Procedural, Epistemic, and Performative
Yasemin Sari
It is no mystery that equality is a relational term.1 If I were to say, “I am equal,” I would be uttering at best an incomplete statement, and at worst a meaningless one. However, if I were to say, “We are equal,” my statement could be broken up into its components to clarify the meaning of such equality depending on the “we” that is in question, and the condition upon which our equality is based. Minimally, I would be addressing a collection of individuals who understand themselves to be equal by a certain relation. What this relation amounts to has been subject to change—that is, natural equality, equality before God, equal dignity, and equality before the law—without changing the core element of relationality.
In an early twenty-first-century setting, nevertheless, I contend that there is a responsibility to explain why we value equality and how we come to perform it in a setting divided by borders—visible and otherwise. For Arendt, equality is an artificial product of human action (including organization). Through this activity, we realize our capacity to recognize each other whereby equality becomes the normative foundation of affording each other equality where mere formal equality—as stated by all our declarations of human rights—falls short.
To be sure, while Arendtian egalitarianism is not a misnomer, Arendt’s articulation of equality as both a precondition and the outcome of the creation of political space—but never from just nature itself—has been a point of criticism, especially as it relates to the question of whether she has elitist inclinations.2 This chapter aims to unpack the puzzlement over Arendt’s understanding of equality that surpasses a formal or material understanding of equality without dismissing the import of either as exemplified in their political and social registers.
Arendt’s contention that “man is apolitical,” and that “politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships”3 will be our starting point in understanding equality as an artificial condition that arises within politics. For her, “politics organizes those who are absolutely different with a view to their relative equality and in contradistinction to their relative differences.”4 The conditions of free political action—that is, plurality and equality—are indispensable for freedom, because neither when one is dominated nor when merely fed lies (or “the truth”) can one exercise true freedom.
To be clear, the term equality appears infrequently in Arendt’s writing, but when it does, it does so forcefully. I will turn to several key passages to explore the development of what I understand to be the three interconnected levels of Arendt’s articulation of “artificial equality”: (1) procedural, (2) epistemic, and (3) performative.
Artificial Equality: Relational, not Natural
In her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt emphasizes the fact that equality is not a norm that comes from nature, and hence does not have the property of universality. Equality is neither natural nor universal, but, rather, is a conventional, artificial phenomenon. In other words, it is spatial and performative. It is clear that her suspicion of a “universal equality” is rooted in her criticism of the regime of human rights that has been inadequate in response to the atrocities of mid-twentieth century that she explores in the Origins. She elaborates on the concept of equality as intimately linked with a principle of justice, which she leaves undeveloped:
Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals.5
As I wrote recently:
Two conclusions follow from the above passage: (1) that equality is not natural, but is instead experienced spatially, and (2) that it rests on a mutual decision—understood as a response to our common existence in the world. . . . Arendt’s statement allows us to see the force of citizenship in her articulation of the condition of equality. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the “mutual decision” of becoming equal points to another possibility: While the law can give human beings certain rights that can be practiced in the presence of others—that is, in public—the participation in this public is first and foremost granted by an act of human beings themselves.6
In James Ingram’s words, “[This] equality is not given from above and does not consist principally in laws or institutions but is achieved through practice.”7 What Arendt offers us here is far from simple. To be sure, the emphasis is on a performance of “mutual decision”—hence it points to the performative level of equality, which nonetheless I contend stems from a procedural level where each is recognized, albeit artificially to have an equal say. Having an equal say—stemming from the mutual decision of different individuals who makes up a political organization—can be understood as having the ability to voice one’s opinion; the practical outcome of this is best understood as a right to due process and having the fundamental recognition of one’s civic rights in a polity. It is in this sense that justice emerges in human relations, and its lack causes an injury most pronounced in the lack of a principle of equal treatment in the eyes of law. The inability to be heard, to be given due process, is equivalent to being treated as unequal without warrant.
