Emily Zakin
The eight essays in Between Past and Future put their titular concepts into uneasy association and tension with one another, engaging in what Arendt calls experimental interpretation in order to reinvigorate their spirit. “Truth and Politics,” perhaps the most well-known and arguably the timeliest essay in the collection, is structured by its conjunction, which shares many of the characteristics that Jerome Kohn attributes to the “between” of Between Past and Future in his introduction. Kohn describes this between as a “gap” or an “abyss”1 that separates more than it connects.2 Likewise, the meeting of “Truth and Politics” hints at a disconnection that is not quite a disjunction—it might have been called “Between Truth and Politics” but not “Truth or Politics.” That sense of a troubled relation among central terms is also at work in three other essay titles: “Tradition and the Modern Age,” “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” and “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern.” In each case, there is a juxtaposition of what doesn’t go together but hasn’t fallen apart. Of the four remaining essays in the volume, two (“What Is Freedom?” and “What Is Authority?”) approach their central concept with a question mark, and two approach their central concept as the site of crisis (“The Crisis in Education” and “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance”). Caesura, question mark, crisis—these impel Arendt’s reflections, whose “only aim is to gain experience in how to think” in the gap between past and future, not to offer prescriptions or “invent some newfangled surrogates” for overcoming it.3
My purpose here will not be to cover (or uncover) the entire terrain of the concepts and crises Arendt attends to, but to focus specifically on how the break in tradition and the question of freedom illuminate the complex relationship between truth and politics. Though not named as a crisis in its title, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” the first essay in the collection, establishes the premise of the essays that follow with the assertion that the “power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force.”4 The break with tradition and the concomitant unraveling of “willed continuity in time”5 is threaded throughout the reflections that follow.
Arendt takes it that “our philosophical tradition”6 is explicitly “anti-political,”7 founded on the opposition between thinking and acting, philosopher and citizen, singularity and plurality. Throughout the essays, Arendt’s discusses “the tradition” or “our tradition” as though its referent were self-evident and indisputable: “the tradition” is the relation of philosophy to politics that begins with Plato and ends with Marx (who she considers still inside the tradition, coming just before the break). Tradition here is not just the general practice of intergenerational transmission,8 which, like thinking, mediates between past and future, but the more specific tradition that “began when Plato discovered that it is somehow inherent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the common world of human affairs.”9 The tradition of political philosophy, in other words, is inaugurated by (and remains equivalent with) the philosophical removal of concepts from the world of experience, which it subsequently attempts to dominate. In this tradition, ideas are contemplated in the solitude of being “between-two” with oneself, not in the shared exchange of perspectives on a public world between us. Indeed, Arendt writes, “political philosophy necessarily implies the attitude of the philosopher toward politics,” an attitude characterized as “the philosopher’s turning away from politics and then returning in order to impose his standards on human affairs.”10 In formulating the ethos of political philosophy in this way, Arendt takes the cleavage between concepts and experience to be intrinsic to it and to (our) tradition (and not only foreshadowed by it). Even at its end, and however inverted, Marx, like Plato, envisions an “ideal of the best form of society.”11
The break with this tradition is not then simply an imminent fallout of modernity, a general trend within it to leave behind inherited ways of being or thinking, whether philosophical or political. While it has sources that draw from and coalesce around the inwardness of Cartesian doubt, the vanishing of authority, the rise of mass society, the incorporeal formalities and abstractions of modern science, liberal individualism, and the disorientation of world alienation, Arendt ultimately attributes the (final) break to the contingent chain of catastrophic events that took place in the twentieth century, catalyzing the development of totalitarian domination.12 The “break in our history” is “caused,” she writes, by the “chaos of mass-perplexities13 on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual sphere which the totalitarianism movements, through terror and ideology, crystallized into a new form of government and domination.”14 Here, Arendt marks a clear dividing line between the long histories of philosophical inwardness and modern world estrangement, and the distinctive twentieth-century event of totalitarianism that aimed to annihilate freedom and dissolve the public realm. She also previews the way in which the ideological decimation of truth undoes the political realm itself, an insight that returns more vividly in “Truth and Politics.”
