Catherine Kellogg
In one of her most demanding and philosophically dense texts, Hannah Arendt argued that understanding freedom is crucial to politics, notwithstanding the fact that this “seems to be a hopeless enterprise.”1 This seeming hopelessness stems from the fact that freedom’s meaning derives from Western philosophical and metaphysical traditions; traditions that inadequately take into account the social and political determinants of its appearance. Specifically, as she argues, in antiquity, freedom was first understood as a status and in that sense, a kind of property of persons, only to be transformed by Christian doctrine where that property came to be understood as an inner realm that was synonymous with free will. In the modern era, freedom came to be understood, especially by the social contract theorists, as the capacity to overcome a first nature in order to partake in a second, social and political nature, accomplished by becoming both individually and collectively indivisible. Freedom thus came to be conceived on analogy with sovereignty, a position with which she vigorously disagrees. However, Arendt gives us a way to think our way out of the seeming hopelessness of thinking freedom when she says:
The possible advantage of our situation following the demise of metaphysics and philosophy would be two-fold. It would permit us to look at the past with new eyes, unburdened and unguided by any traditions, and thus dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw experiences without being bound by any prescriptions as to how to deal with those treasures.2
For Arendt, the demise of metaphysics does not mean that we should forget it, leave it behind and search for something completely new. The break from tradition is not a break from the past. Rather, it is a break from the prescriptions of how to read the past. We remain the inheritors of a tremendous wealth of values and ideas, but they come with no instructions as to how best make use of them.
This perspective allows her to provide a genealogy of Western philosophical and metaphysical understandings of freedom, making note of the fundamental mistakes we inherit from that history. Despite Arendt’s admiration for Kant’s “insight that freedom is no more ascertainable to the inner sense and within the field of inner experience than it is to the senses with which we know and understand the world,”3 the Kantian idea that freedom is the ability to provide a law for oneself is clearly inadequate for thinking political freedom. For Arendt, insofar as freedom is thought in terms of subjective autonomy, which is to say, a subject able to move freely, unimpeded by all inner and outer obstacles, we have entered into a reductio ad absurdum, insofar as this necessarily means the impossibility of entering into relation with anyone else. Freedom thought as subjective autonomy eviscerates the entire political inflection of freedom. As she says,
The freedom which we take for granted in all political theory and which even those who praise tyranny must still take into account is the very opposite of “inner freedom,” conceived as the inward space into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free. This inner feeling remains without outer manifestations and hence is by definition, politically irrelevant.4
As long as freedom is understood to be a property of the mind or will, it is posited, crudely, as the freedom from other wills, and thus loses its active and practical dimensions. Indeed, Arendt said that the “obscure wood” into which philosophy has lost its way owes its greatest debt to Kant who established freedom as a phenomenon of thought itself. For Arendt, “freedom turns out to be a mirage the moment psychology looks into what is supposedly its innermost domain.”5
As she describes it, Kant inherits this point of view from ancient philosophers and then Christians, for whom freedom was conceptualized as an interior “place” of absolute freedom, by those who had no place of their own in the world, and in this sense, as a kind of property for those deprived of property, place or home. This is to say, before it came to be understood as an attribute of thought or will, freedom was understood to designate the status of men who were free to meet and act with others who shared it. As she says:
Before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man’s status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word. This freedom clearly was preceded by liberation: in order to be free, man must have liberated himself from the necessities of life.6
Thought in this way, Hannah Arendt’s infamous denunciation of what she called, “the social” is based on what she identifies as politicizing what is necessarily normatively anterior to political freedom: necessity, or the private or privative dimensions of biological life that were the purview of those without property. Here she is referencing (inter alia) an infamous passage from The Politics in which Aristotle suggests that politics is not an attribute of the living being, but rather the specific difference between animals and humans that defines the human species as such. For Aristotle, it is peculiar to the human species to be capable of speech, notwithstanding the mysteries of biological life that resist human representation and thus overwhelm human understanding. On Aristotle’s account, life in the classical Athenian polis was a life worth living because it depended upon the performance of simple living—biological existence—by those who were not free and were consequently excluded from the good li fe: slaves and women.
