“We speak of four fundamental forces,” a physicist recently said to me, “but I believe there are only two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the sensitive recognition that it is precisely because free will is so uncomfortably at odds with everything we know about the nature of the universe that the experience of freedom — which is different from the fact of freedom — is fundamental to our humanity; it is precisely because we were forged by these impartial forces, these handmaidens of chance, that our choices — which always have a moral valence — give meaning to reality.
Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944. (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive.)
Arendt’s rigorously reasoned, boundlessly mobilizing defiance of helplessness and “the stubborn humanity of her fierce and complex creativity” come abloom in We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (public library) — Lyndsey Stonebridge’s erudite and passionate celebration of what Arendt modeled for generations and goes on modeling for us: “determined and splendid goodwill, refusing to accept the compromised terms upon which modern freedom is offered and holding out for something new.”
Stonebridge, who has been studying Arendt for three decades, writes:
Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.
[…]
She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.
She too lived in a “post-truth era,” she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind.
Having a free mind in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means learning instead to cultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human.
Celebrating Arendt as a “conservationist” who “traveled back into the traditions of political and philosophical thought in search of new creative pathways to the present,” Stonebridge reflects:
Fundamental questions about the human condition are not beside the point in dire political times; they are the point. How can we think straight amidst cynicism and mendacity? What is there left to love, to cherish, to fight for? How can we act to best secure it? What fences and bridges do we need to build to protect freedom and which walls do we need to destroy?
In my own longtime immersion in Arendt’s world, I have often shuddered at how perfectly her indictment of political oppression applies to the tyranny of consumerist society, although Arendt did not overtly address that. In this passage from Stonebridge, one could easily replace “Nazism,” “totalitarianism,” and “the Holocaust” with “late-stage capitalism” and feel the same sting of truth:
Nazism was undoubtedly tyrannical, and self-evidently fascist in its gray-black glamour, racist mythology, and disregard for the rule of law. However, Arendt argued that modern dictatorship had an important new feature. Its power reached everywhere: not a person, an institution, a mind, or a private dream was left untouched. It squeezed people together, crushing out spaces for thought, spontaneity, creativity — defiance. Totalitarianism was not just a new system of oppression, it seemed to have altered the texture of human experience itself.
[…]
The moral obscenity of the Holocaust had to be recognized, put on trial, grieved, and addressed. But it could not be made right with existing methods and ideologies… You cannot simply will this evil off the face of the earth with a few good ideas, let alone with the old ones that allowed it to flourish in the first place. You have to start anew.
One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
This belief that “we are free to change the world and to start something new in it” animated Arendt’s life — a freedom she located not in what she termed reckless optimism (the divested shadow side of Rebecca Solnit’s notion of hope as an act of defiance), but in action as the crux of the pursuit of happiness — what Stonebridge so astutely perceives as “the determination to exist as a fully living and thinking person in a world among others.” She writes:
Freedom cannot be forced; it can only be experienced in the world and alongside others. It is on this condition that we are free to change the world and start something new in it.
Learning to love the world means that you cannot be pleasantly indifferent about its future. But there is a wisdom in knowing that change has come before and, what is more, that it will keep on coming, often when you least expect it; unplanned, spontaneous, and sometimes, even just in time. That, for Hannah Arendt, is the human condition.
“Thus action and reaction among men never move in a closed circle and can never be reliably confined to two partners.” (The Human Condition (HC), The Frailty of Human Affairs, 190)
„Es gibt kein auf einen bestimmten Kreis zu begrenzendes Agieren und Re-agieren, und selbst im beschränktesten Kreis gibt es keine Möglichkeit, ein Getanes wirklich zuverlässig auf die unmittelbar Betroffenen und Gemeinten zu beschränken, etwa auf ein Ich und ein Du.” (Vita Activa (VA), Die Zerbrechlichkeit menschlicher Angelegenheiten, 182)
Scenarios of two persons facing each other in mutual encounters are prevalent in modern social and political philosophy. They negotiate social contracts, struggle for recognition or engage in open consensus-oriented dialogue. From Hobbes, Fichte and Hegel to Taylor, Habermas and Honneth, mutual encounters have served as paradigms. Yet, Hannah Arendt is somewhat wary of making mutual encounters central to her phenomenology of acting and speaking with one another. Arendt might want to insist on a subtle but crucial difference: It is one thing to mutually understand each other in relations of personal affinity and another thing to share experiences and perspectives on our common reality of human affairs.
