AMOR MUNDI

BOSTON COLLEGE STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

VOLUME VII

Other volumes in the series:

I. F.J. Adelmann (ed.), The Quest for the Absolute. 1966.

ISBN 90-247-0211-9
2. F.J. Adelmann (ed .), Demythologizing Marxism. A Series of Studies
on Marxism. 1969. ISBN 90-247-0212-7
3. F.J. Adelmann (ed .), Authority. 1974. ISBN 90-247-1594-6
4. F.J. Adelmann (ed .), Philosophical Investigations in the U.S.S.R .
1975. ISBN 90-247-1724-8
5. F.J. Adelmann (ed.), Soviet Philosophy Revisited . 1977.
ISBN 90-247-1977-1
6. F.J. Adelmann (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Philosophy. 1982.
ISBN 90-247-3057-0

Editor: James W. Bernauer, S.J.

Editorial Board
Donald A. Gallagher
Norman J. Wells
Thomas Blakeley
Richard T. Murphy
Olivia Blanchette

For a complete li st of volumes in the Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library see final page
of the volume.
 Amor Mundi
Explorations in the Faith and Thought
oj Hannah Arendt

edited by
James W. Bernauer, S.J.
Boston College

1987 MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBLISHERS

a member of the KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
BOSTON / DORDRECHT / LANCASTER
Distributors

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Amor mund!.

(Boston College studies in philosophy; 7)

(Martinus Nijhoff philosophy library)
Bibliography: p.
Contents: The faith of Hannah Arendt I James
Bernauer -- Labor, work, action I Hannah Arendt
Collective responsibility I Hannah Arendt --
Enspirited words and deeds I Timothy Roach -- [etc.]
1. Arendt, Hannah. 2. Arendt, Hannah--Religion.
3. Arendt, Hannah--Ethics. I. Bernauer, James William.
II. Title: Explorations in the faith and thought of
Hannah Arendt. III. Series. IV. Series: Martinus
Nijhoff philosophy 1 ibrary.
JC251.A74A46 1987 320.5'092'4 87-1513
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-3484-9 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3565-5
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3565-5
Book information

"Labor, Work, Action" and "Collective Responsibility". Copyright © 1986 by

Mary McCarthy West, Trustee. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc.
"The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?" first published in the The New York Herald
Tribune, February, 1964. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovano-
vich, Inc.

Copyrigbt

© 1987 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht.

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, P.O. Box 163, 3300 AD Dordrecht,
The Netherlands.
 Preface

The title of our collection is owed to Hannah Arendt herself. Writing to Karl
Jaspers on August 6, 1955, she spoke of how she had only just begun to really love
the world and expressed her desire to testify to that love in the title of what came to
be published as The Human Condition: "Out of gratitude, I want to call my book
about political theories Arnor Mundi."t In retrospect, it was fitting that amor
mundi, love of the world, never became the title of only one of Arendt's studies, for
it is the theme which permeates all of her thought. The purpose of this volume's ar -
ticles is to pay a critical tribute to this theme by exploring its meaning, the cultural
and intellectual sources from which it derives, as well as its resources for contem -
porary thought and action.
We are privileged to include as part of the collection two previously unpub -
lished lectures by Arendt as well as a rarely noticed essay which she wrote in 1964.
Taken together, they engrave the central features of her vision of amor mundi.
Arendt presented "Labor, Work, Action" on November 10, 1964, at a conference
"Christianity and Economic Man:Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society," which
was held at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.2 The address is her
reply to the question, What does an active life consist of! Her answer is the most
succinct articulation of The Human Condition's major theses which she ever
composed. Based on a phenomenological analysis of the fundamental human
activities, her statement is meant as a propaedeutic to the choice of arnor mundi as
the indispensable human response to the crisis of our age. That response is
essentially political because the crisis itself is political. This specifically political
character of amor mundi is defined further by her next two pieces. Arendt read
"Collective Responsibility" in reaction to a paper of the same title by Joel Feinberg
at a symposium of the American Philosophical Association on December 27, 1968. 3
The careful distinctions of this presentation define the precise difference between the
realm of worldly politics and the order of personal morality. While the latter is
rooted in a concern with the self, the arnor mundi, which motivates political engage-
ment and collective responsibility, subordinates such concern to a care of the wQrld:
"In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center
of political considerations of conduct stands the world." The indifference or even

v
 preface

hostility to the world, which a paramount concern with the self incites, made religion
a frequent target for Arendt's criticism. She wrote" The Deputy :Guilt by Silence?"
as an analysis of the still controversial 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth, which indicted
Pope Pius XII's conduct during World War 11.4 Her essay focuses attention on the
three capabilities which were for her the seismographic signs of an authentic worldly
existence:judging, speech and action. Our essays include critical readings of each of
these.
Some explanation is required for our subtitle and for the particular orientation
which it indicates for this collection. Despite the formidable secondary literature
which has appeared in the eleven years since Arendt's death, there is a marked
limitation to much of this work. She is approached ordinarily within the context of
strictly modem and secular assumptions. It is my own judgment that these are
inadequate for an accurate understanding of her thought and an appreciation both of
her achievement and of her appeal to contemporary readers. This judgment motivated
my invitation to the volume's contributors. I believe Arendt expressed her own
frustration with the narrow perspectives within which her thought was viewed by
refusing to identify herself with one of the "contemporary possibilities" which Hans
Morgenthau pressed on her in a 1972 dialogue. Arendt replied to his request: "I don't
know. I really don't know and I've never known. And I suppose I never had any
such position. You know the left think I am conservative, and the conservatives
sometimes think I am left or a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I
couldn't care less. I don't think that the real questions of this century will get any
kind of illumination by this kind of thing." She continued: "So you ask me where I
am. I am nowhere. I am really not in the mainstream of present or any other
political thought. But not because I want to be so original--it so happens that I
somehow don't fit."s Her remark testifies to a dramatic reversal which has taken
place in contemporary intellectual culture and which, in part, accounts for the re -
newed interest in her wode. Her 1951 The Origins o/Totalitarianism had embraced,
within that category, systems of both the left and the right. It is prohably the single
most criticized theoretical position she ever maintained. Her later works forced
critics, both of the left and the right, to acknowledge the common assumptions they
shared regarding concepts of authority, freedom, power, history and the relationship
of the economy to politics. This position put her "nowhere" at a time when the
proclamation of identity as liberal or conservative, Marxist or anti-Marxist sought to
indicate existence as an almost separate species.
The special hope of this volume is to chart this "nowhere" where Areudt placed
herself by expanding the horizons within which her thought is interpreted and her
promise regarded, an expansion of horizons which journeys into the premodern as
well as the postmodern, to Athens but also to Jerusalem. My introductory essay,
"The Faith of Hannah Arendt:Amor Mundi and its Critique-Assimilation of
vi
 preface

Religious Experience" attempts to lIncover the faith which is operating as a

fundamental dimension in Arendt's amor mundi. It argues that. despite her frequent
criticism of religious viewpoints, Arendt was preoccupied with the question of faith
and the necessity for its survival beyond the modern crisis of institutional religion.
My essay tries to do justice to that dimension of her thought and the legacy of her
earliest theological studies, which continued to shape the basic features of her mature
viewpoints. While ail of the other essays are sensitive to this legacy, their critical
excavation of her writings work at the various major sites on which her thought
deployed itself. The essays by Timothy Roach and Patrick Boyle concentrate on the
sources of Arendt's faith and thought as well as the tensions for her which emerged
from them.
One of the most subtle and important features in her thought's typography is its
phenomenology of the person, which is explored in Roach's "Enspirited Words and
Deeds:Christian Metaphors Implicit in Arendt's Concept of Personal Action." His
reading of Arendt discloses how her vision of the person, and the interrelation of
person, act and story, depends upon an uneasy combination of distinct anthro -
pologicaI logics, which reflect her affinity both to the public culture of Greece and to
the Hebraic-Christian religious sensibility. The central intellectual influence which
gnided the way for Arendt's own reflection was Augustine to whose concept of love
she devoted her doctoral dissertation. Patrick Boyle's "Elusive Neighborliness:
Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of Saint Augustine" is the frrst major analysis of that
dissertation and of the authority which its themes exercised for her subsequent work.
Boyle's careful scrutiny of the dissertation uncovers the key questions of ontology,
relation to the world, and relevance of the neighbor which became so pivotal for her
political philosophy. William Richardson's essay "Contemplative in Action" turns
from her philosophies of the person and of politics to her experience of the life of the
mind.6 His study brings her position on the relationship between contemplation and
action into dialogue with alternative paradigms for conceiving of their rapport, the
philosophical framework of Heidegger and the religious paradigm articulated by
Ignatius of Loyola at the very time when, according to Arendt. the hierarchy between
contemplation and action was at the modern point of reversal. Byway of this
dialogue, Richardson shows how a greater conceptual adequacy might be given to
Arendt's achievement of a passionate contemplation in action than was possible
through her own utilization of classical Greek understandings.
Professor Richardson's essay effects a transition from a study of Arendt's sources
to an examination of the resources which her philosophy possesses for contemporary
thought and action. Perhaps the most significant resource which her thought offers
is its potential to confront nuclearism, not just as a political policy but as a perva -
sive cultural attitude. Indeed, I personally believe that it is the renewal of the debate
on nuclear weapons which recently has catapulted her thought to a novel prominence
vii
 preface

on both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Patricia Bowen Moore's "Natality, Amor
Mundi and Nuclearism in the Thought of Hannah Arendt" treats natality, the
capacity for new beginnings, as the leading belief of her faith and as the central
category through which her disparate reflections can be unified. For Arendt, natality
is the source of that worldly action which will serve as an antidote to the spirit of
worldlessness produced by modern culture. In this age of revolutions, such worldly
activity must confront the claims of both human law and personal conscience, and it
is these two realms which our last contributors address. In his "Hannah Arendt's
Constitutional Thought," Professor Robert Burns explores the major issues for
contemporary American constitutional theory which she raised within such a rich
theoretical context. Professor Burns outlines her effort to formulate a "constitution -
alism without transcendence" in the face of the modern erosion of the Constitutional
tradition's intellectual supports. While acknowledging her legal thought's subtlety
and complexity, he suggests essential developments for her position in order to
prevent it from degenerating into a legal positivism where an amoral stability would
be the paramount value.
If serious criticism is the highest honor accorded a thinker's work, our volume
especially pays that tribute in its concluding essay, "The Banality of Virtue: Reflec -
tions on Hannah Arendt's Reinterpretation of Political Ethics" by Francis X.
Winters. Its critical examination of her theory's autonomy of politics seeks to rescue
her thought from its tendency to belittle the significance and efficacy of personal
conscience. Winters' essay indicates a fruitful and, to my mind, necessary expansion
for Arendt's philosophy, its need for an integration of the ethical domain and the
sphere of rights. That task will be the work of those readers who have been enabled
to think more adequately, perhaps even more passionately, because of the questions
which Hannah Arendt raised. All of this collection's essays testify to the debt its
authors owe her life and work, her amor mundi.

As editor of this volume, I wish to acknowledge other debts. First of all, I am

grateful to the contributors for their enthusiastic response to my invitation to become
part of this collection. It has been a personal pleasure to be associated with them and
to be stimulated by their reflections. The original idea for this study came with the
leisure of a research fellowship provided by Boston College, which enabled me to
study Arendt's papers at the Library of Congress; its staff could not have been more
helpful or knowledgeable. When I approached Miss Mary McCarthy about this
project, she encouraged me and generously gave her permission to include the
previously unpublished papers which are part of this volume. I wish to thank her for
both. I am grateful to Mr. Alexander Schimmelpenninck and his staff at Martinus
Nijhoff for the continuing interest and concern which they have shown toward this

viii
 preface

work and the series in which it appears. My debts to the faculty, staff and students at
Boston College are far too many to permit individual enumeration. Special gratitude,
however, is owed to the following: to the Academic Vice-President, Rev. Joseph
Fahey, the Dean of the Graduate School, Dr. Donald White, the Dean of the College,
Rev. William Neenan, and to the College's Committee for Research Grants, for
providing generous financial and secretarial assistance; to the staff of the College's
computer center, to my colleagues Michael Mahon and Michael Zilles, to Chris
Montenegro and to the volume's principal typist, Ms. Jamie Hwang, for their work
in the preparation of this volume; to Ms. Peggy Bakalo, who supervised the work on
the volume and gave of her time so generously; to Rev. Joseph Flanagan,
Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy, who encouraged my work and arranged
my teaching schedule so that it could be completed; and, finally, to Father Frederick
Adelmann, who founded this series of Boston College Studies in Philosophy and
appointed me his successor as its editor. He has shown continual interest in the
project and has given me wise counsel. His gifts as a teacher are only overshadowed
by his grace as a colleague and friend. In appreciation, the editor would like to
dedicate this volume to him. May he enjoy many more years of the philosophical
and priestly life.

James W. Bernauer, S.J.

Boston College
Chestuut Hill, Massachusetts
July 31, 1986

1. Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1926·1969, edited by Lotte Kohler
and Hans Saner (Munich:Piper,1985), p. 301.
2. Arendt's lecture is from The Papers of Hannah Arendt at the Library of Congress,
container 65.
3. Arendt's paper may be read independently from the presentation of Feinberg which
was published in The Journal of Philosophy 65 (November,1968), pp. 674-688.
Arendt's discussion is from The Papers of Hannah Arendt at the Library of Congress,
contsiner 56.
4. "The Deputy :Guilt by Silence?" was published in the New York Herald Tribune
Magazine (Feb. 23, 1964), pp. 6-9.
5. "Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt" in Hannllh Arendt:The Recovery of the Public
World, edited by Melvin Hill (New York:St. Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 333-334, 336.

ix
 preface

6. An earlier version of Richardson's essay was presented in the Spring of 1985 to the
"Hannah Arendt Memorial Symposium in Political Philosophy" which is sponsored by
the New School for Social Research in New York City. I am very grateful to the
Symposium and especially to Mr. Francis X. White for allowing us to include Professor
Richardson's paper in this volume.

x
 CONTENTS

Preface v

The Faith of Hannah Arendt:Amor Mundi 1

and its Critique-Assimilation of
Religious Experience
James Bernauer, SJ.

Labor, Work, Action 29

Hannah Arendt

Collective Responsibility 43
Hannah Arendt

The Deputy: Guilt by Silence? 51

Hannah Arendt

Enspirited Words and Deeds:Christian 59

Metaphors Implicit in Arendt's
Concept of Personal Action
Timothy Roach

Elusive Neighborliness:Hannah Arendt's 81

Interpretation of Saint Augustine
Patrick Boyle, SJ.

Contemplative in Action 115

William J. Richardson, SJ.
Natality, Amor Mundi and Nuclearism 135
in the Thought of Hannah Arendt
Patricia Bowen Moore
Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thought 157
Robert Burns
The Banality of Virtue:Reflections on 187
Hannah Arendt's Reinterpretation of
Political Ethics
Francis X. Winters

About our Contributors 219

 THE FAITH OF HANNAH ARENDT:
Amor Mundi and its Critique.
Assimilation of Religious Experience

People go about, no one is lost--

Earth, heaven, light and forests--
Play in the play of the Almighty.
Hannah Arendt, 19521

James Bernauer, S.J.

Hannah Arendt possessed the gift of thinking poetically amid the ruins of
modernity'S dark times. It is characteristic of such thinking, she wrote, to perceive
that the "process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization." 2 Like the
pearl diver, the poetic thinker can discover in the depths of a sunken past rich and
strange treasures, experiences which have suffered a sea-change but which, in their
new crystallized forms, can be brought to the surface of the present. The work of
Arendt recovers out of the wreck of western culture's beliefs, a faith in the redemption
of the world through the salvific action of those who make it a home where "no one
is lost." Any reader of her writings will appreciate how widely her thought dove in
search of that faith. In presenting the pearls that it discovered, my interpretation of
Arendt attempts to understand the nature of her lengthy confrontation with the
religious beliefs and experiences which she considered so inimical to a love of the
world. I will maintain, to use a simile from Walter Benjamin which she cited, that if
those beliefs are on a funeral pyre in contemporary culture, Arendt's criticism of them
must be seen as the examination not of the chemist but of the alchemist: "While the
former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is
concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus
the critic inquires about the trnth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy
logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by."3

1. Amor Mundi. The all-absorbing passion of Hannah Arendt's life was a

love for the world which exhibits itself in. a relishing of human action's promise and
Bernauer, J. W. (ed), Arnor Mundi. ISBN 90-247-3483-5.
© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands.
 James Bernauer S J.

in a respecting of the political structures which make action possible. It is in the

stage of education that she locates the "point at which we decide whether we love the
world enough to assume responsibility for it," a decision which determines the
meaning of human existence itself.4 Human beings achieve worldliness to the
extent that their lives are illumined by the recognition that care of the world is
superior to care of the self.s She envisioned this conversion of interests as the
founding act of a reborn western culture which would educe the noblest capacities of
human life and create a specifically political solidarity among people of good will.
Such a conversion would reverse our modem destiny and the destructive directions
along which current life and thought continue to move. Arendt's imperative of care
for the world emerges from one of her most unique insights, her appreciation that the
evil done against persons, of which the concentration camp would be the most radical
form, is prepared for and sustained by crimes against the world as such. The Origins
of Totalitarianism is the catalogue of those crimes. Antisemitism, imperialism and
totalitarianism are forces committed to the replacement of worldly experience -- an
historical people, a limited nation-state, a pluralism of human associations and pur -
poses -- by obedience to non-worldly, so-called natural processes defined by laws of
race, destiny and class. The systematic terror deduced from these natural laws
produced a "wilderness" which, in our times, overran the world as a common space
sheltered by institutions such as positive law and by human experiences such as
belonging to a groUp.6 Concentration camps made it appear as if human existence
was "lived as though it took place on another planet," because their horror exploded
from a specifically modem betrayal of the world itself. 7 Prior to criminality was the
modem world-alienation which Arendt exposed in The Human Condition. This
alienation has two faces. It is an escape from worldly ideals of political engagement
and stability of association into a mentality of endless consumption and mobility.
Modem life experiences itself as immersed within natural processes which expand to
include also history with the result that events and worldly entities are degraded into
"functions of an over-all process. "8 The other side of this world-alienation is modem
thought's retreat from the world into the subject. Cartesian introspection turns from
the experience of the world into a certainty of existence possessed by the self, which
is fashioned as a refuge from the dream quality of a dubitable external reality.
Philosophically, this experience reaches its culmination in the homelessness and
spiritual isolation of existentialist conceptions of the person.9 PoliticaUy, it
triumphs in the willingness of the lonely to totaUy submit themselves to the goals
of mass movements in the interest of achieving some sense of place, even if it is
merely the site of impersonal functioning.
Arendt's response to this century's crimes against the world and her alternative
to the world-alienation which fostered them was a new "partisanship for the world,"
which consisted of three interrelated perspectives: a vision of human existence as
2
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

worldly, an understanding of human community as political, and a portrait of the life

of the mind's worldly tasks. IO An elaboration of each of these defmes Arendt's love
of the world. Her anthropology rests upon a phenomenological analysis of human
experience from the perspective of its meaning for the world and not in terms of
certain properties nature is viewed as possessing or of interior states a human essence
is grasped as containing. Human existence means to appear, to oneself and to others.
Within the context of the world, being and appearing coincide and human existence is
not just a being-in-the-world but of-the-world, perceiving and being perceived "To
be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact
of one's own appearinguess. Living things make their appearance like actors on a
stage set for them."11 The crucial need of human existence is for that stage, for a
space of appearance. This need is both ontological and epistemological: the reality
of the person and the world is fashioned through intersubjective confIrmation. Man's
disclosure to others in speech and deed and his reception of their disclosures establish
"who" someone is and the distinctiveness of his abilities. In argument with others
about the experiences which they encounter, but examine from necessarily different
viewpoints, people form a common world between them and an interior space for
thought within them. "Thinking is speaking to oneself, and speaking is thinking
with others."ll Arendt's position reverses Cartesian starting points: worldly exis -
tence gives to the self and its interior experiences a dream-like qUality. "Compared
with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of
intimate Iife--the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the
senses--lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are
transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fIt them for
public appearance. "13
As a being-of-the-world and, thus, a being-with-others, the pursuit of freedom is
to be perceived not on the horizon of the inner experience of will but as a public
virtuosity, the achievement, in participation with one's peers, of open exchange and
mutual striving for great deeds. Out of speech about the world and action within it, a
particular form of friendship is created among people: not the intimacy which defines
itself as the opening of hearts, "unmolested by the world and its demands" but a
"philanthropia," a respect which shows itself in a "readiness to share the world with
other men." In contrast, the misanthrope is the person who fInds no one with whom
to share the world, who "regards nobody as worthy of rejoicing with him in the
world." While overcoming misanthropy. Arendt's political friendship does not
embrace the "spell" of a personal intimacy which would demolish the public space.
that "in-between which relates us to and separates us from others."14
This space of public interdependence must be distinguished from that of social
cooperation, which is not motivated by the urge to discover and display
distinctiveness. but. rather. to satisfy common material wants or emotional needs. In
3
 James Bernauer S.J.

order to meet these needs, there is a tendency to treat public life as a matter of
indifference or even as a positive hindrance. Making a living may force upon one the
subordination of individuality and equality to a utilitarian accomplishment of
objectives; establishing and preserving intimate relationships may demand a dis-
appearance from the public realm. This division between the public and private
spheres of human life, both of which are conditions for existence, organizes the
hierarchy of activities she delineated in The Human Condition and which she
summarizes in the lecture "Labor, Work, Action": the lowest, labor, is mere service
to the production of the consumer goods essential for biological survival; work is the
creation of relatively permanent objects (e.g., works of art) which become part of the
world stage; action is the highest form of life, in which a person demonstrates his
abilities, exhibits his equality with others, and exercises his freedom.
Arendt's phenomenology of being-of-the-world supports the advocacy of a new
culture based on a public way of life. The satisfaction of human life comes through
commitment to a public community whose members "passionately seek and are
provided formal and informal public spaces in all areas of life." 15 Although it does
not possess a monopoly of these communities, politics is for Arendt the paradigm of
such a community and the model of public space itself. The commitment to
political community represents an acknowledgement of the equality of one's fellow
citizens and a recognition of the superiority of care for the world and communal well-
being over private interest. The fruit of such a commitment is the achievement of
specifically public forms of happiness, freedom and significance for human life. For
Arendt, the route to human happiness is blocked by the tendency to perceive it as
either a goal of life or as the concomitant of material satisfaction in a consumer
society. Rather, it accompanies the achievement of a public freedom. This freedom
is linked to a courageous departure from the hidden status of private life and to the
entry into the pursuit of excellence, in the company of and, thus, visible to others.
Freedom is the "free man's status, which enabled him to move, to get away from
home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word." 16 Freedom
demands a coincidence of "I-will" and "I-can" and is exemplified in the achievements
of the Athenian polis, the American and Hungarian Revolntions, the civil rights
movements, and the general exercise of political responsibility. Within Arendt's
perspective, the significance of human life arises from the present and future light
cast upon human possibilities by the great achievement of citizens engaged in the
affairs of the re-public, the public thing. A self-chosen mode of being-of-the-world,
politics consists essentially in constituting small re-publics within which freedom
can be practiced.
The goal of the life of the mind is to make us "at home in the world."I?
Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, maintains that The Life of the Mind's
analysis of the relations among thinking, willing and judging should be understood
4
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

in accord with a political model: a program for good governance with the "three
mental faculties checking and balancing each other like three branches of govern -
ment." She then goes on to add that, due to Arendt's untimely death, a "constitotion
for the mentai republic was not drawn up." IS In fact, however, amor mundi is the
constitution, drawn up as a rehabilitation of those mental powers whose anatomy of
perversion was exhibited in Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann presented the spectacle of
the triple disaster to which the mind is vulnerable: the extraordinary evil perpetrated
by a thoughtless, intelligent man who knew many truths but did not understand what
he was doing; the abdication of his capacity for willing something different from his
superior's orders and his institutional duties; fmally, his inability to judge, his failure
to "look at anything from the other fellow's point of view."19 All of these mental
failures were grounded in a self-ish concern with his own interests and an absence of
love for the world and its pluralism, an absence which justifies his execution in
Arendt's rewriting of the Jerusalem Court's verdict: "And just as you supported and
carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the
people of a number of other nations--as though you and your superiors had any right
to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world-owe find that no one ...
can be expected to want to share the earth with you. "20
Arendt's study of Eichmann led her to distinguish sharply between the
knowledge produced by a desire for truth and the thinking generated by "our curiosity
about the world."21 The latter only searches for meanings, that is, it regards and
questions phenomena in terms of their place and significance for the world and for the
community of actors and spectators who share it during a certain time in history.
Socrates became for her the model of what thinking is: the ability to purge the frozen
opinions and truths which hide the opportunities and challenges appearing on the
world's stage. This thinking is both the creator of personal conscience and a form of
critical love for the world; "always taking sides for the world's sake, understanding
and judging everything in terms of its position in the world at any given time."22
This critical love shows itself to the world in the action which springs from willing.
Arendt's treatment of the will is motivated by the desire to formulate an under -
standing of it and its freedom which, in contrast to most philosophical reflections on
it, is not incompatible with political freedom. Her interpretation of will as the
"mental endowment we have for beginning something new" enables her to define the
will in worldly terms in opposition to that "partisanship for man's sonl apparatus"
which gives primacy to subjective experience.23 Such primacy leads to conceptions
which make the will hostile to the political domain, either as an interior facnlty
"through which one may be a slave in the world and still be free" or as a sovereign
power "independent from others and eventually prevailing against them. "24 The
will's project presupposes and fulfills itself in an "I-can" which endows the mind
with a "self-confidence" and prepares an individual will for association with others in
5
 James Bernauer S J

creating common action, in demonstrating shared freedom. 2s Amor mundi is an

essential dimension of that performance of liberty: the loving of that which is created
by acting together, a loving which gives to the inventions of political liberty a
perdurance, a stable reality for future generations.
This love for the achievements of political freedom manifests itself through a
willingness to judge, our ability to think for ourselves but, more importantly, our
capacity to escape our selves and consider experience in a worldly fashion. This
means, and this is the heart of her view of judgment, the consideration and evaluation
of experience not only from our own perspective but from that of others. Although
she was sharply criticized for her readiness to judge, it had become for her an ines -
capable human responsibility in our time. 26 She was shocked by the moral collapse
of respectable society during the Hitler period: "Those few who were still able to tell
right from wrong went really by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there
were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were
confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because
no rules existed for the unprecedented." 27 The necessity to judge was central to her
whole enterprise and avoidance of it could only alarm her. As she wrote to Karl
Jaspers: "Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most
extraordinary fear about making judgments. This confusion about judgment can go
hand and hand with fme and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found
in those not remarkable for their intelligence. "28 In her examination of Adolf
Eichmann, Arendt was determined to confront this fear and exercise judgment in areas
shielded from it. "If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?--you
are already 10st."29 This determination does not indicate a lack of proper humility--
"Even the judge who condemns a murderer can still say when he goes home: 'And
there, but for the grace of God, go I."'--but, rather, the commitment to remember
tragic events, the memory of which would be empty without understanding. 3O
Arendt's love of the world attempts to overcome the world-alienation which is
the source for both the radical evil of totalitarian practice and the cooperation in it by
the thoughtless which she spoke of as the banality of evil. She appreciated that there
were major obstacles to her conceptions of a worldly human existence, political
community and life of the mind. In her view, the western tradition of thought found
it more acceptable to define the human person apart from intersubjective relations; it
never accorded an intrinsic dignity to political life itself and found the diversity of
views which characterize the public domain as an imperfection, the absence of the
truth which ideally ought to rule human affairs. In terms of her cardinal thesis,
however, the recognition that care of the world is superior to care of the self, Arendt
thought that the deepest sustenance for a continued world-alienation was the
unworldliness native to Christianity. It is to that critique to which we now tum.

6
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

2. Arendt's Critique of Christianity. In contrast to many other relig-

ions which have been identified with the protection of specific communities or
peoples, Christianity displays a particularly intense form of other-worldliness. 31 In
Arendt's examination, this unworldliness, with its intrinsic hostility to the public
domain, derives from Christianity's glorification of the self and its individual destiny.
As she puts it in "Collective Responsibility": "With the rise of Christianity, the
emphasis shifted entirely from care for the world and the duties connected with it to
care for the soul and its salvation." This shift echoes throughout the proclamation of
its good news. The self is the temple of God and "What profit would a man show if
he were to gain the whole world and destroy himself in the process?"32 This
dedication to the self grounds a constellation of Christian positions which debase the
life of action and transform a potentially worldly agent into a pilgrim on earth, a
homo viator. Arendt's indictment of Christianity from the perspective of the world
consists of three interrelated charges.
First, Christianity rejected those classical viewpoints which fostered worldly
engagement. It reversed the early Greek vision of reality, of mortals in an immortal
universe where great accomplishments were motivated because these provided the
only opportunity for achieving the immortality awarded by remembrance of city and
people. This striving for greatness entailed a heroic contempt for one's own life.
For Christianity, the single living individual is born with immortality into a
universe that is mortal: "It is the world that will pass away; men will live forever."33
Desire for an earthly immortality became "futile and unnecessary." The victory of
Christianity over ancient culture was probably due to the sacredness and immortality
which it conferred upon individua1life, an undreamed of hope for people who felt that
their world was in fact passing away.34 In addition to the reversal of Greek experi -
ence, there was an inversion of Roman experience. Christianity undermined the Re -
public's emphasis on the past which had invited a citizen to achieve fulfillment by
contributing to the public reality initiated by the State's founders. With Christianity,
human life is directed to the future, to the eternity which will be enjoyed beyond the
world: "man was only a pilgrim on this earth, and what he was actually looking
forward to was life after death. "35 Christianity's repeal of the classical world's per -
spective did not lead, however, to a revision of the primacy which Greek philosophy
gave to the life of contemplation over that of action. The contemplative vision of
God, which will be the joy of life after death, functions as a Christian standard for the
evaluation of the relative merits of contemplation and action during earthly life.
The second charge in Arendt's indictment proceeds from these principles.
Christianity necessarily demeans the life of political action for it proclaimed a nega -

7
 James Bernauer S 1.

tive freedom to people, a "freedom from politics," a freedom which is "politically

perhaps the most relevant part of our Christian heritage." 36 The experience of inner
freedom which Christian thinkers made their paradigm was a derived and distorted
form of political freedom. This distortion resulted from the alienation through which
"worldly experiences were transformed into experiences within one's own self. "37
The virtue of interior freedom was tied to a liberty from secular involvements, a
mentality which provides the "reason why Christian churches could remain so
indifferent to the question of slavery while clinging fast to the doctrine of the equality
of all men before God."3s To the extent that Christianity deals with political issues,
it must subordinate them to a conception of the common good which is foreign to
the public realm, namely, the "salvation of one's soul as a concern common to all."39
That this separation from an authentic public interest is intrinsic to Christianity was
fortified for Arendt by her consideration of the task central to the discipleship of
Jesus: the pursuit of goodness. Goodness must hide from being seen or heard if it is
to preserve its purity of intention. As Jesus said: "Why callest thou me good? None
is good, save one, that is, God."40 In contrast to the public identity which comes to
the person of action, the Christian dedication to good works drives its adherents to
anonymity. From the perspective of the public domain, the Christian is comparable
with the criminal: "Both are lonely figures, the one being for, the other against, all
men; they, therefore, remain outside the pale of human intercourse and are,
politically, marginal figures who usually enter the historical scene in times of
corruption, disintegration, and political bankruptcy." Good works are performed for
the sight of God alone and, thus, they "truly are not of this world."41
The third count in Arendt's indictment is that, far from Christianity only being
indifferent to the public realm, it is actually the source or support of values that are
destructive of political life. As a result of the Christian belief that the Absolute has
incarnated itself in history, historical reality has never again been free from institu -
tions and individuals who seek to apply absolute standards to the public domain.42 Its
conceptualization of Revelation as truth clashes with a political model of life, which
rejoices in the necessary diversity of opinions due to the different perspectives of
human beings. Christianity's conception of law as divinely enunciated command-
ments, to which obedience is owed, is in conflict with the political qualities of con -
sent, mutual agreement and freedom.43 Finally, the lingering legacy of Christian
values on human civilization supports the tendency to have certain moral experi -
ences, such as compassion and pity, dictate human conduct in the political realm. In
Arendt's interpretation, however, such virtues, when introduced into politics, abolish
the distance of the worldly space which sets limits to what can be done to and on
behalf of others. The violent excesses of a Robespierre, and modern revolutionaries
in general, have their source in the victory of moral feelings over political virtues.
Faced with overwhelming suffering and unrestrained by limited political objectives,
8
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

revolutionary compassion "will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of persua -

sion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics, and
lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct actions,
that is, for action with the means of violence. "44
In the light of her critique of Christianity, it is hardly surprising that Arendt
was opposed to any attempt to transcend secularity and reintroduce religious view -
points and passions into public-political affairs. For the political realm such a return
would risk the injection of a fanaticism utterly alien to the very essence of freedom
and would encourage an escapism from politics by promoting a search for unworldly
solutions to worldly problems.4s The return would be no less dangerous for religion
itself, which would face the threat of being perverted into an ideology and being made
into an instrument of coercion. The amalgamation of religion and politics has an
attractiveness for many as a result of two inaccurate presumptions. First, it is
incorrectly assumed that the crisis of our age is religious in nature and not political.
Those who seek in religion a way of arresting the declioe in tradition, authority and
personal responsibility fail to appreciate that Christianity's historical importance for
these areas was due to its borrowing of Greek and Roman understandings at the time
when, with the collapse of the Roman Empire, it assumed responsibility for western
culture.46 The second inaccurate assumption is the hope that a religious sanction can
be restored to political conduct, that life will be lived once again in the shadow of a
Final Judgment Such an expectation fails to confront the reality that religion is an
ever diminishing force in western communities and no longer affords the possibility
of directing the thought and action of a majority.47 Before responding to Arendt's a-
nalysis of Christianity, it is important to fathom the underlying dynamism which
oriented her treatment and sustained its originality. This is the faith of Hannah
Arendt

3. The Faith of Hannah Arendt. While love for the world exhibits itself
through action, it is also a faith which attempts to introduce into contemporary
culture central religious experiences of the Hebraic-Christian tradition. The task of
her thought was analogous to that of Augustine, who sought to integrate Roman
experience into a worldly Christian faith that could found a civilization. As she
recognized, Augustine was the "great thinker who lived in a period which in some
respects resembled our own more than any other in recorded history, and who in any
case wrote under the full impact of a catastrophic end, which perhaps resembles the
end to which we have come."48 The customary interpretation of Arendt as attempting
a recovery of strictly Greek and Roman secular experience does not do justice to other
essential dimensions of her project It ignores Arendt's theological preoccupations

9
 James Bernauer S.J

which remained with her from her earliest university studies when she decided to
become a theology major after attending the lectures of Romano Guardini at the
University of BerJin.49 Even as a philosophy student, Arendt would follow the
theology courses of Bultmann and Tillich, study Kierkegaard and write a dissertation
on Augustine, whose continning influence on her thought is demonstrated in Patrick
Boyle's "Elusive Neighborliness." While I will maintain that this theological con -
cern survives at the core of her conceptual system, it is interesting to note that even
George Kateb, who takes Arendt as "adamantly untheological" goes on to note that
the "wonder and gratitude for being" which pervades her work and which is in
opposition to totalitarianism's "'contempt' for the given" is "religious in quality."sa
Her recourse to religious experience was more than a matter of theological back -
ground. It is intrinsic to the way that she herself experienced the crisis of our times.
As a result of their own modern assumptions, Arendt's commentators have generally
failed to appreciate how her thought is not a criticism enunciated from within a
modernist framework but actually breaks with that paradigm and becomes a radical
post-modernism, a series of rejections of basic truths and assumptions structuring
modem thought and practice. The sense of discontinnity with the past, which was
once so important a part of modern self-awareness, has been betrayed by modernity's
refusal to acknowledge the unprecedented rupture which totalitarianism represents;
Arendt's analysis of alienation in terms of estrangement from the world rather than
the self; her repudiation of the modern philosophy of history which conceives of it as
a process that we make and its replacement by a philosophy of politics in which the
central category is action and not making; her refusal of utilitarianism which she saw
to be the twin of totalitarianism: "with populations and homelessness everywhere on
the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue
to think of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social and economic events
everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making
people superfluous. "SI Arendt's attempt to unify Nazism and Communism within
the one concept of totalitarianism has been justly criticized. Although she came to
modify that position, she held on to the more general point which she had attempted
to make, namely, that the fundamental political division is not between theories of
the left or the right. Both share common assumptions about the character of history,
the role of the economy, the nature of man. Her thought's renewal of politics has as
little to do with the conceptual democracy of western liberalism as it does with a
conceptual democratic socialism. Both of these rest their cases on the continuing
viability of an absolute morality for the direction of political life. It is this hope
which Arendt perceived as groundless in the wake of modem history and this centu -
ry's unprecedented disaster for our normal ethical conceptions. Her thought passed
beyond modem attitudes because their recourse to morality actually betrayed a despair
in politics itself. While this transcendence did not entail a conversion to a pre-
10
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

modern theology, her own faith was articulated through its web of experiences and
concepts.
Arendt realized that, among the forces most needed for a renewal of the political
realm, were two which were not present in the ancient world:

faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which
Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very
uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils
of illusion in Pandora's box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that
found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few
words with which the Gospels announced their "glad tidings": "A child has
been born unto US;"(S2)

Arendt was convinced that institutional religion was in a state of crisis. There had
taken place in modern times an indisputable loss of belief in religious dogmas and
she felt that it was "sheer foolishness" to hope that religion would be able to dictate a
code of conduct acceptable to the majority.53 This institutional crisis was not a
matter of indifference for her, however, because it nurtured the seeds of a more
profound disaster. While loss of religious belief need not entail the forfeiture of faith
itself, this was precisely the danger: "But who can deny that faith too, for so many
centuries securely protected by religion, its beliefs and its dogmas, has been gravely
endangered through what is actually only a crisis of institutional religion?" 54 AmoT
mundi was the faith she proposed as the way of overcoming this danger. This
project imitated that of her teacher, Rudolf Bultmann, whose theology sought to
rescue an authentic Christian faith from the loss of credibility which many of its
accompanying pre-modern beliefs had suffered.S5 In its integration of religious expe -
rience, Arendt's arnor mundi became a discourse of ultimacy, a religious faith not in
God but in creation. This faith was articulated as an alternative to the appeal which
ideology exercises once faith is displaced. Arendt understood, as had Dostoyevsky
before her, that without faith, a person will become a "flunkey of his ideas" and will
believe anything, especially an ideology's total explanation and its promise to the
masses of a "man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had longed for and of the Hell
they had feared."s6 A strictly secular form of thought is inadequate to this level of
ultimacy and, thus, incapable of meeting the danger of loss of faith or the appeal
exercised by ideology. Although her interpretations were political, Arendt appreciated
how religious perspectives had been abused in the period of totalitarianism and in the
struggle of the Cold War. 57 Her articulation of faith did not become ideology for she
incorporated into it the essential feature of the religious imagination as opposed to
the gnostic. While the latter delights in the infmite, the endless and the unworldly,

