On the Lost Spirit of Revolution
Samantha Rose Hill
At the end of On Revolution, Hannah Arendt turns to the French poet and resistance fighter René Char to describe what she calls “the lost treasure of revolution.” What was this treasure? “The treasure, he thought, was that he had ‘found himself,’ that he no longer suspected himself of ‘insincerity,’ that he needed no mask and no make-believe to appear, that wherever he went he appeared as he was to others and to himself, he could afford ‘to go naked.’”1 In order to capture the lost spirit of revolution, Arendt turns Char’s poetic aphorism into a metaphor for authentic appearance and action in the public realm. Char’s revelation was not otherworldly; it came to him in the midst of fighting for the Resistance. In action, he was able to strip off his mask of appearance, and appear to himself and others as he was. He found himself.
Char’s work plays an important role in Arendt’s work on the lost spirit of revolution, action, the public realm, the break between past and future, and the activity of thinking.2 The experience of public freedom that Arendt describes through Char’s language depicts a way of being in the world that is more authentic and sincere. The men of the revolution in America and the men of the Resistance in France came together in public to begin something new, and in their action, they were released from the demands of everyday life to live fuller, more authentic lives.
Arendt ends On Revolution with the same aphorism from Char that she begins Between Past and Future with and quotes in The Life of the Mind: Thinking: Notre heritage n’est precede d’aucun testament—“our inheritance was left to us by no testament.”3 The absence of testament represents the loss of authority in modernity for Arendt, and this loss of authority was accompanied by a turn toward metaphysics, which attempted to provide a common ground of understanding at the expense of worldly experience and plurality. We see this in Arendt’s reading of Char in her preface “The Gap between Past and Future” where she extrapolates from Char in order to think about solidarity, plurality, and public freedom. Allow me to quote this at some length:
Notre heritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament—“our inheritance was left to us by no testament”—this is perhaps the strangest of the strangely abrupt aphorisms into which René Char, French poet and writer, compressed the gist of what four years in the résistance had come to mean to a whole generation of European writers and men of letters. The collapse of France, to them a totally unexpected event, had emptied from one day to the next the political scene of their country, leaving it to the puppet-like antics of knaves or fools, and they who as a matter of course had never participated in the official business of the Third Republic were sucked into politics as though with the force of a vacuum. Thus, without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations, they had come to constitute willy-nilly a public realm where—without the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden from the eyes of friend and foe—all relevant business in the affairs of the country was transacted in deed and word.
It did not last long. After a few short years they were liberated from what they originally had thought to be a “burden” and thrown back into what they now knew to be the weightless irrelevance of their personal affairs, once more separated from “the world of reality” by an épaisseur triste, the “sad opaqueness” of a private life centered about nothing but itself. And if they refused “to go back to [their] very beginnings, to [their] most indigent behavior,” they could only return to the old empty strife of conflicting ideologies which after the defeat of the common enemy once more occupied the political arena to split the former comrades-in-arms into innumerable cliques which were not even factions and to engage them in the endless polemics and intrigues of a paper war. What Char had foreseen, clearly anticipated, while the real fight was still on—“If I survive, I know that I shall have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure”—had happened. They had lost their treasure.
What was this treasure? As they themselves understood it, it seems to have consisted, as it were, of two interconnected parts: they had discovered that he who “joined the Resistance, found himself,” that he ceased to be “in quest of [himself] without mastery, in naked unsatisfaction,” that he no longer suspected himself of “insincerity,” of being “a carping, suspicious actor of life,” that he could afford “to go naked.” In this nakedness, stripped of all masks—of those which society assigns to its members as well as those which the individual fabricates for himself in his psychological reactions against society—they had been visited for the first time in their lives by an apparition of freedom, not, to be sure, because they acted against tyranny and things worse than tyranny—this was true for every soldier in the Allied armies— but because they had become “challengers,” had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore, without knowing or even noticing it, had begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear. “At every meal we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant, but the place is set.”4
The men of the Resistance found themselves and peeled back the masks that society had imposed on them and they had created for themselves, not because they were fighting against tyranny but because “they had become challengers.” They had a fight to win, and could no longer passively exist in the world; they had to act, and in acting they created a public space where freedom could appear. Arendt is talking about the world of public appearances, and appealing to the language of mysticism, alluding to the prophet Elijah who might enter at any moment and sit down at the table. Here, the experience of freedom is described as a visitation, as otherworldly, as more real and genuine. At the same time, Arendt positions Char between past and future, in order to escape the transcendental claim of metaphysics that a truer, better world exists. What allows Char to have this moment of revelation is his recognition that it “cannot last forever.” It appears and disappears, much like man himself. The possibility of the future, which remains unseen, is felt against the past that appears before him. He is caught between the temporal forces of linear time, and in this “gap space” between past and future, he finds a form of freedom—a form of being where he is at once in the world and removed from the world. In order to root firmly this conception of freedom and genuine appearance in the realm of human affairs, Arendt weaves Char’s aphorism together with Kafka’s parable “He” across several texts, conceptualizing the lost treasure of revolution in relation to what she calls the old metaphysical dichotomy between “true” Being and “mere Appearance.”5 This dichotomy is illustrated by the figures of Char and “He,” who are released from the demands of ordinary day-to-day life and thrown into a gap space between past and future.6 In this space, a form of freedom is possible where they are not hindered by the breakdown of tradition or loss of authority, but liberated philosophically and metaphysically to begin and think anew.