The primacy of this capacity to have an equal say over formal equality is important in Arendt’s account. In her “Introduction into Politics,”8 Arendt identifies our misunderstanding of
the Greek term for a free constitution, isonomia, to mean what equality before the law means for us. But isonomia does not mean that all men are equal before the law, or that the law is the same for all, but merely that all have the same claim to political activity, and in the polis this activity primarily took the form of speaking to one another. Isonomia is therefore essentially the equal right to speak. . . . To speak in the form of commanding and to hear in the form of obeying were not considered actual speech and hearing; they were not free because they were bound up with a process defined not by speaking but by doing and laboring.9
The equal right to speak does not equate with a universal egalitarianism, given the exclusion of women and slaves, among others, on which the city-state was built. Arendt’s account makes clear that she is aware of the limitations of this construct, without endorsing such separation by city “walls” in a twentieth-century political existence. For her, one import of the allusion to isonomia is not its exclusionary history, but the independence of its existence from an egalitarian constitution where each individual is formally equal to another. The equal right to speak brings into focus the ability to lay claim to political activity, which for Arendt is the main locus of human freedom.10 As such, equality involves recognition in the act of treating and taking each other as equal in conversation and debate. Her point is to draw a contrast between the ancient Greek and the contemporary articulations of equality as the term relates to freedom. “Equality,” she asserts,
existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. The difference between this ancient concept of equality and our notion that men are born or created equal and become unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made, institutions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth.11
The ability to become equal among others, to exchange thoughts and opinions, is one of the important tenets of the experience of freedom. The artificial equality of isonomia in this sense is an antidote to “modern equality,” which is “based on the conformism inherent in society.”12
At this juncture, I have laid out what I deem to be the epistemic level of artificial equality, where each party has an equal right to speak and the ability to claim such a voice in political discussion to be heard. I deem this level epistemic in terms of the status of the validity claim of the parties in debate, where the account individuals afford are taken to be equal to one another so long as built on responsible justification.13 Building on procedural equality, this epistemic equality too rests on the condition of performative equality, where each individual’s claim to political activity is made possible by the arrangement of our political frame. For Arendt, this claim to political activity is connected with a “diversity of views”:
The ability to see the same thing from various standpoints stays in the human world; it is simply the exchange of the standpoint given us by nature for that of someone else, with whom we share the same world, resulting in a true freedom of movement in our mental world that parallels our freedom of movement in the physical one.14
Central to Arendt’s thought is her articulation of equality as a political phenomenon, or a necessary condition that makes political action possible. “Wherever the equality of others and of their particular opinions are abrogated,” she states, “as, for instance, under tyranny, in which everything and everyone is sacrificed to the standpoint of the tyrant, no one is free and no one is capable of insight, not even the tyrant.”15 This articulation of equality surely helps us focus on the question of a pre-political equality that may ensure the equal participation of everyone in politics.
In his article, “Arendt on the Foundations of Equality,” Jeremy Waldron articulates Arendt’s commitment to equality by defining how “equality operates in Arendt’s thought as a principle about political participation” embodying two positions: “1. The position that anyone might participate in the actions and discussions of a free republic, 2. The position that the actions and discussions of a free republic are possible only among equals.”16 Waldron understands the first position to be more “democratic in character,”17 namely, that everyone has the equal capacity to enter into politics (or the political realm), or the equal ability to participate. Inasmuch as there is no ground for a priori exclusion from politics,18 the hidden assumption behind this idea is that such equal ability to participate must have prior material conditions to make such participation possible, that is, there must be some understanding of equal access (call this pre-political equality) to practices that would allow for entry into political debate. I contend that this condition of equal access squares neatly with Arendt’s commitment to the import of a diversity of views, or plurality of opinions, in acknowledging the uniqueness of each perspective.19 The second position, laid out in terms of the equality of political agents that partake in a political endeavor, is closely linked with Arendt’s conception of freedom—which Waldron deems the more “republican” position: one can only be free among her equals.
Underlying the aforementioned positions on equality as the modus operandi of politics is her insistence on the divorce of political action from self and group interest, where interests are not the proper register upon which rights can be premised. The stuff of politics is our shared world, and this is why and how we can relate to each other in equality. In her 1958 work The Human Condition, she starts section 24, “The Disclosure of the Agent in Speech and Action,” with the following words:
Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them.20
Arendt’s point is important in that equality and plurality are complementary conditions for speech and action. She demonstrates her caution against equality being reduced to sameness or uniformity by taking into account the phenomenological aspect of human existence, whereby each individual can and ought to be recognized as unique and distinct.
In section 30, “The Labor Movement,” she elaborates further:
The equality attending the public realm is necessarily an equality of unequals who stand in need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes. As such, the equalizing factor arises not from human “nature” but from outside. . . . Political equality, therefore, is the very opposite of our equality before death, which as the common fate of all men arises out of the human condition, or of equality before God, at least in its Christian interpretation, where we are confronted with an equality of sinfulness inherent in human nature.21
As I have noted at the beginning, the condition of equality Arendt identifies in human existence emerges through political organization (formal or informal), and thereby does not rest on a natural property we each possess. As such, equality is not rooted in nature, and differentiated from “sameness,” and “identity,” it gains its validity based on agreement and consent. In her “Truth and Politics,” she turns to Jefferson on this note:
[In] the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson declared certain “truths to be self-evident,” because he wished to put the basic consent among the men of the Revolution beyond dispute and argument; like mathematical axioms, they should express “beliefs of men” that “depend no on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.” (See Jefferson’s “Draft Preamble to the Virginia Bill Establishing Religious Freedom.”) Yet by saying “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he conceded, albeit without becoming aware of it that the statement “All men are created equal” is not self-evident but stands in need of agreement and consent—that equality, if it is to be politically relevant, is a matter of opinion, and not “the truth.” . . . We hold this opinion beca use freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding dominion.22
In differentiating equality from a self-evident fact, Arendt emphasizes its validity as a norm to be dependent on an act of human beings, that is, consent or agreement. Coupled with her criticism of human rights discourse—as she neither endorses a natural rights doctrine nor a nationally endowed rights framework as sufficient for the status of equality—the possibility of being equal depends on the ability to belong to a political community.