11
 James Bernauer S J

the religious imagination dwells with the [mite, the definite and the worldly.5a
Arendt's thought fashions a story out of religious images, which reveal meaning and
ultimately inspire faith.
The continuing appeal of The Origins of Totalitarianism is not.primarily due to
its general historical analyses, which professional historians have so roundly criti -
cized, but to its organization of that history within a particular religious horizon of
meaning that enables the reader to confront and comprehend the horror of what is
described. 59 The focus of her portrayal is not the wicked deeds perpetrated by
individual men but rather a fallen state, a sinful condition, which is a feature of our
age or, as the book's original English title had it, the burden of our time. This fallen
condition is described as an "absolute evil" by which she means that it is not
comprehensible in terms of wicked motives of "self-interest, greed, covetousness,
resentment,lust for power, and cowardice."60 It is man's rebellion against the human
condition itself, the determination to create a new man according to a technology
justified by ideological claims to absolute knowledge of the laws of life and history.
Cecil Rhodes's wish--"I would annex the planets if I could."--expresses the love of
excess 3)1d expansion that is the cry of our epoch.61 Running through the book is a
sense of universal responsibility for crime which has often been misinterpreted as a
moral condemnation not only of victimizers but also of victims.62 In fact, she is
describing a fallen state that makes revolt against the human condition a universal
temptation. She will later pay tribute to the American Revolution's awareness of
this Christian realism which prevented its leaders from sharing the "absurd hope" that
man "might still be revealed to be an angel." She will praise this realism in a
number of other contexts, a praise which conflicts with her tendency to see images of
unworldly innocence as having their source in Christianity. For Christian theology,
of course, it is only Jesus who is without sin. 63 This realism is beyond the horizon
of the secular mind which is committed to a universal innocence that is only lost by
the evil actions of specific individuals. Totalitarian evil operated on a different terrain
and Arendt had recourse to a religious geography in order to capture it. For her,
concentration camps represented "basic Western conceptions of life after death."
"Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union's labor camps, where neglect is
combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by
those types of camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thorough -
ly and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible torment."64
In attempting to symbolize the effect of this sin of totalitarianism, Arendt fre -
quently employs a term rich with religious resonances, "wilderness." It entered her
philosophical vocabnlary with the dissertation on Augustine and comes to mean for
her the dangers of a world laid waste by ideology and terror. Etymologically, it is a
place of wild beasts, where humans are not at home and, thus, where they are subject
to violent feelings of bewitchment and isolation. As Arendt's meditation on Conrad's
12
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

Heart 0/ Darkness indicates, wilderness possesses the same meaning for her which it
had for the Biblical writers. 6S It is a place of temptation, where people are thrown
back upon themselves and can come to believe anything. Separated from the
stability of a shared world, the violence of interior emotions breaks forth like the
vegetation: in Kurtz there is the "mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith
and no fear"; the "spell of the wilderness" had beguiled his "unlawful soul beyond the
bounds of permitted aspirations" and there was, therefore, "no earthly reason for any
kind of scruple." There was "nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly
well pleased." Kurtz "had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he
had kicked the very earth to pieces. "66 Conrad's opposition of the stabilizing earth
and the lawless wilderness is mirrored in Arendt's own conception of the world as a
refuge from the wilderness of totalitarianism. Her arrwr mundi is presented as a
deliverance from the savage dark times which shadowed the earth in this century. As
it was for the Bible, the wilderness is also for Arendt a place to be saved from,
whether it be through religious covenant or through the American settlers' constitu -
tion of themselves as political units "in fear of the new continent's uncharted
wilderness and frightened by the chart1ess darkness of the human heart" The wilder -
ness, even that of our age, need not prevent exodus to a promised land of action.({]
The passage to it requires a paradoxical asceticism. As we have already seen,
the heart of this asceticism is the self-renunciation before the world. Concern with
the self or the soul is subordinated to care of the world. The lack of such care cannot
be disguised by a commitment to mere economic engagement within the world. Max
Weber's study of innerworldly asceticism demonstrated to Arendt that an "enormous,
strictly mundane activity is possible without any care for or enjoyment of the world
whatever, an activity whose deepest motivation, on the contrary, is worry and care
about the self."68 It is interesting to note that Arendt's denunciation of labor, of the
slavery imposed in a society of consumers, and of the evils of the wealthy in our age,
echo Biblical perspectives and much of Christian teaching up to the modern period
and, frequently, until today. Arendt's asceticism is a paradoxical one, however, for
the subordination of care of the self which she counsels must avoid becoming the
"selflessness" that she saw as so characteristic a feature of the revolutionary who
holds that the "value of a man may be judged by the extent to which he acts against
his own interest and against his own will." Such selflessness becomes the soil of
totalitarian success, in which the instinct for self-preservation is lost and one can
willingly accept his condemnation, even "help in his own prosecution and frame his
own death sentence" if the movement demands such. 69 This is where the asceticism
of the self which Arendt counseled imitates the religious care of the self she seemed
to reject. The religious care of the self entails a renunciation of the self before the
Otherness of God and the needs of the human community. This renunciation brings
a heightened sense of individuality to the self and a greater awareness of its place in,
13
 James Bernauer S J

the world. Although she displaces the accent of religious asceticism, she imitates the
model in proposing a subordination of the self to the otherness of the world, a subor -
dination that leads to the possibility of achieving a greater individual distinctiveness.
The religious aura of Arendt's conceptual schema is exhibited best in her
analysis of action. The delineation of that realm allows her to introduce two powers
which she sees as essential both to the character of the actor and to the preservation
of the realm itself. These are the powers to forgive and to promise. 70 Both are put
forward as specifically worldly acts. For Arendt, forgiving is a necessarily inter-
personal act, and she contrasts it to the moral standards for ruling which were
developed by Plato from the private experience of the self. Promising is put in
opposition to the "darkness of the human heart" which symbolizes the unreliability
of the human being who is always capable of change from day to day. Forgiving and
promising shelter the realm of action for they remedy the two predicaments intrinsic
to action. Forgiving is a "redemption" from the predicament of action's irreversi -
bility, the fact that once an action is done, it cannot be undone.71 What allows the
actor to recover from deeds which were performed but which are regretted is the
forgiveness received from others. Without such forgiveness, without release from the
consequences of our acts, we would be confined to the first mistaken deed for which
we are responsible. Forgiveness allows the continuance of a public life, which
always carries the risk of unanticipated, regrettable consequences. Promising is a
liberation from the predicament of the actor's chaotic unpredictability. When people
come together and pledge themselves to a course of action, they make a mutual
freedom and a common political achievement possible. The superiority of those
capable of promising over those who are "unbound by any promises and unkept by
any purpose" is that they have the capacity to "dispose of the future as though it were
the present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very
dimension in which power can be effective."72 Deprived of the ability to make
promises, we would be without a stable individuality and would lack the ability to
join with others in contributing to the world an achievement worthy of future re -
membrance.
Arendt's tribute to forgiveness and promising enables her to introduce into
political experience two of the most potent religious acts. Promising is the
politicalization of the Biblical covenant, and Arendt's utilization of it allows her
conception of politics to bask in the light of the experience of salvation and of the
establishment of a people's identity.73 Arendt claims that Jesus of Nazareth was the
"discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs" and interprets his
teaching to mean that forgiveness "must be mobilized by men toward each other
before they can hope to be forgiven by God alsO."74 While forgiving is eminently
personal, where "what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it," this capacity
need not be rooted in an unworldly love but in the respect owed to others by their
14
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

very existence.75 Whether her distinction between love and respect ultimately holds
up, Arendt nevertheless manages to incorporate the power and appeal of fOtgiveness
into her model of politics. Such a power is crucial for an historical experience that
has been conceptualized as sinful.
Arendt is at her boldest in absOtbing the experience of Jesus into her model of
political life. She regards his insights into the faculty of action to be as Otiginal and
unprecedented as were Socrates's experiences of thought. Her esteem fOt Jesus is
based on the conviction that his "faith was closely related to action" and that the New
Testament's portrayals of him have philosophical implications. The most significant
of these is that freedom is presented as the "power of performing miracles." "The
only activity Jesus of Nazareth recommends in his preaching is action, and the only
human capacity he stresses is the capacity 'to perform miracles. "'76 The appeal of
this fOtffi of freedom for her is that it directly confronts the modern fascination with
history as a natural process: "the work of faith, actually its product, is what the
gospels ca1\ed 'miracles'" which are "interruptions of some natural series of events, of
some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected."
As Arendt points out, this power to perfOtffi miracles is not rooted in will or thought
but in faith.?7 This faith's most essential effect is the personal acceptance of natality.
Specifica1\y differentiated from the classical emphasis on human mortality is the
experience of the promise which one's beginning possesses for the world. For her,
the very purpose of being is to begin and she never tired of citing Augustine's
definition: "that there is a beginning man was created, before whom nobody was"--
"Initium...ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit."78 Natality is the
"miracle that saves the world" and its source is faith's discernment, against the
background of natural processes, of the "infinite improbability" which every new
beginning represents.?9 Although the historical Jesus was central to her faith, Arendt
certainly never accepted any orthodox claims regarding his divinity. For her, there
was a chasm between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christ of the Panline texts. "I
don't feel any loyalty to Christ. 1 may feel a loyalty to Jesus, because that is indeed
an example, what Jesus did, and his whole life, the logoi, and all the stories, this can
indeed become an example."8o
Various interpretations can be given to the role which religious-theological cate -
gories play in Arendt's thought. Some will see in it merely the continuing survival
of religious culture in the thoughts and attitudes of all modern thinkers, a testimony
to the inability to think outside of our western heritage and to the power of language
for in it the "past is contained ineradicably, thwarting all attempts to get rid of it
once and for all. "81 Others will acknowledge what seems evident in her texts,
Arendt's deliberate effort to preserve and reinterpret religious experiences for an
audience bereft of the modern conviction in historical progress. Thus, her utilization
of Jesus's life is comparable to what she thought the Church as an institution had
15
 James Bernauer S J.

done with it, namely, transform it into a "worldly event" which could become a
durable foundation as an example of action. 82 As I have indicated, her thought's
incorporation of religious elements could be understood then as an antidote both to
totalitarian and secular misappropriations of those elements. This is the level I
believe Philip Rieff correctly grasped when he claimed that it was precisely Arendt's
"covert theology" which made her "attractive to an antitheological intelligentsia."83
I would like to put forward yet a third interpretation which, while compatible
with the other two, does the greatest justice to Arendt's thought. There is, in fact, a
religious experience which permeates her thought and which sought expression in the
theological categories it uses. Her belief in God manifested itself in the specific
acceptance of each human being as a gift to the world, in which each has a proper
dwelling place. This conviction, corresponding to the theological reality of a provi -
dential creation, was captured in an observation she made on several lines of an
Audenpoem.

We all know:
'Unpredictably, decades ago, You arrived
among that unending cascade of creatures spewed
from Nature's maw. A random event, says Science:
But that does not prevent us from answering with the
poet:
'Random my bottom! A true miracle, say I,
for who is not certain that he was meant to be?'
But this being 'meant to be' is not a truth; it is a highly
meaningful proposition. (84)

It is a highly meaningful proposition because it is the product of a faith which

overthrows two of the most appalling truths of modem experience: the conviction in
and actual manifestation of superfluousness among human beings; the will to
expansion and rootlessness which has wreaked such havoc and which nevertheless
maintains its appeal.8S Arendt never explicitly connected her meaningful proposition
of faith to Jesus of Nazareth, but two of her major partners in dialogue did. In the
examination of Jesus by Karl Jaspers, which Arendt edited, he wrote that Jesus
"reveals the possibility and hope implicit in all those who are despised according to
the standards of the world, the lowly, the sick, the deformed, in all those who are
banished from the orders of the world; he reveals the potentialities of man himself
under any conditions. He points to the place where a home is open to man in every
mode of failure," In addition to Jaspers, her husband, Heinrich Blucher, also spoke of
Jesus conferring a special hope: "this hope that nobody is left out, that nobody will

16
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

ever be left out, is the hope that he brought into the world, and it is the hope by
which all free men still live whether they know it or not."86
Arendt's amor mundi and her invitation to worldly action expressed and was
nurtured by a religious faith in the intrinsic value of every human being and in love
as the fitting response to each person's appearance. Despite her glorification of
human action and the potential greatness and immortality to which it could lead, she
recognized that the "specifically human quality of greatness" was "being greater than
anything done." Although her political concern elevated respect as a virtue over an
unworldly love, her religious faith affirmed that it was "only love, mutual love"
which can give the "supreme confirmation of one's existence."87 Echoing
Augustine's trinitarian model for understanding the mind's action, her faith brought
love into the very substance of the life of the mind, which achieves its perfection and
becomes worldly when it affirms itself as love: "I will that you be--Amo: Volo ut
sis."88 Arendt's commiUnent to a love of the world actually mirrors the Biblical faith
of a creative God who established and found his creation to be good and who, in the
New Testament, "so loved the world that he gave his only Son." (John 3: 16) De-
spite her critique of religion in general and of Christianity in particular, her own
personal faith led her to transmit religious models and experiences which showed
that, like truth, they still have the promise of forming the "ground on which we
stand and the sky that stretches above us. "89

4. Amor Mundi and Religious Faith. My purpose in pursuing

Arendt's covert theology is not to reduce her thought to a system which is foreign to
it, but rather to exhibit the fundamental vision underlying her project. In her per -
spective, we live in the twilight of a destroyed modernity and of an ever declining
Christianity. Her faith, amor mundi, was put forward as a replacement for both and
of the spiritual vacuum they left behind, a vacuum which was a continuing invitation
for the entry of ideologies. In place of the doubt toward the world generated by
modern thought and practice, she constituted a realm of meaningful attitudes for a
contemporary worldly faith. In her analysis of worldlessness, she was careful to
point out that modern knowledge "neither abolishes nor removes nor even shifts the
unknown that is the region of faith." Although Kant misinterpreted his own dis -
covery, his grasp of the limits of knowledge secured a place for the meanings with
which both reason and faith are concerned. 90 Arendt also attempted to rescue this
region of faith from the modern crisis of religious belief. She recognized that Pascal
and Kierkegaard had carried modern suspicion and doubt into the very center of
religion and that this doubting had led the religiously motivated, like their secular
counterparts, to seek an interior certainty of knowledge, a certainty which is forever a

17
 James Bernauer S J

stranger to faith. Kierkegaard's leap is a descent into the self and undermines the
"general mood of Christianity which resides in the importance of faith. "91 It "may be
that the leap into belief has done more to undermine authentic faith than the usually
trite arguments of professional enlighteners or the vulgar arguments of professional
atheists." In confronting this double assault on faith, Arendt fashioned a "faith-
state; to use the expression of William James or, to employ that of Michael
Polanyi, a "fiduciary program." It is a project of ultimate meanings and commit -
ments intended to inspire both a confidence in the promise of one's natality and of the
worth of assuming collective responsibility for the world; it is as well the foundation
for a worldly questioning of experience, the "faith seeking understanding" which
Augustine would have recognized.92
She intended this worldly faith to have an appeal which was potentially univer -
sal and, thus, sharply distinguished from specific religious commitments. It can be
argued, however, that arnoT mundi also shows the directions by which a religious
faith, especially Christianity, can nurture its worldliness and properly express its
engagement in the political realm. Such an engagement would be guided by Arendt's
central perspectives on politics: the role of forgiveness and public covenants; the
essential virtue of opinion, rather than truth claims, in the public realm; the specific
character of political action in contrast to efforts motivated strictly by the desire to
improve economic conditions; a regard for the world and the freedom created within it
that is irreducible to the role of the world in the salvation of souls. The particular
form of engagement which Arendt's amor mundi promotes would offer a third model
for participation in public affairs among the religiously committed, one that avoids
both the intolerance of religious fundamentalism and the economic reductionism of
movements inspired by Marxist analyses. We know from Arendt's critique of reli -
gion, however, that she would find such a religious utilization of her model
inadmissible and contradictory to its fundamental assumptions. While I have already
shown how Arendt herself employs some of the essential religious experiences which
she rules out of politics, her critique of religion itself should also be contested.
It is undeniable that Arendt has identified unworldly features within Christianity
which have become dominant forces at different points in its history. There has been
a tradition which counseled a radical disengagement from the world because it was
depicted as a place of temptation, evil and corruptibility, unworthy of human love.
The human being was a homo viator, needing salvation from the "shipwreck of the
world. "93 Viewed against the background of this tradition, it is not surprising that
she would conclude, in reference to the experience of action among America's
Founding Fathers, that it was "nothing less than the weight of the entire Christian
tradition which prevented them from owning up to the rather obvious fact that they
were enjoying what they were doing far beyond the call of duty."94

18
 Faith of Hannab Arendt

What is surprising, however, is that her critique ignored the far more prominent
and influential traditions of world-afflfDlation that are also part of religious history. 95
I believe that this disregard was due to three factors: the excessive authority exercised
over her both by Kierkegaard's vision of religion and by her teacher Rudolf
Bultmann's radical disjunction of the selfs existence from a sinful world; secondly, as
I have already mentioned, her conviction that no religion could furnish a universal
foundation for our culture's confrontation with the contemporary political crisis;
finally, her conviction that religion was bound to be dogmatic and lack that "broad -
mindedness" required by our pluralistic culture. 96 In fact, however, her thought's
covert theology demonstrated the potency of certain religious understandings for a
renewal of action and of the political faith upon which such renewal would rest.
Many others ought not to have been disregarded.
Arendt failed to appreciate how the religious emphasis on the care of one's
unique soul generated a sense of individuality which was a resistance to the destruc -
tion of plurality, the disappearance of the many into a mere mass, the "One Man of
gigantic dimensions" which characterized totalitarian-ism. It is precisely this indi -
viduality which inhibits the corruption of religious compassion into the destructive
pity which was such a feature of the French Revolution: "To Dostoevski, the sign of
Jesus's divinity clearly was his ability to have compassion with all men in their
singularity, that is, without lumping them together into some such entity as one
suffering mankind. The greatness of the story, apart from its theological impli -
cations, lies in that we are made to feel how false the idealistic, high-flown phrases
of the most exquisite pity sound the moment they are confronted with com-
passion. "97 Within the religious vision, each person possesses an equal human
dignity which transcends any utilitarian considerations. As creatures of the same
Creator, each individual is also related to all others in an ontological relationship
which is called to concretize itself in mutual commitments. This relationship is the
context for all other communities, including the political, and has sustained the
training for community which has been such an important contribution of religion to
western culture. Arendt disregarded this contribution, that religion, certainly in
America, was a "school of political democracy," giving to people the actual
experience of what it meant to be a member of a community while recognizing that
there was a plurality of such communities. 98 Certainly, the major political move -
ments within contemporary America--civil rights, anti-war, and the challenge to
nuclear policy--testify to the continuing potency of the political action originating in
and supported by ecclesial communities. In addition, Arendt did not appreciate how
religious asceticism was a means of promoting communal and political awareness.
Its call to simplicity of life was not a rejection of the world's goods as such, but
rather a sensitive awareness of the conditions necessary for freedom. As she
recognized in her examination of the desire for wealth and consumption, there is a
19
 James Bernauer. S J

fundamental incompatibility between freedom and luxury.99 By focusing attention on

the more permanent realities, religious asceticism fostered an education in
worldliness, a regard for the superiority of the durable over the passing.
If Arendt had not been so adamant in her judgment regarding religious hostility
to the public realm, she might have found within religious experience resources for
resolving one of her own philosophy's persistent problematics: its dualism between
society and polity. The division is intelligible in terms of her analysis of the
destruction which takes place in the public rea1m when it is subordinated to economic
ambitions and values. Nevertheless, the isolation of politics from the economy
renders her theory irrelevant to the material conditions without which freedom cannot
be achieved. Although Arendt echoes the Bible's warnings on the dangers of wealth,
she does not take up its vision of justice for the poor. The Biblical theology of
creation and covenant demands a strict stewardship of the world's goods, which are the
property of all. Within such a vision, the poor are liberated from the obscurity into
which their poverty has thrown them, and recognition is given to their right to
become participants in the sphere of action. In acknowledging an ontological bond
among all humans, religious faith grounds a collective responsibility which can
never be satisfied by mere political respect, but necessarily includes a task of
economic justice. At the same time, however, this task, which is motivated by a
regard for human dignity, does not degenerate into that economic domination of
human life and purpose which Arendt properly decried. It does involve, however, an
extension of the meaning of the political realm to embrace the necessary conditions
for participation in its freedom. No matter how sublime her depiction of the political
realm, if it were to be bereft of economic justice, Arendt would have presented a mere
mirage.
Arendt's tendency to have her distinctions isolate essentially related realms
shows itself in her radical disjunction of politics and religion. While not wishing to
deny the obvious differences which exist between her amOT mundi and religious
faith, I have attempted to show how they can be thought out as complementary, an
alliance invited by the crisis of the world itself. If religious experience provided
Arendt with some of her philosophy's major categories, her thought offers religion a
path toward a renewed worldliness, an opportunity to shape a presence in the full
light of the public life. The closest she ever came to an articulation of a religious
community's specific responsibility for that life was in her reflections on two Popes,
Pius XII and John XXIII.
Her reaction to Hochhuth's controversial drama about Pius, "The Deputy," is a
searing indictment of a Christian leader's alleged unworldliness and of the disastrous
absence of political capabilities to which it leads: judgment, speech, action. Pius is
portrayed as lacking that most worldly of mental faculties, judgment He is accused

20
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

of failing to understand what was taking place around him and of a "rigid adherence to
a normality that no longer existed in view of the collapse of the whole moral and
spiritual structure of Europe." This loss of a feeling for reality was exhibited in the
"flowery loquacity" of Church statements which attempted to hide its overwhelming
silence, its failure to speak publicly against the fate which was engulfing European
Jewry. Fearing its unpredictability, the spokesman of Catholicism refused to act. If
the Church's conduct during World War II demonstrated to Arendt the calamity which
can result from an unworldly life lived in the world, Pope John xxm manifested for
her both the promise and the danger of a true Christian's appearance in the public
realm.IOO His "astounding faith" liberated him from all utilitarian attitudes and
bestowed a confidence which enabled him to treat all as his equals and to present
himself to the world exactly as he was. In response, the world paid him the tribute
of carefully attending to his words and acts and the honor of capturing his existence
as a permanent reality through the countless stories told about him and passed on for
future generations. Despite her deep admiration for his virtues, however, Pope John
also represented the danger of Christian life, its capacity to shake the world. She
liked to cite Luther's remark on the fearful consequence of an authentic proclamation
of Biblical faith, that the "most permanent fate of God's word is that for its sake the
world is put into uproar. For the sermon of God comes to change and revive the
whole earth to the extent that it reaches it."IOI In her essay on Pope John, Arendt
expresses the awareness that Christian detachment can be both a rich worldly presence
as well as a potentially dangerous transcendence of the world as it is. She is correct
in that a monotheistic faith must refuse to absolutize anything, the world included.
A religious arnor mundi can never be an uncritical love but there is no reason,
contrary to much of what Arendt says, that it must be an unloving criticism.
The religious person's tension between a love for the world and a recognition of
its limitations was Hannah Arendt's own experience and the gift of her Jewish faith.
Arnor mundi does not entail an arnor fati; quite to the contrary, it demands the pre -
servation of a certain distance, the willingness not to conform, the permanent status
of what Arendt called the conscious pariah. I02 As was the case with her friend
Waldemar Gurian, every person who attempts to love and act in the world is also
always a "stranger in the world, never quite at home in it." "His whole spiritual
existence was built on the decision never to conform and never to escape which is
only another way of saying that it was built on courage."I03 It is in that same region
of courage where Arendt's arnor mundi and religious faith can meet. It is a courage
to love the world, not because there is an ideological vision of its potential per -
fection, but because it is greater than the storms of evil which pass over it. It is this
awareness of evil and sin which guides faith and sustains democratic communities.
Manifesting a face scarred by evil, the world appears more vulnerable, but also more

21
 James Bernauer SJ.

real and more lovable. In penetrating to religious depths in western culture, Arendt
found that some of its sea-changed life could

survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the
elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will
come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living--as
"thought fragments," as something "rich and strange," and perhaps even as
everlasting Urphiinomene.(104)

Arendt's faith also testifies to that "perhaps".

1. The full poem, "Fohrt durch Frankreich," is in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah

Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 264 and
488.
2. Arendt, "Walter Benjamin" Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1968), p. 206.
3. Ibid., p. 157.
4. Arendt, "The Crisis in Education" Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin,
1977), p. 196.
5. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited with an interpretive essay
by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 50. Cf. Arendt's
Fall, 1963 course at Chicago. "Introduction into Politics" in The Papers of Hannah
Arendt at the Library of Congress. Box 41. p. 023803.
6. The Origins of Totalitarianism. thitd edition with new prefaces (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich. 1973). p. 473.
7. Arendt. "Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps" Jewish
Social Studies xn (1950). p. 63.
8. Arendt. "The Concept of History" Between Past and Future, p. 63.
9. Cf. "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" Partisan Review xn (Winter. 1946). pp. 34-
56.
10. Arendt. "On Humanity In Dark Times" Men in Dark Times. p. 8.
11. Arendt. The Life of the Mind I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1978). p. 21.

22
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

12. Bhil<hu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy
(London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 94. Parekh's volume is the best of the available
general presentations of Arendt's political philosophy. Other major works on her
thought include Margaret Canovan's The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Stephen Whitfield, Into the Dark: Hannah
Arendt and Totalitarianism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); George
Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and
AIlanheld, 1983); Andre Enegren, La pensee politique de Hannah Arendt (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1984). Indispensable for all future work on Arendt is Young-
Bruehl's biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.
13. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p.
50.
14. "On Humanity in Dark Times," pp. 24-25; The Human Condition, p. 242.
15. Parekh, op. cit., p. 131.
16. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" Between Past and Future, p. 148.
17. Arendt, "Understanding and Politics" Partisan Review XX (1953), p. 377.
18. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, p. 458.
19. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:
Viking, 1965 revised edition), p. 48.
20. Ibid., p. 279.
21. The Life of the Mind I: Thinking, p. 58.
22. "On Humanity in Dark Times," pp. 7-8.
23. The Life of the Mind II: Willing, pp. 195,165.
24. "What Is Freedom?," pp. 147, 163.
25. Cf. The Life of the Mind II: Willing, section 16: "The abyss of freedom and the
nov us ordo sec/orum," pp. 195-217.
26. For an example of such criticism, cf. Walter Laqueur, "Hannah Arendt in
Jerusalem: The Controversy Revisited" in Western Society After the Holocaust, edited
by Lyman Legters (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1983).
27. Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 295.
28. Arendt to Jaspers, Dec. 29, 1963. Cited in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 338.
29. Notes for a lecture given at Wesleyan University, Jan. 11, 1962. Cited in Young-
Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 339.
30. Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 296.
31. Arendt's notes for a lecture, "Religion and Politics," delivered at The University of
Chicago Divinity School on April 29, 1966. In The Papers of Hannah Arendt at the
Library of Congress, container 70, p. 023429.

23
 James Bernauer S J

32. Matthew 16:26. The classic statement of this otherworldliness is in I John 2:

15-17: "Have no love for the world, nor the things that the world affords. If anyone
loves the world, the Father's love has no place in him, for nothing that the world
affords comes from the Father. Carnal allurements, enticements for the eye, the life of
empty show--all these are from the world. And the world with its seduction is passing
away but the man who does God's will endures forever."
33. "The Concept of History" Between Past and Future, p. 52.
34. The Human Condition, pp. 21, 314.
35. Arendt's "Remarks" to the January 21, 1973 Meeting of the American Society of
Christian Ethics. In The Papers of Hannah Arendt at the Library of Congress, con-
tainer 70, p. 011832.
36. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 284.
37. "What Is Freedom?", p. 146.
38. Arendt, "Religion and Politics" Confluence: An Imernational Forum II, 3 (Sept.,
1953), p. 112.
39. The Human Condition, p. 55.
40. Luke 8:19, as cited by Arendt in The Human Condition, p. 75.
41. The Human Condition, pp. 180, 76.
42. Cf. On Revolution, p. 195, and "Religion and Politics", p. 125.
43. Cf. On Revolution, pp. 190, 199.
44. Ibid., p. 82.
45. "Religion and Politics," p. 126.
46. Cf. "What Is Authority?" Between Past and Future, especially p. 125.
47. Arendt's "Remarks" to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society of Christian
Ethics, p. 011839.
48. Arendt, "Understanding and Politics" Partisan Review 20 (1953), p. 390.
49. Cf. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 33-36, 62, 82. Visitors to Arendt's
personal library, preserved at Bard College, will be struck by the number of
specifically theological texts contained in her collection.
50. Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, pp. 158, 165.
51. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 459.
52. The Human Condition, p. 247.
53. "Remarks" to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics, pp.
011838-011839.
54. Arendt, "What Is Authority?," pp. 94-95. Arendt points out that the modem loss
of faith itself is not religious in origin (The Human Condition, pp. 253-254).

24
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

55. A good introduction to Bultmann's project is Heinz Zahmt's The Question of God:
Protestant Theology in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1969), especially pp. 203-252.
56. Arendt's 1967 notes for a lecture on Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, in The Papers
of Hannah Arendt, container 69; The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 446.
57. Cf. "Religion and Politics" in Confluence. Perhaps the most incisive analysis of
Nazism's abuse of religious categories is Uriel Tal's "On Structures of Political
Theology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust" in The Holocaust as Historical
Experience, edited by Ychuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich (New York: Holmes and
Meier, 1981), pp. 43-74. Also, cf. the classic study by Kenneth Burke, "The Rhetoric
of Hitler's 'Battlc'" in Burke's Terms for Order (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1964).
58. On the religious imagination. see the now classic work by William Lynch. Christ
and Apollo (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960).
59. Over tltirty years ago Philip Rieff first suggested tltis approach to The Origins of
Totalitarianism in his article, "The Theology of Politics: Reflections on
Totalitarianism as the Burden of Our Tiroe" Journal oJ.Religion 32 (April, 1952), pp.
119-126.
60. The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. viii-ix, 459.
61. Ibid., p. 124.
62. As examples of such interpretations, cf. Rieff, "The Theology of Politics" and
Benjamin Schwartz, "The Religion of Politics" Dissent 17 (March-April, 1970), pp.
144-161. As an example of this tendency in Arendt, cf. The Origins of
Totalitarianism, p. 452.
63. On Revolution, p. 90. Also, cf. On Revolution, pp. 76-83, as well as her essay
"Christianity and Revolution" Nation (Sept. 22, 1945), pp. 288-289, and "Waldemar
Gurian" Men in Dark Times, pp. 241-242.
64. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 445.
65. Ibid.,. pp. 189-191.
66. Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New York: Signet, 1950), pp.
144, 143, 113, 131, 143.
67. Cf. The Human Condition, pp. 243-244; On Revolution, p. 195. For more on the
specific image of exodus and its political utilizations. cf. Michael Walzer, Exodus and
Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
68. The Human Condition, p. 254.
69. On Revolution, p. 74; The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 307, 315.
70. Cf. "Labor, Work, Action" and The Human Condition, pp. 236-247.
71. The Human Condition, p. 237.
72. Ibid., p. 245.

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 James Bernauer SJ

73. While Arendt recognized the theoretical influence of the Biblical covenant on
political conceptions, she always insisted that its nature as a compact between God and
humanity made it inherently unpolitical because it was not a compact between equals.
I think that her interpretation underestimates the radical novelty of the Biblical
covenant but, in any case, my point stands. For her discussion of this matter, cf. The
Human Condition, pp. 243-244; On Revolution, pp. 166-176, 309-310, and her
"Remarks to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics."
74. The Human Condition, pp. 238·239. Arendt cites Matthew 6: 14-15, 18:35 and
Mark 11:25.
75. The Human Condition, p. 241.
76. Ibid., pp. 247, 8 note I, 247, 318.
77. "What Is Freedom?", p. 168.
78. The Life of the Mind ll: Willing, p. 217; cf. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.
479; The Human Condition, p. 177; On Revolution, p. 212.
79. The Human Condition, p. 247; "What Is Freedom?", p. 169.
80. "Remarks to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society for Christian Ethics," p.
001838. Although it is clear that Hannah Arendt had a personal belief in God (cf. Men
in Dark Times, p. 67; Jeannette Baron, "Hannah Arendt: Personal Reflections"
Response 39 [1980] p. 62; Alfred Kazin, New York Jew [New York: Knopf, 1978] p.
199), she never identified herself as a member of any denomination: "I am neither a
crypto-Baptist nor am I a crypto-Christian! I am by birth a Jew, and as far as religion
goes I do not belong to any church, or to any synagogue, or to any denomination."
("Remarks to the 1973 Meeting of the American Society for Christian Ethics," p.
011828). In a recent article, Judith Shklar has repeated the story which surfaced around
the time of the controversy over Arendt's 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, namely, that
Arendt appeared to have been drawn to Roman Catholicism ("Hannah Arendt as Pariah"
Partisan Review 50 [1983] p. 72). In Arendt's notes for a reply to a question regard -
ing her supposed conversion to Roman Catholicism, she wrote that there "is no truth
in it whatsoever. I suppose the rumour has been started in the old hope--semper aliquid
adhaeret." ("Answer to Grafton" in The Papers of Hannah Arend!, container 42, file
"Eichmarm Case: Correspondence, Periodical, 1963", p. 13).
81. "Walter Benjamin," p. 204.
82. "What Is Authority?," pp. 126-127.
83. Rieff, ''The Theology of Politics," p. 120.
84. The Life of the Mind I: Thinking, pp. 60-61. The verses are from Auden's
"Talking to Myself."
85. For example.. in criticizing Arendt, Kateb claims that we lIare not at home; we
have too much at our disposal merely to construct a home." (Hannah Arend!: Politics,
Conscience. Evil, p. 174).
86. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus (New York: Harcourt Brace and World,
1962), p. 79; Heinrich Bluecher, "Jesus of Nazareth," a lecture delivered at the New

26
 Faith of Hannah Arendt

School for Social Research, May 14, 1954, p. 8. The typescript of this lecture is
avilable at Bard College.
87. "Waldemar Gurian" and "Isak Dinesen" in Men in Dark Times, pp. 257, 99.
88. The Life of the Mind: Willing, p. 104.
89. "Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future, p. 264.
90. The Human Condition, p. 271; The Life of the Mind I, pp. 53-65.
91. The Human Condition, p. 319; on Kierkegaard and Pascal, cf. The Human
Condition, pp. 275-281 and "What Is Authority?", pp. 94-95.
92. "Religion and Politics," Confluence, p. 106. Cf. William James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience (New York: Collier, 1961), pp. 201-203; Michael Polanyi,
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row,
1964), p. 299.
93. Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (London: Burns and Oates,
1963), p. 383. On this otherworldly tradition, cf. Donald Howard, The Three
Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the World (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1966); Gerhart Ladner, "Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation
and Order" Speculum XLIII (April, 1967), pp. 233-259; Max Weber, "Religious
Rejections of the World and their Directions" From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 1958),
pp. 323- 359.
94. On Revolution, p. 26.
95. Cf. the still classic work of H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1956).
96. "Creating a Cultural Atmosphere," The Jew as Pariah, edited by Ron Feldman (New
York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 92. On Bultmann's views, cf. Robert C. Roberts, Rudolf
Bultmann's Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdman's, 1976).
97. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 466; On Revolution, pp. 80-81.
98. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1959), p. 98. On this inadequacy in Arendt, cf. Robert Nisbet, "Hannah
Arendt and the American Revolution" Social Research 44 (Spring, 1977), p. 69, and
Sheldon S. Wolin, "Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political" Salmagundi 60
(Spring-Summer, 1983), p. 14.
99. The Human Condition, pp. 126-135 and On Revolution, p. 136.
100. Arendt, "Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli: A Christian on St. Peter's Chair from 1958
to 1963" Men in Dark Times, pp. 57-69.
101. Ibid., p. 59.
102. Cf. Arendt, 'The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition" The Jew as Pariah, pp. 67-
90, and Feldman's introduction to this collection, "The Jew as Pariah: The Case of
Hannah Arendt," pp. 15-52.

27
 James Bernauer SJ

103. ''Waldemar Gurian," pp. 261-262.

104. "Walter Benjamin," p. 206.