It is possible to override Arendt’s wariness of mutuality. In her monograph Situating the Self, Seyla Benhabib, for example, has fruitfully introduced the Arendtian emphasis on spontaneity, participation, empowerment, performance and storytelling into a framework of mutual action and recognition. One of her central concerns is to address issues of social justice and concrete gender and group identities that have been neglected in Arendt’s work. According to Benhabib, Arendt’s agonistic, anti-modernist view of public space in The Human Condition can be contrasted with an associational view in her later work on totalitarianism (Benhabib, 1992, pp. 93–95). She considers the latter view much better suited to address the concerns of modern politics.
Interestingly, both views proposed by Benhabib imply that acting and speaking in public are enabled by processes that involve mutuality — either as an against-one-another or as a for-one-another. According to the agonistic view, the public space “is a competitive space in which one competes for recognition, precedence and acclaim; ultimately it is the space in which one seeks a guarantee against the futility and the passage of all things human” (ibid., p. 93). This is the public stage of the Greek polis where a homogenous group of elite men competes against each other at the cost of excluding everyone else. Against this, the associational view suggests that public space emerges wherever “emerges whenever and wherever, in Arendt’s words, ‘men act together in concert.’” (ibid.) According to Benhabib’s reading, sites of power emerge from acting in concert through speech and persuasion. The power “emanates from action, and it comes from the mutual action of a group of human beings” (ibid.). It does not need the big political stage to emerge. In fact, these sites of power are particularly likely to appear wherever groups of activists gather — whether it is in a private dining room or for a form of public protest. On this reading, Arendt shifts from viewing the public as a competitive, strategic struggle for recognition by political agents vying for excellence to viewing it as a group-based effort for mutual recognition that lets a particular kind of “We” emerge. Benhabib holds that the latter “We” is particularly relevant for the concerns of modern politics because it can account for concrete group identities.
Now, neither of the views proposed by Benhabib pays particular attention to a somewhat intangible but no less real aspect of human interrelatedness and togetherness in The Human Condition. Since it is so intangible, Arendt finds the metaphor of the web (German Bezugsgewebe, literally woven fabric of relations/references) most appropriate for it. With this she is trying to capture the peculiar experience of boundlessness when we speak and act with one another. In this context, Arendt remarks that action and reaction among men can never be reliably confined to two partners (HC 190). This means, as she elaborates in her parallel German rendition of the same point in Vita Activa1, that there is no possibility to reliably restrict deeds to those directly affected and directly addressed, for instance, an I and a You. Importantly, this is not because there are quantitatively too many humans on this planet for us to determine the consequences of our actions (VA 182). Instead, we experience our actions as boundless because what just now seems predictable as a particular constellation of the web of human relations can be radically changed by a single word or gesture. Therefore, there is no way to fix the fleetingness and fragility of the web of relations, even if we restrict our interactions to smaller and smaller groups. In a first instance, acting and speaking are both irrevocable — since we cannot just undo our deeds — and unpredictable.
Placing the fragility of the web of human relationships at the center of an account of acting and speaking together has implications for how we imagine its power. Just because we experience acting and speaking with one another as boundless does not make it by default an experience of powerlessness. In the same chapter on “action,” Arendt illustrates this for the human capacities to forgive and to promise and their peculiar powers to shape the temporal structure of the web. She claims that the remedy against the irrevocability of our actions springs from the faculty of forgiving, the remedy against their unpredictability from the faculty to make and keep promises (HC 236). To trace Arendt’s wariness of mutuality and why she insists that the political power of mutual encounters is limited, it is helpful to consider her account of forgiving. This can highlight that insisting on the limited political force of mutual encounters is not to dismiss the role of mutuality and close personal social relations for human interrelatedness entirely.