In Between Past and Future, Arendt argues that “He” picks up where Char’s aphorism leaves off, and offers an “exact description of this predicament.” She writes, “It begins, in fact, at precisely the point where our opening aphorism left the sequence of events hanging, as it were, in mid-air.”7 Arendt emphasizes the spatial element in Kafka’s parable and the in-between position occupied by Char, who was writing at the end of the Resistance with liberation on the horizon, in order to locate “He” and Char in the world of appearances. In this space, the past presses forward and the future presses back—and the war between them is caused by the presence of man who disrupts the flow of time. Arendt argues:
Only because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it into Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle or body that gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes.8
It is the insertion of man that breaks up the endless and indifferent flow of ordinary time. That is, it is the birth of man into the world of things that existed before him and will remain after him that contains the possibility of the new. His appearance and presence in the world fights time by being, and the battleground for this fight is the thinking ego, which reflects upon the activity of thinking and has the ability to engage with itself.
In Arendt’s reading of “He” in The Life of the Mind, where she unfolds her understanding of the thinking ego, time and thinking are emphasized in relation to space.9 In a chapter titled “Where Are We When We Think?,” Arendt argues that Kafka’s parable moves from the world of appearances to the realm of thinking, and describes what she calls the time sensation of the thinking ego. “It analyzes poetically our ‘inner state’ in regard to time, of which we are aware when we have withdrawn from the appearances and find our mental activities recoiling characteristically upon themselves—cogito me cogitare, vole me velle, and so on.” This form of reflective thinking exists in the gap space where past and future are equally present in their absence from our sense. Here the protagonist “He” is withdrawn from the world of appearances, and can direct his attention to the thinking activity itself; “He” is not given over to the free flow of thoughts in the mind, what Arendt calls “absent-mindedness.” She writes:
The advantage of this image lies in that the region of thought would no longer have to be situated beyond and above the world and human time; the fighter would no longer have to jump out of the fighting line in order to find the quiet and the stillness necessary for t hinking. “He” would recognize that “His” fighting has not been in vain; the battleground itself originates the region where “He” can rest when “He” is exhausted. In other words, the location of the thinking ego in time would be the in-between of past and future, the present, this mysterious and slippery now, a mere gap in time.10
In his suspension from the realm of worldly affairs, Arendt argues that Kafka’s “He” is “the old dream Western metaphysics has dreamed from Parmenides to Hegel of a timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm.” In order to dismantle this dream, Arendt reworks Kafka’s parable and situates “He” within the realm of worldly affairs. She writes, “The trouble with Kafka’s metaphor is that by jumping out of the fighting line ‘he’ jumps out of this world altogether and judges from outside though not necessarily from above.”11 Arendt takes the “timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm,” and replaces it with her conceptualization of the gap space, which retains the spirit of worldly plurality while affirming one’s own existence as a sensual being in the world. “He” can escape the realm of appearances, to think in the gap space, but “He” never actually leaves the world.
Arendt uses Kafka in Thinking, the first volume of The Life of the Mind, to address the metaphysical fallacy that conflates being with meaning. The battleground for Kafka’s “He” is man’s home on earth, and in Arendt’s reading, the physical battleground gives way to the metaphysical battleground for being itself: “Seen from the viewpoint of man, of each moment of his life inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both directed at him who creates his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life.”12 Through a reading of an allegory in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Arendt reworks Kafka’s parable again to bring it to bear more directly on the question of thinking in the world.13 She argues with Nietzsche that the eternal recurrence, the sempiternal, is actually a string of nows.
The time construct of the thinking ego is different from the time sequence of ordinary life, which is structured by the linear temporality of past, present, and future, and fixed by the calendar, which recurs endlessly. This recurrent time, which Arendt calls historical time, structures everyday life and provides one with a sense of stability and durability in the world. Arendt argues, “That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow.”14 Char’s treasure and Kafka’s parable do not apply to everyday life though, only to the activity of the thinking ego, to the extent that the thinking ego has withdrawn from the activities of everyday life, from the ordinary realm of appearances. “The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent—either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared.” It is reflection that draws the absences before the presence of the mind. For Arendt, this means that thinking is a fight against time itself.