On Arendt’s view, the dividing line between the household and politics axiomatic to the Greek city-state became blurred in the modern era, so that political communities, like nation-states, came to be understood on analogy with families, whose everyday affairs had to be taken care of by an enormous nationwide administration of housekeeping.7 The form of knowledge emerging from this administration was, on Arendt’s view, thus no longer political science but rather national or social economy. And Arendt attributed the decadence and conformism of the political realm in modern societies to the primacy of necessity over freedom as political action.8
For Arendt, this means that in the modern era, political communities deserving of legal recognition came to be understood on analogy with elements from “the social,” for example, families and cultural communities: “Where men live together but do not form a body politic—as for example in tribal societies or the privacy of the household—the factors ruling their actions and conduct are not freedom, but the necessities of life and concern for its preservation.”9 Under these conditions, freedom came to be associated less with a set of structuring principles and more with a capacity of the individual will. The difficulty here is that will “follows judgement”—or those principles for action—which is to say, it follows from the ability to discern the “right aim” and it is only then that it “commands its execution.” Thus, “the power to command, to dictate action, is not a matter of freedom but a question of strength and weakness.”10 As we will see, will implicates judgment but not power, which like freedom, is inexhaustible.
Indeed, “for the history of the problem of freedom, Christian tradition has indeed become a decisive factor” insofar as we automatically equate freedom with “free will.”11 As she says, it was with the early Christians, and particularly Paul, who discovered “a kind of freedom which had no relation to politics” that the concept of freedom entered into the “history of philosophy.”12 For Arendt, freedom has nothing to do with the will at all. But
since the whole problem of freedom arises for us in the horizon of Christian traditions on the one hand, and of an originally anti-political philosophic tradition on the other, we find it difficult to realize that there may exist another freedom which is not an attribute of the will but an accessory of doing and acting.13
With the Augustinian interpretation in particular, we see the rise of freedom thought as a kind of self-control, because on his account, it appears that there are two wills fighting in the heart of every man, particularly the will of the mind, and that of the body. Historically, this means that the ideal of freedom continued from late antiquity and early Christianity, well into the eighteenth century, with such thinkers as Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau grappling with how to conceive of freedom in terms of a will no longer at war with itself.
Seen in terms of this genealogy, the capacity of the individual will has come to be understood, specifically, as the capacity to rule over oneself in a sovereign or king-like fashion. Particularly for the social contract theorists, freedom is understood to be the ability to master certain “natural” desires—the desire to take or do anything we like—in order that the political collectivity “we” might become is finally, indivisible.14 Freedom is thus understood to be identical to sovereignty, which is to say, it entails becoming sovereign over our “first natures” in order to partake of the benefits of sociality, including the benefit of participating “freely” with others who are similarly sovereign over themselves. This is such an egregious error that Arendt said:
This identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will. . . . The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence, that is, with essentially non-political means. . . . If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.15
Against the fantasy of freedom thought either as an inward domain or as sovereignty, Arendt invites us to think freedom as action. As she says, “the appearance of freedom . . . coincides with the performing act. . . . To be free and to act are the same.”16 Freedom, then, is not a quality or a property of persons, but a verb, and for her, this action is helpfully illustrated by Machiavelli’s concept of virtu, which implies the capacity to perform in public in an improvisational manner. For a performing art to be virtuosic, “the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in the end product.”17 Free action is always improvised in public, and it does not outlive its own performance. The virtuosity of our action, the improvisation we make collectively in the public sphere, she says, “is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all.”18
For Arendt then, the true exercise of freedom does not follow from our individual personhood; it is not the beloved liberal dream of choosing freely among alternatives, nor is it a quality having to do with the will. It is a completely political notion insofar as it follows from and relies upon such social conditions as place, time, and political belonging. This is because any action takes place in a certain time, under certain conditions. And any political action takes place with others. Freedom is rare because it is limi ted to the very moment of its being put into action, and without a public realm, “freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.”19 The subtlety of Arendt’s position means understanding the human person as a social being—one who requires place, belonging, and a community to be free.
This assertion makes sense of the particular frustration she reserves for Rousseau since he argued that “a divided will would be inconceivable,” and that in order to create true solidarity, “each citizen should think only his own thoughts.”20 This would mean that any meaningful social intercourse would be subverted, a point made by Rousseau who argued that “it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future.” As Arendt puts it, any community built on a sovereign will would be built on “quicksand.”21 Any action worthy of the name free is political, and that means it requires a political community for its appearance. But that also means that that the moment of the founding of a political society—a founding that makes the appearance of freedom possible—is utterly fragile.