In order to spell out how forgiving is an elementary and authentic political experience (HC 236–243), Arendt considers two models of forgiving — love-based and friendship-based forgiving. An exclusive focus on love-based notions of forgiving is problematic for Arendt because it does not allow us to consider the political possibilities of the experience2. But why should love rule out a political experience of forgiving?
One way to read Arendt here, is to take her to illustrate a characteristic tendency of experiences of love. “Love” as a mutual encounter of the purest form comes with the tendency to close two partners off from the world. The resulting account of forgiving describes an intimate task to nurture back care, appreciation and esteem between an I and a You within their confined circle of two. All that matters in this sphere is You and Me. In the special form of self-forgiveness, love-based forgiving can even be entirely self-revolving. Arendt outright denies the possibility of self-forgiveness as a meaningful, authentic experience (HC 237). I do not think that we need to follow her blindly on her rather harsh dismissal of self-forgiveness as nonsense and mere role play. In certain contexts, it might very well be meaningful and important. According to contemporary mental-health and well-being literature, for example, self-forgiveness refers to practices of self-love to overcome overly self-critical and self-depreciating attitudes. But although we might want to be more careful here, considering self-forgiveness as an extreme case of love-based forgiving can highlight an important and valid point in Arendt’s analysis: Love-based forgiving, whether interpersonal or entirely self-referential, has the tendency to close itself off from the world of human affairs beyond its confined circles and thus to political experience and judgement.
This is particularly interesting because Arendt proposes friendship-based forgiving as an alternative. It is not always the case that we need to establish a closed-off, intimate sphere in order to forgive and to experience forgiveness. Whereas love in its purest form highlights the tendency of mutual encounters to close us off from the world, what Arendt means by “friendships” highlights that it is possible to maintain an openness to the world while we engage in meaningful relations with one another. Of course, our everyday experiences of friendship are personal and intimate experiences. They do require love and tend to flourish in private spaces — for example Benhabib’s dining room where activists gather in secret. However, unlike love it does allow for worldly concerns and point of views to enter the intimate sphere of personal relationships. It thus creates space and distance between the subjects. In the larger domain of human affairs, friendship tends towards a minimal form of mutual personal relation — a political friendship without intimacy and closeness: “[I]t is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of the qualities which we may admire and the achievements which we may highly esteem” (HC 243). For her account of forgiveness as a political experience she concludes that such a minimal mutual relation of respect towards another person “is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person” (HC 243). It is this experience of distance with a mere regard for the other’s humanity and personhood that enables political experience in the strict Arendtian sense. “Friendship” has a tendency to open up to the world because it creates space for an in-between. It is this actual space between subjects that is crucial for enabling an exchange of perspectives and experiences of the world that goes beyond the closely confined circles of small and smallest affinity groups and thus for a political capacity to consider perspectives beyond these circles in our judgments.
This distance-based in-between enables a kind of togetherness that neither emerges from an associational for-one-another nor an agonistic against-one-another. In order to share perspectives and experiences we do not necessarily have to identify with the other standpoints or feel a particularly strong affinity towards them. Rather, the fragile possibility to share perspectives on a common world in a more minimal sense is dependent on our ability to actively see the same aspect of the world in a plurality of different ways3. In addition to an openness to engage in this activity to see and feel things differently, this only requires a basic regard and respect for other persons and their humanity. The feeling of connectedness that emerges on the basis of this mere political capacity to share perspectives on human affairs is different from the identity-based Wes that emerge from mutual action and struggles for recognition.
Why might this difference be important for concerns of modern politics? As Benhabib and many other feminist and critical thinkers have highlighted, being sensitive to concrete historical and material identities is important for issues of social justice. And, as many have pointed out, the historical Arendt was certainly blind to a range of issues that concern social justice. She did not grasp the full severity of racial injustice and was not particularly concerned about feminist struggles for gender equality. However, this does not necessarily make her wariness of mutuality a mere by-product of a conservative enamorment with Greek notions such as philia politiké.