28
 LABOR, WORK, ACTION

Hannah Arendt

For this short hour, I should like to raise an apparently odd question. My ques -
tion is: What does an active life consist of? What do we do when we are active? 1n
asking this question, I shall assume that the age-old distinction between two ways of
life, between a vita contemplativa and a vita activa, which we encounter in our
tradition of philosophical and religious thought up to the threshold of the modem
age, is valid, and that when we speak of contemplation and action we speak not only
of certain human faculties but of two distinct ways of life. Surely, the question is of
some relevance. For even if we don't contest the traditional assumption that
contemplation is of a higher order than action, or that all action actually is but a
means whose true end is contemplation, we can't doubt - and no one ever doubted --
that it is quite possible for human beings to go through life without ever indulging
in contemplation, while, on the other hand, no man can remain in.the contemplative
state throughout his life. Active life, in other words, is not only what most men are
engaged in but even what no man can escape altogether. For it is in the nature of the
human condition that contemplation remains dependent upon all sorts of activities --
it depends upon labor to produce whatever is necessary to keep the human organism
alive, it depends upon work to create whatever is needed to house the human body,
and it needs action in order to organize the living together of many human beings in
such a way that peace, the condition for the quiet of contemplation is assured.
Since I started with our tradition, I just described the three chief articulations of
active life in a traditional way, that is, as serving the ends of contemplation. It is
only natural that active life has always been described by those who themselves
followed the contemplative way of life. Hence, the vita activa was always defined
from the viewpoint of contemplation; compared with the absolute quiet of contem -
plation, all sorts of human activity appeared to be similar insofar as they were char -
acterized by un-quiet, by something negative: by a-skholia or by nec-octium, non-
leisure or absence of the conditions which make contemplation possible. Compared
with this attitude of quiet, all distinctions and articulations within the vita activa
disappear. Seen from the viewpoint of contemplation, it does not matter what dis -
turbs the necessary quiet so long as it is disturbed.
Bernauer, 1. W. (ed), Amor Mundi. ISBN 90-247·3483·5.
© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands. 29
 Hannah Arendt

Traditionally therefore the vita activa received its meaning from the vita
contemplativa; a very restricted dignity was bestowed upon it because it served the
needs and wants of contemplation in a living body. Christianity with its belief in a
hereafter, whose joys announce themselves in the delights of contemplation,
conferred a religious sanction upon the abasement of the vita activa while, on the
other hand, the command to love your neighbor acted as a counterweight against this
estimation unknown to antiquity. But the determination of the order itself, according
to which contemplation was the highest of the human faculties, was Greek, and not
Christian in origin; it coincided with the discovery of contemplation as the
philosopher's way of life which as such was found superior to the political way of
life of the citizen in the polis. The point of the matter, which I can only mention
here in passing, is that Christianity, contrary to what has frequently been assumed,
did not elevate active life to a higher position, did not save it from its being deriva -
tive, and did not, at least not theoretically, look upon it as something which has its
meaning and end within itself. And a change in this hierarchical order was indeed im -
possible so long as truth was the one comprehensive principle to establish an order
among the human faculties, a truth moreover, which was understood as revelation, as
something essentially given to man, as distinguished from truth being either the
result of some mental activity -- thought or reasoning -- or as that knowledge which I
acquire through making.
Hence, the question arises: Why was the vita activa, with all its distinction and
articulations, not discovered after the modem break with tradition and the eventual
reversal of its hierarchical order, the "re-evaluation of all values" through Marx and
Nietzsche? And the answer, though in actual analysis quite complicated, may be
summed up briefly here: It lies in the very nature of the famous turning upside-down
of philosophic systems or hierarchies of values that the conceptual framework itself
is left intact. This is especially true for Marx who was convinced that turning Hegel
upside down was enough to find the truth -- i.e. the truth of the Hegelian system,
which is the discovery of the dialectical nature of history.
Let me shortly explain how this identity shows itself in our context. When I
enumerated the chief human activities: Labor-Work-Action, it was obvious that
action occupied the highest position. Insofar as action relates to the political sphere
of human life, this estimation agrees with the pre-philosophic, pre-Platonic current
opinion of Greek polis life. The introduction of contemplation as the highest point
of the hierarchy had the result that this order was in fact rearranged, though not
always in explicit theory. (Lip service to the old hierarchy was frequently paid when
it had already been reversed in the actual teaching of the philosophers.) Seen from
the viewpoint of contemplation, the highest activity was not action but work; the
rise of the activity of the craftsman in the scale of estimations makes its first
dramatic appearance in the Platonic dialogues. Labor, to be sure, remained at the bot -
30
 Labor. Work Action

tom but political activity as something necessary for the life of contemplation was
now recognized only to the extent that it could be pursued in the same way as the
activity of the craftsman. Only if seen in the image of a working activity, could
political action be trusted to produce lasting results. And such lasting results meant
peace, the peace needed for contemplation: No change.
If you now look upon the reversal in the modem age, you are immediately
aware that its most important feature in this respect is its glorification of labor,
surely the last thing any member of one of the classical communities, be it Rome or
Greece, would have thought of as worthy of this position. However, the moment
you go deeper into this matter you will see that not labor as such occupied this
position (Adam Smith, Locke; Marx are unanimous in their contempt for menial
tasks, unskilled labor which helps only to consume), but productive labor. Again
the standard of lasting results is the actual yardstick. Thus Marx, surely the greatest
of the labor philosophers, was constantly trying to re-interpret labor in the image of
the working activity -- again at the expense of political activity. To be sure, things
had changed. Political activity was no longer seen as the laying down of immutable
laws which would make a commonwealth, have as its end-result a reliable product,
looking exactly as it had been blueprinted by the maker -- as though laws or
constitutions were things of the same nature as the table fabricated by the carpenter
according to the blueprint he had in mind before he started to make it. Political
activity was now supposed to "make history" -- a phrase that occurred for the flrst
time in Vico -- and not a commonwealth, and this history had, as we all know, its
end-product, the classless society which would be the end of the historical process
just as the table is indeed the end of the fabrication process. In other words, since on
the theoretical level, no more was done by the great re-evaluators of the old values
than to tum things upside-down, the old hierarchy within the vita activa was hardly
disturbed; the old modes of thinking prevailed, and the only relevant distinc -
tion between the new and the old was that this order, whose origin and meaningful -
ness lay in the actual experience of contemplation, became highly questiouable. For
the actual event which characterizes the modem age in this respect was that contem -
plation itself had become meaningless.
With this event we shall not deal here. Instead, accepting the oldest, pre-philo -
sophical hierarchy. I propose to look into these activities themselves. And the flrst
thing of which you might have become aware by now is my distinction between
labor and work which probably sounded somewhat unusual to you. I draw it from a
rather casual remark in Locke who speaks of "the labor of our body and the work of
our hands." (Laborers, in Aristotelic language, are those who "with their bodies
administer to the needs of life.") The phenomeual evidence in favor of this distinc -
tion is too striking to be ignored, and yet it is a fact that, apart from a few scattered

31
 Hannah Arendt

remarks and important testimony of social and institutional history, there is hardly
anything to support il
Against this scarcity of evidence stands the simple obstinate fact that every
European language, ancient or modem, contains two etymologically unrelated words
for what we have come to think of as the same activity: Thus, the Greek
distinguished between ponein and ergazesthai, the Latin between /aborare and/acere
or/abricari, the French between travailler and ouvrer, the German between arbeiten
und werken. In all these cases, the equivalents for lahor have an unequivocal con -
notation of bodily experiences, of toil and trouble, and in most cases they are
significaJ)t1y also used for the pangs of birth. The last to use this original con -
nection was Marx, who defined labor as the "reproduction of individual life" and
begetting, the production of "foreign life," as the production of the species.
If we leave aside all theories, especially the modem labor theories after Marx,
and follow solely the etymological and historical evidence, it is obvious that labor is
an activity which corresponds to the biological processes of the body, that it is, as
the young Marx said, the metabolism between man and nature or the human mode of
this metabolism which we share with all living organisms. By laboring, men
produce the vital necessities that must be fed into the life process of the human body.
And since this life process, though it leads us from birth to death in a rectilinear
progress of decay, is in itself circular, the laboring activity itself must follow the
cycle of life, the circular movement of our bodily functions, which means that the
laboring activity never comes to an end as long as life lasts; it is endlessly repetitive.
Unlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added
to the common world of things and objects, laboring always moves in the same
circle prescribed by the living organism, and the end of its toil and trouble comes
only with the end, i.e., the death of the individual organism.
Labor, in other words, produces consumer goods, and laboring and consuming
are but two stages of the ever-recurring cycle of biological life. These two stages of
the life process follow each other so closely that they almost constitute one and the
same movement, which is hardly ended when it must be started allover again.
Labor, unlike all other human activities, stands under the sign of necessity, the
"necessity of subsisting" as Locke used to say, or the "eternal necessity imposed by
nature" in the words of Marx. Hence, the actual goal of the revolution in Marx is
not merely the emancipation of the laboring or working classes, but the
emancipation of man from labor. For "the realm of freedom begins only where labor
determined through want" and the immediacy of "physical needs" ends. And this
emancipation, as we know now, to the extent that it is possible at all, occurs not by
political emancipation -- the equality of all classes of the citizenry -- but through
technology. I said: To the extent that it is possible, and I meant by this

32
 Labor Work Action

qualification that consumption, as a stage of the cyclical movement of the living

organism is in a way also laborious.
Goods for consumption, the immediate result of the laboring process, are the
least durable of tangible things. They are, as Locke pointed out, "of short duration,
such as -- if they are not consumed -- will decay and perish by themselves." After a
brief stay in the world, they return into the natural process that yielded them either
through absorption into the life process of the human animal or through decay; in
their man-made shape they disappear more quickly than any other part of the world.
They are the least worldly and, at the same time, the most natural and the most
necessary of all things. Although they are man-made, they come and go, are
produced and consumed, in accordance with the ever-recurrent cyclical movement of
nature. Hence, they cannot be "heaped up" and "stored away", as would have been
necessary if they were to serve Locke's main purpose, to establish the validity of
private property on the rights men have to own their own body.
But while labor in the sense of producing anything lasting -- something
outlasting the activity itself and even the life-span of the producer -- is quite
"unproductive" and futile, it is highy productive in another sense. Man's labor power
is such that he produces more consumer goods than is necessary for the survival of
himself and his family. This, as it were, natural abundance of the laboring process
has enabled men to enslave or exploit their fellowmen, thus liberating themselves
from life's burden; and while this liberation of the few has always been achieved
through the use of force by a ruling class, it would never have been possible without
this inherent fertility of human labor itself. Yet even this specifically human "pro -
ductivity" is part and parcel of nature, it partakes of the superabundance we see every -
where in nature's household. It is but another mode of "Be ye fruitful and multiply"
in which it is as though the voice of nature herself speaks to us.
Since labor corresponds to the condition of life itself, it partakes not only in
life's toil and trouble but also in the sheer bliss with which we can experience our
being alive. The "blessing or the joy of labor," which plays so great a part in
modern labor theories, is no empty notion. Man, the author of the human artifice,
which we call world in distinction to nature, and men, who are always involved with
each other through action and speech, are by no means merely natural beings. But
insofar as we too are just living creatures, laboring is the only way we can also
remain and swing contentedly in nature's prescribed cycle, toiling and resting,
laboring and consuming, with the same happy and purposeless regularity with which
day and night, life and death follow each other. The reward of toil and trouble,
though it does not leave anything behind itself, is even more real, less futile than any
other form of happiness. It lies in nature's fertility, in the quiet confidence that he
who in "toil and trouble" has done his part, remains a part of nature in the future of

33
 Hannah Arendt

his children and his children's children. The Old Testament, which, unlike classical
antiquity, held life to be sacred and therefore neither death nor labor to be an evil
(certainly not an argument against life), shows in the stories of the patriarchs how
unconcerned about death they were and how death came to them in the familiar shape
of night and quiet and eternal rest "in a good old age and full of years."
The blessing of life as a whole, inherent in labor, can never be found in work
and should not be mistaken for the inevitably brief spell of joy that follows
accomplishment and attends achievement The blessing of labor is that effort and
gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming, so that
happiness is a concomitant of the process itself. There is no lasting happiness and
contentment for human beings outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and
pleasurable regeneration. Whatever throws this cycle out of balance -- misery where
exhaustion is followed by wretchedness or an entirely effortless life where boredom
takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, or consumption and
digestion grind an impotent human body mercilessly to death -- ruins the elemental
happiness that comes from being alive. An element of laboring is present in all
human activities, even the highest, insofar as they are undertaken as "routine" jobs
by which we make our living and keep ourselves alive. Their very repetitiveness,
which more often than not we feel to be a burden that exhausts us, is what provides
that minimum of animal contentment for which the great and meaningful spells of
joy that are rare and never last, can never be a substitute, and without which the long -
er lasting though equally rare spells of real grief and sorrow could hardly be borne.
The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labor of our bodies, fabricates
the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice,
the world we live in. They are not consumer goods but use-objects, and their proper
use does not cause them to disappear. They give the world the stability and solidity
without which it could not be relied upon to house the unstable and mortal creature
that is man.
To be sure, the durability of the world of things is not absolute; we do not
consume things but use them up, and if we don't, they will simply decay, return into
the overall natural process from which they were drawn and against which they were
erected by us. If left to itself or expelled from the human world, the chair will again
become wood, and the wood will decay and return to the soil from which the tree
sprang before it was cut down to become the material upon which to work and with
which to build. However, while usage is bound to use up these objects, this end is
not planned before, it was not the goal for which it was made, as the "destruction" or
immediate consumption of the bread is its inherent end; what usage wears out is
durability. In other words, destruction, though unavoidable, is incidental to use
but inherent in consumption. What distinguishes the most flimsy pair of shoes

34
 Labor Work Action

from mere consumer goods is that they do not spoil if I don't wear them, they are
objects and therefore possess a certain "objective" independence of their own, however
modesl Used or unused they will remain in the world for a certain while unless they
are wantonly destroyed.
It is this durability that gives the things of the world their relative independence
from men who produced and use them, their "objectivity" that makes them withstand,
"stand against" and endure at least for a time the voracious needs and wants of their
living users. From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of
stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that men, their ever-
changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their identity by being related to the
enduring sameness of objects, the same chair today and tomorrow, the same house
formerly from birth to death. Against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity
of the man-made artifice, not the indifference of nature. Only because we have erected
a world of objects from what nature gives us and have built this artificial environ -
ment into natore, thus protecting us from her, can we look upon nature as something
"objective". Without a world between men and nature, there wonld be eternal move -
ment, but no objectivity.
Durability and objectivity are the result of fabrication, the work of homo faber.
It consists of reification. Solidity, inherent in even the most fragile things, comes
ultimately from matter which is transformed into material. Material is already a pro -
duct of human hands that have removed it from its natural location, either killing a
life process, as in the case of the tree which provides wood, or interrupting one of
nature's slower processes, as in the case of iron, stone, or marble tom out of the
womb of the earth. This element of violation and violence is present in all fabri -
cation, and man as the creator of the human artifice has always been a destroyer of
nature. The experience of this violence is the most elemental experience of human
strength, and by the same token the very opposite of the painful, exhausting effort
experienced in sheer labor. This is no longer the earning of one's bread "in the sweat
of his brow," in which man may indeed be the lord and master of all living creatures
but still remains the servant of nature, his own natural needs, and of the earth.
Homo faber becomes lord and master of nature herself insofar as he violates and
partly destroys what was given to him.
The process of making is itself entirely determined by the categories of means
and end. The fabricated thing is an end product in the twofold sense that the produc -
tion process comes to an end in it and that it is only a means to produce this end.
Unlike the laboring activity, where labor and consumption are only two stages of an
identical process -- the life process of the individual or of society -- fabrication and
usage are two altogether different processes. The end of the fabrication process has
come when the thing is finished, and this process need not be repeated. The impulse

35
 Hannah Arendt

toward repetition comes from the craftsman's need to earn his means of subsistence,
that is, from the element of labor inherent in his work. It also may come from the
demand for multiplication on the market. In either case, the process is repeated for
reasons outside itself, unlike the compulsory repetition inherent in laboring, where
one must eat in order to labor and must labor in order to eat. Multiplication should
not be confused with repetition, although it may be felt by the individual craftsman
as mere repetition which a machine can better and more productively achieve. Multi-
plication actually multiplies things, whereas repetition merely follows the recurrent
cycle of life in which its products disappear almost as fast as they have appeared.
To have a definite beginning and a definite predictable end is the mark of
fabrication, which through this characteristic alone distinguishes itself from all other
human activities. Labor, caught in the cyclical movement of the biological process,
has neither a beginning nor an end properly speaking -- only pauses, intervals
between exhaustion and regeneration. Action, though it may ·have a definite
beginning, never, as we shall see, has a predictable end. This great reliability of
work is reflected in that the fabrication process, unlike action, is not irreversible:
every thing produced by human hands can be destroyed by them, and no use object is
so urgently needed in the life process that its maker cannot survive and afford its
destruction. Man, the fabricator of the human artifice, his own world, is indeed a lord
and master, not only because he has set himself up as the master of all nature, but
because he is master of himself and his doings. This is true neither of laboring,
where men remain subject to the necessity of their life, nor of acting, where they
remain in dependence upon their fellow men. Alone with his image of the future
product, homo faber is free to produce, and again facing alone the work of his hands,
he is free to destroy.
I said before that all fabrication processes are determined by the category of
means and end. This shows itself most clearly in the enormous role which tools and
instruments play in it. From the standpoint of homo faber, man is indeed, as
Benjamin Franklin said, a "tool-maker". To be sure, tools and implements are also
used in the laboring process, as every housewife proudly owning all the gadgets of a
modem kitchen knows; but these implements have a different character and function
when used for laboring; they serve to lighten the burden and mechanize the labor of
the laborer, they are, as it were, anthropocentric, whereas the tools of fabrication are
designed and invented for the fabrication of things, their fitness and precision are
dictated by "objective" aims rather than subjective needs and wants. Moreover, every
fabrication process produces things that last considerably longer than the process
which brought them into existence, whereas in a laboring process, bringing forth
these goods of "short duration," the tools and instruments it uses are the only things
which survive the laboring process itself. They are the use-things for laboring, and
as such not the result of the laboring activity itself. What dominates the laboring
36
 Labor. Work Action

with one's body, and incidentally all work processes performed in the mode of
laboring, is neither the purposeful effort nor the product itself, but the motion of the
process and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers. Labor implements are drawn
into this rhythm where body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement -- until
in the use of machines, which are best suited to the performance of laboring because
of their movement, it is no longer the body's movrnent that determines the move -
ment of the implement, but the machine's movement that enforces the movements of
the body, while, in a more ad~anced state, it replaces it altogether. It seems to me
highly characteristic that the much discussed question of whether man should be
"adjusted" to the machine or the machines should be adjusted to the nature of man
never arose with respect to mere tools or instruments. And the reason Is that all
tools of workmanship remain the servants of the hand, whereas machines indeed
demand that the laborer should serve them, adjust the natural rhythm of his body to
their mechanical movement. In other words, even the most refined tool remains a
servant unable to guide or to replace the hand; even the most primitive machine
guides and ideally replaces the body's labor.
The most fundamental experience we have with instrumentality arises out of the
fabrication process. Here it is indeed true that the end Justifies the means; it does
more, it produces and organizes them. The end justifies the violence done to nature
to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree, and the table justifies
destroying the wood. In the same way, the end product organizes the work process
itself, decides about the needed specialists, the measure of co-operation, the number
of assistants or cooperators. Hence, everything and everybody is judged here in terms
of suitability and usefulness for the desired end product, and nothing else.
Strangely enough, the validity of the means-end category is not exhausted with
the fmished product for which everything and everybody becomes a means. Though
the object is an end with respect to the means by which it was produced and the
actual end of the making process, it never becomes, so to speak, an end in itself, at
least not as long as it remains an object for use. It immediately takes its place in
another means-end chain by virtue of its very usefulness; as a mere use-object it
becomes a means for, let us say, comfortable living, or as an exchange object, that
is, insofar [as] a defmite value has been bestowed upon the material used for fabrica -
tion, it becomes a means for obtaining other objects. In other words, in a strictly
utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration; they are transformed into
means for some further ends. Once the end is attained, it ceases to be an end, it be -
comes an object among objects which at any moment can be transformed into means
to pursue further ends. The perplexity of utilitarianism, the philosophy, as it were,
of homo faber, is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without
ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category, that is, utility itself.

37
 Hannah Arendt

The usual way out of this dilemma is to make the user, man himself, the u1ti -
mate end to stop the unending chain of ends and means. That man is an end in
himself and should never be used as a means to pursue other ends, no matter how
elevated these might be, is well-known to us from the moral philosophy of Kant, and
there is no doubt that Kant wanted first of all to relegate the means- end category and
its philosophy of utilitarianism to its proper place and prevent it from ruling the
relations between man and man instead of the relationship between men and things.
However, even Kant's intrinsically paradoxical formula fails to solve the perplexities
of homo faber. By elevating man the user into the position of an ultimate end, he
degrades even more forcefully all other "ends" to mere means. If man the user is the
highest end, "the measure of all things," then not only nature, treated by fabrication
as the almost "worthless material" upon which to work and to bestow "value" (as
Locke said), but the "valuable" things themselves have become mere means, losing
thereby their own intrinsic worth. Or to put it another way, the most worldly of all
activities loses its original objective meaning, it becomes a means to fulfill subjec -
tive needs; in and by itself, it is no longer meaningful, no matter how useful it may
be.
From the viewpoint of fabrication the finished product is as much an end in it -
self, an independent durable entity with an existence of its own, as man is an end in
himself in Kant's moral philosophy. Of course, the issue at stake here is not instru -
mentality as such, the use of means to achieve an end, but rather the generalization of
the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are established as the ulti -
mate standards for the world as well as for the life of acting men moving in it.
Homo faber, we can say, has transgressed the limits of his activity when, under the
disguise of utilitarianism, he proposes that instrumentality rule the realm of the
finished world as exclusively as it rules the activity through which all things con -
tained in it come into being. This generalization will always be the specific temp -
tation of homo faber although, in the final analysis, it will be his own undoing: he
will be left with meaninglessness in the midst of usefulness; utilitarianism never can
find the answer to the question Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his
time: "And what, if you please, is the use of use?"
In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of objects to which the
unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this is the work of art, the
most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce.
Its very characteristic is its remoteness from the whole context of ordinary usage, so
that in case a former use object, say a piece of furniture of a by-gone age, is
considered by a later generation to be a "masterpiece," it is put into a museum and
thus carefully removed from any possible usage. Just as the purpose of a chair is
actualized when it is sat upon, the inherent purpose of a work of art--whether the
artist knows it or not, whether the purpose is achieved or not--is to attain permanence
38
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throughout the ages. Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the man-made world
appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal
itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. And though
the actual source of inspiration of these permanent things is thought, this does not
prevent their being things. The thought process no more produces anything tangible
than the sheer ability to use objects produces them. It is the reification that occurs in
writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which
actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought things,
which we usually call art works, the same workmanship is required that through the
primordial instrument of human hands builds the other, less durable and more useful
things of the human artifice.
The man-made world of things becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability
will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and deeds, only
insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of consumer-goods and the
sheer utility of use objects. Life in its non-biological sense, the span of time each
man is given between birth and death, manifests itself in action and speech, to which
we now must turn our attention. With word and deed we insert ourselves into the
human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take
upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. Since through
birth we entered Being, we share with all other entities the quality of Otherness, an
important aspect of plurality that makes [sic] that we can define only by distinction,
that we are unable to say what anything is without distinguishing it from something
else. In additon to this we share with all living organisms that kind of distinguish -
ing trait which makes it an individual entity. However, only man can express other -
ness and individuality, only he can distinguish himself and communicate himself,
and not merely something--thirst or hunger, affection or hostility or fear. In man,
otherness and distinctness become uniqueness, and what man inserts with word and
deed into the company of his own kind is uniqueness. This insertion is not forced
upon us through necessity like labor and it is not prompted by wants and desires like
work. It is unconditioned; its impulse springs from the beginning that came into the
world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on
our own initiative. To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to
begin, as the Greek word: arkhein indicates, or to set something into motion, which
is the original meaning of the Latin agere.
AIl human activites are conditioned by the fact of human plurality, that not
One man, but men in the plural inhabit the earth and in one wayor another live to -
gether. But only action and speech relate specifically to this fact that to live always
means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert
myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present. Action and
speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must
39
 Hannah Arendt

always also answer the question asked of every newcomer: "Who are you?" The
disclosure of "who somebody is" is implicit in the fact that speechless action
somehow does not exist, or if it exists [itl is irrelevant; without speech, action loses
the actor, and the doer of deeds is possible only to the extent that he is at the same
time the speaker of words, who identifies himself as the actor and announces what he
is doing, what he has done, or what he intends to do. It is exactly as Dante once
said--and more succinctly than I could (De Monarchia, I, 13)--: "For in every action
what is primarily intended by the doer...is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it
comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since
everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is
somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows ...Thus nothing acts unless by
acting it makes patent its latent self." To be sure, this disclosure of "who" always
remains hidden from the person himself--like the daimon in Greek religion who
accompanies man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind
and thus visible only to those he encounters. Still, though unknown to the person,
action is intensely personal. Action without a name, a "who" attached to it, is mean -
ingless whereas an art wolk retains its relevance whether or not we know the master's
name. Let me remind you of the monuments to the Unknown Soldier after World
War I. They bear testimony to the need for finding a "who", an indentifiable
somebody, whom four years of mass slaughter should have revealed. The unwilling -
ness to resign oneself to the brutal fact that the agent of the war was actually Nobody
inspired the erection of the monuments to the unknown ones--that is to all those
whom the war had failed to make known, robbing them thereby, not of their achieve -
ment, but of their human dignity.
Wherever men live together, there exists a web of human relationships which
is, as it were, woven by the deeds and words of innumerable persons, by the living as
well as by the dead. Every deed and every new beginning falls into an already exist -
ing web, where it nevertheless somehow starts a new process that will affect many
others even beyond those with whom the agent comes into direct contact. It is
because of this already existing web of human relationships with its conflicting wills
and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose. And it is also because
of this medium and the attending quality of unpredictability that action always
produces stories, with or without intention, as naturaIIy as fabrication produces tangi -
ble things. These stories may then be recorded in documents and monuments, they
may be told in poetry and historiography, and worked into all kinds of material.
They themselves, however, are of an entirely different nature than these reifications.
They tell us more about their subjects, the "hero" in each story, than any product of
human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it, and yet they are not
products properly speaking. Although everybody starts his own story, at least his
own life-story, nobody is the author or producer of it. And yet, it is precisely in
40
 Labor Work Action

these stories that the actual meaning of a human life finally reveals itself. That every
individual life between birth and death can eventoally be told as a story with
beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great
story without beginning and end. But the reason why each human life tells its story
and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind, with many actors and
speakers and yet without any recognizable author, is that both are the outcome of
action. The real story in which we are engaged as long as we live has no visible or
invisible maker because it is not made.
The absence of a maker in this realm accounts for the extraordinary frailty and
unreliability of strictly human affairs. Since we always act into a web of
relationships, the consequences of each deed are boundless, every action touches off
not only a reaction but a chain reaction, every process is the cause of unpredictable
new processes. This boundlessness is inescapable; it could not be cured by
restricting one's acting to a limited graspable framework or circumstances or by
feeding all pertinent material into giant computers. The smallest act in the most
limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness and unpredictability;
one deed, one gesture, one word may suffice to change every constellation. In acting,
in contradistinction to working, it is indeed true that we can really never know what
we are doing.
There stands however in stark contrast to this frailty and unreliability of human
affairs another character of human action which seems to make it even more
dangerous than we are entitled to assume anyhow. And this is the simple fact that,
though we don't know what we are doing when we are acting, we have no possibility
ever to undo what we have done. Action processes are not only unpredictable, they
are also irreversible; there is no author or maker who can undo, destroy, what he has
done if he does not like it or when the consequences prove to be disastrous. This
peculiar resiliency of action, apparently in opposition to the frailty of its results,
would be altogether unbearable if this capability had not some remedy within its own
range.
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility is the faculty of
forgiving, and the remedy for unpredictability is contained in the faculty to make and
keep promises. The two remedies belong together: forgiving relates to the past and
serves to undo its deeds, while binding oneself through promises serves to set up in
the ocean of future uncertainty islands of security without which not even continuity,
let alone durability of any kind, would ever be possible in the relationships between
men. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done,
our capacity to act would, as it were, be confmed 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.

41
 Hannah Arendt

Without being bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to

achieve that amount of identity and continuity which together produce the "person"
about whom a story can be told; each of us would be condemned to wander helplessly
and without direction in the darkness of his own lonely heart, caught in its ever
changing moods, contradictions, and equivocalities. (This subjective identity,
achieved through binding oneself in promises, must be distinguished from the
"objective", i.e. object-related, identity that arises out of being confronted with the
sameness of the world which I mentioned in the discussion of work.) In this respect,
forgiving and making promises are like control mechanisms built into the very
faculty to start new and unending processes.
Without action, without the capacity to start something new and thus articulate
the new beginning that comes into the world with the birth of each human being, the
life of man, spent between birth and death, would indeed be doomed beyond salvation.
The life span itself, running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to
ruin and destruction. Action, with all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present
reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to
begin something new. I nilium ut essel homo creatus est -- "that there be a
beginning man was created," said Au~stine. With the creation of man, the principle
of beginning came into the world -- which, of course, is only another way of saying
that with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth.

42
 COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

Hannah Arendt

Although I agree with what I think are the two main statements of Mr.
Feinberg's paper, I must admit that I had some difficulty with it. My agreement
concerns his firm distinction between guilt and responsibility. "Collective responsi -
bility: he says, "is a special case of vicarious responsibility; and there can be no
such thing as vicarious guilt." In other words, there is such a thing as responsibility
for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them. But there is no such
thing as being or feeling guilty for things that happened without oneself actively
participating in them. This is an important point, worth making loudly and clearly
at a moment when so many good white liberals confess to guilt feelings with respect
to the Negro question. I don't know how many precedents there are in history for
such misplaced feelings, but I do know that in post-War Germany, where similar
problems arose with respect to what had been done by the Hitler regime to Jews, the
cry "We are all guilty" that at first hearing sounded so very noble and tempting has
actually only served to exculpate to a considerable degree those who actually were
guilty. Where all are guilty, nobody is. Guilt, unlike responsibility, always singles
out; it is strictly personal. It refers to an act, not to intentions or potentialities. It is
only in a metaphorical sense that we can say we feel guilty for the sins of our
fathers or our people or mankind, in short, for deeds we have not done, although the
course of events may well make us pay for them. And since sentiments of guilt,
mens rea or bad conscience, the awareness of wrong doing, play such an important
role in our legal and moral judgement, it may be wise to refrain from such
metaphorical statements which, when taken literally, can only lead into a phony
sentimentality in which all real issues are obscured.
Mr. Feinberg himself, I am afraid, sometimes comes dangerously close to
undoing his own clear distinction when he introduces the notion of "sympathetic
identification," stating that "any feeling one person can experience can be experienced
vicariously by some other imaginatively sensitive person." If this were true, then
there would indeed be such a phenomenon as vicarious guilt feeling; but Mr.
Feinberg also has his doubts about this-- "an authentically vicarious feeling, if there
'can be such a thing." We call compassion what I feel when somebody else
Bernauer, J. W. (ed), Arnor Mundi. ISBN 90·247-3483-5.
© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands. 43
 Hannah Arendt

suffers; and this feeling is authentic only so long as I realize that it is, after all, not
I but somebody else who suffers. But it is true, I think, that "solidarity is a neces -
sary condition" for such emotions; which, in our case of collective gUilt feelings
would mean that the cry "We are all guilty" is actually a declaration of solidarity with
the wrongdoers.
I don't know when the term "collective responsibility" first made its appearance,
but I am reasonably sure that not only the term but also the problems it implies owe
their relevance and general interest to political predicaments as distinguished from
legal or moral ones. My difficulty with Mr. Feinberg's paper is not that he omits
this dimension of the question--he discusses political problems in the last part of his
paper--but that he tries from the beginning to construe all issues according to models
which are either legally or morally relevant, so that the political issue appears to be
not more than a special case of matters that are subject to normal legal proceedings or
normal moral judgements. Mr. Feinberg distinguishes between legal and moral
standards; moral standards are stricter than standards of legal culpability, the distinc -
tion, he thinks, is a matter of degree. I am not sure that I would altogether agree;
gambling, for instance, is legally wrong, at least in this country; although I am not a
professional gambler my moral standards in this matter are considerably less strict.
But I do agree that legal and moral standards have one very important thing in
common--they always relate to the person and what the person has done; if the person
happens to be involved in a common undertaking as in the case of organized crime,
what is to be judged is still this very person, the degree of his participation, his
specific role, and so on, and not the group. The fact of his membership plays a role
ouly insofar as it makes his having committed a crime more probable; and this is in
principle not different from bad reputation or having a criminal record. Whether the
defendant was a member of the Mafia or a member of the SS or some other criminal
or political organization, assuring us that he was a mere cog who acted only upon
superior orders and did what everybody else would have done just as well, the
moment he appears in a Court of Justice he appears as a person and is judged accord -
ing to what he did. It is the grandeur of Court proceedings that even a cog can
become a person again. And the same seems true to an even higher degree for moral
judgement, for which the excuse: My only alternative would have led to suicide, is
not as binding as it is for legal proceedings. It is not a case ofresponsibility but of
guilt
It seems to me that Mr. Feinberg, by the choice of his models, blurs the very
distinction between responsibility and gUilt which was his own point of departure.
No collective responsibility is involved in the case of the thousand experienced
swimmers, lolling at a public beach and letting a man drown in the sea without
coming to his help, because they were no collectivity to begin with; no collective
responsibility is involved in the case of conspiracy to rob a bank, because here the
44
 Collective Responsibility

fault is not vicarious; what is involved are various degrees of guilt. And if, as in the
case of the post-bellum Southern social system, only the "alienated residents" or the
"outcasts" are innocent, we have again a clear-<:ut case of guilt; for all the others have
indeed done something which is by no means "vicarious."
Still following Mr. Feinberg's argument, I would say that two conditions have
to be present for collective responsibility: I must be held responsible for something
I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must be my membership in a
group (a collective) which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve, that is, a
membership which is utterly unlike a business partnership which I can dissolve at
will. The question of "contributory group fault" must be left in abeyance because
every participation is already non-vicarious. This kind of responsibility in my opin -
ion is always political, whether it appears in the older form, when a whole
community takes it upon itself to be responsible for whatever one of its members
has done, or whether a community is being held responsible for what has been done
in its name. The latter case is of course of greater interest for us because it applies,
for better and worse, to all political communities and not only to representative
government. Every government assumes responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of
its predecessors and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past. This is even
true for revolutionary governments which may deny liability for contractual
agreements their predecessors have entered into. When Napoleon Bonaparte became
the ruler of France, he said: I assume responsibility for everything France has done
from the times of Charlemagne to the terror of Robespierre. In other words, he said,
all this was done in my name to the extent that I am a member of this nation and the
representative of this body politic. In this sense, we are always held responsible for
the sins of our fathers as we reap the rewards of their merits; but we are of course not
guilty of their misdeeds, either morally or legally, nor can we ascribe their deeds to
our own merits.
We can escape this political and strictly collective responsibility only by
leaving the community, and since no man can live without belonging to some
community, this would simply mean to exchange one community for another and
hence one kind of responsibility for another. It is true that the twentieth century has
created a category of men who were truly outcasts, belonging to no internationally
recognizable community whatever, the refugees and stateless people, who indeed can
not be held politically responsible for anything. Politically, regardless of their group
or individual character, they are the absolutely innocent ones; and it is precisely this
absolute innocence that condemns them to a position outside, as it were, of mankind
as a whole. If there were such a thing as collective, namely vicarious guilt, this
would be the case of collective, namely, vicarious innocence. Actually, they are the
only totally non-responsible people; and while we usually think of responsibility,
especially collective responsibility, as a burden and even as a kind of punishment, I
45
 Hannah Arendt

think it can be shown that the price paid for collective non-responsibility is
considerably higher.
What I am driving at here is a sharper dividing line between political (collective)
responsibility, on one side, and moral and/or legal (personal) guilt, on the other, and
what I have chiefly in mind are those frequent cases in which moral and political
considerations and moral and political standards of conduct come into conflict. The
main difficulty in discussing these matters seems to lie in the very disturbing ambi -
guity of the words we use in discussions of these issues, to wit, morality or ethics.
Both words mean originally no more than customs or manners and then, in an
elevated sense, the customs and manners that are most appropriate for the citizen.
From the Nichomachean Ethics to Cicero, ethics or morals were part of politics, that
part that dealt not with the institutions but with the citizen, and all the virtues in
Greece or in Rome are definitely political virtues. The question is never whether an
individual is good but whether his conduct is good for the world he lives in. In the
center of interest is the world and not the self. When we talk about moral questions,
including the question of conscience, we mean something altogether different,
something, as a matter of fact, for which we don't have a ready-made word. On the
other hand, since we use these ancient words in our discussions, this very old and
very different connotation is always present. There is one exception where moral
considerations in our sense can be detected in a classical text, and that is the Socratic
proposition, It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, which I shall have to
discuss in a moment. Before doing so, I would like to mention another difficulty
which comes from the opposite side, as it were, namely from the side of religion.
That moral matters concern such a thing as the well-being of a soul rather than that
of the world is of course part and parcel of the Hebrew-Christian heritage. If, for
instance--to give the most common example from Greek antiquity--in Aeschylus
Orestes kills his mother upou the strict command of Apollo and is then, neverthe -
less, haunted by the Erinyes, it is the order of the world that has twice been disturbed
and must be restored. Orestes did the right thing when he avenged the death of his
father and killed his mother; and still he was guilty because he had violated another
"taboo," as we would say today. The tragedy is that only an evil deed can pay back
the original crime, and the solution, as we all know, is brought about by Athene or
rather by the foundation of a Tribunal which from now on will take it upon itself to
maintain the right order and lift the curse of an unending chain of evil doing which
was necessary to maintain the order of the world. It is the Greek version of the
Christian insight that every resisting [of] the evil done in the world necessarily en -
tails some implication in evil, and the solution of the predicament for the individual.
With the rise of Christianity, the emphasis shifted entirely from care for the
world and the duties connected with it to care for the soul and its salvation. In the
early centuries, the polarization of the two was absolute; the epistles in the New
46
 Collective Responsibility

Testament are full of recommendations to shun public, political involvement and to

mind one's own, strictly private business, caring for one's soul--until Tertullian
summed up this attitude nee ulla magis res aliena quam publica -- "no matter is more
alien to us than what matters publicly." What we even today understand by moral
standards and prescriptions has this Christian background; it is still in the line of this
thinking that Mr. Feinberg ,claims stricter standards of culpability in the moral, as
distinguished from the legal, point of view. In present-day thinking about these
matters, the standards of strictness are obviously the highest for moral matters, the
lowest for matters of customs and manners, whereas legal standards are somewhere in
between. My point here is that morality owes this high position in our hierarchy of
"values" to its religious origin; whether the divine law prescribing the rules of
human conduct was understood to be directly revealed as in the Ten Commandments
or indirectly as in natural law notions, is of no importance in this context. The rules
were absolute because of their divine origin, and their sanctions consisted in "future
rewards and punishments." It is more than doubtful that these originally religiously
rooted rules of conduct can survive the loss of faith in their origin and, especially, the
loss of transcendent sanctions. (John Adams, in a strangely prophetic way, predicted
that this loss would "make murder as indifferent as shooting plover, and the exter-
mination of the Rohilla nation as innocent as the swallowing of mites on a morsel
of cheese. ") As far as I can see, there are but two of the Ten Commandments to
which we still feel morally bound, the "Thou shalt not kill" and the "Thou shalt not
bear false witness"; and these two have recently been quite successfully challenged by
Hitler and Stalin respectively.
In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the
center of political considerations of conduct stands the world. If we strip moral
imperatives of their religious connotations and origins, we are left with the Socratic
proposition: It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and its strange substan -
tiation: "For it is better for me to be at odds with the whole world than, being one,
to be at odds with myself." However we may interpret this invocation of the axiom
of non-contradiction in moral matters, as though the one and the same imperative:
Thou shalt not contradict yourself, is axiomatic for logics and ethics (which inciden -
tally is still Kant's chief argument for the Categorical Imperative), one thing seems
clear: the presupposition is that I live together not only with others but also with
my self, and that this togetherness, as it were, has precedence over all others. The
political answer to the Socratic proposition would be: What is important in the
world is that there be no wrong; suffering wrong and doing wrong are equally bad.
Never mind who suffers it; your duty is to prevent it. Or, to invoke for brevity'S
sake another famous saying, this time of Machiavelli who precisely for this reason
wanted to teach Princes "how not to be good": writing about Florentine patriots who
had dared to defy the Pope, he praised them because they had shown "how much
47
 Hannah Arendt

higher they placed their city than their souls." Where religious language speaks of
the soul, secular language speaks of the self.
There are many ways in which political and moral standards of conduct can
come into conflict with each other, and in political theory they are usually dealt with
in connection with the reason-of-state doctrine and its so-called double standard of
morality. We are here concerned with only one special case, with the case of
collective and vicarious responsibility in which the member of a community is held
responsible for things he did not participate in but which were done in his name.
Such non-participation can have many causes: the form of government of the coun -
try may be such that its inhabitants, or large strata of them, are not admitted to the
public realm at all so that non-participation is not a matter of choice. Or, on the
contrary, in free countries a certain group of citizens may not want to participate,
to have anything to do with politics, but not for moral reasons but simply because
they have chosen to take advantage of one of our liberties, the one usually not
mentioned when we count our freedoms because it is so much taken for granted, and
that is freedom from politics. This freedom was unknown in antiquity, and it has
been quite effectively abolished in a number of twentieth-century dictatorships,
especially of course in the totalitarian variety. In contrast to absolutism and other
forms of tyranny, where non-participation was a matter of course and not of choice,
we deal here with a situation where participation, and that as we know can mean
complicity in criminal activities, is a matter of course, and non-participation a matter
of decision. And we have finally the case in free countries where non-participation is
actually a form of resistance--as in the case of those who refuse to be drafted into the
war in Vietnam. This resistance is often argued on moral grounds; but so long as
there is freedom of association and with it the hope that resistance in the form of
refusal to participate will bring about a change of policy, it is essentially political.
What is in the center of consideration is not the self--I don't go because I don't want
to dirty my hands, which, of course, may also be a valid argument--but the fate of the
nation and its conduct toward other nations in the world.
Non-participation in the political affairs of the world has always been open to
the reproach of irresponsibility, of shirking one's duties toward the world we share
with one another and the community we belong to. And this reproach is by no
means successfully countered if non-participation is argued on moral grounds. We
know from recent experiences that active and sometimes heroic resistance to evil
governments comes much rather from men and women who participated in them than
from outsiders whe were innocent of any guilt. This is true, as a rule with excep -
tions, for the German resistance against Hitler and is even truer for the few cases of
rebellion against communist regimes. Hungary and Czechoslovakia are cases in
point. Otto Kirchheimer, discussing these matters from a legal viewpoint, (in his
Political Justice), rightly stressed that for the question of legal or moral innocence,
48
 Collective Responsibility

namely absence of any complicity in crimes committed by a regime, "active resis -

tance" would be an "illusory yardstick, withdrawal from significant participation in
public life, ... willingness to disappear into oblivion" and obscurity "is a standard
which may be rightfully imposed by those sitting in judgement." (p. 331f) By the
same token, though, he somehow justifies those defendants who said that their sense
for responsibility did not permit them to choose this way; that they served in order to
prevent worse, etc. -- arguments, which, to be sure, in the case of the Hitler regime
sounded rather absurd and indeed usually were not much more than hypocritical
rationalizations of an ardent desire to pursue one's career, but that is another matter.
True is that the non-participants were not resisters and that they did not believe that
their attitude had any political consequences.
What the moral argument, which I quoted in the form of the Socratic
proposition, actually says is about the following: If I would do what is now
demanded of me as the price of participation, either as mere conformism or even as
the only chance of eventually successful resistance, I could no longer live with
myself; my life would cease to be worthwhile for me. Hence, I much rather suffer
wrong now, and even pay the price of a death penalty in case I am forced to
participate, than do wrong and then have to live together with such a wrong-doer. If
it is a question of kilIing--the argument would not be that the world would be better
off without the murder being done but the unwillingness to live with an assassin.
This argument, it seems to me, is unanswerable from even the strictest political
point of view, but it is clearly an argument which can be valid only in extreme, that
is, in marginal situations. It is often such situations which are most apt to bring
clarification into otherwise rather obscure and equivocal matters. The marginal situa -
tion in which moral propositions become absolutely valid in the realm of politics is
impotence. Powerlessness which always presupposes isolation is a valid excuse for
doing nothing. The trouble with this argument is of course that it is entirely subjec -
tive; its authenticity can be demonstrated only by the willingness to suffer. There are
no general rules, as in legal proceedings, which could be applied and which would be
valid for all. But this, I am afraid, will be the bale of all moral judgements which are
not supported by or derived from religious commands. Socrates, as we know, was
never able to prove his proposition; and Kant's Categorical Imperative, the only com -
petitor as a strictly non-religious and non-political moral prescription, cannot be
proved either. The even deeper trouble with the argument is that it is applicable ouly
to people who are used to live explicitly also with themselves, which is only another
way of saying that its validity will be plausible only to men who have a conscience;
and, the prejudices of jurisprudence that so often in perplexity appeals to conscience
as something every sane man must have notwithstanding, the evidence is that quite a
number of men have it, but by no means all, and that those who have it can be found
in all walks of life and, more specifically, on all degrees of education and non-
49
 Hannah Arendt

education. No objective sign of social or educational standing can assure its presence
or absence.
The only activity that seems to correspond to these secular moral propositions
and to validate them, is the activity of thinking, which in its most general, entirely
non-specialized sense can be defined with Plato as the silent dialogue between me and
myself. If applied to matters of conduct, the faculty of imagination would be
involved in such thought to a high degree, that is, the ability to represent, to make
present to myself what is still absent--any contemplated deed. To what extent this
faculty of thought, which is exercised in solitude, extends into the strictly political
sphere, where I am always together with others, is another question. But whatever
our answer to this question, hopefully to be answered by political philosophy, might
turn out to be, no moral, individual and personal, standards of conduct will ever be
able to excuse us from collective responsibility. This vicarious responsibility for
things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we
are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by
ourselves but among our fellowmen, and that the faculty of action, which, after all,
is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only in one of the many and
manifold forms of human community.

