CHAPTER 3

Arendt, Nietzsche, and the “Aestheticization” of Political Action

O those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there—we who have looked down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore—artists?

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

An anti-metaphysical view of the world—yes, but an artistic one.

—Nietzsche, The Will to Power

The common element connecting art and politics is that they are both phenomena of the public world.

—Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture”

I. INTRODUCTION

Arendt’s rejection of the turn to will in modern political theory reflects her conviction that the interpretation of freedom as sovereignty or autonomy is incompatible with the nature and conditions of genuine political action. Far from avoiding the plurality-hostile character of the teleological model of action, the modern attempt to ground freedom in the autonomous will radicalizes its antipolitical tendencies. Moreover, Arendt believes that the reduction of action to willing and the subsumption of politics by History destroys whatever remains of the integrity of political action. The turn to will and to History continues and deepens the degradation of politics, action, and plurality initiated by the contemplative tradition. The moderns provide no viable alternative to the “aesthetic” approach to action that Arendt proposes as a way of preserving the dignity of the public realm in the face of its philosophical and cultural devaluation.

In this chapter, I return to the question of Arendt’s “aestheticization” of action, linking it to Nietzsche’s struggle against Platonism. I suggest that Arendt’s performative approach to action decenters the political actor in a fashion parallel to Nietzsche’s decentering of the moral subject. Both Nietzsche and Arendt are concerned with questioning a moral epistemology that rests upon a rigidified distinction between actor and act, agent and “effect.” This distinction, they argue, deprives the realm of action and appearance of any intrinsic value. “Aestheticizing” action through the analogy of performance redeems its meaning, restores its innocence, places it “beyond good and evil” (to use Nietzsche’s much misunderstood phrase). With respect to action, the performance model frees us from the nihilistic habit of justifying existence by the appeal to essence—that “true world” installed by Plato above the “shadow world” of mere appearance. Since, as Arendt repeatedly insists, the political world is the realm of appearance, a revaluation of the Nietzschean sort is absolutely imperative.

Viewing Arendt’s “aestheticization” of action as continuous with the broad Nietzschean project of overcoming Platonism provides deeper insight into the strategic intent of her theory of political action. Yet it also has the effect of intensifying our unease with the agonistic conception of action. The second half of this chapter focuses on the difference between Nietzsche’s and Arendt’s respective “aesthetics of action.” Arendt’s emphasis on the agonistic dimension of action must be read, I maintain, in conjunction with her theory of political judgment. Based on an idiosyncratic appropriation of Kant’s third Critique, this theory provides a forceful critique of the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of Nietzschean aestheticism (the will to power, perspectivism). Deploying Kant’s notions of aesthetic “disinterestedness” and taste as a kind of sensus communis, Arendt avoids trading one reductionism (the Platonic/Aristotelian instrumentalization of action) for another (the Nietzschean reduction of action to an expression of the will to power). Her theory of political judgment invokes Kant in order to reassert the deliberative dimension as a necessary boundary—as a way of limiting the agon and keeping the play playful. She thus avoids the drawbacks of Nietzsche’s aestheticism while reconciling the initiatory and intersubjective dimensions of her theory of political action. Most important, she preserves the disclosive nature of action from subsumption by subject-centered categories.

My interpretation of Arendt’s theory of political judgment emphasizes its continuity with her theory of political action. In this regard I fully agree with Ronald Beiner’s point that Arendt’s “concern with the judging spectator is simply the extension of [her] definition of politics in terms of virtuosity or performance.”1 In addition to “completing” her theory of political action, Arendt’s theory of political judgment serves to close the gap between the actor and the spectator, between the virtuosity of the performer and the apparent passivity of his audience. It therefore makes it possible to see judgment not simply as the fulfillment of action’s disclosive potential, but as itself a kind of acting.² In this way, Kantian aesthetics serves as the unlikely mediator between Arendt’s Machiavellian/Nietzschean emphasis upon initiation and virtuosity, and her Aristotelian emphasis upon deliberation, plurality, and equality amongst citizens.

II. NONSOVEREIGNTY AND THE PERFORMANCE MODEL: ARENDT’S ANTI-PLATONISM

In the discussion of Arendt’s theory of action thus far, I have drawn attention to Arendt’s view that plurality—the fact that “men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world”—is “specifically the condition of all political life.”3 Plurality is the hallmark of action that, unlike labor or work, can only be carried on 22between individuals.⁴ As the condition sine qua non of the “sharing of words and deeds,” plurality makes possible the peculiar freedom of political action, a freedom that is worldly, limited, and nonsovereign. Worldly because this freedom is the freedom of a “plural We” engaged “in changing our common world.”⁵ As Arendt remarks, it is “the very opposite of ‘inner freedom,’ the inward space into which men escape from external coercion and feel free.”⁶ Such philosophical freedom—whether the tenuous freedom of the will or the unlimited freedom of thought—“remains without outer manifestations and hence is politically irrelevant.”⁷

To be free and to act are the same, according to Arendt.⁸ The freedom of action, however, is essentially a limited freedom. The fact that it occurs in the world, in the web of human relationships created by the fact of plurality, has a number of consequences.⁹ First of all, it affects how we understand the initiatory dimension of this freedom—freedom as the capacity to spontaneously begin, “to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination.”¹⁰ It is through this capacity for initiation that the actor “inserts himself into the human world.”¹¹ This insertion—achieved through words and deeds—comes at a price, however. For while action is always a beginning, it is not a beginning over which the actor retains control. To act, to insert oneself into the human world, brings one face to face with the fact of plurality: the political actor “always moves among and in relation to other acting beings.”¹² The political actor therefore is “never merely a doer, but also and at the same time a sufferer.”¹³ The freedom of political action is genuine, worldly, yet nonsovereign. Its authenticity is marked by its distance from the condition of mastery or autonomy. Qua political actors, we are anything but sovereign.¹⁴

Plurality, then, introduces an irreducible contingency to political action, a dimension that in many respects is the ground of action’s peculiar freedom. Yet while contingency is presupposed by the idea of a virtuosic response to fortuna, and while it is manifest in the “startling unexpectedness” of every spontaneous beginning, it also invariably frustrates the achievement of the actor’s purpose. Contingency of action—what Arendt calls action’s “futility, boundlessness and uncertainty of outcome”¹⁵—gives rise to frustration with and, ultimately, hostility to action. This hostility, according to Arendt, lies at the root of our philosophical tradition.¹⁶ Indeed, it gives this tradition its essential character:

It is in accordance with the great tradition of Western thought to think along these lines: to accuse freedom of luring man into necessity, to condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined set of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who seems to forfeit his freedom the very moment he makes use of it.17

Our tradition has been unable to accept the “absurdity” of the “simultaneous presence of freedom and non-sovereignty,” or to understand “how freedom could have been given to men under the condition of non-sovereignty.”¹⁸ It has therefore repeatedly sought an escape from action, a substitute that would avoid the calamities of action and raise the realm of human affairs above “the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.”¹⁹ Plato, Arendt believes, saw the problem clearly: it was necessary to reinterpret action in a manner that gives the actor control over what he initiates. But if the political actor were “to remain complete master of what he had begun,” then action would have to be recast in a way that would neutralize the effects of plurality and make the “ideal or uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership” conceivable in political terms.²⁰ According to Arendt, Plato achieves this theoretical inversion, this neutering of plurality and politics, by reinterpreting action as a kind of making or fabrication. The political actor (the philosopher-king), like the craftsman, “sees” the product he wants to create before he acts: knowing and doing are separated. Action becomes simply the execution of operations necessary for the achievement of a given end.²¹ The resulting split between theory and practice issues in a “natural” hierarchy of ruler and ruled, of knower and executer, a hierarchy seemingly demanded by the “nature” of action itself.²²

While the doctrine of ideas, the metaphysical and epistemological ground of Plato’s analogy, has not survived, his substitution of making for acting has proved foundational for a tradition desirous of suppressing plurality and contingency. The persistence and success of “the transformation of action into a mode of making” is measured, according to Arendt, “by the whole terminology of political theory and political thought, which indeed makes it impossible to discuss these matters without using the categories of ends and means, and thinking in terms of instrumentality.”²³ It is important to note how the Platonic instrumentalization of action is structurally linked to the idea of freedom as sovereignty. Any theory of political action that genuinely desires to overcome the Platonic hostility to plurality and restore a sense of the intrinsic value of political action must, in Arendt’s view, transcend not only the category of means and ends, but the interpretation of freedom as sovereignty that underlies the “transformation of acting into a mode of making.” Overcoming the teleological model that governs the tradition demands an alternative model capable of preserving the very aspects of action covered over by Plato and Aristotle.