It is frighteningly easy to ignore issues of social justice, even for those who are politically invested in a particular struggle for justice and recognition. The history of feminist activist practice has shown that the power that emerges from mutual concerted action just as quickly turns into a desire to build up walls around what has been achieved at the cost of denying others their right to full human existence. Take for example racist tendencies in the suffrage movement or, for a pressing issue in today’s feminist activism, trans-exclusionary tendencies by those who have once been at the forefront of second-wave feminist struggles. A minimal experience of connection with others, not despite concrete differences, but exactly on the very basis of our different perspectives on worldly human affairs is important but cannot be taken for granted. Without the openness to engage in a constant effort to share perspectives and experiences, the for- and against-one-another that certainly is a key driving force of struggles for justice and recognition becomes aimless and loses its emancipatory power. Struggles for mutual recognition turn into reactionary efforts on confined islands of sovereignty.4
Julia Zaenker is a PhD fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. She specializes in phenomenology with a particular interest in Husserlian phenomenology and feminist and political phenomenology. Her dissertation project investigates the relation of second-person address, recognition and communication in their role for sharing experiences and perspectives. Her project is affiliated with the ERC-project “Who are We”.
Footnotes:
1 Arendt first published The Human Condition in English in 1958. Her own translation of the text to German was published later in 1960. She opted to change the title of her translation to Vita Activa. She later remarks in The Life of the Mind that she prefers the “more modest” title Vita Activa over the title “wisely” chosen by her American publisher because it highlights the problem of action as central to her inquiry (LM 6). Notable differences between the two versions of the text are Arendt’s creative choice of words — she does not always go for the most literal translation of her original wording — and subtle changes in the structure of some passages and sentences. As the example of this quote of the week shows, considering both the English and the German version of the text can highlight certain nuances and help to elaborate on some of Arendt’s thoughts.
2 The exclusive focus on love-based forgiving is a tendency Arendt finds in the Christian doctrine. According to the Christian teaching, only love can forgive because it is assumed that “only love is fully receptive of who somebody is” (HC 242). If this were true, Arendt writes, “forgiving would have to remain altogether outside our considerations.” (HC 243)
3 For readings of Arendt that support this interpretation see Zerilli’s (2016) Wittgensteinian proposal and Loidolt’s (2018) phenomenological proposal.
4 This work has been supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research.
Bibliography:
Arendt, H. (2018a). The Human Condition [=HC] (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (2018b). Vita Activa. Oder vom tätigen Leben [=VA] (19th ed.). Piper.
Arendt, H. (1978). Life of the Mind [=LM], Harcourt.
Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the Self. Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Polity Press.
Loidolt, S. (2018). Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. Routledge.
Zerilli, L. M. G. (2016). A Democratic Theory of Judgment. University of Chicago Press.
“[H]is thinking was not a search for truth, since every truth that is the result of a thought process necessarily puts an end to the movement of thinking. The fermenta cognitions which Lessing scattered into the world were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.”
This passage turns the relationship between thinking and discoursing on its head. It is common wisdom that discoursing is a means to good thinking. We share ideas to test their soundness. By communicating our thoughts to others, by exposing our thoughts to probing questions and counterarguments, we are more likely to develop well-considered views on reflection. Discoursing helps us think, deliberate, and judge what there is reason to believe, to do, to be.
But Arendt’s Lessing seems to come at this another way. He would think, and communicate his thoughts, she says, simply to be in discourse with others. It is as if a “discourse between thinkers” has standalone significance (even) without reference to anticipated epistemic gains in the quality of their thoughts or other good outcomes.