The time sensation of the thinking ego runs parallel to Arendt’s conception of revolution in On Revolution and her understanding of thinking as a mental activity. Arendt describes the thinking ego like the revolutionary, as withdrawn from the realm of appearances and daily life, suspended in a present moment, consciously engaged in the activity of thinking. “It is only because ‘He’ thinks, and therefore is no longer carried along by the continuity of everyday life in a world of appearances, that past and future manifest themselves as pure entities, so that ‘He’ can become aware of a no-longer that pushes him forward and a not-yet that drives him back.”15 As a conceptual metaphor, the lost treasure of revolution points us toward new beginnings and authentic appearance in the world, which requires us to rise above the realm of appearances, not withdraw from the world altogether, which for Arendt is not possible. The sempiternal recurrence of foundings and re-foundings gives way to the ability to found something new, the now-time, and our ability to think anew conceptually.
* * *
Arendt’s reading of Kafka as an extension of Char offers us a portrait of an individual who is able to rise above of the realm of appearances and find a more authentic self. This seems like a paradox. In Thinking, Arendt appears to be arguing against the primacy of a true being over a being that merely appears in the world, but the language she uses to describe Char implies that there is a truer being that is liberated by acting in the world. In Arendt’s conception of the lost treasure of revolution, she is making a metaphysical claim about authentic being and mere appearance, but the authentic being that is revealed for Arendt is not removed from the realm of appearances; he is simply liberated from mere appearance.
The lost t reasure of revolution, as she describes it in On Revolution and Between Past and Future, is a way of being without the mask of appearance. Arendt’s claim, reading Char, is that he was “able to go free,” that he had “found himself.” At the same time, revolution presents an opportunity for true being, for stepping outside the realm of appearances, not leaving it. We can appear in our true being before others and find solidarity in that being, but for Arendt, that is not an appeal to another realm beyond the realm of worldly affairs. Arendt wants the metaphysical claim of true being without the “dream of Western metaphysics.” For her, experience is the ground of being, and metaphysical experience is a moment caught between past and future.
In this reading of Char and Kafka, we see Arendt orienting us toward a metaphysics of being that moves from sensual experiences in the world. Arendt rejects the flattening tendency of ontology here in favor of experience, where being is grounded in plurality and retains a form of openness to otherness. Whereas traditionally metaphysics has attempted to provide a common ground for being ontologically, Arendt understands being as necessarily worldly and plural. Notably, this is a turn against Heidegger’s ontological grounding of Being.
At the end of her exposition on Kafka in The Life of the Mind, Arendt begins concluding her remarks by saying,
I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now attempt to dismantle metaphysics and philosophy with all its categories as we have known them from its beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it.16
Arendt is not trying to do away with the concept of metaphysics; she is reworking it in the contemporary era in order to address the loss of authority, and the phenomenal appearance of totalitarianism in the middle of the twentieth century, which broke the Western tradition of philosophy. Like Char in his aphorisms and Kafka with “He,” Arendt finds herself caught in a gap space, where the old concepts and categories of Western philosophy can no longer help us to understand the contemporary world, and so come face to face with it. Arendt understood herself to be doing this work of dismantling, and devising new conceptual metaphors for understanding, like the lost treasure of revolution. As the figures of Char and Kafka’s “He” illustrate, withdrawal from the world of appearances is necessary for mental activities; and it is in this withdrawal—this rising above, not stepping out of—that we can devise new metaphors to bridge over the gap space between the invisible realm of thinking and the visible realm of appearances.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 280.
2 Given the length of this essay, I do not have space to delve into each of these ideas that Arendt conceptually devises throughout her work, and am focusing on the lost treasure of revolution here.
3 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 3. This fragment from Char appears in his wartime diary Hypnos Waking, which he kept while fighting for the French Resistance. Char was a friend and student of Martin Heidegger and he and Arendt travelled in similar circles, but there is no evidence that they met or corresponded. It is clear that Arendt read his work with great interest; there are several volumes in her library, Heidegger dedicated his small collection of poems Pensivement to Char, which he sent to Arendt in 1971, and there is co-edited volume for Jean Beaufret titled L’endurance de la pensée from 1968.
4 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 3–4.
5 In The Life of the Mind Arendt calls this the “two-world theory.” See, for example, Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 23.
6 The “HE” parable in Arendt’s Thinking reads, “He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and this, it must be admitted, would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.” Arendt, Life of the Mind, 202.
7 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 8.
8 Ibid., 11.
9 Because we appear in the world, space belongs to the realm of appearances, but time is an inner sensation that shifts with consciousness.
10 Ibid., 208.
11 Ibid., 207.
12 Ibid., 205.
13 This is Nietzsche’s allegory: “Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long path back, it lasts an eternity. And the other path out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these roads; they offend each other face to face—and it is here, at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: (‘Augenblick’) ‘Now.’ . . . Behold this Now! From this gateway Now, a long eternal lane leads backward, behind us lies an eternity, and another lane leads forward into an eternal future.” Ibid., 204.
14 Ibid., 205.
15 In Thinking Arendt writes, “The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent—either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent ‘regions’ into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself. It is only because “he” thinks, and therefore is no longer carried along by the continuity of everyday life in a world of appearances, that past and future manifest themselves as pure entities, so that “he” can become aware of a no-longer that pushes him forward and a not-yet that drives him back.” Ibid.
16 Ibid., 187.