This gives us a new perspective on the performance model of action outlined in Chapter 2, Section III. In reading Arendt’s description of the “frailty” of the realm of human affairs, one is struck by its substantial agreement with the view she ascribes to the tradition: both see this realm (and the action within it) as exceedingly fragile and contingent, as lacking solidity.²⁴ But what the tradition laments and seeks to escape, Arendt celebrates. First, she emphasizes how contingency is a structural feature of the freedom of action. Virtuosity manifests itself only in terms of the opportunities provided by fortuna: “There is no virtu without fortuna and no fortuna without virtu.”25 It is precisely the extraordinary contingency that pervades the realm of human affairs that gives freedom in the form of virtuosity the chance to appear. Second, she focuses attention on the phenomenality of political action, on the fact that words and deeds are heard and seen. She makes us appreciate the importance of the public realm as a “space of appearances,” as a “kind of theater where freedom appears.”²⁶ Finally, her emphasis on performance underlines the fact that plurality is the fundamental condition of political action. Without other actors, no opportunity for the expression of virtu arises; without an audience, action—words and deeds—fails to appear and generate meaning. The failure to achieve phenomenal expression, in Arendt’s view, is equivalent to the failure to achieve reality: “For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves—constitutes reality.”²⁷ Plurality is ontologically constitutive of the world.

The performance model, then, links freedom as virtuosity (Arendt’s “agonistic” conception) with the condition of nonsovereignty. By highlighting this condition, Arendt effectively decenters the political actor: the freedom of political action cannot be captured by philosophies of action built around the notion of autonomous agency. The categories of “author” or “producer” are inapplicable to political agency.²⁸ Moreover, viewing action as nonsovereign performance allows us to move beyond the categories of means and ends, motives and aims. Not only do these categories fail to capture the phenomenon of political action, but they also obscure the variety of freedom experienced in it. In “What Is Freedom?” Arendt notes that “action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as predictable effect on the other.”²⁹ Of course, motives and aims are important factors in any action, but “they are its determining factors and action is free to the extent it is able to transcend them.”³⁰ Arendt’s insistence on the nonsovereignty of political action frees it from it from its “determining factors,” and, in so doing, helps us to see spontaneity, “the sheer capacity to begin,” as the essence of action’s freedom and the source of its “transcendent” quality.³¹

Arendt’s focus on the nonsovereign freedom found in spontaneous political action raises the question of why this dimension is worth celebrating. Why take so much trouble to rescue it from obscurity, to preserve it through a radical reconceptualization of action as such? Her answer, implicit in her critique of homo faber’s disastrous identification of meaning with utility, is that the transcendent quality of great words or deeds is the source of a significance that is, in principle, unlimited. Great, initiatory, nonsovereign action is boundless: it creates myriad new relationships, unforeseen constellations, and—out of these—stories or lasting meaning.³² No other human activity, according to Arendt, “produces” meaning as naturally as does action in the public realm. Again, this is something highlighted by the performance model, which emphasizes the embeddedness of action in the “already existing web of human relationships” while stressing its phenomenality, its need for an audience. Combined, these aspects of great or initiatory action work to transcend instrumentality and “produce” meaning. Indeed, in The Human Condition, Arendt directly links the meaning-creative capacity of initiatory action to its “futility, boundlessness, and uncertainty of outcome”: “It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of this medium, in which action alone is real, that it ‘produces’ stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces things.”33

Political action thus possesses a unique revelatory capacity, the ability to illuminate the realm of human affairs in its specific phenomenal reality, and to endow this reality with meaning. The “revelatory character of action” and its “ability to produce stories and become historical” together “form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence.”³⁴ This ability to disclose the world and the actors in it, to bring them to presence and endow them with meaning, is, in Kateb’s words, the “existential achievement” of political action.³⁵ And it is precisely this disclosive or revelatory character of action that neither Aristotle, with his ultimately mimetic conception of praxis, nor Kant, with his reduction of action to motive and will, could comprehend or articulate. It is no wonder that Arendt attempts to distinguish her notion of the autonomy or specificity of action from theirs.

The performance model, then, reveals the nonsovereignty or “haphazardness” of action as the root of its specific freedom and meaning-creative power. It situates initiatory, agonistic action within a “space of appearances” (the public realm) in which the extraordinary or revelatory could become, in Arendt’s words, “an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.”³⁶ This was the reason for being of the polis, in Arendt’s view. The polis also provided a “remedy for the futility of action,” a way of preserving the “authentic, non-tangible, and utterly fragile meaning” created by action. Arendt goes so far as to suggest that political community originated as a form of “organized remembrance”: “Not historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and theoretically, it is as though the men who had returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated homesteads.”³⁷

The creation of an institutionally defined public space ensured that “the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made ‘products,’ the deeds and stories that are their outcome, would become imperishable.”³⁸ Great or initiatory action illuminates the world; such illumination presupposes a relatively permanent space where words and deeds can come to presence and be judged as appearances; that is, as a distinct and distinctly real realm of phenomena.³⁹

We are now in position to appreciate Arendt’s deepest motivation for insisting on the autonomy and dignity of political action. She combats the degradation of action by the philosophical tradition and modernity in order to save its disclosive essence from oblivion. Her deconstruction of the teleological model, her “aesthetic” reconceptualization, her violent anti-Platonism: all express her desire to preserve this all-important disclosive dimension. The disclosive nature of political action will be considered in greater detail in the next section. First, I want to investigate how the performance model overcomes the hostility to plurality, appearance, and politics that Arendt sees as shaping the Western tradition of philosophy and political theory.

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche questions the “slavish” tendency to take the actor out of the world by positing the “grammatical fiction” of a subject behind every deed.40 By separating the actor from his acts in this way, the “slave” or reactive man is able to maintain the belief that who we are is, finally, independent of our style of action, our virtu. For the slave, the belief that identity precedes and stands apart from action is immensely comforting: it enables the reactive man to see his impotence, his inability to act and distinguish himself, as a choice, rather than as constitutive of who he is. According to Nietzsche, belief in the subject makes possible “for the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom.”⁴¹

Against the “slavish illusion” of a subject of agency that stands outside the world, Nietzsche argues simply that “there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”⁴² Arendt, in arguing for the interpretation of freedom as virtuosity and action as performance, is urging us, like Nietzsche, to reject the “slavish,” moralizing tendency to posit a reality behind appearances, to take the actor out of the world and separate him from what he can do.⁴³ Freedom, according to Nietzsche and Arendt, is not found in the choice not to act, nor is identity something that precedes or is separable from action. Only the performing self knows freedom and only through performance can an otherwise dispersed or fragmented self be gathered together and display its uniqueness. Individuals become who they are, as Nietzsche would say, through action and the achievement of a distinct style of action.⁴⁴ Arendt makes a parallel point when she claims that individuals show who they are in virtuosic action.⁴⁵

While Arendt’s critique of the “traditional substitution of making for acting” reveals a great deal of the violence this interpretation does to the phenomenon of political action, it is only when we turn to Nietzsche’s unmasking of the moral subject in the Genealogy that we come to appreciate just how violent our moral epistemology is. For while Arendt’s account highlights those dimensions of action that get covered over by the teleocratic conception, Nietzsche provides a genealogy of the basic syntax that we impose upon action, a syntax appropriated, he argues, for the purpose of eliminating difference and constraining agonistic action. Nietzsche sees the reification of this syntax as originating in a slavish hostility to action even more primordial than the philosophical prejudice against the realm of human affairs cited by Arendt. By stressing just how hostile to plurality and difference the moral interpretation of action is, Nietzsche’s analysis supports Arendt’s view that we need a way of conceiving action that breaks decisively with the instrumental view. If, as Arendt argues, plurality is the origin and goal of agonistic political action, then it is essential to see how our grammar of action is always already at work in subverting the basic condition and primary achievement of action.

Nietzsche’s suspicion regarding the subject not only uncovers the hostility to plurality and action built into our very language, but it also reveals how belief in this “fiction” underlies the basic Platonic/metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality.46 Overcoming the reified actor/act distinction would, therefore, not merely enable a more affirmative account of agonistic action; it would also be a central moment in overcoming the Platonic/Christian/ascetic devaluation of worldliness and appearance. This larger overcoming is imperative if the nihilistic dialectic initiated by Plato’s institution of the appearance/reality distinction is to be escaped (the Platonic valuation robs this world of meaning, yet is powerless to protect the transcendent grounds it posits from subsequent undermining by the same will to truth).

This, I think, is where Arendt’s “aestheticism” draws closest to Nietzsche’s. Both embrace the aesthetic as a strategic response to the exhaustion of meaning produced by the nihilistic logic the Platonic valuation sets in motion. If, as Nietzsche suggests, we read the last two thousand years as the story of “How the Real World at Last Became a Myth,” of how we are left with only this world after belief in transcendent grounds withers, then the choice is between a positivistic/nihilistic embrace of “meaningless appearances,” or an aestheticist revaluation of appearances as the privileged locus of meaning. Arendt and Nietzsche deploy the aesthetic against Plato, not out of mere skepticism regarding the existence of Truth or transcendent values (for both, the destruction of such ideals is an accomplished fact of recent Western history),⁴⁷ but rather as a way of rescuing the possibility of meaning in a nihilistic age.