This is a puzzling but intriguing possibility. It centers the relationship between persons in discourse — as if for its own sake. It suggests there is potential worthiness in discoursing that need not be articulated in terms of some other (independently specifiable) good that it produces. It draws attention to a putative value of being-in-discourse that is irreducible to any if its results, whether gains in knowledge or anything else. If correct, that there is self-sufficient purpose to “bring about a discourse between thinkers,” it is realizable only so long as discoursing endures — because its goodness, whatever it is, would not outlast the discoursing that it consists of. And so, Arendt’s Lessing was eager “to stimulate others to independent thought” even “for no other purpose” but sustaining discourse itself. Any “result,” even if good and successful on independent grounds, is unfavorable to the extent it “puts an end to the movement of thinking” with others.
a. Is there value in discourse as such?
But what is the irreducible value of being-in-discourse? An initial possibility is that it denotes the continuity of a valued relationship that exceeds its specific communicative parts. This occurs to the extent certain persons have reason to talk to one another per se — where some value inheres in who speaks to whom — over and above everything else that needs to be said. Even more, sometimes, the sheer fact of being-in-discourse could have a certain primacy over its details. Friends, say, may know they want to talk to one another even if they do not know in advance exactly what they will talk about. They may want to talk to one another even if they cannot crisply specify upfront what discourse-independent goods they expect it to yield. Where pre-specification of contents or outputs is neither necessary nor desirable, a pure relational dimension of discoursing comes readily into focus. Its significance cannot be reduced to its individuated communicative qualities without omitting something crucial — how it sustains the bond of friendship over time.
Even so, in this example of friendly conversation, it is odd to think the locus of value is being-in-discourse. It is probably more accurate to locate value in the friendship that discoursing sustains. Yet the friendship is made of many other features, like mutual care and concern, which are separable from, and endure beyond, the conversations that also help sustain it from time to time. Even if ongoing discourse is partly constitutive of friendship, and even if these archetypal friends want to talk to one another without specifying in advance what they will talk about or expect it to yield, the relevant (relational) good inheres not in conversing as such. There is probably some pre-set and shared understanding that their friendship consists of various features other than talking to one another — mutual care, concern, respect, help for one another (to name a few things). And while ongoing conversation may serve to sustain their friendship, its value is still ultimately reducible to these other (discourse-independent) relational qualities that make a friendship.
Yet Arendt’s image of Lessing’s prioritization of endless discourse makes it seem like it is truly intrinsically valuable — that its value is in discourse as such. I think there may be a way to make some sense of this thought if we could identify a relationship that is both (at least partly) made of discoursing and its character is exceedingly unspecified absent continually talking about it. The more open-ended the terms of a relationship, the more instructive it will be to identify its discourse as a putative good irreducible to specific content or output. In such case, discourse is good for sustaining a relationship that fundamentally consists of continual discoursing about what the relationship is. Here discoursing is good simply because it is a constitutive part of a valued relation-of-discourse. This is not to resolve but to stir the enigma. What kind of relationship so fundamentally consists of discourse, to the extent it is illuminating to regard its worth as irreducible to other discourse-independent goods?
There is a familiar relationship that partly consists of near-maximally open-ended discourse. It is a political community of persons who agree to peacefully share a polity amid persistent disagreement. These persons may have little in common other than a few basic normative commitments: to share a polity, to collectively binding action, and to settle their differences by means of “words and persuasion” (and not merely by force and violence). They have reason to discourse about whatever they deem of concern to the community. But, if committed to a politics of persuasion rather than force, they can never pre-specify its contents or expected outputs. In this relationship, there are few pre-set, stable, agreed-upon values and purposes, other than discoursing about it all without end.
Arendt’s depiction of Lessing’s result-less discourse is indeed a compressed representation of the unique relationship that is a political community. “Lessing was a completely political person,” Arendt tells us. His manner of thinking and discoursing personifies a particular conception of political relationality: civic friendship.
b. Two conceptions of political relationality: fraternity vs. friendship
Amid her “thoughts about Lessing,” and in her accustomed way of thinking by way of sharp distinctions, Arendt contrasts two conceptions — two metaphors — of political accord: fraternity and friendship. They are ways of grappling with persistently hard questions of why form political community and what effectively holds it together? There are surely ways to conceive of grounds for political community in plausibly instrumental terms (i.e., of goods that are wholly specifiable independent of being in political community). Organizing politically may be distinctly good for benefits enjoyed by persons severally, like personal safety, liberty, property, something else — take your pick. The possibility of securing these benefits may motivate their respective forms of political ordering. As I understand it, though, Arendt’s contrasting conceptions of fraternity and friendship are both ways of imagining what a political community’s relational integrity consists of in non-instrumental terms. They are alternative ways of imagining what it means to be in political community.