50
 THE DEPUTY:
Guilt by Silence?

Hannah Arendt

Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy has been called "the most controversial liter -
ary work of this generation," and in view of the controversy it has aroused in Europe
and is about to arouse in this country, this superlative seems justified. The play
deals with the alleged failure of Pope Pius XII to make an unequivocal public
statement on the massacre of European Jews during World War II, and concerns by
implication Vatican policy toward the Third Reich.
The facts themselves are not in dispute. No one has denied that the Pope was in
possession of all pertinent information regarding the Nazi deportation and "resettle -
ment" of Jews. No one has denied that the Pope did not even raise his voice in pro -
test when, during the German occupation of Rome, the Jews, including Catholic
Jews (that is, Jews converted to Catholicism), were rounded up, right under the
windows of the Vatican, to be included in the Final Solution. Thus, Hochhuth's
play might as well be called the most factual literary work of this generation as "the
most controversial." The play is almost a report, closely documented on all sides,
using actual events and real people, reinforced by 65 pages of "historical sidelights"
written by Hochhuth and anticipating nearly all arguments that have been raised
against it The author himself seems at least as interested in literal, factual truth as
he is in literary quality, for he says almost apologetically in his "sidelights" that for
artistic reasons he had "to advance a better opinion of Pius XII than may be
historically justified, and a better one than I privately hold." With this sentence
however, he touches upon one of the really controversial-that is, debatable-points at
issue: Is it true, as Hochhuth clearly thinks, that the Vatican would not have been
silent "had there been a better Pope"?
There have been a few instances in which the Church tried to dodge the grave
issues at stake either by imputing a thesis to the play which it does not contain-
nowhere does Hochhuth claim that "Pope Pius was responsible for Auschwitz" or
that he was the "arch-culprit" of this period-or by referring to the help given to Jews
by the local hierarchy in some countries. The fact that local hierarchies did so,
Bernauer. 1. W. (ed). Amor Mundi. ISBN 90-247-3483-5.
© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers,Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands. 51
 Hannah Arendt

especially in France and Italy, was never in dispute. To what extent the Pope initi -
ated or even supported these activities is not known, since the Vatican does not open
its archives for contemporary history. But it may be assumed that most of the good
as well as the bad done must be ascribed to local and often, I suspect, to strictly indi -
vidual initiative. "During the deportation of Catholic Jews from Holland," Hochhuth
reports, "a dozen members of various orders were actually handed over from Dutch
religious houses." But who would dare blame Rome for that? And since another
question Hochhuth raises-"How could the Gestapo have discovered that this one nun
(Edith Stein, a German convert and famous philosophical writer) had Jewish blood?"-
has never been answered, who would blame Rome for that? But by the same token,
the Church as an institution can hardly book on her account the few great
demonstrations of true Christian charity-the distribution of forged documents to thou -
sands of Jews in Southern France in order to facilitate their emigration; the attempt
of Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg of S1. Hedwig's CathedraI in Berlin to accompany
the Jews to the East; the martyrdom of Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest in
Auschwitz, to quote only some of the best known examples.
What the Church as an institution and the Pope as her sovereign ruler can book
on their account is the systematic work of information done by the nuncios allover
Nazi-occupied Europe to enlighten at least the heads of government in Catholic
countries-France, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania-about the true, murderous meaning of
the word "resettlement" This was important because the moral and spiritual
authority of the Pope vouched for the truth of what otherwise could be only too
easily dismissed as enemy propaganda, especially in countries that welcomed this op -
portunity of "solving the Jewish question," though not at the price of mass- murder.
However, the Vatican's exclusive use of diplomatic channels meant also that the
Pope did not think fit to tell the people-for instance, the Hungarian Gendarmerie, all
good Catholics, who were busy rounding up Jews for the Eichmann Kommando in
Budapest-and, by implication, seemed to discourage the bishops (if such discourage -
ment was necessary) from telling their flocks. What has appeared-first to the victims
and the survivors, then to Hochhuth, and finally through him to many others-as such
outrageous inadequacy was the frightening equanimity which the Vatican and its
nuncios apparently thought it wise to affect, the rigid adherence to a normality that
no longer existed in view of the collapse of the whole moral and spiritual structure
of Europe. At the end of the fourth act of "The Deputy," Hochhuth uses a quotation
from a public statement of Pope Pius, changing only one word: where Pius had said
"Poles," Hochhuth has Pius say "Jews," as follows: "As the flowers in the country -
side wait beneath winter's mantle of snow for the warm breezes of spring, so the
Jews must wait praying and trusting that the hour of heavenly comfort wiIl come."
It is a prime example not merely of what Hochhuth has called "Pacelli's flowery 10 -
quacity" but of something more common, a disastrous loss of all feeling for reality.
52
 The Deputy

Still, what the Vatican did during the war years, when the Pope was the only
man in Europe free from any taint of propaganda, was considerably more than
nothing, and it would have been enough if it were not for the uncomfortable fact that
the man on St. Peter's chair is no ordinary ruler but "the Vicar of Christ." Regarded
as a secular ruler, the Pope did what most, though not all, secular rulers did under the
circumstances. Regarded as an institution among institutions, the Church's inclina -
tion to accommodate "itself to any regime which affirms its willingness to respect
Church property and prerogatives" (which Nazi Germany, but not Soviet Russia, at
least pretended to do) has understandably almost become, as Gordon Zahn, a
distinguished Catholic sociologist, has said, "an unchallengeable truism in Catholic
political philosophy." But the Pope's negligible secular power-as ruler of fewer than
a thousand inhabitants of Vatican City-depends "upon the spiritual sovereignty of the
Holy See" which is indeed sui generis and wields an enormous, though imponderable
"world spiritual authority." The matter is succinctly summed up in Stalin's remark,
"How many divisions has the Pope?" and in Churchill's answer, "A number of
legions not always visible on parade." The accusation levelled by Hochhuth against
Rome is that the Pope failed to mobilize these legions-roughly 400 million allover
the earth.
The answer from the side of the Church up to now has fallen into three parts.
First, there are the words of Cardinal Montini before he became Pope Paul VI: "An
attitude of protest and condemnation ...would have been not only futile but harmful:
that is the long and the short of the matter." (This seems a very debatable point,
since more than 40 per cent of the Reich's population was Catholic at the outbreak of
the war and almost all Nazi-occupied countries as well as most of Germany's allies
had Catholic majorities.) Second, much less profiled but actually the argument that
validates the first claim, these legions could not be mobilized by Rome. (This
argument has more force. The view that the "Catholic Church [compared with the
Protestant Church] bears the greater guilt, for it was an organized, supra-natioual
power in a position to do something," as Albert Schweitzer has argued in his preface
to the Grove Press edition of the play may have overestimated the Pope's power and
underestimated the extent to which he depends upon the national hierarchies and the
extent to which the local episcopate depends upon its flocks. And it can hardly be
denied than an ex cathedra pronouncement of the Pope in the midst of the war might
have caused a schism.)
The third argument on the side of the Church rests on the necessity for the
Church to remain neutral in case of war, even though this neutrality-the fact that in
modem wars the bishops always bless the armies on either side-implies that the old
Catholic distinction between just and unjust war has become practically inapplicable.
(Obviously, this was the price the Church had to pay for the separation of Church
and State and the resulting generally smooth and peaceful co-existence of an
53
 Hannah Arendt

international spiritual sovereignty, binding the local hierarchy in ecclesiastical

matters only, with the national secular authority of the state.)
Even if the Pope had seen in Hitler's wars "the classic example of the unjust
war," as Zahn has characterized it-which he evidently did not- since according to one
of his secretaries, Father Robert Leiber, he had always looked upon Russian
Bolshevism as more dangerous than German National Socialism" (quoted from the
very informative article by Guenter Lewy, "Pius XII, the Jews, and the German
Catholic Church," in Commentary)-he almost certainly would not have intervened. l
The point of the matter is rather that despite his conviction "that the fate of Europe
depended upon a German victory on the Eastern front" (Lewy), and though very
prominent figures in the German and Italian hierarchy tried to persuade him "to
declare [the war against Russia] a holy war or crusade," the Pope maintained publicly
what another historian, Robert A. Graham, S.J., has called a "significant silence."
And this silence is all the more significant as the Pope had broken his neutrality
twice-first at the occasion of Russia's attack on Finland, and shortly thereafter when
Germany violated the neutrality of Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg.
However one may try to reconcile these apparent contradictions, there can hardly
be any doubt that one reason why the Vatican did not protest against the massacres in
the East, where, after all, not only Jews and gypsies but Poles and Polish priests
were involved, was the mistaken notion that these killing operations were part and
parcel of the war. The very fact that the Nuremberg Trials also counted these atro -
cities, which had not the slightest connection with military operations, among "war
crimes" shows how plausible this argument must have sounded during the war.
Despite a whole literature on the criminal nature of Totalitarianism, it is as though
the world has needed nearly two decades to realize what actually had happened in those
few years and how disastrously almost all men in high public position had failed to
understand even when they were in possession of all factual data.
Yet even if we take all this into account, it is not possible to let the matter rest
there. Hochhuth's play concerns Rome's attitude during the massacres, certainly the
most dramatic moment of the whole development; only marginally does it concern
the relations between German Catholicism and the Third Reich in the preceding years
and the role played by the Vatican under Pacelli's predecessor, Pope Pius XI. To a
certain extent, the culpability of "official Christianity in Germany" has been settled,
especially its Catholic page. Prominent Catholic scholars-Gordon Zahn, already
mentioned, at Loyola University in this country, the eminent historian Friedrich Heer
in Austria, the group of writers and publicists around the Frankfurter Hefte in
Germany, and for the early period of the Hitler regime the late Waldemar Gurian,
professor at Notre Dame University-have done a remarkably thorough job, fully

54
 The Deputy

aware, of course, that German Protestantism would fare hardly better, and possibly
even worse if studied in the same admirable spirit of truthfulness.
Heer notes that it is a matter of public record that Catholics who tried to resist
Hitler" could count on the sympathy of their church leaders neither in prison, nor on
the scaffold." And Zabn tells the incredible story of two men who, having refused to
serve in the war because of their Christian faith, were denied the sacraments by the
prison chaplains until just before they were to be executed. (They were accused of
"disobedience" to their spiritual leaders-suspect, one may assume, of seeking martyr -
dom and of the sin of perfectionism.)
All this proves no more and no less than that Catholics behaved in no way
differently from the rest of the population. And this had been obvious from the very
beginning of the new regime. The German episcopate had condemned racism, neo-
Paganism, and the rest of the Nazi ideology in 1930 (one of the diocesan authorities
went so far as to forbid "Catholics to become registered members of the Hitler party
under pain of being excluded from the sacraments") and then it withdrew all prohibi -
tions and warnings promptly in March 1933-that is, at the very moment when all
public organizations (with the exception, Qf course, of the Communist party and its
affiliations) were "co-ordinated." To be sure, this came after the election of March
5th when, as Waldemar Gurian had noted in 1936 in his Hitler and the Christians, it
had become "clear, especially in Bavaria, that even Catholics had succumbed to the
National Socialist whirlwind." All that remained of the former solemn condemna -
tions was a not too prominent warning against "an exclusive preoccupation with race
and blood" (italics added), in one of the pastoral letters signed by all bishops and
issued from Fulda. And when shortly thereafter the help of the churches was enlisted
in determining all persons of Jewish descent, "the Church co-operated as a matter of
course," and continued to do so right to the bitter end, Guenter Lewy reported in
Commentary. Hence, the German shepherds followed their flocks, they did not lead
them. And if it is true that "the conduct of the French, Belgian and Dutch bishops"
in the war years "stands in marked contrast to the conduct" of their German brethren,
one is tempted to conclude that this was, at least partly, due to the different conduct
of the French, Belgian, and Dutch people.
However, what may be true with respect to the national hierarchies is certainly
not true for Rome. The Holy See had its own policy with regard to the Third Reich,
and up to the outbreak of the war this policy was even a shade friendlier than that of
the German episcopate. Thus, Waldemar Gurian observed that prior to the Nazi
seizure of power, when in 1930 the German bishops had condemned the National
Socialist party, the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, "pointed out that the
condemnation of its religious and cultural program did not necessarily imply refusal
to co-operate politically," while, on the other hand, neither the Dutch bishops' pro -

55
 Hannah Arendt

testation against the deportation of Jews nor Galen's condemation of euthanasia were
ever backed by Rome. The Vatican, it will be remembered, signed a Concordat with
the Hitler regime in the summer of 1933, and Pius XI, who even before had praised
Hitler "as the first statesman to join him in open disavowal of Bolshevism," thus
became, in the words of the German bishops, "the first foreign sovereign to extend to
(Hitler) the handclasp of trust." The Concordat was never terminated, either by Pius
XI or by his successor.
Moreover, the excommunication of the Action Francaise, a French group of the
extreme right whose teachings of a catholicisme cerebral had been condemned in
1926 as heresy, was withdrawn by Pius XII in July 1939 - that is, at a time when
the group was no longer merely reactionary but outright fascist. No prudence, final -
ly, and no considerations for the difficult position of local, national hierarchies
prevailed when, in July 1949, the Holy Office excommunicated all persons "who
were members of the Communist Party, or furthered its aims," including those who
read Communist books and magazines or wrote for them, and renewed this decree in
April 1959. (That socialism is irreconcilable with the teachings of the Church had
been stated before, in 1931, by Pius Xl's encyclical Ouadragesimo anno.
Encyclicals, incidentally, are not identical with ex·cathedra pronouncements in which
alone the Pope claims to be "infallible." But there can hardly be any doubt about
their binding authority for the majority of the believers.) And even long after the
war, when we read in the official Catholic Encyclopedia in Germany (Herder) that
communism "is the greatest and most cruel persecutor of Christian churches since the
Roman Empire," Naziism is not even mentioned. The Nazi regime had started
violating the provisions of the Concordat before the ink on it was dry, but all the
time it was in force there had been only one strong protest against the Third Reich--
Pius Xl's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Care) of 1937. It
condemned "heathenism" and warned against elevating racist and national values to
absolute priority, but the words "Jew" or "anti-Semitism" do not occur, and it is
chiefly concerned with the anti-Catholic and especially the anti-clerical slander
campaign of the Nazi party. Neither racism in general nor anti·Semitism in particu -
lar has ever been absolutely condemned by the Church. There exists the strangely
moving story of the German-Jewish nun, Edith Stein, already mentioned, who, in
1938, still unmolested in her German convent, wrote a letter to Pius XI, asking him
to issue an encyclical about the Jews. That she did not succeed is not surprising, but
is it also so natural that she never received an answer?
Hence, the political record of Vatican policies between 1933 and 1945 is reason -
ably clear. Only its motives are open to dispute. Obviously the record was shaped
by the fear of communism and of Soviet Russia, although without Hitler's help
Russia would hardly have been able or even willing to occupy half of Europe. This
error in judgment is understandable and was widespread, and the same can be said
56
 The Deputy

about the Church's inability to judge correctly the total evil of Hitler's Germany.
The worst one can say--and it has been said frequently--is that Catholic "medieval
anti-Semitism" must be blamed for the Pope's silence about the massacres of the
Jews. Hochhuth touches upon the matter in passing, but wisely, left it out of his
play because he "wanted to keep only to provable facts."
Even if it could be proved that the Vatican approved of a certain amount of anti-
Semitism among the faithful--and this anti-Semitism, where it existed, was quite up
to date although not racist: it saw in the modem assimilated Jews an "element of
decomposition" of Western culture--it would be quite beside the point. For Catholic
anti-Semitism had two limitations which it could not transgress without contradict -
ing Catholic dogma and the efficacy of the sacraments--it could not agree to the
gassing of the Jews any more than it could agree to the gassing of the mentally ill,
and it could not extend its anti-Jewish sentiments to those who were baptized. Could
these matters also be left to the decision of the national hierarchies? Were they not
matters of the highest ecclesiastical order, subject to the authority of the head of the
Church?
For, in the beginuing, they were understood as such. When the Nazi govern -
ment's intention to issue race laws which would forbid mixed marriages became
known, the Church warned the German authorities that she could not comply and
tried to persuade them that such laws would run counter to the provisions of the
Concordat. However, this was difficult to prove. The Concordat stipulated "the right
of the Catholic Church to settle her own affairs independently within the limits of
universally binding laws" (italics added), and this meant of course that a civil
ceremony had to precede the receiving of the marriage sacrament in Church. The
Nuremberg laws put the German clergy into the impossible position of having to
withhold the sacraments from persons of the Catholic faith who according to
ecclesiastical law were entitled to them. Wasn't this a matter of Vatican jurisdiction?
In any event, when the German hierarchy decided to conform to these laws, which
implicitly denied that a baptized Jew was a Christian and belonged to the Church like
everybody else, with equal rights and duties, something very serious had happened.
From then on, the segregation of Catholics of Jewish descent within the
German Church became a matter of course. And in 1941, when the deportations of
Jews from Germany began, the bishops of Cologne and Paderborn could actually
recommend "that non-Aryan or half-Aryan priests and nuns volunteer to accompany
the deportees" to the East (Guenter Lewy in Commentary)--that is, those mambers of
the Church who were subject to deportation anyhow. I can't help thinking that if
there was any group of people during the years of the Final Solution who were
more forsaken by all mankind than the Jews traveling to their death, it must have
been these Catholic "non-Aryans" who had left Judaism and who now were singled

57
 Hannah Arendt

out, as a group apart, by the highest dignitaries of the Church. We don't know what
they thought on their way to the gas charnbers--are there no survivors among them?--
but it is difficult to gainsay Hochhuth's remark that they were "abandoned by
everyone, abandoned even by the Deputy of Christ. So it was in Europe from 1941
to 1944."
Indeed "so it was," and against Hochhuth's "historical truth ... in its full ghastli -
ness" all protests that passivity was the best policy because it was the lesser evil, or
that disclosure of the truth comes "at the wrong psychological moment," are of no
avail. To be sure, no one can say what actually would have happened had the Pope
protested in public. But, quite apart from all immediate practical considerations, did
no one in Rome realize what so many inside and outside the Church at that time
realized, namely, that--in the words of Reinhold Schneider, the late German Catholic
writer--a protest against Hitler "would have elevated the Church to a position it has
not held since the Middle Ages"?
It has been Rolf Hochhuth's good fortune that a considerable part of Catholic
learned and public opinion has sided with him. Professor Gordon Zahn has praised
the play's "impressive historical accuracy." And Friedrich Heer in Austria has said all
there needs to be said about truth which, alas, always comes at the "wrong
psychological moment" and, in the period under discussion, would have come at the
wrong physical moment as well: "Only the truth will make us free. The whole truth
which is always awful."

1. Guenther Lewy's, "Pius xn, the Jews and the German Catholic Church" Commentary
(February, 1964) later became part of Lewy's major work The Catholic Church and Nazi
Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

58
 ENSPIRITED WORDS AND DEEDS:
Christian Metaphors Implicit in
Arendt's Concept of Personal Action

Timothy Roach

Hannah Arendt's reflective audacity found its classic expression in the vision of
political action rendered in The Human Condition. Here she essayed a philosophical
anthropology, daring to reinvest hwnan being with a personal dimension, irreducible
to its antecedent affinities with the course of all living being.! Arendt identified the
Greek experience of the polis as the paradigm of such personal disclosure:

The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win "immortal fame" ...
to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed
and word who he was in his unique distinctness.2

Precisely this quest to display one's uniqueness demarcated hwnan being from
the anonymity of other species being. The Greek experience suggested that, in so far
as men were to be distinctly human, their existence had to be political and render it -
self in the public world. Accordingly Arendt's reconstruction explicitly downplayed
the import of the Christian experience of personal being as a consequence of its
ostensibly unworldly ethic and its devaluation of the historical public realm. 3
Arendt's attempt to liberate the language of the person from its Christian basis
will be the theme of the following reflections. My argwnent will proceed on rather
speculative lines, being directed not at Arendt's explicit readings of Christian sym -
boIs, but at the tacit metaphorical implications of her own personal logic. I shall
contend that Arendt both faithfully educes the interrelations between person, action,
and story, yet relies on a Christian-inspired sensibility in evoking the deeper connota-
tions of this logic. Arendt also articulates a cogent logic of action faithful to what
can be styled a Greek sensibility; however, in so far as it aspires to be a personal
logic expressive of the unshareable uniqueness of the hwnan actor, her understanding
can not escape its primitive conflation of Greek and Christian metaphors of what it
Bernauer, J. W. led), Arnor Mundi. ISBN 90·247-3483-5.
©1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrechl. Printed in the Netherlands. 59
 Timothy Roach

means to be. Her resuscitation of the Western tradition bears witness, as she re-
marks, to the sea-change which transforms the sedimentary experiences and concepts
of our sensibility into something rare and'strange; it illuminates the symbolic aliena -
tion of modem man whose explicit intentions and utterances conceal from him the
richer and embrangled heritage of speech and act which inspire him to speak and act
as he does.
Arendt's reflections will be explored and admittedly exploited as follows. An
initial elaboration must be given of the meaning of Greek and Hebraic-Christian
sensibilities. Informed by this perspective, Arendt's interpretation of the active life
will be surveyed as to its constitution of human uniqueness. Two models of this
uniqueness will be delineated. A somewhat abbreviated account of a publicly identi -
fiable and worldly logic of being will be distilled and acknowledged as indicative of
Arendt's allegiance to the Greek tradition. Finally the significant aspects of Arendt's
understanding of the person will be shown to require statement in Ii Christian-inspired
logic. Arendt's reconstruction will be appraised as a trenchant but tragic intuition of
the personal; having fiduciary commitments to two different metaphorical tokens of
the real, her valid insights into the person can not be confirmed in a universe of se -
cular discourse.

I shall assume the propriety of speaking of differing Greek and Hebraic-

Christian sensibilities, and propose that they emerge through distinct styles of
reweaving the elements of experience to resolve creatively the problem of its intel -
ligibility.4 The stories, myths, and histories of our tradition are evocative acts which
institute discrete patterns for grasping and saving the significant in reality. Further-
more, these grand constructions of the tradition evince the same structures of mean -
ing as can be distilled from basic metaphorical tokens of the real. Greek sensibility
construes meaningful order in a way homologous to the assembly of an ideal object
in vision -- which invokes the world in its explicit spatial relations, abstracted from
the temporal process by which it stabilizes its persistent features. The metaphorical
token of the real in Hebraic-Christian sensibility is borrowed from the auditory
sphere; here the perpetual novelty of time's sensuous succession is ordered by being
taken as the word of a speaker, whose faithfulness to the word both assures its mean -
ingful reiteration and subjects its interpretation to his own historical act of meaning.
In each sensibility, the conception of significant action is directly related to its token
of the real.
The Greek imagination strives to educe an eternal, impersonal cosmic order,
responsible for the finite, measured, proportioned, and therefore, significant elements
in reality. Actuality is shaped in accordance with the essential givens of this deeper
cosmic reality; novelty is assimilated into already-given patterns of the real.

60
 Enspirited Words and Deeds

Accordingly, existence is esteemed as an "aweful" contest between the elements of

resistance and the powers of the limit which bestow excellence and significance. Not
mere change, but change unable to bear recapitulable expression falls into non-
significance. Even the purported Greek emphasis on the cyclical nature of history or
the subordination of history to nature stems from this drive to strip the event of its
contingent features, to chart the immanent patterns by which things can be shown to
have happened, to happen, and to happen again.
In the polis, men are similarly obligated to shape themselves for the public eye
-- to shape their own nature and resistances into a constant character expressive of the
excellence of the human. Individuals appear quintessentially by acting in that
situation which most clearly manifests the distinctive shape of man at the breaking
point; one is human by daring to act, despite being ensconced within natural
substantia1ities (of inclination, family, city, or race) which threaten to unleash their
retributive forces precisely when one acts most typically according to character.
History unfolds a fateful intertwining of both character and events, which discloses
the conflict of one's nature with the higher harmonies of reality. One's character
becomes one's fate, one's fate one's character.
In these moments, the Greek hero seems to suffer his fate; he appears inherently
guilty, for he is born into a world which will test his limits in the antecedence of its
order, yet requires him to so act in order to be human. Not the mystery of the unique
personal will, but the antecedent determination of the polis upon the courses of
action in it is established as the law of human reality. Captured in the remembrance
of myth, poetry, and history, the fate of the Greek actor illuminates those limits of
nature which all humans confront to be human, which show all to be faulted, which
show the tragic situation of that greatly acting but encroaching being -- man.
Guided by the intentionality of an auditory logic, the Hebraic-Christian
sensibility attributes order in nature and history to the sovereignty of a creator God,
who stands to reality as does a speaker to his word. The source of order distingnishes
itself by its autonomy over the eventualities of given reality and over its own acts;
that is, God reveals himself as creator of nature and initiator of history. Meaning
becomes irreducibly personal, for the preservation of worldly and historical order can
be ascribed only to the faithfulness of God to his own freely chosen and willed acts.
Furthermore, God's accumulated history, the sum of his words and acts, offers clues
to his intention and will, while never hindering his will from acting in more
capacious deeds. Order is not premised on structures of reality that have always been
and will always be efficacious; all order becomes historically contingent on the novel
possibilities and purposes of God as rendered in his future acts.
God's transcendence of his created world and his encouragement of historical
novelty release human existence from an ontological guilt. Human existence is

61
 Timothy Roach

evaluated by its freely chosen faithfulness or unfaithfulness to God's will as revealed

in creation and history. Personal involvement in sin is historic rather than tragic, for
it originates in an idolatrous and deliberate consumption with self to the exclusion of
other creative and gratuitous possibilities. Human transcendence is discovered
through the experience of grace, repentance, and the empowerment of a new self.
Raised beyond the natural dichotomies of body and soul, and enspirited with a will
conforming to the community of God, man becomes imaged after God as a free and
willful historical actor.
This everpresent possibility of a miracnlous new beginning in grace links actor
to act in a more dialectical manner. Acceptance or rejection of this grace marks one's
life as a life of freedom in which one willfully and responsibly performs one's acts.
Impelled by the need to respond to the historical act of God, existence becomes tensed
with meaning; the integrity of the person's decision becomes the hermeneutic token
by which to understand the meaning of all the actor's commitments in word and deed.
Thus, each life is blessed from its beginning with meaning; its existence is historical
by its perpetual standing before the possibility of this commitment which re-defines
one's whole life. Consequently, no sequence of acts can declare the essence of the
person; only on the basis of understanding the person in this one "re-sounding" act
can all one's acts be constituted as a meaningful, rectilinear story. One's story can be
released from the characteristic course of its expression precisely by becoming a
history of one's spiritual relation to God. Therefore, the transcendence of the human
as an actor who freely performs his deeds fmds confirmation only in the transcendence
of a God who can judge the integrity of one's words and deeds and graciously
confirms persons in their unique histories.
To summarize, abstracted logics constructed according to visual and auditory
metaphors, as embodied respectively in Greek and Hebraic-Christian contexts, have
deposited in our tradition distinct approaches to the question of the person.
According to the visual Greek sensibility, the form of the person is rendered
explicitly and conclusively in the intertwined course of acts and events, in the story
imposed by character and fate. Dominant in this relation is the presiding sense of
order -- the conviction that the story of the hero is illuminated in a distilled and lucid
account of the wider harmony which controls both his greatness and fall. For the
Greek sensibility, the story of the hero is grasped by the aesthetic rationality of the
poet and the historian, who comprehend the story of the hero as an eternal gesture, an
eternal remembrance of the human form.
The auditory Hebraic-Christian logic precludes the tangible expression of the
actor. It drives the meaning of the actor's words and deeds to a spiritual level, on
which the backing of words and deeds receives accreditation only in the deeper history
of the person. Consequently, its conceptions of the person and history are

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necessarily theological; they demand the underpinning of stories, of their beginnings

and endings, in the presence of a God who, in his history and judgement, can extend
to, confmn, and hold each person to the integrity of his words and deeds. Within the
framework of these sensibilities, Arendt's attempt to rearticulate the concepts of actor
and person can be tested as to the intentional sway of its metaphors.

Arendt captures the essence of who one is and the problems of its disclosure in
the following:

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique
personal identities, and thus make their appearance in the world ... The
disclosure of "who" in contradistinction to "what" somebody is -- his quali-
ties, gifts, talents, and short-comings, which he may display or hide -- is
implicit in everything somebody says or does ...but it can almost never be
achieved as a willful purpose.s

Who one is is not constituted by the admittedly different (but not therefore
personally unique) givens of physical appearance, character, talents -- those traits in
terms of which what we are can be described, but which still do not call attention to
the specific powers of initiative with which each person is endowed as his own
prerogative. Rather Arendt suggests that who one is has to do with the unique
proprietorship bestowed upon one's life by one's active taking up of its
inexchangeable course. To anticipate, I propose that Arendt is asserting that the
uniqueness of who one is derives from the fact that each person, once life is given,
becomes the unique dispenser of that breath of life. Only each person can bind his
own metaphorical and literal breath of life to the words and actions of historical
reality. Arendt searches for this unique revelation in speech and action, because, in
these acts, we require the appearance of the person himself who gives them meaning
and validity by indwelling (indeed enspiriting) them as his own words and deeds with
the breath of his oWn life.
The intangible character of this binding contributes to the elusive character of
the who: stated graphically, all the person adds to word and deed is his breath of life
itself. Once performed, words and acts remain alone, the common property of all.
To avoid the consequent translation of who one uniquely is into what one is, Arendt
must circumscribe the sphere of activity in which one's unique binding of breath and
appearance transpires, and must articulate some medium by which the intangible
character of this binding can be mitigated.
In The Human Condition, Arendt attacks this problem by elucidating those
basic manners in which man responds actively to life as given on this earth. This
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 Timothy Roach

dialectic of appearance proceeds through labor, work, and action, and reveals
emblematic styles which men inhabit to exploit their basic bodily-being-in-the-
world. Arendt's reading of these styles justifies her contention that the unique who is
a speaking and acting creature of a public realm.
Exhausting itself in a pre-personal unworldly life of immediacy, the body of
animal laborans is sentenced to an ever-recurring cycle of consumption and
metabolism to forestall its own eventual consumption in the larger cycles of nature.
While labor thus sustains human life, it discloses the human only in its kinship with
all living things of nature "where no beginning and no end exist, and where all
natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition. "6 This form of life
precludes an adequate revelation of the distinct who; it reduces the individual to his
dependence on the anonymous givens of nature's process -- in which his unique
breath of life is consumed and passes away without remembrance.
Work redeems the futility of this process by creating a perdurable world -- the
fabricated world, the world of art and culture. This artificial world of men is "meant
to outlast and transcend them all"; it fashions the world an inhabited place by its
durability, reliability, and objectivity "by which men, their everchanging nature not
withstanding, can retrieve their sameness."7 Worldly objects stabilize human identity
by establishing routine ways of intercourse with things and other humans. The
world institutes a realm of conventional significances, engendering a common sense
of the real by its standing still for the repeated and shared judgement of various
perspectives on its public reality.
Nonetheless its basic structure is still designed for a disclosure other than that of
the unique who. While creating works which stand out against nature's cycles,
worldly man foregoes the revelation of his uniqueness to produce objective articulated
works able to be shared in by all humans. The sublimation of one's breathed
beginning in novel works of the human spirit is the price of worldly immortality. 8
Not an individual life is commemorated in these works, but the immortality of man
itself. They elicit the premise of worldly immortality -- that man was, is, and
always will be man, who finds in these works a common cipher to what it means to
be human. Only man registers a break in nature by creating a symbolic record of
what it means for him to exist. Worldly works call attention to the basis of worldly
reality -- which is to be human, for only humans are not identified with their world,
but instead have a world. Not one's uniqueness, but one's "humanness" is mediated
by work and participation in the world.
This discussion of worldly symbolic works must be extended to language, for
the nature of linguistic utterance will become paramount in the analysis of action. A
quite worldly, almost tool-like interpretation of language can be developed, in so far
as language exploits the ability of human beings to fashion conventional tokens.

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Here language appears as a structured set of words, meanings, grammatical rules, and
paradigms of rhetoric, which every human tacitly honors to appeal to other humans.
These conventional tokens are assumed to maintain their sense as they are used by
different persons to illuminate the world. Language exhibits an impersonal character,
a flxed signification which varies only within limits as it is used to point out
different constellations of facts and events in the world. This ostensive, impersonal
role of language presupposes that its users dwell in a common world whose
structures are already understood, and need only be referred to in order to clarify the
meaning of any utterance. To take up such a language is less a personal act than
allegiance to a prescriptive sense of reference, whose flnal arbiter is the clear structure
of relations in a common world. One agrees to view one's world and existence in
terms of what can be seen through the idiom of the word as it has already been
defmitively delineated in its shared signiflcance.
Therefore, this linguistic imperative establishes what will be referred to as a
third-person view of language and the world. Abstractly stated, this view entails that
the meaningful is only divulged within those statements which take the form of third
person reports about the world. This imperative strips the personal "I" of special
signiflcance in the realm of discourse; it ostensibly adds nothing to the meaning of
what happened to say "1 saw x happen at y." A third-person report would translate
this expression as "he saw x happen at y" or, more to the point, "x happened at y."
If something is to be said meaningfully, it is presupposed that every other individual
must be able to utter it as well, and that its denotation be clear by reference to the
words and the common world alone. One's vantage point in the world is as a user of
the common forms and tokens of language; only what can be stated in these forms
can be meaningfully appraised.9 One's perspective on the world is not as the unique
user of the word "I" and its bearing when one takes it up, but as one user, whose
perspective could be assumed by anyone of other users, of the tokens and meanings
of a common language. With this view of language in mind, speech and action can
be addressed, with attention to the influence of this third-person language and a
competing view of language which accepts the importance of the intrusion of the
flrst-person "I" into discourse.
In the realm of action, Arendt espies a sphere in which the life sustained by the
anonymous laboring process, and the world shared in its conventional signiflcance,
can be relied upon to permit the disclosure of unique persons. Only here is the dis -
tinct human identity paramount -- the inexchangeable identity created by the unshared
beginning, the unique course of actions, and the flnal consummating ending, which
compresses for all remembrance the unfolded way of one human being. The meta -
phorical embranglements which afflict Arendt's thought will surface in exposition of
the modes of revelation peculiar to this realm.

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 Timothy Roach

Arendt's existential polis of actors emerges wherever a plurality of men indwells

a space of appearances. The space of appearances connotes a public realm of actors
and spectators who concur on the canons of appearance and share a common world
which makes possible the estimation of speech and action from different perspectives.
The paradoxical plurality of this order signifies that the actors within are deemed
equal by their participation in this realm and its judgements, but are also unique in -
dividuals who freely and deliberately pursue their own course of action. In this
convivial order, action erupts into a reality established through the acknowledgement
of others; the reality fostered by this existential polis is the panoply of living stories
in which "I appear to others as they appear to me."lo This public criterion of
meaning and reality is constitutive of Arendt's reflections.
What aspects of speech and action then disclose the appearance of a new actor or
identity? Arendt relates these two activities to their effect on the others who exist
within this space of appearances:

The disclosure of the "who" through speech and the setting of a new
beginning through action always fall into an already existing web where their
immediate consequences can be felt. Together they start a new process which
eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting
uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact. l1

Persoual identity is an achievement accomplished only by setting forth into the

web of human relationships. One is a distinct someone by engaging in actions with
others and accepting courageously as one's identity the inexchangeable and
irreversible course of events stimulated by one's deeds. One's identity is not mediated
just by one's words and intentions, but by the form one's story takes by "rubbing
against" and being rubbed by the stories of other actors. Uniqueness depends upon
performance in the public realm -- withdrawal from this realm deprives one's identity
of the depth and articulation it receives from its steady appearance in a course of
events and from the acknowledgement of other actors and spectators. One can be
someone only by acting.
Action thus reveals the natality of the unique who by his initiation of new
eventualities in the world; by speech, the actor names himself as the actor and by
describing his story and his intentions, he contributes to the evidence on which his
act can be appraised. Arendt explains:

Without the accompaniment of speech ... action would not only lose its rev -
elatory character ... it would lose its subject ... Speechless action would no
longer be action because there would no longer be an actor. and the actor, the
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doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time, the speaker of the
words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word ... it becomes
relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the
actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to dO. 12

Why action without the speaker would also lose its actor will become the crn -
cia! question to be answered. Arendt expressly does not intend that the actor has
clearer insight into his action and the import of his newly achieved identity.u
Entrance into the public realm is granted with the proviso that one will not speak the
fina1 word in regard to one's identity. At this point, suffice it to say that speech in -
treduces the unique subject by reference to whom his particular acts are rendered
meaningful and given coherence; by speech, the persons of the public realm are
differentiated, allowing them to validate the reality and glory of one another.
Arendt thereby resolves the dilemma of capturing the intangible or elusive
uniqueness of the who by recourse to the living story. The intangible who that one
is is translated into the medium of the public story which one initiates and endorses
by one's word.

Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which
he is himself the hero -- his biography ...l4

Arendt realizes that this solution is itself problematic, due to the boundless
nature of these actions and processes initiated in the public realm. This boundless -
ness raises the problems of anonymity, unpredictability, and irreversibility, although
Arendt holds that remedies for the latter two mitigate the seriousness of the first
dilemma.
The threatened anonymity of action can be traced to the inherently elusive cha -
racier of personal expression, but is amplified by the insertion of action into the web
of human relationships. Because of this involvement, the actor initiates his action,
but can never author its outcome. IS Arendt reaffirms this plight to be the risk of ac -
tion, overcome only by the courage to accept as one's own one's public identity,
exposed to the cross-purposes of historical reality; yet she also points out that to
model the public sphere on the authoring of fictional works would be to exchange its
freedom (and the confirmation of others) for the sovereign (but unshareable) world of
a divine maker. While accepting the disruptive effect of action on public identity,
she finds solutions endemic to the public rea1m itself. The unpredictability of action,
due to the unreliability of the actor and the lability of historical consequences, is
counterba1anced by the act of promising, which binds actor and public to the meaning
of his intended actions. Similarly the irreversibility of action, which almost fatally
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 Timothy Roach

binds the actor to the unforeseen consequences of his deed, can be "undone" by the
power of the public realm to forgive the actor and permit again a new beginning.
Thus, Arendt deems it possible to circumscribe the meaning of one's public actions
in accordance with the originating intent of one's enacted words and deeds.
Finally, while not recanting on the intangible character of the person's
uniqueness, Arendt contends that its public appearance bridges the gulf between its
living story and some form of reified remembrance. This commemoration becomes
possible not only because speech and action are "activities whose end will always be
a story with enough coherence to be told," nor because it is "the backward glance of
the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the
participants."!6 These retrospective powers of storytelling would still be vitiated by
their killing of the living spirit of the actor in their reified forms. However, since
the intangible who must seek public accreditation for its reality, the remembrance of
the polis assures persons that "their fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that
comes from being seen, being heard, and generally appearing before an audience of
fellow men."!7 The storyteller is empowered to retell the story by one's entrance into
the public realm, which registers one's tacit agreement to accept as one's identity this
public story.
In further support of this solution, Arendt appeals to the revelatory powers of
speech. The capacity of language for articulating interpersonal reality enables others
to take up again the words of historical actors and experience the living spirit with
which they encountered and altered the shape of the public realm. In so far as
history, poetry, and drama remain faithful to a mimetic presentation of the mutual
implications of word and deed, historical remembrance can recapitulate distinct human
identities by enabling later men to relive and evoke these spirits achieved by word-
illuminating-deed. 18 Historical remembrance consummates the public form of
personal action by mediating the drives of natality and immortality; it extends to
immortal duration the space of appearances in which men can be seen in their unique
utterances and disclosures. The unique binding of one's breath of life to word and
deed is perpetuated in a form which can be re-enspirited, indeed resurrected by all men
who re-act one's public story.

Given this sketch of Arendt's explicit declarations on action, her logic of

personal action can be shown to be comprised of two tacitly-working metaphorical
motifs, one dominated by the disclosure of the who in action and the other by the
revelation of the who in a peculiar mode of action, the speech-acl The former admits
of expression and accreditation in a third-person worldly account, whereas the latter
eludes such a rendering, remaining intangible and unworldly. By exploring the more
radical form of accreditation required by the unworldly variant, it can be shown that

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these descriptive metaphorical metaphysics of the person recapitulate the forms of

Greek and Hebraic-Christian sensibility.
The third-person account of action basically reiterates the preceding reading of
action, but reveals interesting implications in its logic. This account confIrms the
uniqueness of the person by telling his story as it appeared in prescriptive public
expressions able to be acknowledged by third-person spectators. One's personal
action calls attention to one's inexchangeable presence as the identity which sets into
motion new processes which alter the course of others' lives in a distinct fashion.
Similarly the signifIcance of speech lies not in the speaker's own unshareable taking
up of the token "I" but in its translation to a third-person shareable report whiCh, by
means of conventional expression, clarifIes ihe identity of the actor for the judgement
of the public realm at large. The revelation of the actor and the recounted story of his
action do not stand on wholly irreconciliable levels.
The translation of this unique identity into third-person terms exposes the
premise of this realm and the principle which Arendt deems operative in the move
from labor to work to action. Describing the space of appearances, where men "make
their appearance explicitly," she writes

To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality ... which is the same as

appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of
others, by its appearing to all "for what appears to all, this we call Being,"
and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream,
intimately and exclusively our own, but without reality.19

The unique reality of one's who and one's unique breath can only be confIrmed
in a realm of mutual judgement of what appears to all. Who one is is endowed with
an objectivity -- a depth of features and essence -- by its validation as an integral
appearance from multiple human perspectives. The disclosure of one's person is
significant only in those facets able to be taken up by other persons. The common
pledge of the public realm designates that whoever one wants to be must be shown in
the sum of one's words and acts. One must appear as one wishes to be.
Participation in the public realm and the quest for its validation dictate that each
actor acknowledge to himself that since "I appear to others as they appear to me, then
I appear to myself as others appear to myself." Each actor must understand that he
stands to his own who in the same relation that he stands to the who of any other
person; he has no privileged access to it and no absolute control over its disclosure.
One discovers who one is, if one discovers it at all, in the· same manner as one
discovers the identity of other appearing actors -- by a study of the course of one's

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 Timothy Roach

action and enterprises among men, which can be captured in a common third-person
narrative.
If possible, the proper vantage for one to view one's who would be at the
conclusion of one's life, when one could reflect and declare "Now I know who I was,
I was _ _ , he who was born in 1951, he who marched against a senseless war,
he who forfeited his family for a new land ... " This distanced objective viewpoint of
one's person would epitomize the third-person account of appearance, available to any
storyteller once the entanglements of one's tensed life were given up (like the breath
of life) and one's meaning rested in clarity and immutability. In this rendering, one's
who cuts a rather epical stance in the world, fashioning a truncated, yet rounded
appearance, bound by one's appearance and disappearance in the illuminated world of
men.
This conclusion evinces Arendt's metaphorical kinship with visual and Greek
sensibilities. To appear, one must act in such an enduring and essential manner as to
stand out against the background of history as one unforgettable gesture of the human
spirit The premise of this appearance is the primacy of the world, which represents
the sum of those words and acts which can be heard and seen by all. Accordingly the
reality of the world is constituted by the way things are "" by the way they do
happen. The world is a world of the indicative tense "" what is real is; the
subjunctive tense and that of possibility are abrogated by an acceptance of the real.
One's person is judged not by who one might or could have been or intended to be,
but by who one was in the world. Action is both "daimonistic" (beyond one's
control) and "eudaimonistic" (evaluated as to whether it wholly reflects the distilled
image of one in one's worldly excellence) because it plays to the world of spectators.
The world's primacy determines the entire physiognomy of action. According"
ly, the miraculous character of human beings resides not in their very existence as
absolute, radically new beginnings, but in their public effect as beginners of new
courses of action. Human beginning is defined by the world's terms and its immortal
remembrance. Given the indicative sense of the world and the assimilation of one's
beginning to appearance in the world, one's identity is as much suffered as it is
enacted. One only appears if one's inborn givens and one's projects are matched by a
fortuitous web of relations and eventualities in the world. In light of what happens ""
what appears and stands out (the premise of the world) "" one's existence is fated in
one of two ways. Either one's appearance is not sustained by the world and passes
like mere breath into insignificance, or one's appearance endures in the remembrance
of the world, and is, and to the eyes of the world, could not "not have been." Since
one can appear only by accepting one's identification with what does happen in the
world, only those individuals are fully personal whose stories alter the world in a

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form which must be retold again and again to account for the world itself and its
novelties.
Muted by the conflated sources of Arendt's reflection, and despite her explicit
intentions, this abstracted third-person logic both shares and illuminates the tragic
atmosphere of Greek sensibility. These models reflect a human being delineated in
its significance by its meaning for an already constituted world in terms of whose
principles one's existence might represent a distinct arrangement or precedent, but
never a whoUy unique beginning. The third-person model and its recapitulated Greek
polis do not afford an accreditation of what Augustine calIed the radical and unique
beginning which each person is just by being. In this world, meaning is not referred
to the singular will which "means" words and actions, nor is the history of action
taken to be the initiative of a creator God who can redeem alI actions as he can bring
existence out of nothing. Rather this world is based on a tragic problematic precisely
because it does not find the meaningful in such a radical wiU or radical beginning.
Action and identity in this world emerge within a refractory medium in which one
daringly accepts as one's own the way in which this course is played out to its
spectators. This world has a tragic atmosphere not merely because human action
fails, not merely because its denouement is beyond one's control (even with Arendt's
remedies to limit its frustrations); it is tragic because what is humanly real and
significant is restricted to that which can be seen and shared by alI. Appearance is
implicitly tragic because the prerogative of personal meaning is usurped by the
worldly. In this world, alI action inclines toward tragic denouement, because it can
never be fully personal or accredited as personal.
Arendt would object that this experiment in abstraction fails to do justice to the
depth of her own account -- and she would be correct. Repeatedly, she defends the
irreducibility of the person into any reified form, invokes the experience of human
natality against the world, and agrees that

What the storyteUer narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor
himself...because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that
foUows. 20

In discussing those situations in which speech itself constitutes quintessential

action, Arendt offers a clue to this difference by explaining that "finding the right
words at the right moment, quite apart from the information or communication they
may convey, is action."21 Coupled with her suggestion that speech and action are "of
an entirely unworldly nature: this clue implies a notion of the personal as that whch
comes into being on the occasion of public speech-acts, yet is not describable in
terms of the public world. 22 The personal involves an intimate relation between the

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 Timothy Roach

actor and his acts, but does not implicate the actor as fully disclosed in the course of
his public actions in the world. What then is this personal factor elicited in speech-
acts?
As its name implies, the speech-act refers to a linguistic expression in which an
act is performed in its very utterance. The examples commonly cited are expressions
such as "I promise," "I take this woman to be my wife," "I confess." In each of
these expressions, the primary role of the statement is not the declaration of truths
previously unknown, nor a prediction of epistemic consequences, nor generally the
communication of information. Rather, in sounding each expression, one acts and
calls attention to one's action in a communal conventional form of expression: in
saying "I promise," I do promise, in saying "I take ... ," I do marry, and by saying "I
confess," I do confess and assume responsibility for certain acts. Perhaps a closer
examination of the self-reflexive reference of the token "I" will offer insight into the
personal, unworldly implications of such acts.
From the point of view of others in the world, my uptaking of the token "I
promise" is meaningful by its translation into the phrase "Timothy Roach
promises," and ultimately to the phrase "he promises." In this way, I identify myself
for the world in terms of a proper name and link this individual to the action which
follows and its consequences. However, in the speech-act itself, the central factor
remains the self-reflexivity of this token "I" which, unlike other tokens, always has
one term of reference when I use it -- namely myself. But what is the meaning or
reference for me in this act, which none other can make for me and which I make
only in these self-reflexive declarations?
For me, the uptaking of the word "I" refers to this very act of unshareable
uptaking itself; by uptaking this token, I author or bring into being the very "I" of
which I speak. By breathing my very life into these words, my breath and my life
become the breath and life of a unique person. For me, the use of "I" does not
merely identify me as the agent of certain actions; it alerts me to the fact that only
"I" can use this word to bind my breath and life to my acts. In the use of the token
"I," I do not merely tell myself something about my course of action; I act again
even by self-reflexively calling attention to the fact that I am acting.
This point can be clarified by returning to Arendt's statement of the
paradigmatic speech situation. This situation is that in which the actor announces to
the world who he is, what he has done, and intends to do in the future. For the
speaker himself, however, such a linguistic report can never conclusively render his
identity, for his self-reflexive speech itself constitutes an autobiographical act of his
being. I can never presume to give an inclusive account of all my acts, for my self-
reflexive identification as "I" is itself a "meta-act" which purports to give concrete
backing to the entire thrust of my life. This "meta-act" would itself have to be taken

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up again by another integrative act of meaning, which would link it to my past

history. For me, my personal existence as one who acts has a logical
inexhaustibility, a possible infinity of self-referring acts by which my taking up of
the "I" always gives a different meaning to my former words. Thus the use of the "I"
is privileged, not only because it always refers back singularly to its user, but
because it involves the self-accreditation which logically stands outside the utterance
and is not accessible to the objective judgement to which the actual utterance is
commended. For the speaker or the actor, the taking up of the "I" affirms one's
responsibility for the utterance or the act, but also attests to one's irreducibility into
one's words or deeds.
This point shatters the logical symmetry of Arendt's public world, for it
undermines a basic premise -- that nI appear to others as they appear to me," or, as
has been seen, that "I appear to myself as others appear to me." In speech-acts, I do
not appear to myself as others appear to myself. The appearance of others can be
ordered within a third-person account of their deeds; my own speech-acts preclude
such a definitive account by me. Accordingly, for me, my existence never wholly
appears in the world or in the sum of my acts as they are representable in third-person
renderings. In my world, my existence and the existence of others do not share a
symmetrical balance; others appear within my world, I myself never can. As will be
seen, the logical force of "my world" removes the sense of "my" appearance in any
neutral third-person world with others.
The third-person model concurs that the "In refers to the performance of an act,
but this act is the public and commonly acknowledgeable initiation of consequences
which are implicated in the speech-act convention. The act in the speech-act model
transpires on a different logical plane; here, the act is not only the utterance of a
token which causes certain eventualities in the world. Here the act is the utterance by
which I take this act to be my act, by which I mean this act to be the commitment
of my being, by which I author who I take myself to he. I act in the speech-act
situation not by what I bring about in the world by uttering certain tokens, but in the
very act of binding my breath and my life to these tokens. This act occurs beyond
the bounds of third-person sense and commonality, because the third-person account
of what happens is not commensurate to the meaning for me of my saying these
tokens -- which is my acting, my meaning, and my authoring. Therefore, the
speech-act depends on my binding to public conventions and others, but it possesses
a depth whose confrrmation is problematic.
A closer look must be taken at the way in which this elusive, intangible who is
constitnted in the act of speaking itself. These self-reflexive utterances of the speech-
act point to a personal whole, which is never lucidly given to the self, but which
stands forth ouly in these very acts of integrating the dimensions of one's being to

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 Timothy Roach

utter meaningfully these statements and to make these commitments. The act is
neither the merely explicit, public presentation of words and deeds, nor is it an
interior act of subjective construction of which the public act is an external
expression. Rather, from the perspective of each person, regardless of its worldly
effects, the uptaking of the "I" represents the meaning of "I," for it is the act by
which I move unshareably from and integrate the dimensions of my being to mean
and stand by my public words.
In speech-act situations, each speaker speaks from within a body and history --
and from reliance upon the sense-giving powers of this lived body and intrusive
history. Accordingly, he speaks from a situatedness of possibility, compounded out
of the entire pre-reflective and pre-personal inheritance intimated by this indwelling:
the tacit rules governing the pervasive sense of the body as one entity moving among
others, the concomitant sexual flavoring of this movement which expands into a
valuation of the entire realm of social relations, the implicitly acquired sense of how
reality as a whole is tied together, and the metaphorical insinuations by which it
influences more articulate conceptions and adumbrations of what it means to be a
self. To this can be added the particular heritage of one's linguistic existence: one's
inhabitation amid the rules, grammar, semantics, and metaphorical tokens of a
language, which pre-disposes one to read existence in certain ways. Finally one's
own history is assimilated and accentuated in distinctive patterns and stories which
inform one's tensive standing amid a life already structured by the biological rhythms
of its passing. In each act of personal meaning, one intangibly summons forth this
whole tacit, tensive impetus of one's existence and commits it, as if newly born, into
one act.
Consequently, when I act by mating my unshareable breath with tokens of com -
munal significance, I live through the integration by which all these intentionalities
and possibilities of realities are both relied upon and given a force by my
commitment of my person in the breath of my words. This personal act is neither
possible without its stretching forth into public expression, nor is it reducible to this
public expression. In other words, my personal act is both in the world and yet
beyond the world; I am both the actor of my deeds, and yet, as actor and speaker,
beyond the sum of my deeds or an accounting in terms of these explicit deeds. As
can be seen in a survey of the moments of action, this trans-worldly character of who
one is alters the whole complexion of appearance -- the appearance of a new beginner,
the confusions of this identity, and the confirmation of the who one uniquely is.
In so far as the uniqueness of the who is dependent on the exclusiveness of the
living breath, a more radical sense is extended to one's character as a new beginning
in the world. For me (and every I in the world), my incarnation in the lived body can
never be one event among others in the world, and consequently, my beginning can

74
 Enspirited Words and Deeds

never be described in the same way as the beginning and appearance of others. The
other appears within my world, a world which carne to be for me only with my
beginning. My bodily beginning in birth is both the personal condition and a priori
for there being a world. As I indwell my body and take up my breath of life, I fmd
myself possessed of a radical agency, which precludes my reduction to any state or
sum of acts in the world. The miraculous character of every person as a new
beginning is not a result of action's eventualities; all action testifies to the
unpredictable intrusion of persons who challenge the world by virtue of their being
radically new beginnings in each act they perform.
This character of persons as radically new beginnings dictates that, in this logic,
the language of persons must similarly be a language of free, responsible, and willful
actors. The actor is deemed free from antecedent determinations of history or nature
on his acting, yet responsibly binds himself to action's consequences with the caveat
that he be permitted to speak again as to their meaning and relation to himself. This
paradoxical transcendence to, yet incarnation in one's acts is held together by
assuming that the person acts willfully, that these acts are empowered by the
personal source of his existence. In this grammar of the person, it is significant to
ask: if a person really means what he says and does, and take this "meaning" to
involve something more than merely saying words and doing deeds. It becomes
significant as well to speak: of the person as willing what he does not do, as willing
acts yet not being able to bring the full force and backing of his person to author
these acts. Finally it becomes significant to evaluate a person on the basis, not just
of the accomplishment of deeds, but of whether he really meant or willed these deeds
"with all his heart and soul and mind" -- whether he fully incarnated his living breath
in actions for which he bears responsibility.
By this dialectical relation between actor and act, the identity of the actor is
rendered quite problematic. One's who can never be revealed merely by the story of
one's deeds, for these deeds are meaningful only in the light of who one is -- of that
personal who, not reducible to his words and deeds, who yet takes them as his own.
A person's appearance in word and deed does not resolve the problem of his intan -
gibility and action's anonymity; it rather points to and intensifies his mysterious
elusiveness. A subtle solipsism always insinuates itself into one's world. One
achieves who one is by acting, yet one's idol is honored rather than Qne's person if
who one is is translated into one's story or the agent of one's acts. Who one is
always lurks in one's acts and yet beyond them in the breath that enspirits them and
accepts them as binding one's person. On this model, even promising and forgiving
can offer no means to circumscribe the identity of the who in the course of one's acts;
they express the primordial affirmation and injunction of the public sphere -- that it
deals with persons who will act but can never be assumed to be identifiable with their
acts.
75
 Timothy Roach

The final moment of action involves the affrrmation of the person in some form
of historical remembrance. What should be cleat is that not any third-person account
or autobiographical reflection can grasp and confirm the elusive person of this model.
What can not be recaptured in any such recapitulation is the personal tensive breath
of the unique who, binding itself out of its history. To confirm this unique who
would mean to hold it to that personal act of binding tensively its breath and life to
tokens and acts of the world -- and meaning them. This task of challenging and
holding one to one's words and acts as they were personally delivered and bound can
only be performed by another living, speaking, acting being.
This demand is partially fulfilled in the plurality of the existential polis; in
speech-act situations, other persons hold one to those actions which one takes as
one's acts. Beyond the evident impossibility that any person or community could
similarly hold one to a faithfulness to one's entire history of acts, another "logical"
point underscores the insufficiency of this mode of personal confrrmation. It was
noted that the meaning of the act for the actor retains an elusiveness beyond the
explicit grasp of any other person. In the judgement of certain acts in which the
adherence to the spirit as well as the letter of the action is significant, no human
being can judge reliably the indwelt personal backing of other speakers and actors, or
indeed, of himself. The adequate confrrmation of who one is entails a judgement of
one's historical, but systematically elusive act of meaning one's words and deeds.
Such coufirmation can be delivered only by a living, personal agent, whose
existence would span that of one's personal history, whose existence would stand
outside the determinations of the world and be privy to one's meaningful acts, and
finally whose existence would confrrm and judge one's breathed words as the integral
acts of a person, a radically new beginning with eternal significance. Only such a
being could uphold the radically new sense of one's life, and remember the acts of
one's history, not as actions fitting into a coherent story, but as the historically
presented acts of a person which, as it were, "resound" the meaning of that which
comes before and will come later. Finally only such a being could read the person in
the depth of his acts, knowing who should be forgiven, and who should be judged
from the history of his acting and uttering, sealing the eiuI of one's life not as a mere
transference into consummated form, but with a radically iastjudgemenL
To be explicit, the speech-act model enjoins a confrrmation able to be rendered
only by a living personal God, who meets each person in his own history of
speaking and acting, and holds their personal meaning in the living remembrance of
his history, or, by forgetting, consigns their breath of life to mere wind in the
passing cycles of nature. Not only is the logical implicate of this model the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but it is also the God of Augustine, who knows the
secrets of our hearts, and therefore, the meaning of our acts. Contrary to Arendt, it is

76
 Enspirited Words and Deeds

in confession and judgement before this God that we learn who we inexchangeably
are, rather than what we are.23
If the living God of the Hebraic-Christian tradition is "logically" demanded for
the confirmation of persons with such uniqueness, it is also the case that the dialectic
of actor and action is patterned on the relation of God to his revelatory history. This
can be seen in the manner by which the speech-act model assembles meaning out of
the particulars of reality. The third-person model characterizes the discernment of the
person as an isolating of the essential hero from his more accidental expressions in
the course of affairs. It accepts the public chain of events as the commonly
accessible traces of one's person, with the corollary that a judicious ordering of one's
unique story could elicit those consistent and enduring acts which both distinguished
one and afforded one a mediated objective expression. This model overcomes the
ostensible instability of the self by translating it into a shareable medium, whose
meaning can be read, like a conventional language, by all circumspect spectators.
The speech-act model portrays the appreciation of personal meaning in a
different fashion. It adheres to the way meaning is assembled when I authoritatively
take up the first-person token, and by acting, translate the common world of meaning
into "my world." In this act, the world shifts a-symmetrically to its meaning for me,
and the appreciation of my action demands its interpretation in terms of my person,
rather than in terms of the world and its common logic. This model accordingly
exploits that character of language as a medium not meaningful only in its explicit
denotation, but revelatory of meaning which can escape its medium and refer to the
personal initiative of its speaker. In such originative acts of meaning, one under -
stands words, not only in themselves and their conventional usage, but in terms of
the historical speaker who utters them.
This style of relating the speaker to words, and the actor to acts, marks the fully
personal actor of Arendt's speech-act model as an image of God in the Hebraic-
Christian tradition. It is this God who stands to his creation as a speaker stands to
his word, with the caveat that he is the speaker par excellence and the creation his
novel creation out of nothing. This God himself acts in nature and history but is
never reducible to these acts. He exhibits the power of a free will, able to inject
novelty into any situation. Furthermore, all the meaning of order and history derives
its sense and standing from being the faithful act of God; no regularity is significant
in itself, but is meaningful only as the historical act of this redeeming, personal God.
The personal who similarly is the actor not reducible to his deeds, the ever new
beginner whose acts and history have meaning only in the light of who he authenti -
cally is. Accordingly, personal revelation is always bound up with the enspirited
backing of his breath and the force of his life. It is the authoritative and faithful
backing of one's words and deeds that testifies to them as the willed acts of a free

77
 Timothy Roach

person, uncoerced by the givens of his character, nature, or history. The notions of
the person, his will, freedom, and his being a veritable new beginning all stand
together to require a logical and symbolical accreditation. This accreditation can
occur only by acting in conformity with the history of a God, who can assure the
status of one's radically new beginning by his miraculous powers of creation, can
freely redeem one from one's acts by his miraculous grace, and can save one's breath
of life from the dissipation of its natural cycle by enspiriting it in so far as it
meaningfully enacts the deeds of his history.
Arendt's endeavor to articulate and commemorate symbolically the personal
uniqueness of who one is therefore falls into a fatal contradiction, based in the meta -
phorical confiation of the Western tradition. In so far as her reflections are faithful to
its antecedents in Greek sensibility, she is unable to educe the radical uniqueness of
the miraculous beginnings of persons. But, in so far as she properly intimates what
constitutes the radical uniqueness of the person, her reflections construct a person
able to be confirmed only by the personal God of the Hebraic-Christian tradition. A
final statement of this divergence in sensibility will display the difficulty in
articulating the uniqueness of the person, with its tacit Christian heritage, in a
universe of secular discourse.
In the auditory, speech-act model, persons affirm their status as radical
beginnings by the free achievement of themselves in their words and deeds, but who
they are ineluctably escapes reduction to the story of these actions in the public
world. On this model, the "who" can responsibly declare "I am not just my acts,
my stury, my life, though these are my acts, my story, my life -- just as I am not
just this body, but this body is mine." The difference in this model of personal
meaning and personal history and Arendt's third-person Greek model most sharply
appears in her beautiful evocation of the spirit of Greek remembrance. Speaking of
history as a category of human existence, she writes

.. .its beginning lies rather in the moment when Ulysses, at the court of the
King of the Phaeacians, listened to the story of his own deeds and sufferings,
to the story of his life, now a thing outside himself, an "object" for all to see
and to hear. What had been sheer occurrence now became history.24

Greek sensibility accepts this translation of personal existence into its publicly
affIrmable and limited denouement. Accordingly, it can accept a tragic confirmation
of one's reality -- a reconciliation with reality itself as afforded by what Arendt calls
"the tears of remembrance."
The speech-act model logically wars against such a translation of "my history"
into the "story of his life, now a thing outside himself, an 'object' for all to see and
78
 EnsWited Words and Deeds

to hear." Personal meaning and personal history, predicated on the unique mating of
"my" breath with words and deeds, is not explicable in third-person terms, but de -
mands an assessment and judgement in terms of one's tensed, unworldly, unshareable,
historical acts. This history of "my" unique existence escapes the public confmna -
tion of any coherent and ordered story of my life; it requires rather a symbolic
underpinning in a personal principle which can hold it to the meaning of its living
breath by judging and redeeming the person who I am. The metaphorical logic of the
person finds its symbolic fulfillment in the language and history of the creating,
personal God of the Hebraic-Christian tradition. Only because of this God in this
tradition is Arendt wholly justified in asserting

Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one
and the same. God created man in order to introduce in the world the faculty
of beginning: freedom.2S

1. Arendt identifies the personal as the deeper dimension of the political sphere in
Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Harvest Book, 1968), p.
73.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), p. 197. Hereafter this work will be cited as HC.
3. HC, pp. 73-78, and Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking
Press, 1968), pp. 65-68, 72-73.
4. For general phenomenological studies, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1953), Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co. by arrangement with Westminster Press, 1970), Oswald
Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968). For a critical
analysis, see James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (London, Oxford
University Press, 1961).
5. HC, p.179.
6. HC, p.96.
7. HC, p.137.
8. HC, p. 211.
9. HC, p.4.
10. HC, p.198.
11. HC, p. 184.

79
 Timothy Roach

12. He, pp. 178-79.

13. He, p.192.
14. He, p.186.
15. He, p. 185.
16. He, pp. 97, 192.
17. He, p.198.
18. He, pp. 187-88.
19. He, p.199.
20. He, p.192.
21. He, p.26.
22. He, p.95.
23. He, pp. 10·11.
24. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 45.
25. Ibid., p. 167.

80
 ELUSIVE NEIGHBORLINESS:
Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of Saint Augustine

Patrick Boyle, S. J.

Recent studies of Hannah Arendt's thought rarely provide readers with more than
a few cursory remarks for understanding the relationship between her ideas and those
of Saint Augustine. l Because her interpretation of Augustine deserves fuller
attention, I want to explore the connection between Hannah Arendt and Augustine in
the hope of offering a new direction for interpretation of her own thought.
References to Augustine are not infrequent in some of Arendt's better known works
such as Between Past and Future, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind,
but the principal document which establishes the link between these two thinkers is
Arendt's seldom studied doctoral dissertation, written in 1928 under the direction of
Karl Jaspers and published as Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. 2 Using Arendt's
partially revised translation of the dissertation as the primary source for this essay, I
analyze Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Augustine there and then comment on the
way the themes and the problems of the dissertation emerge in some of her other
writings.3
Above all, such a project must take into consideration the specific character of
her doctoral dissertation. For example, Arendt asserts that her study of the question
of love in Saint Augustine does not represent an exercise in theological reflection,
but rather, and in keeping with her own firm conviction that Augustine was a
philosopher who drew out the theological implications of his thoughts, an "inquiry
of purely philosophical interest."4 It is not necessary to unravel her complicated use
of Heideggerian and, to a lesser degree, Jasperian, terminologies, to demonstrate how
three themes, that is, ontology, stance towards the world, and relationships to others
in the world, emerge clearly in the dissertation and together constitute its primary
focus. I seek to show that her philosophical "experiment," which she hoped to revise
and publish in English some thirty years later, offers much insight into her thought
because of the questions she raises there, namely, what is the relevance of the
neighbor?, and how is it that one fmds a place in and belongs to the world?
Bernauer, J. W. (ed), Amor Mundi. ISBN 90-247-3483-5.
© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands.
81
 Palrick Boyle S J

Following several years of study with Martin Heidegger at the University of

Marburg, Arendt transferred to the University of Heidelberg where she began the
dissertation at the age of twenty-three. From a personal standpoint, the change and
the research may have provided her, "reserved and preoccupied with herself," as she
had confided to Heidegger shortly before commencing the dissertation, with a means
of addressing her own "anxiety over existence in general"s and establishing, or at least
preparing, her own framework for writing about human existence in society and the
public realm. Not long after the dissertation, Arendt's. attention would turn to the
crises of the times.6 By 1943, she was writing political tracts, lamenting the
tragedy of those who, having lost a sense of their own history and the tools for
interpreting it, became, in the face of the horrors of Nazism, "ready to pay any price
to belong to society."7 Yet her earlier research in preparing the dissertation and its
analysis of the vinculum or bond Augustine posited as guiding the true Christian
community may have helped her find her own path -- in contrast to Augustine's -- in
her search for the basis of political community. Arendt sought a new vinculum that
could withstand the rigors of philosophical investigation and set standards for the
establishment of a truly human world. s Analysis of her dissertation yields some
insight into the beginnings of this lifelong project.
In the dissertation, Arendt struggles with Augustine's articulation of the
"worldly" existence of "other worldly" Christians. This is most evident in the third
section of the dissertation, entitled "Social life," in which Arendt answers the
question she has asked of Augustine throughout the project: "what is the relevance of
the neighbor?"9 This question serves as a guide to her whole interpretation of
Augustine. Her analysis of neighborly love's relation to the vinculum for commu -
nity reveals what she came to see as the diSjointed and contradictory nature of
Augustine's thought on love. lo In that conclusion Hannah Arendt not ouly took her
position in a growing controversy over varying interpretations of love in Augustine
in the first half of the twentieth centuryll but more importantly, foreshadowed her
own comments on love, "one of the rarest occurrences in human lives," -- more
properly suited to the private realm. Arendt's study also laid the groundwork for her
later conviction that, without the "reformulation of Christian thoughts through
Augustine, Christian politics might have remained what they had been in the early
centuries, a contradiction in terms."12 A fresh look at this little studied dissertation,
therefore, seeks to establish the grounds for better comprehension of her views on
Augustine whom she called "the greatest theorist of Christian politics," and to
suggest how her interpretation of him reflected back into her own thoughts. 13 The
richness and complexity of Arendt's thought is due in part to her early investigation
into the Christian philosophy and theology of this fourth century bishop of Hippo.
The three interconnected concerns mentioned above help penetrate the disserta -
tion's conceptual density and make sense of its conclusions about Augustine. Under
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 Elusive Neighborliness

the category of ontology I include Arendt's investigations into the source, end, and
givenness of human existence and the existence of the world. The second and third
categories develop out of this investigation, seeking to discover what stance a person
can or should take towards the world and how that person comes to understand the
relevance of the neighbor. There is, however, another reason for approaching her dis -
sertation from this perspective. These three concerns characterize Arendt's study of
love in Augustine, but also, when considered in the context of the overall perspective
of Arendt and Augustine, indicate the places where their interests and preoccupations
coincide. Both passionately pursued their own reflections on human existence,
entered into questions of ontology wh~re necessary, but avoided disassociating their
thoughts from the problems and needs of their respective historical situations.14
A passion for philosophical inquiry, reflection, and thinking, punctuates the
works of Augustine, most notably, the Confessions. The same passion emerges
formally for Arendt in the dissertation and has its clearest expression in The Life of
the Mind, her last work. In her dissertation Hannah Arendt notes the importance of
introspection for an Augustine who had become "a problem unto himself. "IS In her
second book, Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt describes at length the problems intro -
spection caused in the life of this eighteenth century woman. 16 But in striking
contrast to Augustine, who regarded introspection and inwardness as rich sources of
self-knowledge and growth and who regularly exhorted his flock at Hippo to "turn to
the inner voice of conscience; Hannah Arendt saw in introspection many dangers,
calling it her "youthful error." 17 Arendt consciously distanced herself from psycho-
logical approaches and interpretations. For example, she castigated the psychiatrists
at Eichmann's triaI for offending the court with a "comedy of soul experts."18 For
Augustine, the opening of the soul became a science, while Arendt, for many
reasons, guarded the inner life and protected it from view. But despite their differing
approaches, a common passion for reflection shows forth in the writings of both
Hannah Arendt and Saint Augustine.
It is a mistake, however, to reduce the philosophical frame of mind of either to
a preoccupation with personal introspection. Rather, they both articulated their
philosophical convictions in terms of the world in which they lived and for that
world. Augustine's two cities scheme presented a theological vision rooted in the
tensions of present controversies and formulated in the shadow of approaching troops.
Arendt, too, wrote and reflected in the shadow of the crises of the twentieth century. 19
Neither was far removed from the urgency of the present situation. And yet, in the
midst of the crises, each held out for the possibility of beginnings and for action,
"the very essence of human freedom. "20 Arendt, in fact, did not hesitate to draw upon
the Augustinian theme of beginnings or to notice a parallel between the crises of
Augustine's times and those of her own. She described Augustine, some twenty
years after the dissertation, as
83
 Patrick Boyle. S J.

the great thinker who lived in a period which in some respects resembled our
own more than any other in recorded history and who in any case wrote under
the full impact of a catastrophic end, which perhaps resembles the end to
which we have come.21

The full impact of history, about which both were so sensitive, tempered loose
talk about new beginnings. Some scholars have made of Augustine's pessimism a
simplistic and misleading cliche. One notices in Arendt's later writings traces of a
certain pessimism. 22 Thus, crises and the cold realities of history added a "realist"
strain to their reflections about new beginnings and new life. Within this context,
examination of the ontological questions they asked, any of those they had about
one's stance towards the world and about relationships with others, should capture not
only something of the approaches of Arendt and Augustine, but also of the link
between them. That link originates with Arendt's dissertation on love in Augustine.

Love and Saint Augustine

Overview. It is unclear why Hannah Arendt chose Augustine and the question
of love as the topic for her dissertation. However, the fact that several of her
professors, among them Heidegger, Jaspers, Guardini, and her friend Hans Jonas, all
published works on, or in some way related to, Augustine indicates the interest
contemporary German thinkers had in the early Christian writer from North Africa. 23
But for Arendt, why the question of love? Perhaps it had to do with the missing
element of Heidegger's Being and Time and with the problem of a self characterized
"by its absolute egoism, its radical separation from its fellows. "24 Or perhaps,
Augustine'S concept of love as neighborly would provide the answers for Hannah
Arendt's expanding questions about the world -- a place of dubious welcome for the
Jew. Arendt does not so much as allude to any of this in the dissertation but, in
retrospect, both reasons seem plausible. Arendt's interest in Augustine and his treat -
ment of the question of love certainly extended far beyond the framework of a nar -
rowly academic project.
First of all, the topic of love in Augustine allowed Arendt to pursue a large
question about where and how and to whom a person in this world belongs. Her
inquiry into the "other human being's relevance" in the dissertation fits well in this
larger question. 25 It is imponant to note in passing, however, that Augustine
himself seems less concerned about this question than with making sure that one

84
 Elusive Neighborliness

belongs to the "right" person -- God -- and is headed towards the "right" home -- life
in God.26 Second, concrete examples of this concern about one's relation to the
world abound in Hannah Arendt's later works, whether she is writing about the plight
of the Jews or a kind of "world alienation" imposed on people by mass society.27
"Nothing in our time is more dubious ... than our attitude toward the world," she
wrote. 28 Finally, the topic of love in ~ugustine gave Arendt the possibility to
confront philosophically the existential questions of her own life and of the world in
which she lived Augustine undoubtedly provided excellent points of departure.
By attempting to conduct, as she says, "an inquiry of purely philosophical
interest," Hannah Arendt certainly took an unconventional approach to Augustine. 29
In the dissertation's introduction, she acknowledges three difficulties in Augustine
that would hinder her interpretation: the existence of diverse trains of thought side by
side in Augustine; his steadily increasing dogmatic rigidity; and a biographically
demonstrable development -- his conversion experience -- involving a change in the
horiwn of his thinking.30 Because her project concerns primarily the parallel trains
of thought on love in Augustine, Arendt chooses not to treat the second and third of
these difficulties. She justifies her intention to interpret Augustine's concept of love
this way, first, because Augustine's thoughts on love emerge from the pre-theo -
logical or pre-conversion concepts operative in his thought and, second, because this
way of interpreting would be in keeping with Augustine's understanding of
auctoritas. authority. "The right to inquire and interpret is given to us by Augustine
himself," she writes. It allows her to conduct an analysis in which "Augustine's
dogmatic subservience to scriptural and ecclesiastical authority will remain largely
alien."3l Hannah Arendt thus clears the path for a narrowly philosophical treatise.
Arendt states that her objective in the dissertation is to interpret the parallel
trains of thought found in Augustine's writings on love in the direction of a
"substantially common base. "32 She asks whether there is a single principle or
intention that pervades or philosophically unifies all that Augustine writes about
love. Stating that no such principle or intention exists, Arendt then demonstrates
that the trains of thought are, in fact, heterogeneous. They cannot be traced back to a
common base or source. She chooses, therefore, the one notion -- neighborly love --
common to all of Augustine's writings on love, with the conviction that when
analyzed in a variety of contexts, this notion will show just how disjointed
Augustine's thoughts on love really are.
To accomplish this task, Arendt first identifies three concepts of love in
Augustine: love as craving (pre-theological); love as charity or cupidity (pre-
theological); and love as neighborly (Christian). Next, she considers how the three
concepts relate to each of three "conceptual contexts" or situations in which the
question of1ove arises and is siguificant: namely, when a person inquires about, f"l!st,

85
 Patrick Boyle S J

his or her existence, second, about the source of existence, or third, about social
life. 33 The tripartite division of the text roughly follows these three situations: 1)
Love as craving; 2) Creator-creature; 3) Social life. Finally, after examining these
separately and together, Arendt concludes that none of the three situations with any of
the three concepts points to a common philosophical base or intention. Augustine's
thought supports disjointed views.
Love as craving, for example, will mean to a person pondering his or her own
existence that the world and other people are merely objects to be by-passed because
of an overwhelming desire to possess the ultimate object which neither can provide:
endless life. Love defined as charity, however, sends the person along a different
path: namely, along that ofloving the world and others because they come from God.
In the former the world and other people are only objects which fail to satisfy a desire
to possess life eternally. In the latter they are God's good creation and, therefore,
should be loved in God. What these and other examples reveal is that, when com -
pared and contrasted, the three situations with the three concepts never harmoniously
ground the one element which is common to them in Augustine -- the neighbor and
the need to love the neighbor. None of them can adequately or coherently answer
Arendt's existential questioning about the relevance of the neighbor. Augustine's
concept of love is philosophically disunified. Arendt looks to see if there is a way
out of this impasse.
The final and crucial section, Social Life, confronts the problem, giving the
reader a clearer understanding of the question which Arendt says guides her inquiry.
"The several parts of this essay are linked only by the question [of] the other human
being's relevance -- a relevance which to Augustine was a matter of course. "34
Through her careful study of Augustine's treatment of love, Hannah Arendt discovers
that the answer to the question about the ground for the neighbor's relevance cannot
be found in craving, charity, or even neighborly love. She concludes that the real
source of the neighbor's relevance for Augustine is the past. "This past alone is
common to all men."35 In Arendt's view, Augustine invests the common and sinful
past of humankind with a specifically Christian meaning, such that the common
situation of mortality, the equality of all in sin, becomes, through the redemptive
action of Christ, a new situation, open to an equality of all in grace. Neighborly
love for believers becomes the normative expression of their new equality. So, for
Arendt, Augustine's neighborly love does not grow out of a comprehensive philo -
sophical view of love. It is the desired (and commanded) expression of the believer's
new situation. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." A closer look at each of the sections
of the dissertation will illuminate Arendt's path to this final conclusion.