Nietzsche’s critique of a detached, autonomous ego and the moral interpretation of action that goes with it is thus of paramount importance to Arendt, and in many respects it sets the stage for her own reconceptualization of action. The moral/teleocratic interpretation of action must be overcome in order to avoid the reduction of plurality and difference, on the one hand, and that of meaning and appearance, on the other. But while framing freedom as sovereignty leads, in an obvious way, to the reduction of plurality, what is it about the distinction between actor and action that makes the moral interpretation so inimical to difference? What about the focus upon motives and goals, intentions and consequences, means and ends, is so hostile to action that we are compelled to “aestheticize” the phenomenon in order to save it? Nietzsche provides clues to these questions in the section from the Genealogy cited above, the most important clue being that the imposition of this distinction alters the perspective from which we view the phenomenon of action. We now view action, Nietzsche insists, from the standpoint of those for whom agonistic action was the greatest evil.

Nietzsche’s argument takes the following form. From the point of view of the active man—the man who creates his own values as an exercise in self-affirmation, who is capable of great action, who can distinguish himself and lives to do so—the distinction between the “subject” and his effects makes no sense. The energies or forces of the noble man are, as Giles Deleuze reminds us, always acted: such a man is his deeds and does not conceive himself otherwise.48 The reactive man—the slave, in Nietzsche’s terminology—needs to make this distinction in order to create the illusion of freedom in impotence. But he also needs this distinction in order to seduce the active man into believing that he is responsible for his actions because he could always have acted differently. The active man could, qua agent, choose not to act in an affirmative, agonistic manner; indeed, he could adopt a code of behavior based on the slavish denial of action. From the point of view of the slave, action is the original sin. It represents a form of life whose strength is manifest in its deeds, a form of life that is constantly individualizing and distinguishing itself through action.⁴⁹ The slave revolt in morality, in Nietzsche’s eyes, is precisely a revolt against the life of action: the transvaluation of values it achieves is predicated upon the goodness of abstaining from action.

The trick is to get the agonistic actor to accept this radical change in perspective, to view his action as blameworthy rather than self-affirming. This, Nietzsche argues, is accomplished by means of the fiction of the subject, the fiction of a force separated from what it can do. Taken in by the tautological doubling of the deed present in language (for example, “the lightning flashed”) that the slave presses upon him, the master succumbs to the idea that “the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb.”⁵⁰ He accepts a moral epistemology that makes “the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey” and so becomes ashamed of his uniqueness and distinction. The active man willingly denies his agonistic spirit in order that he, too, might be “good,” in the slavish sense of the word.⁵¹ Thus, the strategic employment of a reified distinction between actor and act, subject and “effects,” overcomes the “pathos of distance” between two radically different types. Through reflection, the vocabulary of justification, and shame, the forces of the active type are rendered reactive.⁵² No longer evaluated in terms of style or virtuosity, action is brought down to size through constant monitoring of its motives and consequences.

The moral interpretation of action, then, reveals a hostility toward individualizing or great action in its very structure. It inserts a justificatory gap between actor and deed, ensuring that motives and consequences take precedence over the performance of action as such. At this stage, the stage of “bad conscience,” the energies required for agonistic action are turned inward, channeled into the activity of self-surveillance and self-punishment.⁵³ The spontaneous, initiatory quality of action is increasingly smothered through the universalization of the standpoint of the one who does not act. The moralization of action (the story of which Nietzsche tells in the Genealogy) results in an antiagonistic attitude: the essential thing is to adjust one’s behavior to the needs of the herd.⁵⁴ Our virtues, “namely, public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence and pity” are the virtues of a tame animal, an animal who does not act, an animal “easy to get along with and useful to the herd.”⁵⁵

Arendt’s sympathy with Nietzsche’s interpretation of the general tendency promoted by the moral interpretation of action (and its teleocratic counterpart) is clearly evident in her dramaturgical account, and in her sardonic admission that her “Greek” theory of virtuosic action is “no doubt … highly individualistic, as we would say today.”56 The trajectory of her analysis of modernity in The Human Condition attests, moreover, to her agreement with the Nietzschean thesis that action and difference are fatally undermined by a moralizing interpretation, one that elevates the perspective of utility and that culminates in the celebration of behavior over action.⁵⁷ From her emphasis on homo faber’s inability to grasp the meaning of action, to her conclusion that man as the animal laborans is increasingly incapable of performing it, Arendt’s analysis presumes that Nietzsche’s genealogy is essentially “correct,” that the deep hostility to action manifest in the moral interpretation works itself out in modernity’s reification of instrumentality, life, and material comfort.⁵⁸

Of course, Arendt hardly endorses the principle of “rank ordering” that underlies Nietzsche’s analysis and that guides the aristocratic radicalism of texts like Beyond Good and Evil. What she shares with Nietzsche is a deep suspicion of a moral epistemology that seems to breed docile subjects, and which systematically devalues agonistic action in the world of appearances. It is due to this “normalizing” tendency of the moral interpretation that she, like Nietzsche, opts for a performative conception of the self and a more action-friendly, theatrical conception of the public realm. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Arendt does not conflate democracy with a Christian or Socratic moral epistemology. In contrast to Nietzsche, her Greeks are democrats; hence, she can appropriate the greater part of his analysis in the name of a democratic agonism.

Is this move coherent? Can one be a “modern” with regard to formal political structures (democracy, constitutionalism, rights, etc.) while maintaining a Nietzschean skepticism toward the effects of universalist moral vocabularies? The contemporary debate on this issue has been fierce, resulting in a polarization of “universalists” (Habermasians and liberals), on the one hand, and “contextualists” (communitarians and postmodernists like Lyotard), on the other. As is often the case, Arendt’s position straddles the dichotomy. Yet the question is an important one insofar as it underlines the political undecidability of the anti-Platonist project. As the example of Nietzsche illustrates, not all forms of this project are democratic. It should therefore come as no surprise that Arendt’s “revaluation of appearance” substantively diverges from Nietzsche’s. Before turning to this matter, however, I want to examine the disclosive character of Arendt’s politics of appearance. What does political action disclose? How does this disclosure take place?

III. THE DISCLOSIVE NATURE OF “AESTHETICIZED” ACTION

According to Arendt, the primary phenomenon revealed by agonistic, virtuosic action in the public sphere is the unique identity of the agent.⁵⁹ Human plurality, she states, has “the twofold character of equality and distinction.”⁶⁰ The distinctness of the human individual is not reducible to the quality of otherness or alterity, which he “shares with everything that is,” nor to the quality of individuality, which “he shares with everything alive.”⁶¹ The form of being together implied by the notion of plurality enables the expression of a unique distinctness, a uniqueness that appears through words and deeds: “Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere bodily existence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human.”62

A life without action and speech is “dead to the world,” because it is through action and speech that individuals disclose who they are. The “disclosure of who somebody is,” according to Arendt, is “implicit in both his words and deeds.” She hastens to add that “the affinity between speech and revelation is much closer than between action and revelation.”⁶³ Without the accompaniment of speech, “action would not only lose its revelatory character but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject,” the agent.⁶⁴ Action without speech ceases to be action because “there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words.”⁶⁵

In speaking and acting, then, “men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.”⁶⁶ If one reads this statement in conjunction with Arendt’s remarks on the “fiercely agonal spirit” that pervaded the polis (where “everybody has constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all”), one is tempted to accuse her, as many of her critics do, of holding an overtly romantic, expressivist theory of the self.⁶⁷ They see the Arendtian political actor as a self that externalizes, uncovers, or “defines” itself through the tangible medium of words and deeds. However, it is important to see that Arendt’s agonistic conception, like Nietzsche’s, is based on the rejection of anything like an expressivist conception of self.⁶⁸

What kind of self, then, is implied by the performance model of action? The expressivist conception assumes a core self, a basic or essential unity of innate capacities that are expressed, actualized, or concretized in the world of appearances. The “disclosure of the agent in speech and action” implies, from this perspective, an abiding subject, a reality, behind appearances. In contrast, the performance model deployed by Arendt and Nietzsche seeks to unmask this “fiction,” to escape the slavish, moralizing prejudice against action, a prejudice manifest in the “necessary” positing of such a subject as the causal ground of all deeds/“effects.”⁶⁹ Arendt interprets freedom as virtuosity precisely in order to keep the actor in the world, to frame his identity qua actor as coextensive with, rather than prior to, his actions. From Arendt’s point of view, the self that precedes action, the biological or psychological self, is an essentially dispersed, fragmented, and plural self; it is a self whose lack of appearance deprives it of both unity and reality.⁷⁰ Like Nietzsche, Arendt challenges the assumption that a single, unified subject resides behind action; like him, she suggests that the unworldly self—the thinking as well as the biological and psychological self—is in fact a multiplicity of conflicting drives, needs, and faculties.⁷¹

The unity, coherence, or identity of the agent, then, is not a given; rather, it is an achievement, the product of action. But how does the performance of virtuosic action give rise to an identifiable self, a self possessed of perceivable unity and, thus, of “unique distinctness”? Action, according to Arendt, provides us with an escape from the inner, determining, multiple self. Freedom as the spontaneous beginning of something new is made possible by the transcendence of needs and psychology that entry into the public realm enables (since, to repeat, here neither the needs of life nor purity of motivation are at stake). Such an escape from the divided self is not found in man’s other free activity, thinking, which is the freedom of a “two-in-one,” of a self engaged in internal dialogue. The attempt of the philosopher to escape the realm of plurality through contemplative withdrawal “always remains an illusion,” for in his solitude he is, according to Arendt, “more radically delivered to this plurality inherent in every human being than anybody else.”72 Only entry into the public realm delivers us from such self-division: here the “companionship with others” calls “me out of the dialogue of thought” and “makes me one again—one single, unique, human being speaking with but one voice and recognizable as such by all others.”⁷³

