, 112, 122
152–3, 157, 188, 200 sphere 4, 43, 84, 89–90, 159–61, 163, 194
punishment 7, 58, 139, 153–5, 202, 206
obedience 92–3, 107, 114, 134, 138–9, 141–2 Pythagoras 13, 21–2
objectivity 43, 54
obligation 88, 136 reason 31–2, 59, 119–21, 126, 135
ontology 50, 56, 57, 142–4, 195 charisma of 99–100
opinion 4, 9, 13, 43, 75, 137, 185, 191–2, 195 instrumental 31, 55
and doxa 22, 53–4, 65, 78 and truth 10–13, 18–20
realm of 4, 159 reason of state 158–9
of spectators 62, 64–5, 123, 125–6 rebellion 8, 78, 142, 198, 204, 210
see also public, opinion rebellious action 200–1, 204–7, 209–10
relativism 4, 43–5, 50
parvenu 173–5, 177–8, 199, 204, 208 remembering 1, 94, 97
peace 67, 112, 140, 207 remembrance 12, 29, 162, 170
-treaty 113 resistance 92, 108, 142, 209
perception 16–18, 41, 65, 72, 170 respect 7, 79, 92, 159–61, 163, 172
perspectivism 4, 43 responsibility 58, 78, 96–7, 108, 129, 144,
Plato 14, 17, 21–2, 39–40, 42, 44, 53–4, 157, 173, 177–8, 204
56–8, 63, 65, 67, 78, 114 collective 145
polis 49, 65, 76, 112–14, 129 see also individual 135, 138
city-state moral 118, 139
political revolution 78, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 104,
action 15, 87–90, 100, 122, 128–9, 134, 115, 157
174, 197, 209 American 100, 156–7
community 15, 113, 136, 195, 200, 204 Atomic 27

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 218 INDEX

revolution (Cont’d) stateless 28, 134, 198

and beginnings 95, 97, 100 subjective 17, 56, 72, 75, 77, 83, 124, 209
French 95, 98, 100, 160 superfluity 81
revolutionary superfluous, human beings as 34, 153, 208
act 90, 97, 100
action 5, 94, 97–8, 103 techne 55, 59–60
beginnings 5, 95, 100 terror 31, 34–6, 81, 167, 194
movements 87–9, 99 totalitarian 26, 31, 34–5, 134, 142–5, 166–9,
power 103, 107–9 175
spirit 78, 170 government 35, 194
rights 88–9, 91, 99–101, 140, 208 regimes 30, 34, 48, 159
claiming 156, 172–3 totalitarianism 6–7, 31, 34–6, 79–80, 82,
human 134–5, 142–3 118, 128, 134, 136–43, 159, 166–70, 178,
political 175, 200 192, 194–5
secrecy 195–6 experience of 31, 35–6, 79, 82, 118, 128,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 174, 188, 190 138–40, 142, 145, 188, 194
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 187–8 truth 4, 39–50, 78, 105, 128, 137, 158, 170
concealment and disclosure of 65–6, 76
Schmitt, Carl 98, 101, 103–4, 106, 109, moral 135, 195
111–12 political 4, 191–3
Scholem, Gershom 25, 180, 188–9 see also aletheia; reason
secrecy 8, 186–7, 189–90, 195–6
state 128 unconcealment- 47, 56–8 see also aletheia
self-interest see under interest un-forgetting 54, 56 see also aletheia
socialism 27, 96
Socrates 13–14, 22, 44, 54, 66–7, 77–8, 114, violence 2, 5–6, 35, 43, 88, 90, 92–4, 97–8,
139, 159 103–9, 111–15, 128, 153, 193
solidarity 95, 121, 135, 161, 174 instrumental 105–7
solitude 155, 185, 190, 192, 194–5 originary or original 104–5, 108–9, 111–12
sovereign 53, 88, 90–1, 93, 96–7, 99, 104, of war 112–15
106 virtue 14, 15–17, 59, 65, 95–7, 110, 118, 127,
decision 103–6, 109, 111–12, 114–15 159, 161, 185
power 88, 93, 98, 103–4 political 4, 121, 127–8, 138, 141, 191
and violence 88, 111, 115 vitaactiva 43–4, 56, 93, 98, 136, 163 see also
sovereignty 88–92, 98, 100, 114, 136–7, public, life; political, life.
156–7 vitacontemplativa see contemplative life
and freedom 53, 90–1, 100, 136 Voegelin, Eric 166–7, 170–1
individual 77, 100, 156
state 88, 104, 111 war 93, 95, 101, 103, 105, 112–15, 173
spectators 1, 6, 21–3, 53–5, 57, 67, 69, 72, 74, -crimes 143
83, 123, 188, 195, 198 see also under Weber, Max 5, 8, 31, 88–90, 92–4, 96–100,
judgement; opinion 105, 118, 127, 197, 199–200
spectatorship 74, 124–5 White, Hayden 167, 171–2
speech acts 6, 97, 122–3, 126–7 will 5, 54–6, 77, 82, 84, 88–90, 92, 108, 122,
state 88–94, 97–8, 101, 104, 128, 141–3, 154, 135–8, 156–7, 162, 170
174, 176–8, 199, 206 and evil 152–3

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 INDEX 219

free 95, 100 worldlessness 7, 25–36, 48, 144, 159,

to power 157, 161 184, 204
Winnicott, Donald 71–2, 83–4
world alienation 4, 26, 28–31, 33–6, 137, 144 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 10, 14, 145–6

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