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1. Love as craving: human existence and its end.

Arendt begins the first situation, a reflection on human existence, with a dense
summary of the ontological structure of craving in Augustine. The single
"defioition" of love Augustine gives is that love is a craving for the possession of
somethiog for its own sake. 36 Arendt interprets the meaning of the definition and its
structure as follows. The object of any craviog is always previously given and
known and is a good because one· seeks it for its own sake. Through reflection on
human existence, for example, the individual realizes that life is a good that is both
known and possessed at the present moment. As such, life is not craved. Simul-
taneously, however, the individual looks to the future realiziog that death puts an end
to life and so, when reflecting on human existence, concludes that the presently
possessed life "on earth is a liviog death, a life altogether determined by death."37
Because the possibility of losing one's life io the future is real, life itself becomes
the priocipal object of craving and fear of death becomes a means of expressiog one's
love for life.
The overall plan of the dissertation, reviewed above, suggests the direction io
which Arendt will move in order to explain the first situation. But she must fITst
specify several points about love as craving in Augustine: that its primary object is
endless life; that the notions of charity and cupidity derive from the structure of
craving; and that the structure itself has implications for all other objects of desire
and for the relevance of the neighbor.
The primary object of human desire is happiness. Even though individuals
mean different things by 'happiness,' all want to live happily and are agreed io want -
iog to live for the sake of "the true life ... the one which is both everlasting and
happy," the beata vita.3! Arendt emphasizes that the eudaemonistic train of thought
in Augustine is centered on life itself -- the real object of human striviog. For the
individual who perceives this, the ultimate good, the swnmum bonum, becomes
eternity.39 Participation in eternity is the good that "thou canst not lose against thy
will. "40 But the human quest for eternity is constantly frustrated, because the safe
and disposable objects of love on earth are all doomed to die. Narrowly considered,
love as craving is nothing more than an anxious fear of losing life which turns itself
ioto a quest for freedom from that fear. In Arendt's ioterpretation of Augustine, if the
individual is ever to experience true freedom from fear, then love as craving must be
ordered towards that object, or those objects, which can release the individual from
the dread of death because they promise life etemally.4l
Love as craving manifests itself tlrrough charity and cupidity. These two
concepts denote possible relationships to the objects of craving. They can be
distinguished from craving accordiog to the objects desired, but not according to the

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structure of desire itself.42 Actually, charity and cupidity derive from the fundamental
and pre-theological structure of human desire and serve to regulate desire's movement
in a certain direction following the "goods" perceived as most apt to produce
happiness, permanence and eternity. Cupidity, on the one hand, is the fearful mode
of loving based on mistaken perceptions and strengthened by habit such that "in its
flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost
in dcath,"43 Charity, on the other hand, turns fear into freedom for the individual
who has recognized that life, eternity and happiness are to be found in and through
God alone. By cleaving to God, the individual rightly orders all desire in relation to
the ultimate good 'who' alone endures in a world marked by death.
It is at this point that Arendt first introduces a discussion of Augustine's "two -
fold concept of the world." Thus, her inquiry into the ontological structure of human
desire now becomes a consideration of one's stance towards the world. As Augustine
said,

'world' is the name not only for this fabric God has made, of heaven,
earth and sea, of things invisible and visible. We use the word 'world' also for
the dwellers in it, just as we use the word 'house' for both its structures and
occupants.44

The world, in Hannah Arendt's reading of Augustine, is "constituted as an

earthly world not only by the works of God," but by the "lovers of the world" and by
that which they 10ve.45
As confusing as this twofold concept may seem initially, it is based on the
view that God is not the only agent in the activity of "making." Theologians
generally reserve the category 'creation,' encompassing all reality, seen and unseen,
the world and its inhabitants -- to God alone. Within creation, however, and this is
the point Arendt emphasizes, individuals engage in the activity of making a human
world. Through loving -- though often mistaking creation for the creator -- human
beings "create" a world marked by their actions in time. This activity gives the
world its distinctly human character because, out of the fabric of heaven and earth,
human beings fashion a world they recognize to be the product of their own efforts.
Understandably, Augustine's twofold concept of the world has important
implications for Arendt's analysis of his thoughts on love. For Augustine, the
longed-for freedom of life in God is only possible if the individual has ordered all
desire in relation to that good. Therefore, the world as the fabric and occupants of
creation must be loved in God because they are goods of God's making. At the same
time the world must be rejected because, in Arendt's pregnant phrase, "it is the love
of the world which turns heaven and earth into the world as a changeable thing."46 In

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clinging to the human world by means of cupidity or a disordered love fleeing death,
the individual seeks to have that which will certainly be lost in death: the world as he
knows it. But charity frees one from the world because the object of its desire and
attachment is the One whose life knows neither death nor decay. True attachment to
God in charity severs human dependence on all transitory things because it ultimately
frees the human being from mortality. Therefore, rightly ordered love or charity
ascribes to the individual a love for the world, insofar as the world is God's creation,
and a withdrawal from the world, insofar as the ultimate good is neither the world nor
anything one can possess in it.
The conclusion Arendt draws from her analysis of the structure of craving in the
first situation can be summed up in a few points. First, pre-theological love as the
quest for permanent life results in fear if God is not recognized as the summum
bonum in whom endless life is offered to those who cling to God. Thus considered,
charity and faith in God combine to provide an explanation of the "whither" of
human existence. Second, rightly ordered love or charity voids the world of any
absolute significance because loving the world cannot obtain true life. Rather, the
world must be by-passed in charity's quest for a greater good. In the same way,
craving lessens the importance of the neighbor who is also the "world" because
loving the neighbor cannot win the life which lies outside the world. Most
importantly, the structure of craving, analyzed alone, or with its derived concepts of
charity and cupidity, fails to explain the relevance of the neighbor. Neighborly love
fits poorly into the framework of this first situation which sees individuals only as
adjacent, each one guided by an individual quest for life. As Arendt writes, "it is not
in love, but before love that I decide about my neighbor's being. "47 Therefore,
Hannah Arendt turns to a second situation in the hope that it will explain the
relevance of the neighbor in Saint Augustine.

2. Creator-creature: discovering the source of existence.

Having found that the structure of love as craving, even in its ideal expression
as well-ordered love, by-passes neighborly love in its quest for eternity, Arendt
returns to her initial questions and considers craving in a different light: in its past-
oriented quality, from which the "happy life enters desire's field of vision." 48 Arendt
relates Augustine's theme of memory to the structure of craving by making a parallel
between craving's future-oriented desire and memory's past-oriented remembering.
Recognizing the source of one's being in God, memory calls the past into view.
Arendt captures the richness of Augustine's notion of memory when she writes: "In
memory. the past is salvaged because, in this 'presentation'. it becomes a possible
future."49 Memory enables the person to reflect on that which lies "before [the]

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mundane experiences at one's disposal," by focusing the person's attention on the

ultimate source of being. If forward-looking craving brings with it awareness of
one's dependence on the wish for a happy life in eternity and foreshadows the
"whither" of existence, then memory's distinct kind of experience illuminates the
"whence" of existence and of one's condition as a creature, that is, one's dependence
on God.
Arendt's considerations in this second situation shift from what has thus far
been a concern with typically eudaemonistic questions to the ontological-ethical
dimensions of love in Augustine. The discovery of oneself as a creature in the
referring back to God demonstrates for Hannah Arendt the irreconcilable heterogeneity
of Augustine's philosophical ideas. On the one hand, Augustine's interpretation of
being is guided by a Greek concept of being, one that equates being with "the eternal
structure of the world."50 On the other hand, religious faith is the origin of his
Christian interpretation of the universe, "in which all mundane existence is conceived
as created -- thus precisely denying its eternity:51 A problem arises from these
disjointed views because the creature's every question about his or her being is also a
question about the world. From the Greek standpoint, "the being asked about by the
creature is the very structure of the world the creature is a part of," but in the
Christian view of the world, "the creature's inquiry into its own being lets it ask
itself out of the world" through Christ's promise of immortality. At this impasse,
Arendt asks: "What sort of world is it, into which the creature is born and which is
still not its original determinant?"52
From the parallel lines of thought concerning being in Augustine's writings
derive two antithetical concepts of the world: one, as an eternal structure in accord -
ance with a Greek view, and the other, as creation in accordance with Christian faith.
Arendt notes that the Christian view dominates in Augustine's later writings, but she
insists that this can be understood only when it is taken in conjunction with the
earlier view.53
Despite Augustine's heterogeneous approaches to being and the world, this
second situation clearly allows the world, viewed from the believer's standpoint, to
lose its arbitrary and "by chance" nature. Now the world, the "fabric of heaven and
earth and the inhabitants of the world," is viewed explicitly as God's creation and, at
the same time, as the human world formed by creatures' inhabitation and love of
God's creation. The creature, therefore, fmding himself in a world that is already
given, "makes the world and makes himself part of the world." 54 By loving what is
given them, creatures tum the fabric of creation into the "world." Thus, the love of
the world, which makes it "worldly" and a home, depends on the lover's being .in the
world.55

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Paradoxically, this new and explicit "creaturely" context actually removes the
creature from the world once again. In accepting the source of its being in God and
its dependence on divine grace for existence, the creature comprehends itself as
belonging not to the world, but to God. This is why, according to Arendt, the
concept of charity becomes crucially important for Augustine. The creature
recognizes its dependence on God and realizes that a choice for the world instead of
God can only be a choice for death. It is only by cleaving to God that the creature
can live in accord with the source of life and with the only power capable of
removing the threat of death. Charity, then, becomes the believer's relation to all
others in imitation of God. And yet, even if charity is "the law of love written in the
hearts of men," it is nevertheless a God-given command that is impossible to
fulfill.56
Ultimately, the creature that depends on God's grace comes to know sin as
covetousness -- a disordered love of the world. Since all beings but God lack the
ultimate power to give existence, the creature is constantly faced by the possibility of
returning to the world in an attempt to give the world a significance independent of
God. This sinful kind of worldliness occurs when "man expressly makes himself at
home in [the world] aod desirously looks to it alone for his good and evil." 57 In this
way the covetous creature that would try to "create," perverts the original purpose of
his createdness, that is, "to fmd the way beyond the world and to his proper source. "58
The life of charity, therefore, is one in which the creature, with humility and self-
denial before God, seeks to love self and the world as God does: as creation. As
Augustine says, to love charitably is to love in self and in others "exclusively God's
goodness, the Creator Himself. "59
The problem Arendt finds in this second situation is that neighborly love,
considered as the commandment to deny oneself and to love everything in imitation
of God, really fails to explain how we are neighbors at all. 60 A life of charity
depends on the love of God, and its realization rests on divine grace. In choosing
God, the creature views itself, the world and others only insofar as they are created.
"To the lover who loves as God loves," Arendt concludes, "the other ceases to be
anything but a creature of God. "61 Tied to God, as it were, the creature now lives in
the presence of God alone, and in absolute isolation from the world, because his or
her original relation to the world as a lover of the world has been severed. For the
creature who has discovered the source of being in God in this second situation, all
others lose their worldly distinctions. Since all are equal before God, neighborly love
is a summons for each creature to enter into the divine presence. Loving one's
neighbor in the process of the creature's return to God only teUs us how the other is
loved. It does not answer the question of the creature's relatedness.

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3. Social Life: neighborly love and Christian existence.

In the first two situations, Arendt's intent was not to downplay the importance
of love for the neighbor in Augustine's scheme, but merely to show that neither
situation adequately reflects the relevance of the neighbor. In craving an unreachable
goal, love makes a person by-pass the world and other persons. An all-embracing
love for God does not reveal the neighbor's relevance. Arendt hopes that the situation
she calls "Social Life" spells out the neighbor's specific relevance. Faith now comes
to the forefront of her considerations as the basis of true fellowship in Augustine.
Faith was present in the first two situations only from the standpoint of the
individual's concern with questions about the source and end of existence. 62 In both
situations the individual remained isolated. Hannah Arendt now asks the question
about the relevance of the neighbor from the standpoint of society in Augustine.
What is crucially important to her here is that, in Augustine, shared faith is tied "to
the factuality of history, to the past as such." 63 Only in this kind of faith can the
question about the relevance of the neighbor and the role of neighborly love in the
community of believers be answered and understood. Arendt asks:

Under which aspect does the mere concurrence of believers turn into a
common faith -- into a communion of faith itself, which regards all men,
even unbelievers, as brothers, since everyone is my neighbor?64

For Hannah Arendt, the view of Christian faith that emerges in Augustine,
based on the redeeming death of Christ, understands redemption as being not only for
the individual, but for the whole world, the same world which is simply a "given" for
every person. In coming to faith, the individual simultaneously affirms that the
ultimate origin of being is God and that all persons have their human origins in a
common ancester, Adam. In fact, it is only through this second affirmation, the
common descent of all people from a human ancestor, that the believer can
understand the equality of all people before death. This alone "could make Christ,
too, a historic and effective reaIity."65 The kinship and equality all share is rooted in
their common mortality -- the condition of human existence. Faith assigns a new
meaning to that mortality and its origins in a common past.
The interplay of the notions of faith, common ancestry and equality figure
prominently in Arendt's interpretation of Augustine's views on human society and
show how her own analysis links the theme of "stance towards the world" to that of
"relationships to others." According to Augustine, persons living in society, sharing
a common mortality, live in interdependence, in the mutual give and take of life
together. It is not interdependence as such which founds society in Arendt's view of
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Augustine, however, but rather the belief that mutuality serves some purpose, that
the other person "will prove himself in a common future."66 This belief ultimately
enables social life to continue. But Christian faith reveals the true meaning of the
human equality of mortality. In their common descent from Adam, all are equally
sinful before God. Faith invests the common past with new meaning, and the
believer's grasp of this meaning, once again, changes his or her relationship to the
world. The believer moves from a "matter of course" worldly existence to a "matter
of choice" existence in faith. Neighborly love expresses one's choice for God and for
eternal life in the heavenly community. Because the world's estrangement from God
through sin is the cause of its historic fellowship with death, so, too, the believer's
choice out of the world through grace is historically dependent on Christ's redemptive
action for the whole community. Recognition of origins, therefore, in this last
situation of Arendt's analysis, concerns not simply the individual, but all of
humanity. All share in a sinful origin in Adam by generation, and all are called to
share in a graced origin in Christ through faith.
Returning to the questions that guided Arendt's research readily demonstrates the
movement of her thought. On what is the neighbor's relevance grounded? What
gives neighborly love its great importance in Augustine? Arendt claims that
Augustine's argument grounding the neighbor's relevance is not tied to Christianity,
but derives from his belief in the equality all share because of a common history and
mortality.67 Christian faith provides an explanation and new meaning for that
equality, and out of this understanding comes the Christian emphasis on neighborly
love. We can meet others only because we are members of a common race and we
should love them because the equality we share has been made explicit in Christian
faith. That is, we love the sinful other not because sin characterizes the common
past -- sin leads always to death -- but because grace revealed in the other and in
oneself through Christ initiates a transformed understanding of the common past.
The equality of sin becomes, for the Christian, the background to an equality of
grace.
Because Arendt emphasizes Augustine's view of a common past -- the primary
link between people -- she assigns to faith a secondary, but, nonetheless, important
role in determining the relevance of the neighbor. Faith explicates the meaning of
the past as a pre-existing link and serves as a guide for a future-oriented life which is
realized in an ever-extending present. Faith has a particular effect on society. It tends
to dissolve the "matter of course" relation one has to the world and the interdependent
structure of social life. The believer is no longer of the world in the sense that he
experiences divine love -- the love extended to all in the heavenly community -- in
his prayerful isolation before God. He remains in the world, however, because he
depends for his daily life on the purely social interdependence characteristic of the
earthly city.68 The believer lives in the constant peril of forgetting the newfound
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meaning of the past and relapsing into a sinful life, which for the believer, will lead
to eternal death. Every individual Christian lives in the peril of death.
What is Arendt's final assessment of neighborly love in Augustine's thinking?
Separated from the world, the believer's love depends on the working of divine grace;
the other is always loved for the sake of that grace. The "indirectness" of this love,
Arendt notes, puts a stop to "matter-of-course social relations."69 One is obligated to
love the other, not on the basis of a shared humanity, but in imitation of Christ. In
the relativity that a hoped-for eternity establishes, the world, the neighbor, and
relations in society all become radically provisional. Well-ordered love is the passage
to love and life in God. As individuals, creatures come to know one another as
members of the human race; through faith they detach themselves from the natural
links of society and human history; then, together, they bind themselves to one
another in mutual love and in imitation of Christ. Neighborly love, though
extrinsic, characterizes the bond of the faithful: those worldless individuals lifted out
of the "matter-of-course dependence in which ail men live among each other."70
To conclude, how have the concerns of ontology, stance towards the world and
relationships in the world come to the surface in the dissertation? Each of the three
sections, following its analysis of the structures of craving, describes how that
fundamental human desire reflects upon and encounters the source, end and givenness
of existence. But as Hannah Arendt rightly points out, the person's every question
about being and human existence is also a question about the world in which one
lives. Put another way, Augustine's ontological interest, as highlighted by Arendt,
gives rise to certain existential choices. Foremost among these are the stance one
would take towards the world and the approach to others that stance and its
accompanying faith require. To the believer's query about the world and others,
Augustine replies in a way that recalls the johannine paradox of being "in the world"
but "not of it" and advocates observance of the biblical command to "love thy
neighbor." Following her careful study of Augustinian texts, Hannah Arendt
concludes that it is the past and not a unified philosophical system which, in
Augustine, links and relates every person to the neighbor.
Arendt's principal contribution to Augustine scholarship lies in her ability to
highlight the importance of neighborly love in the community of believers within
the overall complexity of Augustine's theology. Arendt shows, for example, that
Augustine's articulation of the "this worldly" social existence of Christians --
neighborly love -- can be appreciated only if one links it to the common situation of
mortality in which every person lives. "The new life can only be won in fighting
the old. "71 This means that the Christian sees death no longer as simply a rule of
nature, but as an approaching threat which carries with it the possibility of
punishment for sin. Therefore, in common defense against the world's sinful past

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(continued in the present) and committed to a faith expressed in neighborly love,

Christians find a new' point to human togetherness, that of social life based on Christ
and defined by mutual love in view of eternal life. "The Christians' 'being in the
world' expresses their link with their own past," writes Arendt in summarizing
Augustine, and through imitation of Christ they strive to become the "impulse that
will save their neighbor."n Faced thus with the danger of eternal death through sin
and animated by a concern for the salvation of the other's soul, the Christian turns to
life in a world opened to the possibility of grace.

Retrospective: Hannah Arendt and Saint Augustine

The question which guides the reflections in the second part of this essay is
whether the themes and the conclusions of Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin provide
further insight into Hannah Arendt's later writings? Under headings similar to those
used in the frrst section, I try to show how the dissertation and its themes fit into
Hannah Arendt's gradually developing personal and intellectual perspective. I have
entitled the parts of this section, "Source, end and givenness of existence;" "Stance
towards the world;" and, "Relationships to others." Some of the connections I make
between her dissertation and later writings are meant only to elucidate Hannah
Arendt's subsequent remarks about Augustine. Others, however, mean to suggest
that there is an echo -- oftentimes a dissonant echo -- of the dissertation and its
interpretation of Augustine in Hannah Arendt's mature thought. In both cases,
however, it is my hope that this retrospective analysis can contribute to a fuller
understanding of how her initial perspective, growing out of the dissertation,
developed through her reformulation of Augustinian themes and problems in other
contexts.
A final note before proceeding: Hannah Arendt's thoughts on time and will in
Augustine are most probably deserving of separate treatment. An in-depth considera -
tion of these elements is not possible here. Where clearly pertinent, however, I have
tried to incorporate into the text consideration of these two important elements.

1. The source, end and givenness of existence.

Despite her interest in Augustine and her familiarity with theological questions,
Hannah Arendt reflected on existence principally from a philosophical standpoint.
Instead of developing the theological dimensions of questions when they occur in her
writings, she indicates their theological importance and comments on the difficulties
or presuppositions involved in answers to them. For instance, Arendt mentions how

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the problem of human nature is unanswerable in its general philosophical sense. "If
one refers to Augustine," she writes at the beginning of The Human Condition, "the
answer to the question What am I?' can be given only by God who made man," and
"can be settled only within the framework of a divinely revealed answer."73 Her
intent in making remarks of this kind is neither to develop theological critiques of
Augustine or other authors, nor is it to provide the backdrop against which she would
propose her own theological answers. However much one is tempted to draw out of
her texts evidence of an underlying theological project, or even impulse, Hannah
Arendt never writes theology.74 Nevertheless, she does acknowledge that resolution
of certain fundamental questions is either impossible or better left to others and that
some questions can only be answered in faith.
Although Arendt refrains from explicit theological elaboration of the question
about the source of being, she nonetheless keeps her distance from the •god of the
philosophers, who, since Plato, has revealed himself to be a kind of Platonic ideal of
man. "75 Arendt formally rejects that answer to the question about the source of
being. Later in the same work, when discussing the rise of science and technology in
the Modem age, she states that "no matter how we explain the evolution of the earth
and nature and man, they must have come into being by some transmundane,
'universal' force. ·76 Although Arendt consistently calls human beings "creatures,"
she does not try to persona1ize that force.77
Moreover, Arendt does refer to "God.· Whether these references reflect traces of
her Hebraic religious culture and belief or whether they derive simply from the need
to respect the conventions of acceptable language is hard to say. But Hannah Arendt
usually chose her words carefully and deliberately and did not hesitate to defy
convention for the sake of making a point. Unfortunately, because this question
points in the direction of her personal religious beliefs, a topic about which she never
wrote, attempting to answer the question more completely would be unfair to Arendt,
because it would require the impossible task of trying to look into her soul. What
we can say is that Arendt denied being a "crypto-Christian," always acknowledged her
Jewishness by birth, and pointed out, on at least one occasion, that the crucial
problem facing contemporary religion was that "people do not believe anymore."78
Arendt lived in the tension the Modem age created for belief and never withdrew from
the difficult questions it brought with it. For her, neither the agnostic nor the
believer could escape a certain fundamental question. "Do I like being alive, and
being a person, so much that I am willing to pay the price?"79 The price to pay is
that of freedom. The question of freedom is prominent in the writings of Arendt; her
treatment of it suggests that she approached ontological concerns about the source of
being principally in terms of existential questions about the activities of human
beings in the world, this world. 80 This ontological concern is evident both in her
work on Augustine and in her other works. Early on, Arendt confronted what she
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came to call the "facticity" of human mortality and the givenness of existence -- two
unanswerables for which Augustine gives explanations based on his own
philosophical and theological views. Both problems are the natural subjects, in
Arendt's views, of myths that attempt to come to terms with what is beyond
understanding.81 Arendt's confrontation of these questions in her own work leads her
not to theological reflection, but to an emphasis on the importance of freedom,
especially in its relation to political life. 82 Augustine, because he, too, struggled
with ontological questions without disassociating them from existential concerns,
notably, the scope and origin of human freedom, became and remained a rich
background out of which Arendt could formulate many of her own ideas, often in
contrast to his.
Saint Augustine's theology never adequately explains for Arendt the source of
human existence in God as creator or the origin of the structure of the world as the
"fabric of heaven and earth" created by God. 83 However, the concept of a "common
world" she describes in The Human Condition as related to "the human artifact, the
fabrication of human hands as well as to the affairs which go on among those who
inhabit the man-made world together," bears a striking resemblance to the "human
world" she finds in Augustine -- constituted "by the lovers of the world and by that
which they love."84 Her concept of the common world is founded on the mysterious
givenness of all existence, from which a human world can be made. 85 This is
precisely the horizon Arendt sees in Augustine's pre-theological view of the structure
of craving and the human condition. Arendt describes Augustine's view of the initial
relationship of the creature to God and to the world in the following terms:

As the creature finds the world, it finds itself -- 'of the world,' and also created
by God. In the pure act of finding itself as a part of God's creation, the
creature is not yet at home in the world: it is only in making itself at home
there that it establishes the world. 86

Passages such as this demonstrate how Arendt makes explicit certain ideas of
Augustine which, while certainly prescnt in his writings, are "matters of course" for
him: namely, that humans perceive themselves as created members of a pre-existing
order and as having the power, especially through the craving for permanence, to
establish, fashion and make familiar the given world. Arendt explores this question
about the givenness of existence and of an established human world first, by seeing it
as an issue in Augustine and then, by making it her own.
The question about human existence undoubtedly led Augustine and Arendt to
different conclusions. For Augustine, the believer's reflections on mortality and the
source of being flow into belief in God as creator: all beings come from God and

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through faith can escape death in the movement of return to God. In human terms
this is the quest for the beata vita or eternal life in God. And although Arendt does
not share Augustine's vision, her references to the theme of natality, the miracle of
coming to be in a given world, clearly have their roots in her interpretation of
Augustine, later developed in The Human Condition. 87
Hannah Arendt's understanding of natality does not include Augustine's compre -
hensive theological view of creation,life and death, nor does it serve as an explana -
tion of mortality or as a myth to resolve questions about the "end" of existence.
"Speculations about life after death ... are no doubt as old as the conscious life of
man on earth."88 Natality, quite simply, is the mysterious possibility mortals have
for beginnings in this world. 89 Arendt does not enclose this mystery in either myth
or theology, Augustinian, biblical, or any other. The concept of natality enables
Hannah Arendt to trace a pathway from the mysterious givenness of existence to a
human world engendered by the miraculous possibility for action.
By means of the theme of action, Arendt links her concept of natality to the
question of immorta1ity and to the kind of human activity worthy of the mysterious
possibility for new beginnings. The Ancient Greeks, in her view, saw action as the
way of wirming an immortal place in the memory of the ages to come. "Action" in -
dicates the potential greatness of mortals "to produce things ... which would deserve
to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness."90 The fall of Rome
signaled the end of antiquity and coincided with the rise of the Christian belief in
everlasting life for mortals which "made striving for an earthly immorta1ity futile and
unnecessary. "91 The Modern age differs from these earlier times in that both the
striving for earthly immorta1ity and the belief in everlasting life have all but been
abandoned. From Heidegger she learned that the authentic human life has to do not
with striving for immortality, but with "facing death." But Arendt lamented the loss
of the Ancient view of earthly immortality, for when she describes one of the
characteristics of the Modern age as the "almost complete loss of authentic concern
for immortality," she calls it a clear manifestation of the loss of the "public realm,"
that place created by humans for true speech and action.92 Founded on the possi -
bilities given it by natality, action was Hannah Arendt's way of reasserting the
human potential for lasting greatness in the face of death.
It is not surprising that Hannah Arendt and Saint Augustine part ways in their
reflections on immortality: Augustine moving along his path in response to the pre-
eminent desire to adhere to God in Christian faith, and Arendt, on hers in response to
her need to explore elsewhere, to formulate new principles and foundati\lns for a truly
human life and to re-assert the possibility for human beginnings and action in a
given but frequently hostile world. She turned from study of the "other worldly"
immortality of Augustine to advocacy of the possibilities for a "this worldly"

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immortality. Even in the dissertation she does not dwell on Augustine's frequent
theological speculations about Heaven and Hell, but instead concentrates on how
neighborly love is the specifically Christian possibility for life and action in the
world.
But Hannah Arendt's remarks on the issue of immortality suggest that sbe never
found a position entirely satisfactory to her. If one looks, for example, at her interest
in Greek and Roman concepts of the world and civil society and the role which glory
and virtuosity played in each as expressions of the only kind of immortality humans
can strive for, it is possible to see that the demythologization she applied to the
Augustinian framework also hindered any other explanation from taking complete
hold on her thought.93 No myth, even that surrounding the American Republic,
could ever adequately fill the void left by the demythologization of religion's myth
and the disappearance of the public realm for lack of true speech and action. 94 As a
result, her search for a new political philosophy constantly confronted the problems
of "this-worldly" immortality. Despite the fact that she never resolved the issue of
immortality, the questions it posed return in another of Hannah Arendt's concerns:
the stance one could take towards the world.

2. Stance towards the world.

If superficially reflected upon, the environment that is ours and includes other
people and human artifacts -- the reality we usually call the "world" -- is simply
there. Augustine understands it as most natural that we would love the world because
it is ours, because it is ever before us and has a natural rapport with US. 95 The
experience of conversion to faith, however, changes one's relationship to the world
and to oneself. One moves, in faith's discovery of the world as creation, from a
"matter of course" or natural relationship to existence, as Arendt describes it in the
dissertation, to one henceforth marked by choice and a new moral dimension of
thought. 96 The world and all that exists in it is now seen within the context of belief
in creation. Alive with a new-found sense of God, the believer, in deciding about the
world, will choose estrangement from it, because all action must now be ordered in
relationship to its source and end, because faith has destroyed forever the old "matter
of course" relationship with the world. One cannot be in the world as before. Once
the believer sees the world as changeable, its true meaning and values now have
consciously to be taken into account. Creation can no longer be confused with the
Creator or be considered tacitly as an ultimate end.
In Arendt's interpretation of Augustine, the world becomes radically provisional
for the believer. Arendt fmds in Christian faith a reversal of the Greek concept of the
world as eternal, since Christianity's biblical roots contributed to a more fundamental

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concern for the sanctity of life. Whereas the Greeks viewed the world as eternal,
Christians abandoned that notion and placed in its stead a belief in individual human
immortality. As a response to faith and conversion, therefore, estrangement from the
provisional world is in no way negative, for at its center is the graced action of the
creature returning to the Creator. This turning to God invests the past with a new
meaning and establishes for the believer a different sort of involvement in the world
based on a newly discovered relationship to others and to the world in the order of
creation. Augustine finds expression of this new relationship in the community of
believers united by their common faith, and characterized by their mutual love. Truly
to live as a neighbor means to set one's heart on God the creator and to praise God in
loving all creatures in and for God. Neighborly love in Augustine, Arendt remarks,
"is the peculiarly Christian possibility for a relationship to the world even in
attachment to God. "97
How does Hannah Arendt work out in her own thought the question about one's
stance towards the world? Her view of natality as a real miracle, for instance,
presupposes a kind of belief which, in tum, "can bestow upon human affairs faith and
hope."98 To believe is to change one's stance toward that which is simply "there,"
and toward the world constituted by other people. Arendt's recognition of the impor -
tance of natality corresponds to her affinity for a particular stance towards the world,
that of the non-assimilated Jew or conscious pariah.99 In an early essay in which she
reflects on the kinship of the pariah to the poet, Arendt states that "both alike [are]
excluded from society and [are] never quite at home in il."l00 Nonetheless, Rahel
Varnhagen, for Arendt, the archetypical pariah, was filled with "a passionate compre -
hension" able to discover "human dignity long before reason made it the foundation
of morality."101 If the conscious pariah is truly a person of courage rather than
resignation in the face of suffering, then that person's taking a stance towards the
world is never merely implicit, because the one choice never given the pariah is that
of living a "matter of course" existence. Instead, he or she always lives in the midst
of the tensions of a world that is not a home, and with an anomalons status society
often perceives as a threat to it. 102 The isolation that the pariah experiences and the
tension that characterizes the pariah's life result from being in society, but not really
of it, from being an outsider, clinging, as it were, to something else.
In many ways the pariah is in search of a framework -- that of creator-creation-
creature -- or else some other within which to decide how to order one's relationship
to the world and how to come to terms with the "whence" and "whither" of existence,
as well as with its "who" and "what." Whatever specific stance towards the world the
pariah chooses, a stance that may change according to circumstance and events in
history, the great risk in leaving behind a "matter of course" existence is that of
absolute isolation from those who remain in the world. This experience is not
unlike the isolation Hannah Arendt describes in the dissertation as the condition of
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the believer who seeks the presence of God in prayer.l03 In fact, it is tempting to
draw a parallel between the conscious pariah who experiences a kind of estrangement
from the world and the Christian who finds that the movement towards God in faith
and love removes him or her from the world. Both have rejected something of the
world's disordered condition, its tendency to mistake the creation for the creator, and
its substitution of the satisfaction of selfish desires for the beata vita. Augustine's
rejection of the world, for instance, stems from disdain for its praise and its
incapacity to measure true worth, for the pride that is the sinful companion of earthly
praise.
Not surprisingly, Hannah Arendt treated such questions with a different
vocahulary for a different age. And yet, her opposition to a naive faith in progress,
for instance, or her fears about American society'S growing dependence on images
reveal, I think, a fundamental rejection of "worldly standards" and pride.104 At the
bottom of her rejection one finds not simply the experience of the world's hostility to
Jews, nor the discovery that some of her people had, through loss of their sense of
history, become faithless in their efforts to assimilate, but her growing awareness
that the world created by the Modern age has abandoned its search for immortality in
favor of a frantic consumerism amid superabundance. IDS For Hannah Arendt,
rejection of certain social standards opened up for her the possibility to affirm one's
humanity in the world.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl captures Hannah Arendt's stance towards the world in
the expression amor mundi, a love which, because it grows out of a feeling of
responsibility for the world, includes strong criticism of the world. The notion armr
mundi helps one to understand Arendt, but study of her dissertation suggests that
this expression implies neither her rejection of Augustine's amor dei, nor her
equation of the object of her love with the world Augustine rejects. The loves of
Augustine and Arendt have a common locus: the world and the people who constitute
it. Their seemingly contrary visions, arnor mundi or arnor dei, are linked insofar as
they affirm possibilities for a truly human world without adding to those the
illusions either of "perfectibility" or "progress."I06 Augustine, for example, develops
his ethics of human relationships in terms of love and a vision of what the other can
become. I07 Arendt best expresses a similar thought through the theme of natality and
in the expression of Pindar, "Become what you are."
Another link between Augustine and Arendt with regard to their stances towards
the world concerns their different, but complementary attempts to offer the world a
genuinely human set of values. Augustine, of course, sees the world within a
comprehensive religious approach which centers on the creature's turning towards
God and finding in God the source of all life. But this transcendental vision recog -
nizes that grace and love, however 'other worldly', can fmd their concrete expression

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only in this world. In contrast, Arendt's VlSlQn is neither comprehensive,

transcendental or religious. It concerns the individual person perhaps less than the
fate of the world itself -- from which people have become alienated "in their flight
from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self." 108 The common
world, depending on speech and action for its life, cannot withstand the twofold
movement of a kind of cosmic expansion, on the one hand, and the retreat in to the
small world of introspection, on the other. For Hannah Arendt, the task is clear even
if the means to accomplishing it should prove elusive. The only way of sustaining
the public realm, that is, of genuinely loving the world, is through the re-assertion of
basic human capacities. Thus, she began her appeal for the safeguarding and encour -
agementoftrue "speech" and "action."

3. Our relations to others in the World.

The paradox facing the pariah and the believer is that both, despite their
estrangement from the world, remain in the world. What should be their lived
response to the world? Guided by the primacy of "cleaving to God," Augustine sees
a path for understanding and shaping the earthly life of the believer in the scheme of
the "two cities." In obedience to God's law, one should love the neighbor as oneself
within the context of the fundamental desire to be with God. Formation of a com -
munity of believers results from this. For such a community, the individual's
constant turning to the inner voice of conscience helps determine whether his or her
love of neighbor is genuine or not 109 By contrast, Arendt's description of the faith
community can be off-putting for the Christian, if it is not properly understood, and
it may remind one of the argument that the Christians were indeed responsible for the
fall of the Roman Republic. At various times she describes the faith community as
"estranged" and other-worldly, as being in peril of lasting death because it is
individually oriented, as apolitical and yet as destructive of the "in-between" of the
world through its emphasis on love and its radically provisional view of the world
and all that is in it.1 10 Christian faith ends the natural relationship of interdependence
which characterizes society, she writes in the dissertation, and "dissolves the human
race into its many individuals."lll
Arendt's description of the community of believers simply highlights the role
which faith plays in human association and the inability of the Christian community
per se to found and perpetuate a political community. Without faith, there can be no
overarching myth to explain past, present, and future in terms of a God who is
creator and redeemer in history. Without faith in such a myth, the introspective
movement of the individual leads not to the discovery of a personal God towards
whom love becomes the appropriate response, but to a fundamental isolation, in

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which the world itself disappears and the impulse of love becomes inappropriate in
the public rea1m because there is no community at all.
For Hannah Arendt, rejection of the transcendental myth and of the
corresponding neighborly love which constitutes for Augustine the vinculum of the
faith community meaus either that some other myth must replace it or that a totally
different foundation must be found for meaning in life. Had Arendt found that
Augustine based the neighbor's relevance on some intrinsic ontological principle,
this would not have solved the problem of faith. Such a discovery might have
uncovered a vinculum bonding society, but since that vinculum would be ontologi -
cally given, and therefore not subject to human choice, it would be without value
because it would eliminate political life. Loving or respecting one's neighbor would
become simply a biological necessity, akin to eating and sleeping for survival. In
fact, for Augustine, the vinculum can be called extrinsic because it stems from
Jesus' commandment in faith "to love one another." Yet the vinculum in
Augustine, I would suggest, is indeed rooted in a pre-existing ontological reality:
God's prior love of creation.1l2 In Christian terms, the bond of neighborly love is a
response to God's love in creation and in re-creation through Christ "Love one ana -
ther as I have loved you." It is not so much because Arendt rejected Augustine'S
version of love or faith that she had to look elsewhere. She found both inadequate to
the purposes of public society for an age in which the decline of authority, religion
and tradition necessitates a confrontation with "the elementary problems of human
living-together."113
The concern for an elementary, this-worldly political vinculum occupies a
prominent place in the thought of Hannah Arendt. 114 For instance, she writes that
our present danger has to do with the possibility that we "forget our ability to
associate." She is referring here to the American practice of voluntary association,"
our traditional instrument for facing the future with some measure of confidence." 115
Love is no substitute for the vinculum that through contract, covenant or agreement,
"binds each member to his fellow citizens. "116 Love would never be able to
"withstand the glare of publicity that attends all political action without being
distorted or perverted. "117 In her search, Arendt turns to the importance of history and
of event as the stuff out of which a vinculum for political organization can be
derived. On the basis of these a public inyth and story are created. This may be seen
as parallel to Augustine's reflection on the decisive importance of the Christ event in
history. For Augustine, the story of Christ becomes a normative history of
forgiveness and [ave, to be continued in the life of the Christian community and in
the transforming faith of believers. Neighborly love is the concrete expression of the
continuation of the story turned in the direction of the world.