Action, then, affords the self the chance to escape the “always changeable and somewhat equivocal” nature it has in private, and to assume a “definite and unique shape.”⁷⁴ This definite, recognizable shape signals the achievement of a distinct style of action, which is to say that it reflects the actor’s virtuosity.⁷⁵ It is also created by the principles that inspire an agent’s action, and by the persona, the masks or roles, that the actor assumes in public appearance.⁷⁶ Arendt’s essential point is that if “the disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is … is implicit in everything somebody says or does,” then the achievement of identity is reserved for those whose words or deeds reflect a consistency of style. The performance of action in public provides the opportunity for stylization; and stylization, in turn, is the precondition for the kind of reification identity demands and for the transformation of a public life into a memorable narrative or story.⁷⁷

The idea that identity is not given, but is instead achieved through the creation of a distinctive style, again recalls Nietzsche, who presented the problem of creating a self worthy of display and remembrance in a similar light. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes:

One thing is needful—To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them all into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views. … In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it is a single taste!⁷⁸

Nietzsche’s conception of the self as a work of art is importantly different from Arendt’s idea of the revelation of self that occurs in political action. Nevertheless, Nietzsche sees selfhood, “becoming what one is,” as an achievement wrested from diverse materials, and as consisting primarily in the attainment of style. As Alexander Nehamas notes, whether one has, in fact, attained this end is not something the actor can judge.79 Nietzsche emphasizes that hardness toward oneself is necessary in order to bring coherence to welter, an emphasis Arendt echoes in stressing the discipline that playing a public role enforces.⁸⁰ But regardless of discipline, the final judgment about whether style or coherence is achieved—and what kind of character is displayed—resides with others—with the audience. Style and character, the marks of an achieved unity, are essentially public phenomena, utterly distinct from whatever feeling of unity the agent may experience himself.⁸¹

There is a third essential difference between the performance and expressivist models. The “disclosure of the agent in speech and deeds” implies, for Arendt, the absence of an underlying subject; identity as something achieved rather than given; and the decentered nature of such self-revelation. Arendt stresses that the disclosure of the agent—the “reward” of agonistic, individualizing action—is nothing like a project. Intentionality has the most tenuous connection to the “who” that action reveals.⁸² Nor is the disclosure of the agent in words and deeds a process that necessarily increases self-knowledge or brings one closer to self-transparency. As Arendt states in The Human Condition, “disclosure can almost never be achieved by willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this ‘who’ in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the ‘who,’ which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself.”⁸³ We cannot be the authors of ourselves, or of the stories that will be told about us.⁸⁴ The audience—our peers and those who come after—decides what the masks we wear in public signify and define, the “who” that they reveal.

As political actors, we disclose our unique identities, but we do not express ourselves. We do not do so for two basic reasons: first, there is no unified self to express; second, although action can be said to achieve or make identity possible, at the same time it conceals that identity. Nietzsche again is apposite. In the Preface to The Genealogy of Morals, he famously remarks that “we men of knowledge are unknown to ourselves … we are not ‘men of knowledge’ with respect to ourselves.”⁸⁵ If we substitute “men of action” for “men of knowledge” in the first phrase, we approach Arendt’s position. “Nobody,” she states, “knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in word or deed”; nevertheless, “he must be willing to risk this disclosure.”⁸⁶

The revelatory power of political action is not confined to the agent; action also discloses the world. For Arendt, “world” is virtually synonymous with the “public”: it connotes that realm of phenomena that lies between men, and which, as such, is common to them.⁸⁷ Like every in-between, the world “relates and separates men at the same time.”⁸⁸ Political action not only takes place within this “interspace”; it is, moreover, about it, in a double sense. First, political speech and action have a worldly content or referent that balances, to some degree, the agonistic urge to “self-revelation at any price.” As Arendt puts it:

Action and speech go on between men, as they are directed toward them, and they retain their agent revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively “objective,” concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arises their specific, objective, worldly interests. These interests constitute, in the word’s most literal sense, something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some worldly, objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent.89

Arendt here emphasizes the world in its “objective” aspect, as a space articulated and defined by the durable things within it. Action is concerned with this world; however, it is important not to confuse the world-disclosive nature of action with the creation of this objective physical in-between. As noted in Chapter 1, Arendt identifies work as man’s specifically world-building capacity.⁹⁰ In disclosing the world, action does not create it qua objectivity; rather, it constitutes it as a space of appearances, as a horizon for meaning. Action transforms the world by overlaying the “objective in-between” with a “subjective in-between,” an in-between consisting solely of words and deeds. Such an in-between, Arendt remarks, is “altogether different” from the “physical worldly in-between with its interests.”⁹¹ The disclosive nature of action is found in the constitution of this subjective in-between: in “overlaying” the world, it transforms a space of durable things into a space of appearances, a space for meaning.

The world-disclosive nature of action refers, then, less to the realm of objectivity per se than to the illumination of the “world” as a public space (although Arendt strongly links the two aspects when she claims that “our feeling for reality depends utterly on appearance”).⁹² Stripped down to its thinghood, the world is the product of homo faber. While durable and lasting, it is a world in which appearance is not enough. In this world “everything must be of some use … must lend itself as an instrument to achieve something else.”⁹³ It is a world, in short, where significance is a function of utility—and, as Arendt reminds us, “utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.”⁹⁴ The threat of meaninglessness posed by a potentially unrestricted instrumentality is escaped by the overlaying of the objective world with “the web of human relationships” created by action. The functional mentality of homo faber is limited by the care for the world, the commitment to the public realm and performance, that characterizes the agonistic political actor. The world can now appear as something more than an artificial space, a refuge from the repetition of nature: it now stands as a self-contained space of appearances, one where phenomena are judged in terms of their greatness or beauty rather than their utility.⁹⁵

The world, considered as a space of appearances, is constituted “wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action.”96 Here appearance, and only appearance, has full reality (“In the realm of human affairs” Arendt writes, “being and appearance are indeed one and the same”).⁹⁷ The publicity of this world, its shining brightness, clears an ontological space for appearance, a space “where freedom is tangible in words that can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and events which can be talked about, remembered, and turned into stories.”⁹⁸ The phenomenality of the public realm is seen by Arendt as the basic constitutive condition of its meaningfulness: virtuosic action is appearance that generates its own meaning. Indeed, according to Arendt, “if … we understand the political in the sense of the polis, its end or raison d’être would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear.”⁹⁹ As long as there is such a space for virtuosic action, the world is illuminated in its appearance, in its beauty; where such activities cease, the world darkens and the public space ultimately disappears.¹⁰⁰

The world-disclosive nature of political action consists, then, in the way it illuminates the world as appearance; in the way virtuosic action glorifies appearance and makes it into a source of meaning. But for reality to present itself as appearance, for a space to be opened in which phenomena shine forth in their phenomenality, we need an undiluted plurality. The reality of the public realm relies “on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can be devised.”¹⁰¹ Plurality, “the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear,” confirms our feeling for the reality of ourselves and the world, and allows us to escape the “weird irreality” of a diffuse and isolated subjectivity.¹⁰² However, the real ontological significance of plurality resides not in the simple confirmation provided by others, but in the fact that “everybody sees and hears from a different position.”¹⁰³ Our “common world” can come to presence only through the play of perspectives that this difference in position creates: “only where things can be seen by many and in a variety of aspects without changing their identity … can worldly reality truly and reliably appear.”¹⁰⁴ Plurality thus plays an ontologically constitutive role. For this reason, Arendt vehemently rejects the Platonic/philosophical privileging of truth, or sophia, and identifies opinion, doxa, as the stuff of political life.¹⁰⁵

In Arendt’s view, it is the nature of opinion to express perspective. Every opinion is relative to one’s position in the world, and as such it formulates in speech what dokei moi, what appears to me.¹⁰⁶ Opinion in this sense is hardly the expression of subjective bias or arbitrariness; rather, it signifies the politically essential fact that “the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it.”¹⁰⁷ It is precisely the variation implicit in the “it appears to me” that underlies the presencing of the common world. Moreover, through the expression of opinion one enters the public realm, revealing oneself in the process: “To assert one’s own opinion belonged to being able to show oneself, to be seen and heard by others.”¹⁰⁸

Arendt’s affirmation of the perspectival character of opinion returns us to one of her most prominent themes—the tension between truth and opinion, a tension that she sees rooted in the philosophic hostility to politics.109 Throughout her work, Arendt persistently emphasizes the way truth denatures politics by marginalizing and degrading opinion. In “Truth and Politics,” she flatly states that “every claim in the sphere of human affairs to an absolute truth whose validity needs no support of opinion strikes at the very roots of all politics and government.”¹¹⁰ The claim to truth is destructive of politics in its denial of perspective—the “it appears to me” that is essential to the presencing of the world as appearance. Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a “despotic character”; it

peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from a political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.¹¹¹