It might seem that the break with tradition would liberate us from old ideas and liberate us to think and act anew, but it also stymies us because its concepts continue to hold us in their grasp even as they become less able to orient us and less adequate to phenomena we confront in the world. The effect of this disequilibrium and loss of exchange between concepts and experiences is an overall disorientation and loss of meaning. Even though “the tradition” had subtly undermined the public realm by unmooring thinking from acting, and prioritizing necessity over contingency, it had also supplied a source of meaning that made sense of experience and anchored thought. The break with tradition does not overcome but redoubles the implicit discordance of philosophical disdain for action, which continues to resonate in confused and jarring ways,15 leading us into new perplexities.16
For instance, Arendt asserts that the “contradictions and antinomies” of freedom arise from the philosophical concept of inner freedom, and not from the political experience of freedom of action.17 But the “rise of totalitarianism”18 also renders freedom and politics incompatible, and reinforces the “liberal credo” that freedom begins where politics leaves off, that freedom is “freedom from politics,”19 a tenet that banishes freedom from the political realm,20 withdrawing it from action, isolating it from others, and estranging it from the world.21
“What Is Freedom?” distinguishes between (non-phenomenal, inner) philosophical freedom and political freedom:22 the tradition of political thought has misled us into believing that freedom is sovereignty, individual and willful, and it thereby obscures political freedom, the freedom to act. As such, and even though freedom is the “raison d’être of politics,”23 both “the enormous weight of this tradition” and the “telling urgency of our own experiences” press “into the same direction of a divorce of freedom from politics”24 and a distrust of the political realm.
In marking the distinction between the philosophical concept and the political experience, Arendt insists that “man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality”25 found not in the solitude of a disengaged self but in interaction with the world and with others. The distorting effects of philosophical freedom are manifold. For one, it transposes what is essentially a public and shared activity that belongs to “a politically organized world”26 into inner life, shielded within the self. For another, it assigns this freedom to the “will” whose “essential activity” is to “dictate and command.”27 Taken together, these two distortions mean that the free activity and movement of political life are philosophically transformed into an invisible and individual sovereignty, replacing action with self-mastery.
On Arendt’s account, political freedom requires, beyond liberation, both “the company of other men” and “a common public space.”28 That is, it requires a world between us. The company of others implies that these others have an equal claim to political participation and to the sharing of their perspectives. The common public space implies that one has crossed the threshold of private existence, venturing forth into a space of appearance and visibility. Without these elements of a world (plurality, space, visibility, equality, and shared reality), the capacity to begin is confined to the obscurity of “the human heart,” which Arendt calls “a very dark place.”29
In conceiving of freedom as a capacity for spontaneity, a faculty of beginning, and the freedom to initiate (available even to those without political freedom), the tradition of political thought salvages what might otherwise be lost during conditions of “external coercion.”30 Although spontaneity is not yet political freedom (the full experience of political action in a public realm), nor is it the ambition of willful sovereignty, and Arendt views it as a resource that endures during the dark times when political freedom (experienced in action) is foreclosed. In the dark times of totalitarianism, which isolates human beings from one another and evacuates the common world, “what usually remains intact in the epochs of petrification and foreordained doom is the faculty of freedom itself, the sheer capacity to begin.”31
The loss of shared reality is both a cause and a sign that the political world has entered a zone of darkness. We cannot be free together without also sharing a public world, and this brings us to the problem of truth. In reflecting on the mutual hostilities and shifting alliances between truth and politics, Arendt’s focus in “Truth and Politics” is on the “injury political power is capable of inflicting on truth,”32 even while, as she reminds us at the essay’s conclusion, the political realm “where we are free to act and to change”33 is limited, bordered, and reliant upon “what we cannot change at will.”34 Truth remains at the limit of politics, standing beyond human action as its ground. Taking truth’s perspective, the essay brackets the “dignity” of the political realm,35 which resides in “acting together and appearing in public,”36 in order to display the deformations wrought by a politics concerned only with “interest and power.”37
Arendt launches her analysis on the basis of the distinction between rational truth and factual truth.38 Factual truths, that is, those that concern historical facts (“all factual truth, of course, concerns the past”39 ), are more vulnerable and fragile than rational truths, both because of their wholly contingent quality (they originated in free human action and could have been otherwise) and because they concern a reality that is among human beings in their plurality rather than within the human mind in its singularity. So even while facts and events “constitute the very texture of the political realm,”40 and are thus what hold the public realm and human reality together, they are also dependent on the flux of human affairs (for both their happening and their remembrance) and might vanish without recovery once lost. A fact that has been “lied away” has little chance of being rediscovered.41 Indeed, the contingency of historical events makes them both implausible and unexpected.42 Historical facts43 are not discerned through rational insight, and they can be manipulated: they are easy to disbelieve.