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Augustine's framework is, therefore, impossible for Arendt who posits respect
in the place of love as the appropriate attitude for those in the public reahn of speech
and action. 118 Out of true human speech and action grow history and event and a
story which can become the gauge of any period's immortality.119 For a world of
uncertainty, stories are the only worthy answer to the givenness of existence. Stories
are salvific because they reveal meaning without committing the error of defming it,
bring "about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and ... contain
eventually by implication the last word we can expect from the 'day of judgment'" 120
In the dissertation, I suggest, we find the earliest example of the link Arendt makes
between attitudes and stories in their relationship to activity in the world. But in her
reading of Augustine, the Christian expression of love as neighborly carries with it
the historic possibility of the isolation of the Christian from the world. 121 By faith,
the human race is dissolved into a collection of individuals called into the presence of
God because the event of God's acting in history has changed everything and has
placed all before a new and ultimate 'beyond': either lasting death or eternal beatitude.
Finally, although Hannah Arendt questioned Augustine's Christian framework
and the coherence of his view of neighborly love, she did not abandon the search for
the principles which would encourage an authentically human existence. For her the
vinculum· that could bond human beings to one another is the power of promise:

The force that keeps [people1 together, as distinguished from the space of
appearances in which they gather and the power which keeps this public space
in existence, is the force of mutual promise or contract. l22

In the human capacity for making promises is found, perhaps, the true meaning
of her amor mundi, for promises are the "uniquely human way of ordering the
future."I23

Conclusion

This essay on Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Saint Augustine has studied Der
LiebesbegrijJ bei Augustin and some of Arendt's other references to Augustine with
two goals in mind: first, to provide the reader with an understanding and evaluation of
her seldom studied dissertation, and second, to determine, through review of it and
other references to Augustine, the connection between Augustine's thought and
Hannah Arendt's subsequent writings.
Considered in the perspective of Hannah Arendt's later writings, the dissertation
provides a key to fuller understanding of her thought because it is in the dissertation

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that she establishes the importance of several themes taken from Augustine and, in
subsequent writings, develops them according to her own perspective. Considered
independently of their development, these themes can be summarized in three points.
First, as regards the importance of ontology, the view that human existence is
a mysterious given emerges in the dissertation. For Arendt, this discovery in
Augustine leads to a related discussion of the source of existence and its end, or
"creation" and "immorta1ity." Second, the question of one's stance towards the world
shows itself in Arendt's sustained emphasis on the importance of Augustine's twofold
conception of the world, that is, as the fabric of heaven and earth, on the one hand,
and as the human world, on the other. Arendt demonstrates how the structure of
craving provides the link in Augustine between creatures and the world they fabricate
and inhabit. Discovering, in Augustine's framework, that craving attaches creatures
to the world, Arendt finds a way to articulate how, for Augustine, human beings
make a place for themselves in the world and belong to it. They can regard one
another as objects of desire -- to be possessed for their own sake or for the sake of
reaching the God who is the source and end of their existence.
The possibility of the relevance of the neighbor constitutes the third and most
important theme of the dissertation. Her inquiry into the neighbor's relevance has as
its goal an understanding of the distinctively social character of human existence. To
reach that goal Arendt eliminates along the way the possibility that cmving be the
true source of the neighbor's relevance because its two expressions lead, in cupidity,
to death, or, in charity, to a negation of the world's and the neighbor's intrinsic value
through an overriding quest for endless life in God. The final possibility for the
relevance of the neighbor, Christian faith, derives from belief in a particular
interpretation of history and appears to be linked to a specific community of believers
for whom it is the distinct possibility of a social life in this world.
Already in the dissertation we are aware of Arendt's hesitancy with regard to
Augustine's framework, its risk of isolation for the individual, its reliance on belief
and revelation, and its lack of a unified philosophical basis. Therefore, for this
reason alone, any appropriation of Augustinian elements in her subsequent writings
will necessitate a sometimes complicated reinterpretation of the themes for other
purposes. Against the background of Heideggerian and Jasperian influences, trying to
unravel her reinterpretations becomes an unruly and probably impossible task.
Nonetheless, the three themes outlined in this essay emerge in their own right in
many of Arendt's writings and, because they are so clearly evident in the dissertation,
provide a perspective from which to speculate on the role Augustine played in the
development of Hannah Arendt's thought. I have tried to show that the three themes
of the dissertation, though modified, integrate themselves into her ovemll perspective
in the following ways.

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First, from an initial recognition of the givenness of human existence, Arendt

moves into a consideration of the concepts of natality and new beginnings, both of
which fmd their core insight in that passage from the City of God she so frequently
cites: "that there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody." 124
Arendt explores this theological insight in terms of its applicability to the public
realm. Arendt's concern with political events is certainly behind this application but
so, too, is a philosophical and personal concern in her writings with the relation
between the "self' which had become "a problem unto itself' and its necessary
emergence into the public world of appearances, for only there could human activities
"fmd an adequate home in the world." 125 Arendt's writing reflects the tension of this
relation, manifest most clearly in the distinction between private and public realms
she derives from her reading of the Greeks.
Second, if "new beginnings" opened for Arendt the possibility for authentic
action in the world, then one's relationship to that world becomes a problem of
central importance. The link between Augustine and Arendt on this point has to do
with her streamlining and modifying of Augustine's twofold conception of the world
in favor of her own concept, the "common" world. This new category functions
similarly to the category used by Augustine but has a different emphasis. Arendt
rejects neither creation, nor the view of the world as the fabric of heaven and earth.
Indeed, those who did, ceded to a false image of man as creator, a view Arendt
criticizes, or to an iruage of the world as a place in which "everything is possible," a
view she clearly abhors. 126 Nonetheless, Arendt's fOCus is clearly upon those
activities constitutive of distinctly human prerogatives in.a given world: speech,
action, natality, promise.
The stress Arendt places on the common world emerges in her earliest essays
and is based on the conviction that "only when a people lives ... in concert with
other peoples can it contribute to the establishment of a commonly controlled and
commonly conditioned humanity. "127 But the very fact of being a "people" is
premised on the possibility of human bonding and the sharing of a common past.
To discover how this occurred, Arendt moves through and beyond the insight she
frequently attributes to Augustine: namely, that in Augustine's Latin, "the word 'to
live' had always coincided with inter homines esse, 'to be in the company of
men."'12S The importance of discovering how to establish an authentic neighbor-
liness' no matter how frustratingly elusive, remains with Arendt whether she is
writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, because of which men of good
will were driven into isolation, or later, in The Human Condition, where she
describes the modern experience of world-alienation. 129
Neither Augustine's Christian faith, including its particular view of revelation
and immortality, nor the past alone, nor a worldless love, could provide Arendt with

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a philosophical way out of isolation and into the common world in which the
neighbor's relevance could be affirmed for the Modern age. Rather, through turning
the question she asked of Augustine -- What is the relevance of the neighbor? -- back
upon herself, Arendt slowly develops the view that "the strength of mutual promise,"
best describes the bond between persons in the public realm because:

All political business is, and always has been, transacted within an elaborate
framework of ties and bonds for the future-osuch as laws, and constitutions,
treaties and alliances -- all of which derive in the last instance from the faculty
to promise and to keep promises in the face of the essential uncertainties of
the future. 130

1. The notable exception to this is the recent biography by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl:

Hannah Arendt, for love of the world (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
especially pp. 490-498.
2. Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (Berlin: J. Springer, 1929).
3. Hannah Arendt, "Love and Saint Augustine. An Essay in Philosophical Inter-
pretation'" Arendt Papers. Library of Congress. Washington. D.C. The translation is
thought to have been made by E.B. Ashton. Subsequent references to this document
will be made under the heading "Dissertation."
4. Dissertation. p. 33246. Cf. Young-Bruehl. p. 74.
5. Young-Bruehl. p. 52.
6. While still at Heidelberg, Arendt was introduced to Zionism by her friend Hans
Jonas.
7. Hannah Arendt. "We Refugees." Menorah Journal 31 (January. 1943). p. 65.
8. For Americans. it was the belief that mutual promise and human deliberation could
produce good government. Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin
Books. 1963), p. 214.
9. Dissertation. pp. 33241. 33345.
10. Dissertation. pp. 33243. 33246.
11. Best known of the studies on love in Augustine are. John Burnaby. Arnor Dei. A
Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1938) and
Anders Nygren. Agape and Eros (London: S.P.C.K.• 1953). For a concise summary of
the controversy over possible interpretations of love in Augustine. cf. Raymond
Carming, "Distinction between Love for God and Love for Neighbor in St. Augustine,"

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Augustiniana, 32 Nos. 1/2 (1982), pp. 5-41; and Raymond CatlIting, "Love of
Neighbor in St. Augustine," Augustiniana, 33 Nos. 1/2 (1983), pp. 5-57.
12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958),
p. 242; ''The Concept of History," Between Past and Future: $ix Exercises in Political
Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 73.
13. 'The Concept of History," p. 73.
14. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, "In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah
Arendt's Phenomenological Humanism," Review of Politics 46 (April, 1984), p. 183.
"Even in her most abstruse theoretical works ... Arendt's passionate concern for the
present age shone through."
15. Literally, "Quaestio mihi factus sum." Cf. Dissertation, p. 33269; Saint
Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1984),
X, 16.
16. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewish Woman, (London: East
and West Library, 1958), p. 10. Arendt comments on similar problems in "lsak
Dinesen: 1885-1963" in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1968), pp. 95-109. In the view of Dinesen, too much worry about one's identity or
"self" could easily make one a "prisoner" and "slave" of that self. (p. 96).
17. Saint Augustine. "Homilies on I John," in Augustine: Later Works, trans. John
Burnaby, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1955), 6, 2-4 (pp. 303-305); Young-
Bruehl, p. 88.
18. Hannah Ar~ndt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Viking Press, 1963), p.22.
19. Arendt's response to Eric Voegelin's commentary on the Origins of TotaliJarian -
ism contains a strong defense of her treatment of contemporary issues: "A Reply,"
Journal of Politics 15 (January, 1953), pp. 78, 81.
20. Hannah Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," Partisan Review 20 No.4 (July-
August, 1953), p. 390.
21. "Understanding and Politics," p. 390.
22. Hannah Arendt, "Home to Roost," in S.B. Warner, The American Experiment
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976), pp. 61-77.
23. Arendt's initial contact with Augustine's thought came from Guardini's lectures and
Heidegger's sentinars. Cf. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "From the Pariah's Point of View:
Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Life and Work," in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of
the Public World ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), p. 6.
Augustine was the perennial source of controversy and commentary in the German
theological and philosophical circles of the time. His thought provided scholars with
the possibility of exploring the relationship between Christian faith and Ancient
philosophy. This possibility was enhanced by the fact that one could approach
Augustine's thought on love psychologically -- as a means to happiness -- or ethically
and ontologically -- as obedience to God's eternal laws in conformity to the ordo
rerum. Cf. Canning, p. 7.
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24. Hannah Arendt, "What is Existenz Philosophy?," Partisan Review 8/1 (Winter
1946), p. 50. For a brief discussion of this point see Young-Bruehl, p. 75. William
Barrett makes the same criticism. Cf. Robert Meager, An Introduction to Saint
Augustine (New York: New York University Press, 1978), p. xvii. Barrett states, "If
we return to Augustine after reading Heidegger, we will find the latter lacking.
Heidegger's Dasein - his incarnation of human being - does not have Augustinian love
at its center, and to that degree is empty and falls short of petsonal being."
25. Dissertation, p. 33242.
26. Confessions, IV, 16 (pp. 89-90).
27. Cf. Hannah Arendt, ''We Refugees," Menorah Journal 31 (January 1943), pp. 69-
77; Human Condition, pp. 256-257; Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World
Publishing Company, 1958), p. 259.
28. Hannah Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing," (1959) Men
in Dark Times, p. 4.
29. Dissertation, p. 33246.
30. Dissertation, p. 33241.
31. Dissertation, pp. 33243, 33244.
32. Dissertation, p. 33243.
33. Arendt does not explicitly say that charity is "pre-theological." It emerges in a
person's faith discovery of the source of being. Thus, the creature who now has faith
moves from a pre-theological sphere into one which is more properly theological.
Also, it is important to note that Arendt separates the three "situations" and three con -
cepts of love only conceptually. This, I suggest, gives the work its extremely abstract
character. For the sake of clarity, Arendt's "conceptual contexts" will be called simpy
"situations. "
34. Dissertation, p. 33242.
35. Dissertation, p. 33360.
36. Most translations of Augustine use the word "desire." For instance. cf. Saint
Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions, in The Fathers of the Church, Volume 70,
Hermigild Dressler, ed., (Washington: Catholic Univ. Press, 1982), 35 (p. 62). "For
love is nothing more than to desire something for its own sake."
37. Dissertation, p. 33252. Cf. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus
Dods, (New York: Modern Library, 1950), xn, 20 (p. 402).
38. Dissertation, p. 33252. cr. Saint Augustine, Sermons, 306, 3,4 and 7.
(Patrologia Migne, XXXVIII, 5-A, 1401, 1403).
39. Dissertation, 33254.
40. Dissertation, p. 33253. Arendt cites De libero arbitro I, 34 and Sermons 72, 61.
41. Dissertation, p. 33254.
42. Dissertation, p. 33265.

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 Patrick Boyle S J

43. Dissertation, p. 33261.

44. "Homilies," II, 12 (p. 276). Cf. Dissertation, p. 33258.
45. Dissertation, p. 33258. Cf. "Homilies," II, 12 (p. 276).
46. Dissertation, p. 33258.
47. Dissertation, p. 33285.
48. Dissertation, p. 33287.
49. Dissertation, p. 33288. Cf. Confessions, X. 14 (p. 221).
50. Dissertation, p. 33295. Cf. Saint Augustine, The Catholic and Manichean Ways
of Life in The Fathers of the Church, Volume 56, Roy Deferrari, ed., (Washington:
Catholic Univ. Press, 1947), II, 6-8 (pp. 70-75).
51. Dissertation. p. 33296.
52. Dissertation, pp. 33296, 33295.
53. Dissertation, p. 33299.
54. Dissertation, p. 33300.
55. Dissertation, p. 33300.
56. Dissertation, p. 33331.
57. Dissertation, p. 33302.
58. Dissertation, p. 33320.
59. Dissertation, p. 33331. Saint Augustine, In loannis Evangelicum tractatus, 87,4.
Cf. "Homilies on the Gospel of Jolm," in Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, ed. Phillip Schaff (Graod Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), LXXXVI (p. 555).
60. Dissertation, p. 33341.
61. Dissertation, p. 33334.
62. Dissertation, p. 33349. cf. "Homilies on I Jolm," I, 3 (p. 261). "They have
seen, and we have not; yet we are their fellows, because we hold a common faith."
63. Dissertation, p. 33350.
64. Dissertation, p. 33350.
65. Dissertation, p. 33351. In a footnote on page 33367 Arendt writes, "Cf. how
Christ aod Adam are coordinated throughout pursuaot to Rom. V. 12-21, as in Pecc.
mer. et rem. I. 16, for instance,"
66. Dissertation, p. 33352. For examples of Augustine's thoughts on what binds
human society together see. Saint Augustine. De diversis quaestionibus ad
Simplicianum in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. Jolm Burleigh (London: SCM
Press, 1953) I, 16. (p. 398). "Human society is knit together by transactions of
giving and receiving, and things are given and received sometimes as debts and
sometimes not."; De fide rerum quae non vident"T. in The Fathers of the C,hurch.
Volume 2, ed. Ludwig Schopp, (New York: CIMA, 1947), 4 (pp. 454-455). "If this
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 Elusive Neighborliness

faith in human affairs is removed, who will not mark how great will be their disorder
and what dreadful confusion will follow? -- Therefore. when we do not believe what we
cannot see, concord will perish and human society will itself not stand firm."
67. Dissertation, p. 33360.
68. Dissertation, p. 33364.
69. Dissertation, p. 33365.
70. Dissertation, p. 33366.
71. Dissertation, p. 33360.
72. Dissertation, p. 33362, 33363, 3364.
73. Human Condition, p. lO-11n.
74. For an opposing view, see, Philip Rieff, "The Theology of Politics: Reflections
on Totalitarianism as the Burden of Our Times," Journal of Religion 32 (April, 1952),
pp. 119-126.
75. Human Condition, p.40
76. Human Condition, p.269.
77. Human Condition, p.286. Cf. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 302. " ... man is
only the master. not the creator of the world.1!
78. Hannah Arendt, "Remarks at American Society of Christian Ethics," unpublished
conference given on January 21, 1973. (Library of Congress), 11839 (p. 12).
79. "Remarks," 11835 (p. 8).
80. Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?," in Between Past and Future, p. 146. It is
worthwhile noting that Arendt views Augustine (following SI. Paul) as being the source
of freedom's "first appearance in our philosophical tradition," in the experience of
religious conversion. Cf. also, On Revolution, pp. 124, 232-234, 301-302.
81. Myths used to answer fundamental questions could also be employed as political
instruments. See, for example, Arendt's discussion of how the docttine of Hell in Plato
and later in Christianity served political ends in "Religion and Politics," Confluence 2
No.3 (September, 1953), pp. 105-126, pp. 121-125.
82. "What is Freedom?," p. 145. Here Arendt tries to show how freedom and politics
coincide. "... the philosophical tradition has distorted ... the very idea of freedom
by transposing it from its original field, the reahn of politics and human affairs in
general, to an inward domain ... "
83. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 234.
84. Human Condition, p. 52; Dissertation, p. 33258.
85. Origins of Totalitarianism, p.301.
86. Dissertation, p. 33301.
87. Human Condition, p. 177.

III
 Patrick Boyle S.]

88. "Religion and Politics," p. 124.

89. Perhaps the most frequently cited reference to Augustine in the works of Arendt
comes from the City of God, XII, 20. "That there might be a beginning, man was
created before whom nobody was." "Understanding and Politics," p. 390; Human
Condition, p. 117; "Willing," in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978),
pp. 108-109.
90. Human Condition, p.19.
91. Human Condition, p.21.
92. Human Condition, p. 55
93. "The Concept of History," pp. 48, 51, 52.
94. On Revolution, pp. 233-235.
95. This is Arendt's interpretation. Dissertation, p. 3314. The interpretation is
plausible, even if her reasoning seems faulty. She makes three basic points: that the
principal question about love in Augustine is not "whether to love at all but what to
love" (Sermons 34, 2); that the world is constituted by the "lovers of the world"; that
for the person born into the world. "love of the world is never a choice, for the world
is always there, and to love it is natural" (p. 33314). If there is a flaw in her reason -
ing it seems to derive from the "twofold" concept of the world she sees in Augustine
which is, after all, ouly one concept looked at from different standpoints. In my
reading of Augustine, the world is loved naturally, not ouly because humans constitute
it. but also because it is the "fabric" of heaven and earth which has no human source.
Cf. "Sermon I," in Selected Sermons of Saini Augustine, trans., ed., Quincy Howe (New
York: Holt, 1966) 34 (p. 3).
96. The moral dimension enters primarily because the "new social life, based on
Christ, is defined by mutual love." The fact that one's "relation to the other ceases to
be a matter of course ... is expressed in the commandment of love." Dissertation, p.
33362.
97. Dissertation, p. 33284.
98. Human Condition, p.247.
99. Judith N. Shklar, "Hannah Arendt as Pariah," Partisan Review 50 No.1 (1983),
pp. 64-77.
100. Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition," (1944) in The Jew as
Pariah: Jewish Idenlity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed., Ron H. Feldman (New
York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 76.
101. Rahel Varnhagen, p. 174.
102. Rahel Varnhagen, pp. 181, 184. Note how Varnhagen, model of the pariah,
fought for "her stolen natural existence." She fmally became a Saint-Simonist.
103. Dissertation, p. 33341.
104. Hannah Arendt, "On Violence," Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1969), pp. 127-128; "Home to Roost," p. 68.

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 Elusjve Neighborliness

105. Human Condition, p. 126.

106. In the dissertation Arendt makes a point of showing that Augustine does not
share St. Paul's thoughts on human perfectibility. Dissertation, p. 33276; On the
question of progress see, "On Violence," pp. 127-128.
107. "Homilies on I John," 8, 10 (p. 324).
108. Human Condition, p.6.
109. "Homilies on I John," 6, 2-4 (pp. 303-305).
110. Human Condition, p. 242. Arendt writes, "love, by its very nature. is
unworldly, and it is for this reason rat..i.er than its rarity that it is not only apolitical
but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces."
111. Dissertation, pp. 33351, 33364.
112. Arendt acknowledges this dimension of Augustine's thought. Dissertation. p.
33315.
113. Hannah Arendt, "What is Authority?," Between Past and Future, p. 141.
114. Young-Bruehl, p. 449.
115 Hannah Arendt, "Civil Disobedience," Crises of the RepUblic, pp. 97, 102.
116. "Civil Disobedience," p. 86.
117. Sheldon Wolin, "Democracy and the Political," Salmagundi 60 (Spring-Summer)
1983, p. 8.
118. Human Condition, p. 243.
119. Paul Ricoeur, "Action, Story, History," Salmagundi 60 (Spring-Summer, 1983),
p. 70.
120. Hannah Arendt, "Isak Dinesen: 1885-1963," Men in Dark Times, p. 105.
121. Dissertation, p. 33364.
122. Human Condition, pp. 244-245. Arendt expresses similar thoughts in "Karl
Jaspers: Citizen of the World?," Men in Dark Times, p. 93.
123. "Civil Disobedience," p. 92.
124. Human Condition, p. 177. City of God, XII. 20.
125. The Life of the Mind I (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,1978), p. 23.
126. "... nothing is more obvious than that man ... does not owe his existence to
himself." "On Violence," p. 115. (emphasis in original); For the question about a
world in which everything is possible, see Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Three.
127. Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah," p. 90.
128. "The Concept of History," p. 73.
129. "The Jew as Pariah," p. 90; Human Condition, p.4.
130. "What is Freedom?," p. 164.

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 CONTEMPLATIVE IN ACTION

William J. Richardson, S.J.

Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to
be dead, are being made to speak . . .. What was experienced was that
thinking as pure activity--and this means impelled neither by the thirst for
knowledge, nor by the drive for cognition--can become a passion which not so
much rules and oppresses all other capacities and gifts, as it orders them and
prevails through them. We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason
versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in
which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback. l

These are the words of the mature Hannah Arendt reflecting on the great mo -
ment of her youth when she fell in love for the first time. It came to pass at the age
of eighteen in "the extraordinary, the magical" heart-rending year at Marburg (1924)
when she began her university studies there.2 For it was then that she first met
Martin Heidegger.
That the two allegedly became lovers, as her biographer reports, is perhaps none
of our business. What is our business, at least in these pages, is that he awoke in
her through his own passionate thinking a passion for thought in tum that marked
her entire career. This passion took her down a different path than the one that
Heidegger himself followed, but when it came to its end with the undelivered lectures
on the nature of willing that would culminate in taking a philosophical distance from
Heidegger in a analysis of his notion of "willing non-willing," one can wonder about
the ultimate distance between them and the strange history of their common passion.
Eine sta;rre Hingegebenheit an ein Einziges ("an unbending devotion to a single one")
she called it in the full flame of her teen-age ardor, and her biographer takes it as
testimony to her adolescent love. 3 But was it only that? What may have remained of
this initial devotion in the recollection of maturity as her own path came to an end?
The question is legitimate, for after their brief but intense romance their paths
were clearly divergent. If Heidegger was the prototypical thinker, concerned with the
meaning of Being, Hannah Arendt's concern was for doing, the vita activa, as she
liked to call ito-indeed, she never considered herself a "philosopher" at all in the
Bernauer, J. W. led), Arnor Mundi. ISBN 90-247-3483-5.
© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrechl. Printed in the Netherlands. 115
 William Richardson S J

Kantian sense of a "professional thinker. "4 It is significant that the term vita activa
should have so captured her fancy, even to the point of becoming the original title for
The Human Condition. For it comports with it, hence makes ingredient to the
thinking of it, its correlate in the Graeco-Roman tradition, the vita contemplativa.
For Arendt, then, the problematic of contemplative life by way of counterpoise
becomes ingredient to her reflection on the active life, and she seems to nurture a
fondness for it, even a yearning for it, born perhaps of her empathy with the Greek
mind that valued it so highly.
How she conceived these two notions emerges clearly in The Human Condition.
There she proposes to make a rigorous effort to "think what we are doing." This
emphasis is on the doing, of course, and leaves out of consideration the "highest and
perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking."s For it is
doing, far more than "labor" or "work," that characterizes what for her is the specific
prerogative of a human being, i.e., "natality" --that "new beginning inherent in birth
<that> can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the
capacity of beginning something anew, i.e., of acting." And since action is the
"political activity" par excellence, natality rather than mortality "may be the ceAtra!
category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought."6 In any case, it
is what profoundly specifies the human condition. And when the medieval Latins
translated the Greek term for "political life" (bios politikos), they did so by the
formula of vita activa.
Whether the vita activa is identified with political life as such, i.e., with the ac -
tive engagement of the free citizen in the polis, or whether the notion is broadened to
include other activities as well, it remains essentially an "unquiet" life, concerned
with what man makes, or brings about, himself. As such it differs profoundly from
the bios theoretikos, life given over to theorein, essentially a "beholding." Arendt
traces the origin of the term theorein, as others have done, back to the word theasthai
in Homer, where it signifies a kind of "wonder-struck beholding" on the part of those
humans to whom a god (usually in some human disgnise) appears. She underlines
here the fact that both the appearing of the god in disguise and the response of
humans to this appearance are utterly gratuitous on the part of the god, hence
something to be suffered (patlwsl (Socrates' term, Theaetetus, 155d) or received by
men as gift, rather than achieved by human effort. Moreover, she finds this "wonder-
struck beholding" cognate with the thaumadzein of Plato, that "admiring wonder"
which is the true "passion" (patlws) with which philosophy itself begins. Wonder at
what? For the pre-philosophical Greeks, wonder at the invisible harmonious order of
the kosmos, beyond all the rhythms of change.7
We can see, then, how this bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation, came to
enjoy a place of privilege for the Greek mind among all forms of human activity.

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"The primacy of contemplation over activity rests on the conviction that no work of
human hands can equal in beauty and truth the physical kosmos, which swings in
itself in changeless eternity without interference or assistance from outside, from man
or god." But as the notion of contemplation is developed by the philosophers, it
becomes clear that on the part of one who contemplates such truth, the pathos
(passivity) must be complete. "Every movement, the movements of body and soul
as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth. Truth... can reveal
itself only in complete human stillness," stillness that, whatever its attraction, blurs
for Arendt all distinctions and differentiations in the life of activity.8 Moreover it
implies a stepping out of time, however briefly (as in Plato's cave metaphor), in a
kind of nunc stans --"the standing now"--to feel the touch of eternity as if in a
transitory brush with death.9
When these Greek categories passed into the Christian tradition, the same
hierarchy remains. Instead of the harmony of the kosmos or the Platonic Ideas, the
eternally true is God himself. Contemplation of this truth is the highest form of
human existence, to which everything else, i.e., all the complexities of the active
life, must be subordinated.10 And even if the contemplative experience be filtered
through the categories of love that plunge it back into the world in the service of
others, it remains for Arendt a kind of fleeing from the world and hiding from its
inhabitants that "negates the space the world offers to men, and most of all that
public part of it where everything and everybody are seen and heard by others." 11
For our purposes, let us accept in broad outline Arendt's reading of the polarity
between contemplation and action, especially in the monastic tradition of the West--
though a more thorough-going treatment would require further nuance. But in the
sixteenth century, while Martin Luther was preaching salvation through faith alone
in Germany and Theresa of Avila was founding convents in Spain, there emerged
another kind of religious personality in Europe who introduced into the tradition
another kind of contemplation: Ignatius of Loyola.
There is no need here to rehearse his history. It is common knowledge how
after his conversion at the age of thirty, following a battle wound at Pamplona,
Ignatius spent eleven austere months of withdrawal at Manresa seeking to know the
will of God for him. The anguish of this time: the neglect of his bodily needs, the
fasting, the seven hours on his knees in daily prayer, the mood swings from
consolation to desolation, the torture of scruples, the temptation to suicide--all such
signs of the "dark night of the soul" yielded at last to several mystical experiences,
one of which was classically contemplative. As reported later: "He saw in a marvel -
ous manner into the divine mysteries. This light was extended also to the power of
discernment between good and evil spirits, and was so overwhelming that he beheld,
so it seemed to him, all human and divine things with wholly new eyes of the

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spirit."12 Such was the ascetical way of the entire monastic tradition that led Ignatius
in fact by the Cardoner river to the passive gaze of the classic contemplative.
But if we look at the same man fony years later in Rome, fully engaged in the
active life of governing the religious order he helped found, he is still very much a
mystic but now of a different son. Now the contemplation of the Holy Trinity did
not withdraw him from the world but immersed him in it. Thus Jerome Nadal, his
longtime secretary would write:

We know that Father Ignatius had received from God the exceptional grace of
being able without effon to pray and rest in the contemplation of the Most
Holy Trinity. .• To this was added that in all things, actions, conversations,
he felt and contemplated the presence of God and the attraction of the spiritual
things: he was contemplative in action, something he habitually expressed
by the words: we must find God in all thingS. 13

The claim here is that this is an acceptable use of the word "contemplation." It
should be noted that what is at stake for Ignatius is not a vision of God as some Neo-
Platonic object of knowledge in which one could repose in a passive beholding, but
awareness of God as acting in the world. God's will for Ignatius was not the divine
natore or divine truth but divine action that invited the collaboration of his "servant"
and "instrument" in the accomplishing of it. This conception of God as being at
work in the world may indeed derive from the vision by the banks of the Cardoner.
At any rate, it is found in the book of the Spiritual Exercises, that notebook record of
the Manresa experience for use in the guidance of others. There we find an exercise
under the title of "Contemplation for Obtaining Love."
This meditation summarizes and concludes the entire set of spiritual exercises
and begins with two preambles to the effect that: I) love is proved by deeds rather
than words; and 2) love consists in a mutual exchange of gifts. He proposes to
consider how God's love has shown itself by deeds rather than words and invites the
exercitant to respond by a corresponding gift of himself or herself. Ignatius then
suggests that one reflect on the countless gifts that God has bestowed on human
beings, beginning with creation itself; then how God himself actually dwells in his
gifts by his presence, works in them through his power, is the Source of everything
that comes to human beings, like rays emanating from the sun. The appropriate
response from humans, then, would be a loving surrender to the divine bounty by
engaging itself in active collaboration with the divine will at work in the World. It
is a gesture of loving gratitude, of meditation as thanks-giving, if you will. In short,
this constant effon to discern and realize, i.e., co-activate, the divine will in the world

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and collaborate with it is precisely what Ignatius meant by "finding God in all
things."14
How this conception functions in the spirituality Ignatius offers those who
follow his inspiration may be seen in the advice he offers young men in training,
whose preoccupation with studies does not permit them long periods of prayer. Let
them "exercise themselves in seeking the presence of our Lord in all things--for
example, in conversing with someone, in walking, looking, tasting, hearing,
thinking, and in everything they do, since it is true that his Divine Majesty is in all
things by his presence, power and essence." 15 When the conception worked well in
history (obviously not always the case), the results were good: from the foundation
of colleges to the reductions in Paraguay, from Matteo Ricci to Teilhard de Chardin.
What, then, do we infer from all this? Ignatius appeared on the scene precisely
at the time when the hierarchy between contemplation and action was, according to
Arendt, on the point of reversal. For, after the calculations of Copernicus that made
it possible to conceive of "virile man standing in the sun ... overlooking the
planets," and after the discovery of the telescope by Galileo that made it possible for
man to measure truth by an instrument of his own fashioning, and after the
meditations of Descartes on a guaranteed way to certify knowledge, truth was no
longer something to be beheld (in contemplation) but to be achieved by human
action. 16 Archimedes' dream had finally been realized--a point had been discovered
outside the earth from which man, while still on earth, could dislodge the world.
This shift for Arendt is the most decisive characteristic of the modem era: the vita
activa had lost all point ofreference to the vita contemplativaP And yet, at least in
the religious tradition, Ignatius was there to say that the two were still reconcilable--
not that his personal experience could be shared, of course, but that the structure of it
was somehow viable and sharable with others.
But that is in the religious sphere. In the secular sphere, the distinction be -
tween knowledge and thought became paramount. "Certainty of knowledge could be
reached only under a twofold condition: first, that knowledge concerned only what
one had done himseJf--so that its ideal became mathematical knowledge, where we
deal only with self-made entities of the mind-·and second, that knowledge was of such
a nature that it could be tested only through more doing."18
Henceforth, the role of thought itself would be radically changed. Although it
never had been identified with contemplation as beholding of truth, it had always
been conceived as the dialogical discourse within one's self that would lead to it.
Now that truth was not to be beheld but to be fashioned, thought was no longer the
handmaid of inchoative contemplation ("theology") but of the human doing that
would produce certifiable know ledge. 19

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But not for Arendt! She had come to know thought at Malburg--real, passionate
thought: thought that was "pure activity" in which the cultural treasures of the past
could be "made to speak," in which "thinking and aliveness become one." And when
after thinking about what we do, she came at last to think about how we think, it is
not surprising that she took this model as her standard of excellence. We know that
she came to the task in the Gifford lectures after the Eichmann study, where,
impressed by the "banality of evil," she found that the problem lay not in his
stupidity but in his thoughtlessness. 20 What, then, does sbe mean by thought?
First of all, it is not the privilege of the few, but the "natural need" of all
human life that must not be left to the specialist, "as though thinking, like higher
mathematics, were the monopoly of a specialized discipline." On the contrary, it
"accompanies life and is itself the dematerialized quintessence of being alive ....
Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers. "21 To be alive in thought, then, is the only
remedy for the "thoughtlessness" of an Eichmann or the sleep-like existence of
"unthinking men." Deep as life and broad as life, thinking is not just a cerebral
discipline but encompasses the whole of life, hence is the source and inspiration of
all art. Thinking is "sheer activity" (pure praxis), i.e., it does not serve any aim
outside itself but rather is its own end.22
In all this, the great model, of course, is Socrates--not simply because of his
own passion for the dialogue of thought but because this found its place within the
polis. Socrates was equally at home in both spheres. 23 But he also manifests the
limitations of thought, inasmuch as thought interrupts all activities and is interrupted
by them. Identified with life, the activity of thinking demands a certain withdrawal
from life, as indicated by Xenophon's stories of Socrates' distractedness in the
military camp.
More precisely, what is thinking? Hard to define, it is at least different from
knowing. Arendt makes her own Kant's distinction between reason (Vernunft) and
intellect (Verstand ), taking the latter to signify the faculty of cognition (primarily
scientific) and the former to signify the faculty that reaches beyond what can be
known as objects to ultimate unities, or unifying principles, of meaning (like Ideas
of God, freedom and immortality) that thought cannot know as objects but cannot
dispense with, either. Thinking, for Arendt, is the functioning of just such a faculty
of reason.
Who is it that thinks? Kant, as we know, makes a distinction between the
"self' of everyday experience that appears in consciousness (the "phenomenal" self)
and the subject that is thinkable but not knowable (the "noumenal" subject). Arendt
makes her own Kant's formula from the Critique of Pure Reason: "in the
consciousness of myself in the sheer thinking activity <beim blossen Denken >, I
am the thing itself <das Wesen Selbst, i.e., das Ding an sich > although nothing of

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myself is thereby given to thought" (B 429). This is what encourages her to speak
of this subject as "sheer activity," and she adds: "The thinking <subject> is ...
therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities, and without a life story."24
But if the thinking subject is "sheer activity" and "ageless," is it therefore
timeless? It is in addressing this question that Arendt makes her own most personal
contribution to the notion of thinking. To explain her position she makes use of a
parable of Kafka, entitled "He":

He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from the origin.
The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both.
Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to
push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight
with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For
it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and
who really knows his intentions. His dream, though, is that some time in an
unguarded moment--and this, it must be admitted, would require a night darker
than any night has ever been yet--he will jump out of the fighting line and be
promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire
over his antagonists in their fight with each other. 25

For Arendt, this Kafka parable describes the "time sensation" of the thinking
subject when it directs attention to its own activity and is withdrawn from the
business of everyday life, where two tenses of time, past and future, are experienced
as antagonistic forces that crash into the present NOW.26 For Kafka, it is a metaphor
for the whole of life.
Arendt insists that the thinking subject here is not the self of phenomenal (or
phenomenological) awareness. "It is because the thinking <i.e., the noumenal>
subject is ageless and nowhere that past and future can become manifest to it as such,
emptied, as it were, of their concrete content and liberated from all spatial,
categories." For the thinking subject, time is an enemy, since it interrupts the
"immobile quiet in which the mind is active without doing anything." The subject
rests, then, in a kind of nunc stans, i.e., a quasi-"etemal presence in complete quiet,"
hence, apparently timeless. 27
Arendt is sensitive to the fact that Kafka's "He" seems to jump out of the world
altogether, and she admits that without man in the world there would be no difference
between past and future but only everlasting change. Instead, she suggests the
metaphor of a parallelogram of forces: past and future are conceived as two vectors,
each proceeding out of an "infinite" distance, that intersect in man as if at the apex of
a 90 degree angle that represents the present:

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Ideally, the action of the two forces that form our parallelogram should result
in a third force, the resultant diagonal whose origin would be the point at
which the forces meet and upon which they act. . .. This diagonal force,
whose origin is known, whose direction is determined by past and future, but
which exerts its force toward an undetermined end as though it could reach out
into infinity, seems to me a perfect metaphor for the activity of thought.