The Platonic instrumentalization of action, the separation and ranking of knowing and doing, hinges upon the appeal to a truth above opinion, a truth beyond perspective. Arendt repeatedly draws attention to the political context in which Plato formulated his concept of truth—the conflict between philosophy and the polis that led to the execution of Socrates.¹¹² Determined to make the polis safe for philosophy, Plato saw it as imperative that opinion be stripped of legitimacy. Hence, his “furious denunciation of doxa … ran not only like a red thread through his political works, but became one of the cornerstones of his concept of truth. Platonic truth … is always understood as the very opposite of opinion.”¹¹³ By framing truth in opposition to appearance and perspective, Plato creates one of the most effective weapons for reducing plurality and escaping the frailty of the realm of human affairs: “To the citizens exchanging opinions about human affairs which were themselves in a state of constant flux, the philosopher opposed the truth about those things which in their very nature were everlasting and from which, therefore, principles could be derived to stabilize human affairs.”¹¹⁴

The Platonic demand that the philosopher replace the phronimos, that sophia replace opinion, results in a “tyranny of truth,” a tyranny of absolute standards. That which is temporally good is always open to debate and persuasion; it is also irreducibly relative, as befits the “interhuman realm” that “by its nature consists of relationships.” Here, according to Arendt, a “fundamental relativity” reigns.¹¹⁵ Philosophical truth, in its concern with an absolute good, addresses man not in his plurality and relativity, but in his singularity; it abjures context and circumstance; it compels rather than persuades. The will to truth—in its Platonic, absolutized form—undermines doxa, since it is no longer concerned, as Socrates was, with eliciting the truth of appearance and opinion. Its sole aim is to unmask these as illusion. The result is the creation of an abyss between truth and opinion and the destruction of “the specific political reality of the citizens,” namely, the realm created or constituted by doxa, by the “it appears to me.”¹¹⁶ Because truth in the form of absolute standards destroys opinion and plurality, Arendt joins with those who, like Lessing, would willingly sacrifice the attainment of truth in order to preserve “the inexhaustible richness of human discourse.”117

I should note that Arendt’s hostility to a Platonic politics of truth does not encompass the domain of factual truth. While factual truths, like rational or religious truths, have a “coercive,” persuasion-resistant character, Arendt considers their availability to be a fundamental presupposition for any genuine formation of opinion.¹¹⁸ Where the line between fact and opinion has been systematically blurred, or where ideology and the rewriting of history succeed in producing a full-scale alternative reality, there a “politics of opinion” in Arendt’s sense cannot take root.¹¹⁹ While, from a doxastic perspective, it is possible to speak of the “despotism” of factual truth, this despotism is of a different order from that exercised by truths of reason or religion. The former provide nonpolitical boundaries to be realms of opinion and persuasion, while the latter invariably quash the plurality of perspectives that generates the “incessant discourse” Arendt cherishes.

While Arendt’s preservation of the distinction between fact and opinion distinguishes her from some neo-Nietzschean interpretivists, she nevertheless agrees with Nietzsche that, in the public realm at least, there are no moral facts. In this discursive realm, even the most solid truths of reason, religion, and morality are transformed into the stuff of opinion. Thus, while it is always tempting for the statesman, no less than the philosopher, to endow certain propositions with the unquestionable force of truth, Arendt insists that this move is always made in bad faith. Her example is the set of “self-evident truths” that Jefferson appealed to in the Declaration of Independence. For Arendt, the “self-evident” characterization is a transparent rhetorical ploy by which Jefferson attempted to “put the basic consent among the men of Revolution beyond dispute and argument”; however,

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.” There exist, on the other hand, philosophical or religious statements that correspond to this opinion—such as that all men are equal before God, or before death, or insofar as they all belong to the same species of animal rationale—but none of them was ever of any political or practical consequence, because the equalizer, whether God, or death, or nature, transcended and remained outside the realm in which human intercourse takes place. Such “truths” are not between men but above them, and nothing of the sort lies behind the modern or the ancient … consent to equality. That all men are created equal is not self-evident nor can it be proved.¹²⁰

Arendt’s insistence that, politically speaking, the statement “all men are created equal” is in the realm of opinion is hardly intended to diminish its importance. On the contrary, she thinks this statement expresses a belief of the “greatest importance,” namely, that “the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding dominion.”121 What is at stake in her reading of Jefferson is the issue of whether, in the name of equality, the appeal to prediscursive grounds of validation should be allowed, regardless of the potentially stifling effect such appeals have on the realm of plurality. Arendt leaves little doubt as to her position: like Madison, she believes that “all governments rest on opinion,” nothing more, nothing less.¹²² To hold otherwise—to rely, with Jefferson, on the crutch of truth or to wield, with Plato, the weapon of truth—is to deny the fundamental transformation all propositions undergo when they enter the public realm. Moreover, it is to undermine the continuing commitment to the work of persuasion and dissuasion necessary to support such founding choices. In other words, it is not a question of instantiating a truth of God or nature in an inhospitable realm, but rather of persuading our peers that the pleasures of dominion, and of inequality, are indeed base.

Here, as elsewhere, Arendt explicitly repudiates the will to power or domination.¹²³ Nevertheless, her rejection of rational or religious truth as a meaningful or relevant guide to action in the public realm, combined with her deep suspicion of those who, like Plato, wish to transcend the arena of appearance and perspective, reflects the logic, if not the ideological substance, of Nietzsche’s struggle against Platonism.

For Nietzsche, the claim to universality is a distinguishing characteristic of the moral interpretation of action. He suggests that one primary reason for the triumph of this perspective is that the reification of the subject occurs in language itself.¹²⁴ The grammatically instituted split between actor and action enables the moral interpretation to present itself, plausibly, not as one interpretive vocabulary, but rather as a representation or translation of the structure of the world and action in it.¹²⁵ Much of the power of the ascetic valuation derives precisely from its denial of perspective, partiality, and interests. And it is from this denial that the game of deducing actions from general principles is derived, a game that, as Lyotard reminds us, is as old as the West itself.¹²⁶ Indeed, its greatest monument is Plato’s Republic.

Nietzsche, of course, denies the possibility of eliminating perspective, of coming up with a vocabulary that mirrors the structure of a reality beyond interpretation. As he says in GM III, 12: “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’” This position frees us from the despotism of the ascetic will to power/will to truth (an ideal which “permits no other interpretation, no other goal”), affirming instead the essential pluralism of the world.¹²⁷ And this, moreover, makes possible a stronger, life-affirming kind of objectivity, quite distant from the contemplative ideal of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”: “… the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”¹²⁸

Arendt’s politics of opinion, her emphasis on the constitutive role of perspective and the coercive nature of truth, can be seen as a specifically political version of Nietzschean perspectivism, albeit one that retains a healthy respect for nonmoral facts. Only by affirming the essentially perspectival character of opinion is the world saved from the reductive effects of the Platonic/moral interpretation of action, an interpretation predicated on the gap between reality and appearance, and on the untruth of appearance. The performance model adopted by Arendt from Nietzsche identifies reality with appearance, preserves plurality in the strong sense, and thereby maintains the value of action and the integrity of the public realm.

There is much, then, in Arendt’s theory of agonistic political action that builds on Nietzsche’s aestheticist struggle against Platonism. Yet, as I mentioned above, the parallels and continuities discussed so far do not touch upon Arendt and Nietzsche’s deepest connection, their turn to the aesthetic as a way out of the nihilism that stretches from Plato to the present.129 If, as Michel Haar notes, nihilism begins with the assertion that “this world is worth nothing and nothing in it is worth anything,” and proceeds to invent a “true world” possessing all the attributes lacking in this one (unity, stability, identity, truth, goodness, etc.), then “the division of the two worlds, the feat undertaken by Plato, constitutes the nihilistic act par excellence.”¹³⁰ It is so because this division denies meaning or value to the appearances themselves: only insofar as these are signs of some (non-apparent) reality are they granted significance.¹³¹ Western man early gets into the habit of making meaning dependent upon some realm of essence beyond existence. An inevitable corollary of the will to truth or essence is the dialectic of enlightenment, the process by which all such “transcendent” grounds are dissolved in a corrosive skepticism: the true world becomes a fable. The central value of our culture, truth, drives us to ceaseless unmasking, to the destruction of life-affirming illusions and horizons, to the “truth that there is no truth”—God is dead.¹³² The irony, as Tracy Strong observes, is that this discovery does not liberate us from the sense that we must have truth in order to have meaning, that meaning is somehow inextricably tied to truth or the universal.¹³³ We continue to search for what we know does not exist, confirming our growing sense of meaninglessness; worse, we come to be at home in this exhaustion of meaning.