Arendt charts a transformation from the ancient (and especially Platonic) conflict between rational truth and politics, where the enemies of truth are error, ignorance, illusion, and opinion, but not lying,44 to the modern conflict between factual truth and politics, where the enemy is falsehoods that undermine both. The original conflict between truth and politics emerged out of the distinctive “ways of life” of the philosopher and the citizen;45 by associating opinion, in its multiplicity, with illusion, and truth with singularity, the Platonic conception degrades political life, the sphere of plurality in which opinions and perspectives are voiced and shared, and makes truth tyrannical.46 With the modern disappearance of transcendent truth, the “ancient antagonism” between philosophy and citizenship has been reborn as the hostility toward “unwelcome factual truths” that are at odds with “a given group’s profit or pleasure.”47
Unlike philosophical truth, which is singular and “transcends, by definition, the realm of the many, the world of human affairs,” factual truth is bound to the human world and “is always related to other people”—it does not concern a different way of life.48 This means that factual truth takes place in the realm of plurality, and lacks self-evidence.49 Emerging from human freedom and action, factual truth is both contingent and relational, it “is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about.”50 The fabric of human reality is woven by testimony and sustained by a robust web of relationships, a reliance that makes both trust and storytelling51 necessary components of truth since the “apprehension of reality is dependent upon our sharing the world with our fellow-men.”52 Because reality kills “all the other potentialities originally inherent in any given situation,” factual truths are also “intractable.”53 The reality of historical facts, that is to say, their ability to endure as truth beyond the contingent moment of their happening (the ephemeral moment of action), is overwhelmingly dependent on human testimony (on plurality and communication) and has no higher appeal54 than “records, documents, and monuments,”55 the durable artifacts and traces that congeal what has been witnessed and narrated and that anchor the shared reality of the historical object (and the cultural world56 ), even while retaining an opacity that cannot be elucidated by rational insight.
Facts are fragile and resilient, haphazard and opaque, irrational and obtuse, and these qualities make factuality galling and frustrating. Despite their stubbornness, the destruction of historical facts is not at all “inconceivable”—it is easy to imagine a “power monopoly” that would dispose of factual truth and thereby tear the fabric of reality.57 Arendt outlines two predominant strategies of destruction: (1) the transformation of fact into opinion, that is, into the unstable flux of a diversity of views; and (2) the replacement of actuality with potentiality. In the first, factual truth is discredited “as just another opinion.”58 In the second, political lies treat the past as though it were open to action like the future.
Recall that for Arendt, the public realm is a space of appearances, understood not as illusion in contrast to reality but as reality: reality is available to us through its appearance. On the one hand, according to Arendt, the political realm relies on the stability of a shared world to sustain it. On the other hand, the stable world of reality is permeated with opinions, with a diversity of views, with multiple perspectives.59 Indeed, there is no public realm unless there is more than one viewpoint in play. As elements of worldly reality and human plurality, opinion and fact “belong to the same realm,”60 but they cannot be collapsed. Facts can be distinguished from opinion in that the former are “beyond agreement, dispute, opinion, or dissent,”61 while the latter seek assent. Historical truths remain, like rational truth, coercive rather than persuasive. But one way that lies work is by “blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion,”62 exchanging the thusness of the former for the flux of the latter.
As we saw in the discussion on freedom earlier, human freedom and power require a stable shared reality in order to flourish. Power, for Arendt, is intrinsically transitory and ephemeral: it arises when human beings act in concert, and it disappears with the end of action. If power attempts to usurp reality with its own inventions, it makes not only the world but also its own possibility and practice insecure because it undermines the space of appearance: “If the past and present are treated as parts of the future—that is, changed back into their former state of potentiality—the political realm is deprived not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new.”63 And yet, liars will sound more “persuasive,” “plausible,” and even “logical”64 in their assertions since they can supplant the contingent story of action with a fantasied but logical necessity. Lies are more believable than the truth.