It’s not surprising that Arendt’s thought has become a critical reference for debates about sovereignty because on her account, the conception of freedom on analogy with sovereignty obscures the key advantages to political life, which is the possibility of making something new happen. Thinking freedom in terms of sovereignty—in terms of the ability to rule over oneself (either as an individual or as a collectivity)—misses this most important dimension of what freedom really means, which has nothing to do with autonomy (or authority) at all, but with the capacity to act. Thus, to press the point that her conception of freedom marks a radical departure from the social contract theorists, Arendt’s notion of free action as the potential to produce something new does not assume a state of anarchy prior to law but rather is made possible by the demarcation of political and social realms, between freedom and necessity. Arendt insisted on noticing the ways that the Greek archein—translated as “rule”—is vitally related to the Greek archē, or beginning. Thus, while the sovereign models of power she attacks understand “rule” as what comes after anarchy, Arendt’s attack on sovereignty and rejection of theories of freedom based on the sovereign will of the private subject is illuminated by the way that she insists that sovereign models of law and power posit anarchy or unruliness as having been overcome or settled as a consequence of the rule of law. As she says,
Whatever ancient literature, Greek as well as Latin, has to tell us about these matters is ultimately rooted in the curious fact that both the Greek and the Latin languages possess two verbs to designate what we uniformly call “to act.” The Greek words [mean] to begin, to lead, and finally, to rule; and [also] to carry something through. The corresponding Latin verbs are agree: to set something in motion; and gerere, which is hard to translate and somehow means the enduring and supporting continuation of past acts whose results are the res gestae, the deeds and events we call historical. In both instances action occurs in two different stages; its first stage is a beginning by which something new comes into the world. The Greek word . . . which covers beginning, leading, ruling, that is the outstanding qualities of the free man, bears witness to an experience in which being free and the capacity to begin something new coincided. Freedom, as we would say today, was experienced in spontaneity.22
Arendt’s notion of free action, as that with the potential to reconfigure or disrupt the public and produce the new does not assume a state of anarchy prior to action, but rather is actually made possible by the demarcation between political and social realms, the very rules that free action paradoxically threatens to defy or exceed. Thus, Arendt’s understanding of freedom, tied as it is to concepts of action and natality has much in common with Walter Benjamin’s conception of divine violence, which is to say, it relates directly to the potential for being politically interruptive structurally rather than normatively. Further, it implies that in the political, these events will always necessarily be “out of time.”
Arendt’s theory of free action, then, entails as a kind of secular “miracle” in that it brings something completely new into the world: “Our whole existence rests, after all, on a chain of miracles, as it were—the coming into being of the earth, the development of organic life on it the evolution of mankind out of the animal species.”23
Arendt tells us that the problem of the “new” confronts us with the difficulty of imagining an event that would not be what Kant called the “continuation of a preceding series.”24 Here, she is following Aristotle, for whom time (as all things) is assumed to be a thing with parts; it is made up of a past, a present or a now, and a future.25 For Aristotle, however, only the now can, strictly speaking, be said to exist. In other words, a thing can only be said to have an existence insofar as it has a presence, an existence in the present. From this it follows that those things that are in the past (already), or in the future (not yet), cannot be said to be. This criterion for existence, as Heidegger points out, leads immediately to a paradoxical problem with the “being of time.” If a thing with parts is to be at all, all or some of its parts must also be. Since its parts, past and future, are not, time does not show itself capable of substantial being. Any time span is assumed to be divisible into past and future, so that any “now” that is presumed to be extended in the sense that “now it is 6 o’clock” falls prey to such division. Given the non-being of past and future, only that which is instantaneously present deserves to be addressed by “is.” Thus, on one hand, Aristotle describes the “now” as the present and as the instant, and on the other hand the “now” as both identical and different. The present and instant are dual characteristics of the “now.” The present is continual freshness, its ever-changing position between past and future, while the instantaneous character of the “now” is its indivisibility, the result of the operation of dividing time into past and future.
Considered as an instant, the “now” does not seem to be a part of time, for following the image of time as a line, the now does not go to make up time as a line any more than a point goes to make up a line. This is why the “new now” presents us with the problem of freedom: no word or deed that can be accounted for by “a reliable chain of cause and effect.” In a precise sense, this is what Hannah Arendt means by “natality”: it is the capacity to bring something new into the world that “breaks into the world like an infinite improbability.”26
Arendt’s arresting prose is punctuated by this kind of description of moments out of time that splits into the historical world. A particularly good example is the opening paragraphs of the section of The Origins of Totalitarianism called “Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” There she says:
It is almost impossible, even now, to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion.27
Of course, this “splitting” or breaking of history requires that some future remains; some political formation must endure. Thus, while Arendt’s political theory is, in a nutshell, a theory of freedom, deeply indebted to her understanding of time as radically open to new possibilities, political freedom is clearly not just a matter of the new “moment” between past and future. It also requires a political structure or political organization that can hold or endure as the space of freedom’s appearance.