Nietzsche’s aestheticism—his championing of art against truth, his affirmation of illusion and appearance, his conviction that we need art to save us from truth—is obviously incomprehensible outside this context. Arendt’s aesthetic approach to action is a parallel response to the same world-historical phenomenon, the self-devaluation of the highest values, the collapse of tradition and authority.¹³⁴ The realm of appearances—whether construed broadly as in the Nietzschean aestheticization of the world, or narrowly as in the Arendtian “aestheticization” of the political—holds the promise of meaning freed from the will to truth, from the nihilism implicit in all teleology, whether of Nature, God, or Man. The aesthetic attitude toward existence propounded by Nietzsche and the aesthetic approach toward political action proposed by Arendt have as their goal the redemption of a world rendered valueless by the collapse of absolutes and authority. Only by living “superficially”—as artists, as political actors, as glorifiers of appearance—do we escape the tragic wisdom of Silenus invoked by Nietzsche at the start of The Birth of Tragedy and by Arendt at the close of On Revolution.¹³⁵ The glorification of appearance that takes place in art and action in the public realm endows the world with a meaning it otherwise lacks: both activities make the world beautiful; both escape the reduction of meaning that characterizes modernity.136

IV. LIMITING THE AGON: DIFFERENCE AND PLURALITY, PERSPECTIVISM AND JUDGMENT

It has been suggested that Arendt theatricalizes action as a way of overcoming its Platonic/Aristotelian instrumentalization; that the performance-oriented, agonistic dimension of the resulting theory of action is essential to the preservation of plurality; that this conception of action owes much to Nietzsche’s anti-Platonic, “immoralist” aestheticization of action; and, finally, that she and Nietzsche are one in their celebration of a nonsovereign, decentered freedom of action “beyond good and evil.” When viewed in such a light, Arendt’s theory appears far indeed from what Habermas presents in his consensus reading. But this raises the question of whether Arendt’s anti-Platonism leads her, like Nietzsche, into an uncritical endorsement of agonistic subjectivity. Can she be unaware of the dangers and distortions an unrestricted agonism invites—distortions that threaten to undermine the very conditions of political action (plurality, equality, commonality)?

Arendt, of course, is aware of the dangers of an excessive emphasis on the “fiercely agonal spirit” behind all genuine political action. In a previously unpublished manuscript, “Philosophy and Politics,” she noted how this spirit constantly threatened to overwhelm the polis, to splinter it through centrifugal force.¹³⁷ She therefore broadens the Nietzschean focus on the agonistic quality of action by reasserting the deliberative element present in both action and judgment. This move on her part may seem a capitulation—an abandonment of an ill-advised aestheticization of action—and a return to the sound common sense embedded in the Aristotelian notions of praxis and phronesis. I would like to stress, however, that Arendt’s modification of her “aestheticized” agonism does not employ external measures: the appeal she makes is not to reason or dialogue, but to taste.¹³⁸ Her theory of political judgment limits the agonal dimensions of politics not by abandoning the aestheticization of action, but by completing it. Hence, her highly idiosyncratic appropriation of Kant’s third Critique, an appropriation that enables her to preserve plurality and politics from the subjectivism of Nietzsche’s more purely agonistic model.

While Arendt’s revised version of agonistic politics places her at a distance from consensus theorists like Habermas, it is also at variance with those who, following Nietzsche, tend to view discourse as war, as agon without limit (Deleuze, Lyotard, and Foucault, at various moments).¹³⁹ But here it might be objected that it is simply wrongheaded to accuse Nietzsche of promoting an overly agonistic, masculine model of subjectivity, one more intent upon self-display and self-composition than on being open to otherness. After all, the whole point of Nietzsche’s archaeology of the moral, responsible subject in The Genealogy of Morals is to reveal the hidden coercions and violence that underlie the creation of any such centered subjectivity.140 Contemporary appropriations of the Genealogy (e.g., Adorno and Horkheimer’s in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Foucault’s in Discipline and Punish) have stressed the violence, paranoia, and pathology that accompany the constitution of the self-identical subject.¹⁴¹ Against such an essentially deformed subjectivity (a subject that would prefer any amount of self-inflicted pain, even death, to the relaxation of its all-too-dearly bought boundaries), Nietzsche, it is claimed, deploys a dissolvent notion of aesthetic experience, which halts the unending process of self-violation and self-mortification that is the ascetic ideal.

In this interpretation, increasingly dominant thanks to poststructuralism, Nietzsche stands as the great subverter of what Jochen Schulte-Sasse has called the “agonistic individuality of modern subjectivity.”¹⁴² It is important to take this reading seriously, if only because the critique of autonomy is such a central element in both Nietzsche and Arendt. Does the Nietzschean version of this critique result in the rejection of anything resembling an agonistic subjectivity? If we stick to the Genealogy, it is clear that Nietzsche’s decentering of the subject, and his unmasking of the supposedly “free” agent, are not indictments of subjectivity tout court; nor can it be said that the positive image of subjectivity contained therein is antiagonistic. Contra Foucault, subjectification is not always or merely subjugation for Nietzsche.¹⁴³ If it were, then Nietzsche would be in the position of grounding the “joy in action” in the absence of a reflexive relation to self, in sheer instinctual behavior. However, occasional embarrassing remarks about the “blond beast” aside, the thrust of Nietzsche’s analysis is that man only becomes an interesting animal as a result of this self-violence. “Breeding an animal with the right to make promises,” the “tremendous labor” of the “morality of mores,” does not bring forth one fruit.¹⁴⁴ There is the slavish will, to be sure, the will turned against itself, the will that is an instrument of self-surveillance, self-punishment, and adjustment to the herd. But there is also what Nietzsche calls “the sovereign individual,” the “ripest fruit,” the man in whom the process of discipline and interiorization has yielded a will strong enough to liberate itself from the morality of custom, and from morality as such.¹⁴⁵ He is responsible, this “master of a free will,” but only to himself. He is freed from the constraints imposed by motives and goals and the moral criteria appropriate to them: his discipline is not in need of such props. Nietzsche’s positive image of subjectivity is that of an individual who is “autonomous and supramoral,” whose discipline is such that he “becomes what he is” by the imposition of a certain style upon the fragments that provide the raw material for his self. Such an individual masters himself, overcomes himself, in the activity of self-composition. This self-overcoming, which is also a self-creation, constitutes, in Nietzsche’s view, genuine freedom:

For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance that divides us. That one has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice men to one’s cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained mastery over the other instinct for “happiness.” The man who has become free—and how much more the mind that has become free—spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.146

Nietzsche’s formulation of the virtuosic freedom of such a subject casts the “anti-agonistic” reading in doubt. It inevitably colors the way we view Arendt’s parallel conception of virtuosic agency. If free action by definition transcends the categories of motives and goals, what possible meaning can it have apart from the aesthetic enjoyment, the feeling of power, which such self-conscious mastery, such display of one’s own virtuosity, produces? Where “the deed is everything,” it is abundantly clear that what matters is the style of action and not its origin or goal. Nietzsche’s self-consciously aesthetic approach to action raises the question of how such “autonomous” action can ever amount to more than the form-giving “process of subduing” he refers to.¹⁴⁷ His celebration of the artist’s will as a paradigmatic instance of such overcoming, of creative/appropriative interpretation, leads us to ask Arendt what prevents her conception of action from devolving into a similar subjectivism? How does one reconcile the imperative of greatness (the distinctive quality of “aesthetic” action) with the preservation of genuine plurality?

Nietzsche’s aestheticization of action culminates, then, in an overstatement of the world- and self-creative potential of great, agonistic and/or artistic action. “Active” forces are “spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving”; they are constantly engaged in the process of imposing “new interpretations and directions” upon phenomena.¹⁴⁸ The “will to power” is the attempt by each interpreting force to assert its hegemony. The world, in this view, exists only as a “sign chain” awaiting investment. As Nietzsche puts it, “Whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation.”¹⁴⁹ Devoid of any intrinsic meaning, identity, or structure, the world and self offer unlimited opportunities for the Apollonian imposition of form, the affirmative creation of value. Through his virtuoso deployment of new tropes, the “artist” creates both new ways of seeing the world and new compositions of self.¹⁵⁰

Another way of characterizing the deficiencies of Nietzsche’s aestheticism is to say that it divides performer and audience, rendering the latter virtually superfluous. What does the creator of new values, and fresh illusions, care for the spectator? Like Nietzsche, he recognizes his own untimeliness. Insofar as the audience does have a place in the Nietzschean paradigm, it is in the contemporary form of interpretivism: the audience is seen as an aggregate of agonistic interpreters or critics, each seeking to impose his reading on any performance.¹⁵¹ From this standpoint, the abolition of the “true world” really does do away with the apparent one as well: meaning and structure derive solely from the subjective positings of the actor or audience. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche does not hesitate to link the unmasking of the “true world” to the unmasking of the apparent one.152 As a result, there can be no meaningful talk of a shared world of appearances. The dissolution of any transcendent or transcendental ground of appearances implies that these have value or meaning strictly as a function of “perspective seeing.” Nietzschean perspectivism ultimately denies appearance its own reality: belief in such a reality is only a metaphysical hangover.

How, then, does the appropriation of the third Critique enable Arendt to escape the excesses of an aestheticized, agonistic conception of politics? How does Kantian aesthetics help to reassert the intersubjective nature of the phenomena that Arendt wants to preserve? How, finally, can a theory of aesthetic judgment limit, without neutering, the agonistic conception of political action?