These qualities of lying become especially dangerous and pernicious when they become matters of government policy or propaganda, forms of organized lying that aim to rewrite history. Although small particular lies tear “a hole in the fabric of factuality,”65 this will leave noticeable incongruities and patches. But organized lying aims to create a new tapestry that destroys, negates, and violates reality. While the traditional political lie aimed to keep secrets hidden, “modern political lies are so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture—the making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack, or fissure.”66 The modern lie, aimed at fellow citizens, not enemy nations, makes a full-on assault on public things, things everybody knows, and thereby undermines the texture of trust and testimony that is necessary to sustain a common world embedded among plural actors.
Arendt adds that “it can be difficult to lie to others without lying to oneself,”67 and that self-deception becomes an almost inevitable consequence of successful lies that reshape shared reality, both because the liar is himself oriented by the perceptions of his deceived fellows, and because self-deception is advantageous since it creates the “semblance of truthfulness,”68 and the appearance of being trustworthy. This susceptibility to self-deception means that the truth no longer finds its “last refuge” in the liar;69 the liar does not even hold the truth within himself. The breakdown in the distinction between truth and falsity has the result that “a whole group of people, and even whole nations, may take their bearings from a web of deceptions.”70
Arendt offers “no remedy”71 for this loss of bearings, since she views its possibility as intrinsic to “the disturbing contingency of all factual reality,”72 but she does write that the “boundless” possibilities for lying are also a “self-defeat”73 since lies cannot produce “the secure stability of factual reality” that is necessary for the political realm. Lies are actions74 that threaten the space of action. The ability to lie is a “little miracle” that confirms (even as it endangers) human freedom.75
Unlike lying, truth-telling is not intrinsically action; only in circumstances “where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle”76 has the truthteller “begun to act,”77 that is, moved toward “changing the world”78 rather than stating what is. Arendt depicts the truthteller as an outsider, “alone” and “outside the political realm,”79 without cause or commitment. Even so, there are “public institutions” whose value/criterion is truth.80 The judiciary and academia81 serve as “refuges of truth”82 with an “authentically political significance”83 —in their independence from power struggle, they improve “the chances for truth to prevail in public.”84
Arendt does not provide a solution to the contemporary distrust of politics, but she does remind us that truth and politics can be allies. While truth might seem to be outside of politics, it is necessary for and secures the public realm: “no permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.”85 Lies, by contrast, destabilize the world, and lying “pulls the ground from under our feet and provides no other ground,”86 creating the “experience of a trembling wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality.”87 By tearing at the fabric of reality, organized political lying endangers not only truth but freedom, since the freedom of being a citizen in a community relies on and requires equal access to a public and durable space of appearance.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), xiii.
2 Ibid., xvii.
3 Ibid., 14.
4 Ibid., 25–26.
5 Ibid., 5.
6 Ibid., 156.
7 Ibid., 163.
8 Because the world is shared between past and future, “the crisis of authority in education is most clearly connected with the crisis of tradition” (Ibid., 190). Education is bound to human temporality, and its purpose, in Arendt’s view, is to prepare children for participation in a common world, not to “form” them.
9 Ibid., 25.
10 Ibid., 17.
11 Ibid., 18.
12 Ibid., 26.
13 The idea of “mass-perplexities” and “mass-opinions” are an important clue to underst anding Arendt’s meaning here. Totalitarianism is not simply opportunistic upon modernity or modernization, but is specifically tied to the vulnerability of truth when shared objects dissolve.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 18.
16 What Arendt calls a “perplexity” arises from the persistence of traditional concepts even as they cease to cohere with experience. Arendt attributes the greatness of the nineteenth-century thinkers to their realization that the (political, moral, and scientific) categories of thought they had inherited were inadequate to the contemporary world and its “new phenomena” (Ibid., 24), and to the insights and maneuvers by which they made visible the mismatch between concepts and experience, exploding traditional terms from the inside (Ibid., 23). Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche set out to overturn their precedent thinkers (to replace doubt with faith, philosophy with politics, and ideas with life), and in their thought she finds an apprehensive foreboding, but not yet a “new beginning and reconsideration of the past” (Ibid., 27).