This worldly political space is rare enough: “Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence” but “power is actualized only where the word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal.”28 And again “what keeps people together after the fleeting moment of action has passed (what we would today call ‘organization’) and what, at the same time, they keep alive through remaining together, is power.”29 But even though this political organization is rare, it is all important: “To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which humanly and politically speaking is the same as appearance. To men, the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearance at all.”30
Among the most difficult thoughts entailed in Arendt’s understanding of the freedom to begin something new, is that we are entangled in a chain of events whose effects are unknowable, but for which, at the same time, we are also responsible. This is why Arendt’s theory of freedom as the capacity to bring something new into the world, a capacity to break history in two, is also a theory at bottom, a theory of responsibility. We are born in such a way that we are always responding to others and so to be undertaking deeds and words that we didn’t begin, and send them along through more words and deeds whose results are limitless. “The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action,” Arendt explains, “is simply that action has no end.”31 And, because our action is necessarily plural in the sense that it requires the assistance of others to be completed, we face having to accept the burden of freedom in a network of uncertain relationships, and the burden of being carried to unknown and unknowable destinations, while at the same time being responsible for those actions. The result is that whoever acts never quite knows what they are doing, and so can become “guilty” of consequences they never intended or even foresaw. It means that no matter how unexpected the consequences of our deeds and words, we can never undo them. Even more perilously, the processes we start are never finished unequivocally in one single deed or event. And the meaning of those words or deeds is never disclosed to the actor(s) but is left to the “backward-directed glance of the historian and the analytical zeal of the political scientist” who do not act. The fact of this “simultaneous presence of freedom and non-sovereignty, of being able to begin something new and of not being able to control or even foretell its consequences”32 means that freedom, as a matter of possibility, contra Rousseau, requires the presence and interaction of others and thus a common space of appearance and action.
Arendt says about that common space of appearance and action that it “does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them . . . do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time.”33 This is one of the many reasons Arendt is so compelled by the virtue of courage, because with freedom and responsibility comes sorrow. Arendt begins her chapter on “Action” in The Human Condition with an epigram from Isak Dinesen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them” opens the chapter on Action from The Human Condition.34 And as she says in the preface to Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism: “With the defeat of Nazi Germany, part of the story [of the Second World War] had come to an end. This seemed the first appropriate time . . . to try to tell and to understand what had happened, not yet sine ira et studio, still in grief and sorrow and hence, with a tendency to lament, but no longer in speechless outrage and impotent horror.”35 For Arendt, human beings and not a human being inhabit the earth and this plurality is a specific mark of what is peculiarly human. At the same time, action always produces a “who” found in the narration of events, a “who” that is judged, found responsible for those actions by those who write and tell the story of what happened, always after the fact.
The question of the meaning of those new events—narrated by the historian and the political scientist—is taken up most carefully in The Life of the Mind. There (and elsewhere) Arendt proposes that thought is marked by duality. (And again, with her remarkable position on thinking, we can see again why she found Rousseau’s conception of an undivided General Will so distasteful.) Thinking is a conversation between I and myself, an activity of asking and answering.36 The 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.”37 For Arendt, this two-in-one of thought points to the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth and “explains the futility of the fashionable search for identity.”38
And so long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself, I am as I appear to others. We call consciousness (literally, as we have seen, “to know with myself”) the curious fact that in a sense I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me, which indicates that the Socratic “being one” is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.39
For Arendt, thinking has no political relevance, and does not appear in the public world of appearances. It is judging that makes thinking manifest in the world of appearances. This judging is a public disclosure of who has acted, and what it has meant, by way of the opinion of spectators—historians and political analysts—who judge its meaning, and by the world situation to which it responds.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968), 145, 143.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (London: Harcourt Press, 1978), 12.
3 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 144.
4 Ibid., 146.
5 Ibid., 144.
6 Ibid., 148.
7 See, in particular, Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
8 The feminist debates about Arendt’s delineation of the family and private life from the political or public life are important here.
9 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 148.
10 Ibid., 152.
11 Ibid., 157.
12 Ibid., 158.
13 Ibid., 165.
14 Ibid., 163.
15 Ibid., 164, 5.
16 Ibid., 152–53.
17 Ibid., 153.
18 Ibid., 146.
19 Ibid., 149.
20 Ibid., 163.
21 Ibid., 163–64.
22 Ibid., 165, 166.
23 Ibid., 169.
24 Arendt, The Human Condition, 205.
25 Aristotle, Physics, 217b33-18a6.
26 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 169.
27 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Press, 1976), 267.
28 Arendt, Human Condition, 200.
29 Ibid., 201.
30 Ibid., 199.
31 Ibid., 233.
32 Ibid., 235.
33 Ibid., 199.
34 Ibid., 175.
35 Arendt, Origins, xiii.
36 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (London: A Harvest Book Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971), 185.
37 Ibid., 191.
38 Ibid., 187.
39 Ibid., 183.