In her essay “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt compares works of art to the “products” of action, words, and deeds. What they share, she says, is “the quality that they are in need of some public space where they can appear and be seen; they can fulfill their own being, which is appearance, only in a world which is common to all.”¹⁵³ Kant’s aesthetic theory—which is particularly attuned to the public character of beauty, offering “an analytic of the beautiful from the viewpoint of the judging spectator”—gives us access to this reality in a way foreclosed by Nietzsche’s (ultimately) reductionist view of appearance.¹⁵⁴ For Nietzsche, appearances are merely artifacts, errors, illusions created for the sake of life.¹⁵⁵ As a result, one ought not discuss the problem of the beautiful except in terms of the needs of the creator and the forces expressed in his creation. To approach the world of appearances or the beautiful from the contemplative standpoint, as Kantian aesthetics does, is one more sign of the decadence of the ascetic ideal. What Nietzsche specifically holds against Kant—namely, that he, “like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator) considered art and the beautiful purely from the point of view of the spectator” (GM III, 6)—is the primary reason that Arendt holds that his aesthetic theory has political relevance.¹⁵⁶

In the third Critique, Kant goes out of his way to establish the specificity of aesthetic judgments and their objects. The broad distinction he draws between determinate and reflective judgments, between judgments for which “the universal (the rule, the principle, the law)” is given and judgments in which only the particular is given and “the universal has to be found,” is intended to open a gap between the activities of judging an object as an instance of something, and judging it in its specificity, qua representation.¹⁵⁷ Aesthetic judgments are reflective precisely because they concern representations as representations, rather than as instances of a given concept. The extremely strong distinction Kant draws between aesthetic judgment—the judgment of whether something is pleasing or displeasing to us as representation—and cognitive judgment—the judgment of the objective qualities of a perception—is meant to underline the very different faces a phenomenon presents to us given the different attitudes with which we approach it. In the aesthetic attitude, we perform a kind of epoche by which the natural attitude, with its concern for and interest in things, is bracketed. As Kant says in section 2 of the third Critique: “When the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether we, or anyone else are, or even could be, concerned with the real existence of the thing, but rather what estimate we form of it on contemplation.”158

Kant’s careful isolation of aesthetic experience and judgment enables us, contra Nietzsche, to conceive a way of judging appearances that does not reduce them to one more expression of an overflowing life.¹⁵⁹ His spectatorial approach, albeit exaggerated and rigidly formalistic, opens up a sphere removed from the pressing interests of life, a sphere where, in Arendt’s version, “we are confronted with things which exist independently of all utilitarian and functional references, and whose quality remains always the same.”¹⁶⁰ Kant’s conception of the aesthetic has the merit, according to Arendt, of drawing our attention to the fact that “only works of art are made for the sole purpose of appearance.”¹⁶¹ Aesthetic objects are those “whose very essence is to appear and be beautiful. … The proper criteria by which to judge appearances is beauty,”¹⁶² not because beauty is edifying, but because it lets the appearances shine forth as appearances.

“Saving the appearances,” then, presumes something like the contemplative attitude Nietzsche scorned. From Kant’s perspective, genuine aesthetic experience and judgment presuppose the achievement of a disinterested attitude.¹⁶³ Yet one is hard-pressed to see how such an attitude could be achieved in that other realm of appearances, the political realm. Arendt, however, claims that something like the aesthetic attitude is indeed necessary if we are to be open for that world. In “The Crisis in Culture,” she glosses Kant’s fundamental line of reasoning:

The proper criterion by which to judge appearances is beauty. … But in order to become aware of appearances we first must be free to establish a certain distance between ourselves and the object, and the more important the sheer appearance of a thing is, the more distance it requires for its proper appreciation. This distance cannot arise unless we are in a position to forget ourselves, the cares and interests and urges of our lives, so that we will not seize what we admire but let it be in its appearance.¹⁶⁴

Arendt’s intention here is fairly clear. In order to do justice to political action, in order to redeem the meaning potentially disclosed by words and deeds in the public realm, the judging spectator must be able to assume an attitude similar to Kant’s uninteressiertes Wohlgefallen (disinterested pleasure or satisfaction). Without it, nonsovereign political action would lose its revelatory capacity: action would be judged solely in terms of material or moral interests; worse, it might be seen as the mere manifestation of power. To appreciate the “play of the game” that characterizes a genuinely agonistic politics, the audience must be “released from life’s necessity.” Only then will they be “free for the world.”¹⁶⁵ This is why Kant’s formulation of aesthetic or taste judgments is an appropriate model for political judgment, for “taste judges the world in its appearance and in its worldliness … neither the life interests of the individual nor the moral interests of the self are involved here. For judgments of taste, the world is the primary thing, not man, neither man’s life nor his self.”¹⁶⁶

While the question of the nature and degree of “abstraction from interest” appropriate to the political realm is a perplexing one, it is important to see the thrust of Arendt’s reliance on Kant. Agonistic political action threatens to fragment the polis. One way of avoiding this is to cultivate an ethos whereby actors are more committed to playing the game than to winning.167 Another equally important way of limiting the agon is to insist that political judgment—the meaning we draw from words and deeds—operates at a certain distance from the immediate interests of the audience. “Disinterestedness,” in raising men above the pressing needs of life and the self, is essential to the appreciation of action and so to the intrinsic value of plurality, opinion, and politics itself.

But while some measure of disinterestedness is crucial to avoiding a politics of ideology, interests, or need, it seems ironic that Arendt would urge the adoption of a contemplative attitude toward political action. After all, The Human Condition identifies the contemplative (Platonic) impulse as specifically antipolitical.¹⁶⁸ Arendt, however, is careful to distinguish between the contemplative attitude that characterizes theoria, and the “objectivity” that characterizes the man of practical judgment. The latter arises not from achieving agreement with oneself (Socrates), but rather from being able, in Kant’s words, to “think in the place of everybody else.”¹⁶⁹ Having an “enlarged mentality,” what Arendt calls “the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present,” presumes both distance and imagination.¹⁷⁰ Imagination—which Kant describes as the free play of the mind’s power of representation—enables us to put ourselves “in the place of any other man,” and thereby to abstract from “the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment.”¹⁷¹ Aesthetic—and political—judgment achieves its disinterested character not through a complete withdrawal from the world, but by being representative, a point Arendt stresses in “Truth and Politics”:

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question of neither empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think were I in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion.¹⁷²

The representative thinking made possible by disinterested judgment is Arendt’s Kantian version of Nietzsche’s perspectival objectivity, the objectivity born of using “more” and “different” eyes to judge and to interpret a thing.¹⁷³ There is, however, an obvious and crucial difference between perspectives represented through the free play of imagination and the “perspective seeing” Nietzsche describes. For Nietzsche, having “more” and “different” eyes means the ability to relativize all accepted meanings, dissolving their apparent solidity in the free play of signifiers.174 In Kant and Arendt, on the other hand, the free play of the imagination has the effect of focusing the judging agent’s attention on the publicly available aspects of an issue.¹⁷⁵ The representative nature of judgment enables the transcendence of “individual limitations” and “subjective private conditions,” thereby freeing us for the purely public aspect of the phenomenon.

The difference between genealogical “objectivity” and representative judgment, between the kind of aesthetic distance endorsed by Nietzsche and that endorsed by Kant and Arendt, is summed up by the contrast between Nietzsche’s trope of “seeing things from another planet” and the Kantian/Arendtian appeal to “common sense,” the sensus communis.¹⁷⁶ Nietzschean aestheticism, in the form of perspectivism, has the effect of either placing one beyond any community of interpretation (the genealogical standpoint), or denying that a viable “background consensus” exists, thereby robbing the public realm of its fundamental epistemological precondition. There can be no arena of common discourse, no genuinely public space, when the “death of God” leads to the advent of Weber’s “warring gods.”¹⁷⁷ Lyotard expresses a similar thought when he links the discovery of an irreducible plurality of incommensurable language games to the decline of the legitimizing metanarratives of modernity.¹⁷⁸ In such a situation, judgment and interpretation are inevitably aestheticized: we are left, in Nietzsche’s phrase, with the “yay and nay of the palate.”¹⁷⁹

For Kant, the significance and implications of aesthetic distance are quite opposite. As noted previously, he is struck by the public character of the beautiful, despite the nonobjective quality of aesthetic experience.¹⁸⁰ The impartiality of detached aesthetic judgment, while not pretending to truth, guarantees that the object or ground of aesthetic satisfaction will be communicable. And this in turn reveals a quality of taste as judgment that is obscured by Nietzsche and our own subjectivist notion of taste. Taste judgments of the disinterested sort are characterized by a peculiar claim: the pure judgment of taste “requires the agreement of everyone, and he who describes anything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give approval to the object in question and describe it as beautiful.”¹⁸¹ The communicability of taste judgments leads Kant to posit the existence of a common sense, a common “feeling for the world.” Indeed, Kant describes taste itself as “a kind of sensus communis.”¹⁸²