Fraternity, first, for Arendt, denotes human relation based in shared inner features of human nature, like sympathy or reason. It is (the possibility of) a powerful unity of interest — of common feeling or thought. It “obliterates all distinctions.” It may manifest, perhaps, in sharing foundational values or ways of life. Arendt calls this is an “invisible” mode of relation since it shrouds itself from a worldly reality of many peoples for whom feelings of kinship are typically absent. She also calls it an “instinctual” mode of relation since it “tend[s] to muteness” and not “dialogue.” In a fraternity model, disagreements are blemishes; persons seek their own to avoid contest.
Friendship, though, denotes human relation mediated by an externally shared world. Evoking antiquity (when the concept had political resonance), Arendt understands Aristotle’s phila, of “friendship among citizens,” as “a readiness to share the world with other men.” She says it is “sober and cool,” not “sentimental.” It is “not intimately personal but makes political demands and preserves reference to the world.” It is a worldly co-existence. In this tradition, Arendt explains, “the essence of friendship consisted in discourse,” and “only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in the polis.”
In contrast to fraternity, a friendship conception of political accord upholds plurality and distinction, not unity or likeness. It is a politics that could embrace a “fundamental relativity” among civic persons and a potentially “infinite number of opinions that arise when men discuss the affairs of this world.” Disagreement is at home in this mode of relating; it gives discourse partners even more to talk about.
The friendship model makes space for plurality, for dissent, for contest. It is to insert enough distance between persons — a shared world — to separate and link them. A world is “shared,” though, only when it is an object of discourse among a plurality of persons who hold it in common. It is constituted by “many voices;” a multiplicity of expressed opinion “both links and separates men, establishing in fact those distances between men which together comprise the world.”
One must wonder about the stability of political community in Arendt’s friendship model. It entails a multiplicity of views and interests that somehow co-exist in and around common objects. These persons do not necessarily share fundamental values or ways of life. Yet they have little choice but to share a polity, its public institutions, and resources; and they can try to shape its affairs, while accepting potential opponents will do the same. In these conditions, are not civic relations at constant risk of turning un-friendly in the ordinary sense of the word?
The instability is deep because their most basic commitment is just to keep discoursing about what it means to be their community — what collective decisions to take, what its values should be, what should appear in its polity. And while the community necessarily enacts and enforces collectively binding norms, embodying certain values, that are expected endure for some time, these are still impermanent on the fundamental level, always up for debate, prone to change. It seems there is no further substantive bedrock of agreement. As far as I can tell, Arendt’s conception of civic friendship does not stipulate anything like constitutional pre-commitments to public standards that embody a reciprocal respect, good will, and concern for citizens’ wellbeing — qualities we might otherwise associate with civic friendship.1
We should be careful not to overstate the concept’s vacuity either. There still is a fundamental commitment at play — at least to co-exist peacefully and keep discoursing about what do as a community. This also means, more substantially, I think, that a political community must act to secure conditions and affordances for ongoing discoursing in the polity.
Still, this latter imperative flows from the more minimal commitment to simply (continue to) be in discourse. There need not be independent commitment to maintaining certain social or material conditions for other reasons — like, e.g., under a specification of political obligation to underwrite minimal standards of living. Rather, upkeep of shared worldly structures — social, material, normative — is required because it is both the precondition and object of ongoing discourse among persons in political community (if they are to be civic friends). The public spaces, institutions, and resources in a polity must form a “world,” a structure with some durability, made fitting for human habitation, where separate persons can discourse about sharing what is in it.2 And the specifics of world-maintenance are surely up for debate. The only thing that is theoretically secure — and paradoxically maybe even not open to debate — is a shared commitment to the continuity of a political relationship that is (in a salient sense) defined by open-ended discoursing itself.