Recalling that membership to political community is neither a given nor a predetermined fact of human existence, but is linked to political action, it is not surprising that equality, once it presents itself as a necessary element of human plurality, is articulated within the realm of human action: the site of human freedom per se. This aligns with Arendt’s understanding and dismissal of sovereignty in political space, where individuals are not necessarily related to themselves or to each other as masters. As political action is action in concert with a view to a worldly principle23 —justice, freedom, and equality—sovereignty as it pertains to mastery is dismissed from the realm of freedom and placed in the realm of production by homo faber (who uses instrumentality and violence). This point sums up the performative aspect of equality, that is, the recognition of equality in political agency.
As political action is what creates any political space, the people who act together have to be articulated as equals, peers, to be able to accomplish such creation. In conclusion, perhaps it is important to heed Arendt’s remark in Origins:
Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different.24
To be sure, equality is a political (hence, artificial) enterprise in Arendt’s thought. What I have shown in this chapter, however, is that Arendt has a nuanced account of equality that goes beyond our formal and material articulations of equality, thereby outlining the normative order in which it can be placed. Artificial equality is not just a theoretical underpinning of her ontological commitments to human plurality and freedom, but it also has the potential to remedy our practical shortcomings in articulating human existence based on a principle of justice.
Notes
1 Elizabeth Anderson explores the import of such relationality in her influential essay “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (January 1999): 287–337.
2 Hauke Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–98. In her On Revolution, Arendt allocates a lengthy discussion to the question of “the élite” or “élites” whereby she diagnoses the problem in the lack of public spaces from which an élite can spring from the people: “The trouble lies in the lack of public spaces to which people at large would have entrance and from which an élite could be selected, or rather, where it could select itself. The trouble, in other words, is that politics has become a profession and a career, and that the ‘élite’ therefore is being chosen according to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical” (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, [Penguin Books, 1990], 277).
3 Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in Promise in Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 95.
4 Ibid., 96, *Denktagebuch, August 1950.
5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Benediction Classics, 2009), 301, my emphasis.
6 See my “An Arendtian Recognitive Politics: The Right to Have Rights as a Performance of Visibility,” Philosophy Today 61, no. 3 (2017): 709–35.
7 James Ingram, “What Is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights,” The American Political Science Review 102, no. 4 (2008): 401–16, 410.
8 Arendt, “Introduction into Politics.”
9 Ibid., 118.
10 As she concedes, “This equality has, of course, nothing to do with justice” (Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 118).
11 Arendt, On Revolution, 31.
12 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 41.
13 For a detailed account of a principle of epistemic responsibility I have developed, see my “Arendt, Truth, and Epistemic Responsibility,” Arendt Studies 2 (2018): 149–70.
14 Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 168.
15 Ibid., 169.
16 Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt on the Foundations of Equality,” in Politics in Dark Times, ed. Seyla Benhabib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17–38, 30.
17 Ibid.
18 Waldron points out that this possibility to participate “supervene[s] on something about all humans” (Ibid., 34), and that this is the condition of natality (Ibid., 36–37).
19 One other caveat here would be the institutional arrangements that makes such participation a real possibility, and perhaps this is where Arendt’s notion of a “right to have rights” would have some force in articulating the act of participating (or claiming such participatory capacity) even where one is denied a voice, that is, refugees not partaking in the discussions that affect their existence and life plans.
20 Arendt, Human Condition, 175.
21 She continues: “In these instances, no equalizer is needed because sameness prevails anyhow; by the same token, however, the actual experience of this sameness, the experience of life and death, occurs not only in isolation but in utter loneliness, where no true communication, let alone association and community, is possible. From the viewpoint of the world and public realm, life and death and everything attesting to sameness are non-worldly, antipolitical, truly transcendent experiences” (Ibid., 215).
22 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (Penguin Books, 2006), 242.
23 Cf. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (Penguin Books, 2006); “Introduction into Politics.”
24 Arendt, Origins, 54.