The aesthetic distance achieved by representative thought thus points to the “grounding” of judging insight in common sense, a point Arendt emphasizes. “Common sense …”, she writes, “discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly private and ‘subjective’ five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a nonsubjective and ‘objective’ world which we have in common and share with others.”¹⁸³ The significance of Kant’s theory of taste judgment for politics is that it shows how a nonfoundationalist theory of judgment can in fact serve to strengthen rather than undermine our sense of a shared world of appearances. Kant’s analysis of taste judgment reveals how, in Arendt’s words, “judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.”¹⁸⁴ It does so by highlighting the public-directed claim implicit in all pure judgments of taste, by showing how the expression of approval or disapproval, satisfaction or dissatisfaction, appeals to the common sense of one’s judging peers. In matters of taste, one “expects agreement from everybody else.”185 Oriented toward agreement, relying upon common sense, taste judgment emerges, contra Nietzsche, as the activity through which the public world presences itself as appearance; as the activity through which a community “decides how this world, independently of its utility and all our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what we will see and what men will hear in it.”¹⁸⁶

Kant’s theory of judgment thus opens a space between the false objectivism of Plato (political judgment as determinate, as a kind of epistxmx) and the subjectivism that accompanies Nietzsche’s endorsement of perspectival valuation. Taste judgments are valid, but their “specific validity” is to be understood precisely in opposition to the “objective universal validity” that marks cognitive or practical judgments in the Kantian sense. As Arendt says, “Its claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself for his considerations.”¹⁸⁷ Taste judgments are crucially dependent upon perspective, upon the “it appears to me,” on “the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world.”¹⁸⁸ Nevertheless, they constantly refer us to a world of appearances “common to all its inhabitants.” Kant’s notion of taste judgment provides the perfect model for political judgment, in Arendt’s opinion, because it preserves appearance and perspective without abolishing this world.

We can sum up the achievement of Kant’s theory of judgment by saying that it removes the specter of subjectivism, yet without recourse to objective or cognitive grounds of validation.¹⁸⁹ Lacking an objective principle, taste judgments are necessarily difficult, and where their validity is questioned it can be redeemed only by persuasive means. As Arendt says in “The Crisis in Culture”: “Taste Judgments [unlike demonstrable facts or truths demonstrated by argument] … share with political opinions that they are persuasive; the judging person—as Kant says quite beautifully—can only ‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually.”¹⁹⁰

Taste judgments are, in a word, redeemed deliberatively. Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment—departing from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for representative thinking and culminating in the persuasive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgment—is thus, for Arendt, political through and through.¹⁹¹ It requires an ongoing process of exchange and deliberation, one “without criteria,” as Lyotard would say.¹⁹²

This is yet another reason why Kantian taste judgment is the appropriate model for Arendt’s account of political judgment, the “receptive side” of virtuoso action. It reasserts the intersubjective nature of both appearances and judgment, while severing the links between the common or public and the universal. Our capacity for judgment rests on our feeling for the world, and this requires neither a transcendental ground for appearances nor universally valid criteria of argumentative rationality. Practical questions emphatically do not admit of truth.¹⁹³ Yet political judgment seen as a kind of taste judgment nevertheless helps to limit the agon by reintroducing the connection between plurality and deliberation, by showing how the activity of judgment can, potentially, reveal to an audience what they have in common in the process of articulating their differences. And what they have in common, contra Aristotle and contemporary communitarians, are not purposes per se, but the world. Debate, not consensus, constitutes the essence of political life, according to Arendt.194 The Kantian conception of taste judgment reopens the deliberative space threatened by agonistic action, in a way that makes consensus not the assumed telos of political debate, but at best, a kind of regulative ideal.

The turn to Kant enables Arendt to avoid the antipolitical aspects of an actor-centered conception of agonistic action. The disclosive quality of political action comes to depend importantly upon the audience, conceived as a group of deliberating agents exercising their capacity for judgment. Thus, the meaning of action is seen by Arendt as predicated upon a twofold “death of the author”: the actor does not create meaning as the artist does a work, nor can judging spectators redeem this meaning unless they are able, in some measure, to forget themselves. This is not to say Arendt’s conception of political action and judgment extinguishes the self; rather, it is to say that self-coherence is achieved through a process of disclosure that is importantly decentered, for both actor and judge. As it turns out, the judging spectator is also engaged in the “sharing of words and deeds” in his capacity as a deliberating agent. And, as Arendt reminds us, “By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is, and this disclosure, which is involuntary, gains in validity to the degree that it has liberated itself from merely individual idiosyncrasies.”¹⁹⁵

The agon is limited, then, not by retreating from the aestheticization of action, but by following its anti-Platonic impulse through to the end. The “completion” of the theory of action by a Kant-inspired theory of judgment retains the focus on action as something heroic or extraordinary. It does so, however, by shifting the emphasis from world- and self-creation to the world-illuminating power of “great” words and deeds, to the beauty of such action. As a public phenomenon, the beautiful can only be confirmed in its being by an audience animated by a care for the world. The difference between Arendt’s “aesthetic” approach to politics and Nietzsche’s aestheticization of life is nowhere clearer than in the connection Arendt draws between greatness and beauty in “The Crisis in Culture”:

Generally speaking, culture indicates that the public realm, which is rendered politically secure by men of action, offers its space of display to those things whose essence it is to appear and to be beautiful. In other words, culture indicates that art and politics, their conflicts and tensions notwithstanding, are interrelated and even mutually dependent. Seen against the background of political experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the manifestation of imperishability. The fleeting greatness of word and deed can endure to the extent that beauty is bestowed upon it. Without the beauty, that is, the radiant glory in which potential immortality is made manifest in the human world, all human life would be futile and no greatness could endure.¹⁹⁶

Arendt’s “aestheticism,” an aestheticism predicated upon a love of the world, is critically different from Nietzsche’s, which is the aestheticism of the artist. A persistent theme in Arendt’s writing, one parallel to her emphasis on the tension between philosophy and politics, concerns the conflict between art and politics.197 This conflict does not emerge out of the phenomenology of art versus that of political action; as we have seen, Arendt thinks these are importantly similar. Rather, the conflict centers on the mentality of the artist versus that of the political actor. The artist, according to Arendt, is a species of homo faber, who characteristically views the world in terms of means and ends. He is unable to conceive praxis independently of poiēsis: the work always retains priority over the activity itself. The result is that performance is denigrated, action misconceived.

Nietzsche, of course, has even less use for homo faber than Arendt, who takes pains to voice her criticism not against making as such, but against the universalization of a particular attitude. Nevertheless, if we take an Arendtian perspective, it is clear that Nietzsche, the artist-philosopher, must be counted amongst those who “fall into the common error of regarding the state or government as a work of art,” as an expression of a form-giving will to power.¹⁹⁸ Plato’s Republic stands as the initiator of the state as “collective masterpiece,” as artwork, trope. The fact that Plato launched this metaphor in terms of what Lacoue-Labarthe calls a “mimetology,” while Nietzsche repudiates again and again all metaphors of correspondence or adequation, does not alter their fundamental agreement: both regard action not as essentially performance, but as making.¹⁹⁹ Poiēsis has a radically different connotation for Nietzsche, to be sure, but the activity of self-fashioning and self-overcoming does not overturn the Platonic paradigm so much as bring it to closure. Nietzsche may explode the notion of telos in its classical sense, but the model of the work retains its significance. Thus, despite the importance of his anti-Platonism to the project of deconstructing the tradition’s model of action, his contribution to the thinking of plurality and difference in a political way is subject to a crucial limitation. Thought essentially in terms of an “aesthetics of existence,” in terms of a project of self-fashioning freed from any telos, the positively valorized notion of difference proposed by Nietzsche remains poetic. Like the activity of the artist, it “must be isolated from the public, must be sheltered and concealed from it,” if it is to achieve adequate expression.²⁰⁰ The poetic, ultimately antitheatrical framework assumed by Nietzsche prohibits the Arendtian thought that, under certain very specific conditions, it is precisely the public realm that is constituted by plurality, and which enables the fullest, most articulated expression of difference.

The critique of Nietzsche’s aestheticism implicit in Arendt’s theory of political judgment is thus of the utmost importance in coming to terms with what I have (somewhat misleadingly) called her “aesthetic” approach to politics. Arendt, unlike the tradition that runs from Plato through Schiller and Hegel to Nietzsche, studiously avoids the figure of the state as a work of art. Indeed, her “aestheticization” of politics stands in profound opposition to the conflation of art and politics performed by the German philosophical tradition after Kant.²⁰¹ The “poetic” character of Nietzsche’s aestheticism suggests that he is not the “dynamite” he claimed to be; it suggests that he, like Kierkegaard and Marx, rebelled against the tradition without finally being able to extricate himself from its conceptual structures.²⁰² Nietzsche’s failure is a predictable one, according to Arendt, because his transvaluation proceeds by turning the tradition upside down, by inverting its conceptual hierarchies. The inevitable result of all such “turning around” operations is entrapment within the structure one is trying to escape. Thus, Nietzsche’s “inverted Platonism” stands, along with Marx’s attempt to go beyond philosophy, not as a genuine break with the tradition, but as its point of closure.203 Falling prey to the philosophical/Platonic identification of action as a kind of making, Nietzsche ultimately fails to provide the resources necessary for saving action and plurality from their philosophically induced oblivion. With Nietzsche, we are still unable to think the essence of action decisively enough.