To come full circle, this priority of open-ended discoursing, of civic friendship, is not easily grasped in epistemic or other outcome-oriented terms. With only minimal normative conditioning, its discourse cannot support reasonable expectations of producing good output on independent grounds. All it demands is the continuity of discoursing among persons who have reason to talk to one another because they share a polity. Its normative ordering is purely relational: “a readiness to share the world with other men.” This is an interpretation, anyway, of what it could mean to value being-in-discourse without reduction to anticipated outputs, whether learned truths or consensuses or collective decisions that must occur from time to time. It inheres in certain persons agreeing to discourse as and to members of the same political community into the future. It is no more but no less than a venture in “sharing-the-world-with-others.”3
c. Arendt’s Lessing’s example of worldly civic friendship in endless discourse
Arendt sees in Lessing a personification of civic friendship rather than fraternity; she reports that he “wanted to be the friend of many men, but no man’s brother.” She relates, quite amazingly, how Lessing “rejoiced” in the notion that “the truth” as “uttered” may be “immediately transformed into an opinion among many,” and then aptly “contested, reformulated, reduced to one subject of discourse among others.” She thought that Lessing’s “greatness” consisted in his “gladness” that there may be no “single truth.” He was glad, that is, that “discourse among men will never cease so long as there are men at all.”
His preoccupation with discoursing, moreover, meant a keen focus on the worldly space that both holds a discourse and is its object. For this reason, in judging art and ideas, Arendt says, Lessing was most “concerned with the effect” of the art or ideas “upon the spectator” and the “worldly space which has come into being between the artist or writer and his fellow men as a world common to them.” He was “always taking sides for the world’s sake” and he understood and judged “everything in terms of its position in the world at any given time.” He would thus “attack or defend in his polemics according to how the matter was being judged by the public and quite independently of the degree to which it was true or false” and without assuming any “fixed position.” And so, for instance, where “everyone else was contending over the ‘truth’ of Christianity, he was chiefly defending its position in the world.” He would argue in opposition when he was “anxious that it might again enforce its claim to dominance” but in its favor when he feared “that it might vanish utterly.” He wanted religion to have a place in the world alongside the philosophy of its critics. In “taking sides for the world’s sake,” Lessing was securing the conditions for more discoursing. He was prioritizing ongoing discourse over any decisive outputs.
Arendt acknowledges we may be “astonished that Lessing’s partisanship for the world would go so far that he was prepared even to sacrifice to it the axiom of noncontradiction.” But his thinking was just not a “search for truth.” It was a “mode of moving in the world in freedom.” He conceived of thinking as a “freedom of movement,” which, in turn, meant “never binding his thinking to results;” results are undesirable because they put an “an end to the movement of thinking.” The many “disjunct” ideas he “scattered into the world,” Arendt says, “were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought.” And he wanted to “stimulate others to independent thought,” she thinks, “for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.” His priority was the continuity of a discourse relation. He was partisan to the “world” because it is a precondition and the shared object of (civic) friendship.
And so, in the role of civic friend, Arendt’s Lessing sought to humanize “the world by incessant and continual discourse about its affairs and the things in it.” The inverse possibility — the idea of a singular truth, discovered form beyond, to then rein over persons — was undesirable to him since it “might have the result that all men would suddenly unite in a single opinion.” If such misfortune occurred, then “the world, which can form only in the interspaces between men in all their variety, would vanish altogether.” And if such a “world” were to vanish, the possibility of civic friendship, of incessant discourse among partisans and rivals alike, would go with it.
Arendt, Hannah (1968): On Humanitiy in Dark Times. Thoughts About Lessing. In: Men In Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 3–31.