17 Ibid., 142.
18 Ibid., 148.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 154.
21 Ibid., 145.
22 Ibid., 159.
23 Ibid., 145.
24 Ibid., 149.
25 Ibid., 147.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 144.
28 Ibid., 147.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 145.
31 Ibid., 167.
32 Ibid., 227.
33 Ibid., 259.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 258.
36 Ibid., 259.
37 Ibid.
38 Although she suspends the “legitimacy” of this distinction, she accepts it as a heuristic tool of investigation, and she makes use of a typology that characterizes philosophical truth as more vulnerable than scientific truth, which is itself more vulnerable than mathematical truth. Because philosophical truths are “highly differentiated and always unique thought trains” (Ibid., 226), they cannot be reproduced in the same way that geometric axioms could be if books were burned. The rationality of the human mind is nonetheless a field of stability or “relative permanence” compared with the “ever-changing affairs of men” (Ibid., 227).
39 Ibid., 254.
40 Ibid., 227.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 247.
43 Historical objectivity, or the idea of the historical object as common to all, the “same world” appearing in varying aspects, persists through different historiographical epochs and can be found in both “Homeric impartiality” (Ibid., 51, 258) and “Thucydidian objectivity” (Ibid., 52), as well as modern historical science.
44 Ibid., 228.
45 Ibid.
46 Contra Plato, Arendt finds in Greek political life the model for holding a world in common precisely insofar as it is regarded from “diverse points of view” (Ibid., 51). The commonality, the objectivity, of the world emerges from the exchange of “‘it appears to me’” (Ibid., 51), of doxa or opinions. On Arendt’s account, we create a world between us through sharing different perspectives, and this world is in crucial ways differentiated from both the private life of the home and the intimate life of the heart and soul. The public space, the space of appearances, is a kind of theater demarcated by the barely metaphorical “walls” of law (nomos), a worldly space that must also be temporally construed, since there can be no world without temporal continuity.
47 Ibid., 231.
48 Ibid., 233.
49 Ibid., 239.
50 Ibid., 234.
51 “Reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable” (Ibid., 257). Stories give meaning to facts, that is, they transfigure contingency by making events more “humanly comprehensible” (Ibid., 257), and they thus help conserve a shared world and a space of freedom by reconciling us to reality: “the teller of factual truth is also a storyteller” (Ibid., 257).
52 Ibid., 249.
53 Ibid., 238.
54 “In the event of a dispute, only other witnesses but no third and higher instance can be invoked” (239).
55 Ibid., 239.
56 Arendt highlights “the objective status of the cultural world, which, insofar as it contains tangible things—books and paintings, statues, buildings, and music—comprehends, and gives testimony to, the entire recorded past of countries, nations, and ultimately mankind” (Ibid., 199).
57 Ibid., 235.
58 Ibid., 239.
59 Given the way in which factual claims are woven into human reality, and are inescapably part of an “interpretive context” (Ibid., 245), Arendt asks: “Do facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all?” (Ibid., 234). Her reply is that facts can be rearranged in accord with new perspectives, but that no generation “has the right to touch the factual matter itself” (Ibid., 234), a “right” that is seemingly an epistemic right—there might be different perspectives on responsibility or guilt for an historical event, but the event itself is a “brutally elementary data” (Ibid., 234) and even “the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in historicism” have to trust in this factual indestructability (Ibid., 235). On this view, facts are conservators of the past. The totalitarian “disregard for factuality” and “conviction that everything is possible” (Ibid., 87) upends the boundaries of truth with the boundlessness of potentiality.
60 Ibid., 234.
61 Ibid., 235.
62 Ibid., 245.
63 Ibid., 254.
64 Ibid., 247.
65 Ibid., 248.
66 Ibid., 249.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 250.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., 251.
71 Ibid., 253.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 A lie is itself a “form of action” (Ibid., 245), and the liar, Arendt writes, “is an actor by nature; he says what is not so because he wants things to be different from what they are—that is, he wants to change the world” (Ibid., 246).
75 Ibid., 247.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 255.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 256. Arendt points in particular to the political relevance of “the historical sciences, and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents” (Ibid., 256–57). This can also be related to the conservative role (preservative of the shared world) of education.
82 Just as spontaneity is a refuge of freedom in dark political times, so the academy can be a refuge of truth.
83 Ibid., 256.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 225.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 253.