Footnotes:
1 For a conception like that, see, e.g., Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State.
2 This is to say her concept of civic friendship entails a concept of a “world.” It is unclear to me, though, whether her concept of a “world” also entails a concept of civic friendship, i.e., persons discoursing about commonly held things, which separate and link them.
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte observed as he dove for the deeper meanings of our commonest concepts. But, as James Baldwin and Margaret Mead demonstrated in their historic conversation about forgiveness and the crucial difference between guilt and responsibility, Western culture has a confused understanding of what forgiveness really requires of us and what it really gives us — a confusion tangled in the conflicting legacies of Ancient Greek culture, that primordial womb of drama and democracy, with its politically immature notions of justice, and Christian dogma, with its incomplete and psychologically puerile conceptions of love.
To disentangle this cultural confusion into a lucid and luminous understanding of forgiveness demands an uncommon largeness of spirit and depth of intellect, an uncommon breadth of erudition and historical knowledge, and an uncommon sensitivity to what it means to be human. That is what the uncommon Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) accomplishes throughout The Human Condition (public library) — the superb 1958 book that gave us her insight into how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world.
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)
The very need for forgiveness, Arendt observes in a chapter titled “Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive,” springs from “the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting” — a process fundamental to what it means to be alive. We act because we are, but we don’t always act along the axis of who we aspire to be. Aspiration is a sort of promise — a promise we make to ourselves and, sometimes, to the world. Forgiveness is only ever needed, and possible, because of the inherent tension between action and aspiration. Arendt writes:
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing — is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past… and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between [us].
To live in a world without forgiveness, she intimates, is to make of life an instant fossil record, each imperfect action instantly ossifying us into a failed promise of personhood:
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities — a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self.
As a secular philosopher and one of the greatest champions of reason amid one of the most unreasonable epochs in the history of our civilization, Arendt observes:
The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense… Certain aspects of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth which are not primarily related to the Christian religious message but sprang from experiences in the small and closely knit community of his followers, bent on challenging the public authorities in Israel, certainly belong among them, even though they have been neglected because of their allegedly exclusively religious nature.
The capacity for forgiveness and the enactment of that capacity in the willingness to forgive is what holds the sphere of human experience together — the private sphere as much as the public sphere, for forgiveness is as vital in our deepest personal bonds as it is in the collective experience of public life. In a sentiment the great civil rights leader John Lewis would echo in his life-earned conviction that “forgiveness and compassion must become more important principles in public life,” Arendt writes:
Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men* from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.
In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.
Arendt observes that punishment is not the opposite of forgiveness but an alternative to it — one enfeebled by the paradox that human beings are “unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.” (Yes, do read that again; turn it over in your mind like a Zen koan — I did — until it unfolds its subtle riches of profound wisdom.) She considers the complicated and often superficially understood relationship between forgiveness and love — the least public emotion upon which, somehow, the foundation of all public and political life rests:
Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it… It is the reason for the [Christian] conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others… Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.
With one of her exquisite pirouettes of logic, Arendt thus delivers us at — and delivers us from — the most dangerous fault line in the Christian model, a fault line that must be sealed and healed before we can have a less confused, more complete and generative understanding of forgiveness: one based not on the emotionally intoxicating but unstable experience we call love but on the ethically and intellectually grounded orientation of respect. She writes:
If it were true, therefore, as Christianity assumed, that only love can forgive because only love is fully receptive to who somebody is, to the point of being always willing to forgive him whatever he may have done, forgiving would have to remain altogether outside our considerations. Yet what love is in its own, narrowly circumscribed sphere, respect is in the larger domain of human affairs. Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politikē, is a kind of “friendship” without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem. Thus, the modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.
Against this backdrop, forgiveness can only ever be a communal experience. More than half a century after Arendt, in a cultural moment so inflamed with reflexive indictment and so clouded with the saccharine delirium of self-righteousness, it is nothing less than an act of countercultural courage and resistance to regard this wisdom with unwincing receptivity. Such courage asks of us what Arendt terms “the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them.” There is, after all, nothing riskier than willingness, and nothing more rewarding.
Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing — is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past… and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between [us].