The thinking subject reposes in such a present, like "the quiet center of a storm
which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it."28
Arendt is aware of the tenuous nature of her proposal, inSisting that it applies
only in the realm of "mental phenomena: hence not to "historical or biographical"
time where "gaps do not occur." Springing from the clash of past and future, such a
present is outside of historical time, "coeval with the existence of man on earth"--
"the small, inconspicuous track of non-time beaten by the activity of thought within
the time-space given to natal, mortal men. "29
But what is to be said about such a conception of thinking? Of course, we do
not have Arendt's own final redaction of these texts, but given what we have, it
seems that we can at least say this much: In The Human Condition, "thinking" was
spoken of usually in the Greek sense as, different from contemplation, to be sure, but
as discoursive activity that was a propaedeutic to contemplation. In The Life of the
Mind, she speaks in her own name, synthesizing Plato with Kant, so that thinking
becomes the activity of the noumenal subject that takes place in a gap between future
and past, a nunc stans that, if not eternal in the sense that divine truth is eternal, is
nonetheless outside of time. This I find highly problematic, for it seems to make
thinking in its purity essentially a-historical. But this goes ill with her own style of
thinking which is profoundly historical and historicizing. It goes ill too, I believe,
with the essential dynamism and historicity of natality and the whole problematic of
story-telling.
There appears to be, then, in her own experience of "passionate thinking" a kind
of nostalgia for the contemplative ideal of the Greeks that is inimical to the life of
action, at least to the extent that thought (witness Socrates) demands some kind of
withdrawal from action. But in her own work, she seems to have achieved a kind of
operational synthesis of the two, though on the conceptual level she found no
philosophical paradigm to parallel the one that Ignatius discovered in the religious
sphere. This is said with reserv~, of course, for we do not know how she might have
explored the role of contemplation in the functioning of judgment insofar as this
relates to political action. An explicit treatment of judgment was to have brought
The Life of the Mind to a close, and presumably it would have followed a Kantian

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parailigm.30 How it might have developed, however, is a matter of speculation. The

present reflection makes no pretense at writing the book that Arendt left unwritten
and proceeds with the data as we have them. In such a context, we ask simply if
there is some analogue of the Ignatian paradigm possible for thought. We are
suggesting here that there is, if only to explore the relationship with Heidegger that
began when she fell in love with him in 1924.
Let us begin with her own explicit interpretation of Heidegger's philosophical
enterprise as it appears in the Gifford Lecture that she never delivered. It appears in
Part II of The Life of the Mind where she traces the history of the notion of will,
culminating in a discussion of Nietzsche's "repudiation" of the will and Heidegger's
apparent endorsement of that "repudiation" with his "passionate insistence" (Arendt's
phrase) on willing "not to will" (Heidegger's phrase). Allegedly, this insistence was
a new development on Heidegger's part and derived from a shift in his thinking that
took place in the midst of the ten-year span (1936-46) in which he devoted his
university courses chiefly to the study of Nietzsche. This shift constitutes what
Heidegger himself later called the "turning" (Kehre) in his thought. If Heidegger
claims that this turn-about is a sign of deep continuity with his earlier endeavour,
Arendt dismisses the claim as a post factum "reinterpretation" of the "original" shift
that consists in a "concrete autobiographical event precisely between volume I and
volume II <of his Nietzsche book, i.e., ca. 1940>": "What the reversal originally
turns against is primarily the will-to-power. In Heidegger's understanding, the will
to rule and to dominate is a kind of original sin <of destructiveness (p. 178», of
which he found himself guilty when he tried to come to terms with his brief past in
the Nazi movement."3!
That's the heart of her interpretation. She expands her analysis of the relation
between the earlier and later period in Heidegger's development by showing how
certain themes of Being and Time (like care, death and sell) emerge after the tum--all
in light of that interpretation of the tum.31
It would not serve any purpose to quarrel with her in her absence about this
interpretation of Heidegger's development, except to say that it is doubtful that many
Heideggereans today would agree with her. Elsewhere, the present writer argued that
the tum was apparent in Heidegger's work at least ten years earlier than she claims,
i.e., by 1930, and on the basis of recently published materials one could argue for its
being in play much earlier.33 That is why it seems gratuitous to dismiss Heidegger's
own explanations as "reinterpretations" of some more "original," unacknowledged
fact. When Heidegger was once asked explicitly, "given the turning, how did it come
about?" he replied:

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The thinking of the turning i£ a change in my thought. But this change is

not a consequence of altering the standpoint, much less of abandoing the
fundamental issue, of Being and Time. The thinking of the turning results
from the fact that I stayed with the matter-for-thought <of> "Being and
Time," i.e., by inquiring into that perspective which already in Being and
Time (p. 39) was designated "Time and Being." ... The distinction you make
between <the early and later Heidegger> is justified only on the condition that
this is kept constantly in mind: only by way of what <the early Heidegger>
has thought does one gain access to what is to-be-thought by <the later
Heidegger>. But the thought of <the early Heidegger> becomes possible only
if it is contained <in the later Heidegger>.34

It seems clear, then, that the turning had nothing to do with the influence of
Nietzsche, and still less to do with the tragic events of 1933. Rather it had every -
thing to do with his most primordial philosophical experiences of the early twenties:

I was trying to follow a way which was leading I knew not where. Only the
immediate prospect was known to me, for this was continually opening up,
even if the field of vision often shifted and grew dark.... The course was a
scarcely perceptible promise of a liberation unto freedom, now dark and
confusing, now a lightning-flash of sudden insight which then again for a
long period of time withdrew from every attempt to utter it.3s

The point is that the dynamics of the turn were always already operative in
Heidegger's thought, and this was part of the palMS of the "passionate thinking" that
set Arendt aflame in 1924.
That said, no pretense is made here at a formal critique of Arendt's analysis of
Heidegger. It will be more useful if we simply extract certain themes for comment
that may throw light on her or him or them both. To begin with, she is very aware
of the import of Heidegger's endeavor, to engage in the "thinking of Being" where the
"of' is both subjective and objective genitive, i.e., suggesting that Being is the
origin and the term of Dasein's thought. But she then proceeds to "ontify" being
almost to the point" of ridicule, speaking of it as analogous to Hegel's Absolute
Spirit, hence a "ghostlike existence," a "Somebody," or a "Nobody"--in any case an
apparently antic Something that "behind the backs of acting men" secretly guides the
course of history. Understandably she objects to the determinism involved. She
speaks disparagingly, too, of the role assigned to the thinker in this process. He is
one who responds to Being and by "sheer thinking" enacts "the counter-current of
Being underlying the -foam' ofbeings--the mere appearances whose current is steered

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by the will-to-power." And all this takes place while the thinker remains a solitary
"in 'existential solipsism', except that now the fate of the world, the History of
Being, has come to depend on him. "36 She remains skeptical, too, about an
identification of thinking and acting. She quotes Heidegger, who puts it this way:
"If to act means to give a hand to the essence of Being, then thinking is actually
acting. That is, preparing <building an abode> for the essence of Being by which
Being transposes itself and its essence into speech. "37
If these are her reserves, there are at least three ways in which she finds the
thought of the later Heidegger congenial. In the first place, she seems to be
comfortable with Heidegger's conception of thinking as letting-be:

and letting-be as an activity is thinking that obeys the call of Being. The
mood pervading the letting-be of thought is the opposite of the mood of
purposiveness in willing; later ... Heidegger calls it "Gelassenheit," a
calmness that corresponds to letting-be and that "prepares us" for "a thinking
that is not a willing." This thinking is "beyond the distinction between
activity and passivity" because it is beyond the "domain of the Will," i.e.,
beyond the category of cansality. 38

Implicitly she recognizes here that the process of thinking lies deeper than willing
and, indeed, makes it possible.
A second aspect of Heidegger's thought that she finds congenial is the
conception of thinking as thanking. Conceding an etymological warrant for the
correlation Heidegger finds between Denken and Danken, and even finding it
acceptable insofar as it resonates for her with the tones of Plato's "admiring wonder"
(thaumadzein) with which philosophy begins, nonetheless thinking as thanking
makes impossible the discernment "of disharmony, of ugliness and finally of evil,"
whether that evil be "radical" or "banal." 39 Perhaps that explains why she finds so
congenial what she takes to be a "new outlook, so isolated from the rest of his
thought <that it> must have emerged from another change of 'mood' no less
important <than the original tuming>"; namely, a theme that emerges in Heidegger's
analysis of Anaximander.40 There, in meditating on the "coming-to-be and passing-
away" (genesis-phthora) of beings, Heidegger underlines the concealment inherent to
the process of revealment, i.e., the untruth (" errance") intrinsic to the process of truth
(aletheia) as it emerges in history.41 The issue here is important, for it is not at all
something new in Heidegger's thought, and it is interesting that she finds it so
fascinating. Curiously enough, the theme emerged the fITst time he thematized the
notion of letting beings be.

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In his essay On the Essence of Truth (1930), Heidegger begins with an analysis
of the traditional notion of truth as correspondence and argues that the essence of such
truth is freedom: "To free oneself for a binding directedness is possible only by
being free for what is opened up in an open region. Such being free points to the
heretofore uncomprehended essence of freedom . . . .The essence of truth is
freedom."42 This freedom, already analysed in Being and Time in terms of Dasein's
"disclosedness" has been addressed again in On the Essence of Ground as the
"transcendence of Dasein," i.e., its passage beyond beings to Being (discerned there as
World).43
Call it "disclosure," "transcendence," "ek-sistence," Dasein is free insofar as it is
open to the Open of Being. What, then, is the essence of freedom? Letting beings
be! "To let be--that is, to let beings be as the beings that they are--means to engage
oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand,
bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself. Western thinking in its
beginning conceived this open region as til alethea, the unconcealed," i.e., as truth.44
Heidegger continues to meditate this notion of a-letheia in the essay and for the
fIrst time orchestrates it as revealing itself to--but also concealing itself from--human
beings:

Considered with respect to truth as disclosedness, concealment is then

undisclosedness and accordingly the untruth that is most proper to the essence
of truth. . .. The concealment of beings as a whole, untruth proper is older
than every openness of this or that being. It is older than letting-be itself
which in disclosing already holds concealed and comports itself towards
concealing.4S

He then proceeds to meditate the untruth that is ingredient to truth as a process

of concealment-revealment. It takes two forms: I) the concealment itself is
concealed, and Heidegger calls this "mystery"; 2) the concealment not only conceals
itself but beguiles man into obliviousness of it, thereby leading him astray--and this
he calls "errance" (frre):

Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every opposite to essential
truth. Errancy is the open site for and ground of error. . .. Error extends
from the most ordinary wasting of time, making a mistake and
miscalculating, to going astray and venturing too far in one's essential
attitudes and decisions. However, what is ordinarily and even according to the
teachings of philosophy recognized as error, incorrectuess of judgments and
falsity of knowledge, is only one mode of erring and, moreover, the most
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superficial one. The errancy in which any given segment of historical

humanity must proceed for its course to be errant is essentially connected
with the openness of Dasein. By leading him astray, errancy dominates man
through and through.46

The problematic of errancy, then, that Arendt fmds so fascinating in the analysis
of Anaximander's use of genesis-phthora is indeed not a "new outlook ...isolated
from the rest of his thought" but ingredient to it and there from the beginning of his
meditation on truth.47 In any case, it is in this context that the problem of evil must
be confronted in Heidegger: "With healing (Heilen), evil (das Bose) appears all the
more in the lighting of Being. The essence of evil does not consist in the mere
baseness of human action but rather in the malice of rage (Bosartigen des Grimmes).
Both of these, however, healing and raging, can essentially occur only in Being,
insofar as Being itself is what is contested (das Strittige)."48
But how does Dasein respond to this if thinking is thanking? The argument has
been made elsewhere and can only be summarized here. In Being and Time, thinking
consisted in the phenomenological analysis of Dasein, whose structure was discerned
in its unity as care and whose authenticity was achieved in a dynamic way by a
gesture of acceptance--acceptance of its transcendence, acceptance of its finitude--in
"advancing resolve. n In the later period, the problem of thinking is everywhere but is
thematized most explicitly in What is Called Thinking? There, among other things,
Heidegger meditates on the etymology of Denken as related to Gedachtnis on the one
hand and Gedanc on the other. Gedachtnis is not just "memory" but "re-collection"
in the sense of that "heart" of man where he is exposed most profoundly to Being:
Meister Eckhart's Seelenfuenklein.
Gedanc, on the other hand, suggests thanks-giving, that gesture by which the
thinker acquiesces to the to-be-thought in the most profound gesture of acceptance.
One finds here a complete analogue to what was found in Being and Time: thinking
as the recollected "heart" of Dasein, corresponds to what there was the unified
structure of care; thinking as thanks-giving corresponds to what there was the gesture
of resolve. At any rate, it is in this context that we are to understand Heidegger's
admonition about "willing non-willing," upon which Arendt has laid such stress.
"The occasion for releasing oneself to belonging to <Being> requires a trace of
willing. This trace, however, vanishes while releasing oneself and is completely
extinguished in releasement (Gelassenheit)." But this is the gesture of resolve: "The
essence of thought, i.e., release unto <Being>, is resolve unto truth as it comes-to-
presence. "49
It is just such a gesture of resolute acquiescence in face of das StriUige (the
Contentious) that is at stake, it seems to me when in Introduction to Metaphysics

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(1935) Heidegger analyses Heraclitus' term, polemos (struggle). "The polemos

named here is a conflict that prevailed prior to everything divine and human."5o It is
the primal struggle between revealment and concealment that constitutes the very
essencing of truth.51 He continues:

The struggle meant here is the original struggle, for it gives rise to the
contenders as such; it is not a mere assault on something already there. It is
this conflict that flIst projects and develops what had hitherto been unheard of,
unsaid and unthought. The battle is then sustained by the creators, poets,
thinkers, statesmen. Against the overwhelming chaos they set the barrier of
their work, and in their work they capture the world thus opened up. It is
with these works that the elemental power, the physis first comes to stand.
Only now do beings become beings as such. This world-building is history
in the authentic sense. 52

We see here, then, at least in general terms, how Heidegger conceives the function of
the statesman in the polis. This surely is more than a solitary gesture of thought
consummated in "existential solipsism." May one consider it a legitimate expression
of the bios politikos, hence a recognizable form of the active life? This opens up
larger questions, of course: what is the relation between action and thought in
Heidegger? Does thinking as resolute thanks-giving permit action of any efficacious
kind, let alone political action? At this point we are on the threshold of the entire
discussion that has been launched by Reiner SchUrmann concerning the possibility of
an eventual practical philosophy emerging out of Heidegger's thought. 53
SchUrmann's position on the matter is challenging and provocative, but a discussion
of it lies outside the scope of the present reflection. The question here rather is
whether it may be called a contemplation at all, and if so, whether this kind of
thinking may be called a "contemplation in action," following the structure of the
Ignatian paradigm.
In the first place, it seems legitimate to find in Heidegger's thought an analogue
to the Greek ideal of contemplation by Arendt's own testimony: "Philosophy <for
Heidegger> is the exceptional existential possibility of human reality--which is, in
the end, only a reformulation of Aristotle's bios theoretikos. of the contemplative life
as the highest possibility for man." As such, it emulates the "admiring wonder"
with which, for Plato, all philosophy, i.e., all true thinking, begins. 54 For
Heidegger, this "wonder of all wonders: that beings are" becomes the ground-
question of all metaphysics: "why are there beings at all, and why not rather no-
thing?"55

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Such, then, is the pathos (the passion) of Socrates. And if he is taken by

Arendt to be the model thinker because equally at home in both activity and thought,
the reason, as Heidegger sees it, is that:

Throughout his life and up to his death Socrates did nothing other than place
himself in this dtaft, this current <of thinking>, and maintain himself in it.
This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote
nothing. For anyone who begins, out of thinking, to write must inevitably
be like those people who run for shelter from a wind too strong for them ...
All thinkers after Socrates, their greatness notwithstanding, had to be such
refugees.56

Socrates alone, then, among the great philosophers was no refugee. It should
be noted that this dtaft into which Socrates was dtawn was the dtaft of Being's
withdtawal. For the withdrawal (Entzug) of Being dtaws the thinker with it and
constitutes him/her in that privileged relationship (Bezug). It is the hailing and
being hailed, the call and responding to the calI in acquiescence that Socrates was
caught up in a gesture of thanks-giving.
I suggest that this be regarded as contemplation, not as the Greeks, or even
Socrates, understood it but as an Ignatius would find understandable--as total
accepting exposure to Being advancing toward human beings as their history and
inviting their collaboration to bring it to expression.
Contemplation, then, but also action, at the very least through the action of
speech. First, Heidegger:

If to act means to give a hand to the essence of Being, then thinking is

actually acting. That is, preparing <building an abode> for the essencing of
Being, in the midst of entities by which Being transposes itself and its
essencing into speech. Without speech, mere doing lacks the dimension in
which it can become effective and follow directions. Speech, however, is
never a simple expression of thinking, feeling, or willing. Speech is the
original dimension in which the human being is able to respond to Being's
claim and, responding, belong to it. Thinking is the actualization of that
original correspondence.57

But for Arendt, action and speech belonged close together in the life of the
polis. Just as for the pre-political Greeks of Homer great actions and great words
were "coeval and coequal," so "to be political, to live in the polis, meant that

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everything was decided through words and persuasion, and not through force or vio -
lence."s8 The result was that Aristotle's famous formula for man (zoon logon echon )
was not so much a metaphysical definition as a sociological description of a way of
life in which speech and only speech made sense, and where the central concern of all
citizens was to talk with each other. Thinking that founds speech is, then, a form of
action.

* * *
It is time to conclude. What is the essential in all this?
I) In taking Socrates as model of the thinker in the polis, Arendt invites us to
think of the pathos that impassioned him as the draw of Being's withdrawal that drew
him with it in its wake. The argument has been: that, given the Ignatian paradigm,
this is a form of contemplation in a unique but legitimate sense; and that, insofar as
that draw--withdrawal--drawing-with is the origin of speech, then, given the identifi -
cation of speech and action in the polis (speech, then, as a species of action), it is a
contemplation mediated through action in a unique but legitimate sense. That is
why, given the divergence of their ways, it is possible now to think of Arendt and
Heidegger as dwelling together on mountains a chasm apart.
2) If we think of them this way, we might fmd a better way than she has offered
us to understand the true natality of thought, even when--perhaps especially when--it
tells agairt an old story, e.g., of the founding of the city. It would be grounded in the
temporo-historical structure of a re-collective thought (andenkendes Denken) such as
the following: "If the thinking-upon-what-is-past allows the past <to follow the law
of> its own essence ... , then we experience that what-is-past, in its return through
<our> thinking upon it, swings out over our present and comes to US as a future.
All at once our thinking-upon-what-is-as-having-been must consider this past as
something-not-yet-unfolded."S9 Moreover, we would conceive of thought as a quest
for meaning that, on the one hand, finds a way to account for errance and evil in the
historization of truth and, on the other hand, accounts for the thinking of it as
corresponding in the event of truth, without resort to the hypothesis of a time-less,
world-less, speech-less subject.
3) Finally, that we may end where we began, we are left to wonder about the
pathos of that common passion that took flame in 1924. What is the nature of such
visitation that is a constant of human experience from Homer down to Michel
Henry? "What I called the 'quest' for meaning appears in Socrates' language as love,
i.e., love in its Greek Significance of Eros, not the Christian agape. Love as Eros is
primarily a need; it desires what it has not. . .. By desiring what it has not, love
establishes a relationship with what is not present."60 If quest for meaning, i.e.,
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thought, is for Socrates essentially Eros we cannot reflect upon the pathos that
awoke in 1924 without wondering about the Eros that was interior to it. For when
all is said and done, Arendt's commitment to the political enterprise was a form of
Eros, according to which she could say to the world: amo et 11010 ut sis ("I love you
and want you to be"). But this poses the question of the relationship between love
and desire (Le., as want-to-be) as it came to pass in her at the time she first fell in
love. What, then, is the relationship between desire and thought? And how can it be
shared by two human beings beyond their awareness, Le., in the unconscious, so that
after sixty years of divergence it leaves them together on mountains a chasm apart?
On Heidegger's tombstone is engraved a star--as if to suggest the line from one
of his epigrams: Auf ein Stern zu gehen, nur dieses ("to follow a star--only this").
If one were to imagine a comparable epigram for Atendt's tombstone, it might well
be: eine starre Hingegebenheit an ein Einziges ("an unbending devotion to a single
thing"). For such is the spirit that motivates a symposium like the present one.
Presumably dedicated to political philosophy, it evoked very little about this theme.
The reason may be that this remarkable woman was more than a political
philosopher. She was a contemplative in action--and, in the very best of senses,
remains for us now the prototype of a political ... refugee.

1. H. Arendt, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty" New York Review of Books (Oct. 21,
1971), pp. 51-52.
2. E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven:Yale
University Press, 1982), p. 51.
3. Ibid., p. 53
4. The Life of the Mind I:Thinking, ed. by Mary McCarthy (New YOIkHarcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978), p.3.
5. The Human Condition (Cbicago:University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 5.
6. Ibid. p. 9.
7. The Life of the Mind:Thinking, pp. 142-143.
8. The Human Condition. p. 15.
9. Ibid., p. 20.
10. See ibid., p. 303.
11. Ibid., p. 77

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12. Cited in Hugo Rahner, The Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola, trans. by F. J.
Smith (Chicago:Loyola University, 1953), p. 53.
13. Cited in J. Stierli, "Ignatian Prayer:Seeking God In All Things" in Ignatius of
Loyola:His Personality and Spiritual Heritage, ed. by F. Wulf (St. Louis:Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 1977), p. 140.
14. Ignace de Loyola, Exercises Spirituels, trans. by F. Courel (Paris:Desclee de
Brouwer, 1960), pp. 127-130.
15. Cited in Stierii, art. cit., p. 145.
16. Cited in The Human Condition, p. 264.
17. The Human Condition, p. 320.
18. Ibid., p. 290.
19. The Human Condition, pp. 291-292.
20. The Life of the Mind:Thinking, p. 4.
21. Ibid., pp. 191, 13, 191.
22. The Human Condition, p. 170.
23. The Life of the Mind:Thinking, pp. 167-168.
24. Ibid., p. 43.
25. Ibid., p. 202.
26. Ibid., pp. 206, 203.
27. Ibid., pp. 206, 207.
28. Ibid., p. 209.
29. Ibid., p. 210.
30. The Life of the Mind ll:WilIing, ed. by Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 242-243, 255-273.
31. Ibid., p. 173.
32. Ibid., pp. 176, 236, n. 52.
33. William Richardson, Heidegger:Through Phenomenology to Thought, with preface
by Martin Heidegger, 3rd ed. (The Hague:Nijhoff, 1973).
34. Martin Heidegger, Preface to Richardson (1963),Heidegger: Through Phenomen-
010gy to Thought, pp. xvi-xxii (Heidegger's italics).
35. Heidegger, On the Way to Language (1959), trans. by P. D. Hertz (New
York:Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 6, 41 (translation modified, cited Richardson, op.
cit., p. 632).
36. The Life of the Mind:Willing, pp. 186-187.
37. Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen:Neske, 1962), p. 40. Cited in
The Life of the Mind:WilIing, pp. 180-181.

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38. The Life of the Mind:Willing, pp. 178-179.

39. The Life of the Mind:Thinking, p. 150.
40. The Life of the Mind:Willing, p. 188.
41. Ibid., pp. 188-192.
42. "On the Essence of Truth" in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. by D.F. Krell,
trans. by Jolm Sallis (New York:Harper and Row, 1977), p. 125 (Heidegger's italics).
43. Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New
York:Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 256-2731212-230; "Vom Wesen des Grundes"(1929)
in Wegmarken (Frankfurt:Klostermann, 1967).
44. "On the Essence of Truth," p. 127.
45. Ibid., p. 132.
46. Ibid., p. 136.
47. The Life qf the Mind:Willing, p. 188
48. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," trans. by F.A. Capuzzi in collaboration with
J.G. Gray and D.F. Krell in Basic Writings, p. 237.
49. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. by J. M. Anderson and E.H. Freund (New
York:Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 80, 81 (translation modified).
50. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by R. Manheim (New Haven:Yale
University Press, 1974), p. 62.
51. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," trans. by A. Hofstadter in Basic
Writings, p. 177.
52. Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 62.
53. Reiner Schilrmann, Le principe d'anarchie. Heidegger et la question d'agir
(Paris:Editions du Seuil. 1982).
54. Arendt, "What is Existenz Philosophy?" Partisan Review 8/1 (Winter,1946), p.48;
The Life of the Mind:Thinking, p. 142.
55. "What is Metaphysics?," trans. by D. F. Krell in Basic Writings, p. 112.
56. What is Called Thinking ?, trans. by F. Wieck and J. G. Gray (New York:Harper
and Row, 1972), p. 17 (translation modified).
57. Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, p. 40, cited in The Life of the Mind:
Willing, pp. 180-181.
58. The Human Condition, p. 26.
59. Heidegger, Erlauterungen zu HOlderlins Dichtungen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951,
1951), p. 95 (writer's translation).
60. The Life of the Mind:Thinking, p. 178

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 NATALITY, AMOR MUNDI AND
NUCLEARISM IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH
ARENDT

Patricia Bowen Moore

Ordinary, everyday experiences, because they are ordinary and everyday, have an
uncanny way of defying close observation and immediate interpretation. As they
recede into obscurity, events tend to resist their own recovery, thus robbing us of
their full message. The enigma surrounding this phenomenon is rendered poetically
by T.S. Eliot who writes: "We had the experience but missed the meaning." Owing
perhaps to its ability to remind us that while experience is inescapable, the meaning
of it can elude our grasp, the poet's missive can be equally instructive in the reverse:
We understood the meaning but missed the experience. From the perspective of
philosophy, it is possible to overlook the original inspiration which informs and
pervades a thinker's writings, thereby missing the unifying meaning behind his or her
thought. With regard to the works of Hannah Arendt in particular, what frequently
has been neglected by her interpreters is Arendt's sustained focus on the capacity for
beginning--in fact, in thought, and in action--which the miracle of human birth
announces. Arendt's special term for the profound dimensions of this experience is
natality. When accompanied by the attitude arnor mundi, love for the world, the
category of natality provides Arendt's multifaceted works with a unity and structure
by which to elucidate her thought. With Hannah Arendt, the experience of natality is
elevated to a philosophic thematic; it is the inspiration and meaning governing her
philosophic and political analyses.
Arendt's writings cover a broad range of concerns: for example, love in her study
of St. Augustine (Der Liebesbegrijf bei Augustin, 1929); the crumbling of stable
worldly structures and the collapse of our standards for judgment in her analysis of
totalitarianism (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951); the strange interdependence
between thoughtless-ness and evil in her report on the Eichmann trial (Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963); the story about the struggle for
Jewish identity in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen (1957) and the moving essays
in The Jew as Pariah (1942-1966); the promise and hope evinced by the event of
modem revolutions and the restoration of political foundations in On Revolution
Bernauer, J. W. (ed), Amor Mundi. ISBN 90·247·3483·5.
© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands. 135
 Patricia Bowen Moore

(1963); the instances of the inversion of political speech to lying-in-politics, or the

reclamation of political action evidenced in the protest movements in Crises of the
Republic (1972); the concern with freedom, authority, culture and political thought
in Between Past and Future (1968); the portrait of personalities whose political, or
spiritual, or poetic, or intellectual achievements helped to illuminate "the dark times"
(Men in Dark Times, 1968); the critique of modernity and the challenge "to think
what we are doing" in The Human Condition (1958); and the brilliant descriptions of
the mental activities, thinking, willing, judging, in The Life of the Mind (1978)--
each of these, separately and together, share a common theme, a common inspiration.
This is natality: the powerful insight that captures the meaning of our birth as the
potentiality for worldly beginnings in thought and action. This experience is
delineated from three perspectives which I call: (1) primary natality, or, birth into the
factual world where the principle of begiiming makes its fIrst appearance; (2) political
natality, or, birth into the public realm where the principle of beginning is actualized
through action and speech; (3) tertiary natality, or, the nascent character of the life of
the mind. My discussion presents the theme of natality from the following stand -
points: fIrst, the sources which influenced its development in Arendt's thought;
second, the pre-political, political and theoretical dimensions of natality; third, the
worldliness of natality; fourth, natality'S challenge to nuc1earism.

Sources Influencing Arendt's Development of the Category

of Natality

Hannah Arendt was born of Jewish parents in Hanover, Germany on October

14, 1906. She died in New York City on December 4, 1975. Between the events of
her birth and her death is the story of a German Jewish woman whose life experiences
and philosophical interests led to the discovery that the identity with which one is
born, that is, the identity given at birth, is more than an accomplished fact of exis -
tence. It is rather, a fact of being, a determination of existence; a political potentiali -
ty; and an initiation into the life of thought. With Hannah Arendt, the signifIcance
of the dimensions of our birth (natality) is philosophically thematized; it is conjoined
not with the condition of mortality as has been emphasized in the tradition, but with
arnor mundi, love for the world we hold in common.
Arendt's thematicization of natality as a philosophic and political category had
its genesis in three sources. First, her personal fate as a Jew during the years of
Hitler's regime. In this context, Arendt's Jewishness--an "indisputable factual data"
of her life--had to be defended against two dangers: (1) the temptation to deny one's
communal identity when this identity became a political issue of great personal
moment; and (2) the temptation to deny one's cultural heritage when this heritage

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 Natality. Amor Mundi and Nuclearism

was attacked at its foundations by the very homeland that cultivated a pride in it.
Having been born a German Jew was suddenly, in the 1930's, a political issue of the
first magnitude: A Jew had to choose between one's homeland and one's Jewishness.
"I have always regarded my Jewishness," Arendt states, "as one of the indisputa -
ble factual data of my life, and 1 have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts
of this kind. There is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it
is ..."! If Arendt's Jewishness was, indeed, a fact of birth, it was also a fate she em -
braced with a hard-won gratitude. Arendt's sense of gratitude for the conditions of her
own natality was instilled in her at a very early age at which time she began to ap -
propriate this indisputable fact of existence:

1 came from an old KOnigsberg family .... But the word 'Jew' was never
mentioned at home. 1 first encountered it... in the anti-Semitic remarks of
children as we played in the streets--then 1 became, so to speak, enlightened....
[My mother] would have given me a real spanking if she had ever had reason
to believe that 1 had denied being Jewish. The matter was never a topic of
discussion .... You see, all Jewish children encountered anti-Semitism. And
the souls of many children were poisoned by it. The difference with me lay in
the fact that my mother always insisted that 1 not humble myself. One must
defend oneself! "2

"One must defend oneself' is an early formulation of Arendt's attitude toward her own
fate; it can be rephrased to read: One must defend one's natality. Such a defense
requires a fidelity to one's beginnings. The experience of being Jewish included
instances of being chastised or ridiculed by others simply because one was born a
Jew. This fact of birth which should have been treated as a matter of course by
others was often treated as a matter of debate. As a young child, Arendt defended
herself, her identity, against the antisemitism she met in the classroom by simply
refusing to dignify the remarks with her presense: "When my teachers made anti-
Semitic remarks ... 1 was instructed to stand up immediately, to leave the class, go
home, and leave the rest to school protocol. My mother would write one of her
many letters, and, with that, my involvement in the matter ended completely."3 As
an adult, Hannah Arendt's defense took the form of the written word by which she
combined her powers of intellect with her genius for language. In this way, Arendt
defended not just herself as an individual Jew nor even the Jewish people as a whole,
rather she defended the experience of uatality and the right to one's cultural heritage as
a matter of course and not as proper matter for debate.
The second factor which contributed to the development of the theme of natality
was the influence of Arendt's philosophy teachers: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.

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 Patricia Bowen Moore

From Heidegger, Arendt learned of the passion inherent in the thinking activity. The
kind of passion called forth by thinking is one which transcends the old oppositions
between reason and feeling, spirit and life, thinking and aliveness.4 Heidegger's semi -
nars introduced Arendt to thinking's nascent quality since this activity demands that
we think anew what had been handed down by the "cultural treasures of the past"
presumed to be dead. s From Heidegger, Arendt learned of thinking's passion for the
experience of beginning in thought itself. In other words, she discovered that
thinking, too, is a kind of birthing. Under the guidance of Karl Jaspers, Arendt was
introduced to a kind of thinking which called forth a passion for the world in which
philosophy was meant to be concrete and to go on between one's fellows. Jaspers
emphasized the importance of communion and communication in the philosophic
act. 6 From him, Arendt learned that philosophy is a "function of communication"
and that philosophizing itself is not the "highest mode of man's Being, but rather a
preparation for the reality both of myself and the world. "7 If Heidegger introduced
Arendt to thinking's nascence, Jaspers introduced her to its worldly orientation.
The third source of influence in the development of Arendt's understanding of
natality was her study of St. Augustine's concept of love. 8 While this 1929 dis -
sertation does not employ the term "natality" as such, it does give ample evidence for
Arendt's implicit concern for the experience of "beginning" as it comes to bear on
creaturely existence. In this essay, Arendt focuses on three types of love each of
which is an articulation of the desire on the part of the creature to return to its
original identity in the Creator and for a restoration of the original harmony once
enjoyed with the Neighbor. In Arendt's reading of Augustine, the force of the past
and the presence of beginning collide: the creature possesses a historic beginning in
Adam by generation and a suprahistoric beginning in Christ whose grace holds out
the possibility of restoring to humankind the life of harmonious plurality. Hence,
this is what is meant by "Social Life," or, love for the neighbor as one loves oneself.

Primary Natality: the Capacity for Beginning

At the conclusion of her analysis of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt refers to the

pre-historical, pre-political nature of Beginning as "the supreme capacity of man;"
this capacity, she adds, "is guaranteed by each new birth."9 Hence, the preliminary
experience of natality is fundamentally a potentiality for action. The birth of the
child, of course, is natality's factual manifestation, but this fact is accompanied
always by an innate power to begin. As such, human birth and the capacity for
beginning qualifies a specifically human life. The conjunction of factual birth and
the power to commence beginnings is designated by the term primary natality; its
experience characterizes the pre-political status of the meaning of birth. Primary

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 Natality Amor Mundi and Nuclearism

nalality, therefore, before it assumes political content, is the highest human capacity
because it is the condition by which and through which action can be exercised.
Arendt draws this insight from Augustine's assertion: "'Initium ut esset homo creatus
est"--thata beginning be made man was created."lo We will examine the experience
of primary natality from the standpoint on it as a faculty for worldly beginnings and
in tenns of its pre-political manifestation in the childhood activities of play and
education. Arendt formulates her pre-political philosophy of nalality from the
distinction to be found in the Latin terms designating two kinds of beginning. These
are principium which refers to the principle for worldly beginnings and initium
which refers to the Beginner.11 Both principium and initium are potentialities for
action and, hence, are coeval experiences. Principium is the ontological basis for
the possibility of action and initium is the birth of the potential actor, the beginner,
who has the power to interject new things into the time-order, into history. From
the perspective of primary nalality, that is, from the standpoint of our supreme
human capacity, these conceptual principles for action can be articulated in this way:
the beginner (initium) animates the principle for beginning (principium) with birth
into the world.
The event of birth, then, gives to the supreme capacity for beginning its exis -
tential content and character. "Because they are initium," states Arendt, "newcomers
and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action ....
This beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world; it is not the beginning
of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the creation of
man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only
another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created
but not before." 12 With the birth of the child, therefore, the faculty for novelty, and
so freedom, makes its first appearance in the world. Birth is an announcement of
exceptionality because now the unexpected can be expected of each newcomer.13
Arendt speaks of birth, factnal nalality, as a world-open phenomenon. It is a
miraculous occasion because it saves the world from its natural demise; it is a world -
ly event because the faculty of action is ontologically rooted in nalality. She writes:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal,
'natural' ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action
is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the
new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only
the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and
hope.... It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most
glorious and most succinct expression in the few worlds with which the
Gospels announced their 'glad tidings': 'A child has been born to US.'14

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 Patricia Bowen Moore

But before it becomes fully manifest in the realm of human affairs, the sphere of the
political, natality, of necessity, must experience a kind of pre-political life. This
experience is the actualization of the principle of beginning in the "nursery" activities
of play and education. These activities serve as examples of primary natality in its
concrete expression.
The child's play activity can be viewed as a pre-political paradigm of natality
since through it the child has access to the power of beginning latent at birth.
Playing is a type of "mirror" feature of natality insofar as it reflects the ability to
exercise beginnings without at the same time persuading the child that his or her
actions are adequate to the political. The novelty of play is a special activity which
belongs to the private sphere as it is a rehearsal for the demands of adulthood rather
than politics. By playing, the child is experimenting with the capacity to initiate
new things. By creating his or her own world, a "pretend world" within which a
novel interpretation can be imposed, the child is appropriating both the newness of
the self and the newness of the world. For example, the child initiates what game
will be played and then becomes a participant in its fun; he or she mimics the ways
of adults by, literally, "making-fun" of their world! In short, the world of play is a
fantasy, one partially fashioned after the "real" world. In it, the child learns some -
thing of the common world without having to assume a responsible role in it. In
this world of make-believe, the child is introduced to the elements of the arbitrary and
the unpredictable inherent in all beginnings. IS The child discovers that playing, like
action, acquires its own identity and that the act of playing lasts as long as the
activity lasts but no longer. While the child is experimenting with this new found
capacity for beginning, he or she is also being observed by adults who take great
interest in this potentiality for action. At the proper time, the child is then
introduced to another activity which attempts to fashion this liveliness and creative
adaptation of action, now, for the world. This is the child's debut into the world of
learning.
Arendt's theory of education postulates that the essence of education is natality
guided by the attitude amor mundi.16 Arendt argues for a conservative educational
model in which both the world and its inhabitants collaborate to preserve what is
common to all (Le., the world) and to welcome what is new and distinct (i.e., the
children). Education prepares youths for the demands of adulthood and the worldly
obligations that go with this status. Since amor mundi is the attitude which ideally
takes a favorable position on the side of the common world, and, since this attitude
articulates natality'S deepest interest, Arendt's theory of education juxtaposes human
natality with a love for the world. Hence, education, she insists, is the point at
which we decide "whether we love the world enough" to continually welcome

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newcomers into it, and the point at which we decide "whether we love our children
enough" not to deny them their chance to undertake something new, "something
unforeseen by us but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing the
common world."!7 Education is a preparation not for politics but for adulthood and
the responsibility of preserving the world we hold in common. Arendt's educational
views, therefore, are governed by a type of worldly love expressed in a language not
unlike the nuptial one: a promise "to cherish and protect" both the children and the
world into which they were born.lB Its pre-political objectives are rooted in natality--
the experience by which the world and its newcomers become aware of their
ineluctable bond: "Vis-a-vis the child it is as though [the educator] were a representa -
tive of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child 'This is
our world.'''!9 The essence of education is natality and the subject of education is the
child precisely because natality is the source of life, the supreme human capacity to
renew the world by virtue of the beginnings we are and the concomitant promise to
guarantee its future in the spirit of amor mundi.
Primary natality designates the coincidence of the beginning and the beginner in
a pre-political circumstance. Its concrete manifestation is made evident by the
nursery experiences of play and education. But "politics", asserts Arendt, "is not like
the nursery" because in politics we are dealing with equals and with people who,
presumably, have been educated.20 When the beginner takes a stance on the stage of
the public world with a view to assuming responsibility for its commonly shared
reality, natality is said to have a second premiere. This "second birth" is natality's
specifically political dimension.21

Political Natality: Birth into the Public Realm

In its broadest application, political natality is defined by its singular orienta -

tion to the world of human affairs. For Arendt, this is the domain of politics, or,
that space of freedom created when citizens come together to act in concert for politi -
cal reasons: "This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words
which can be heard, in deeds which can· be seen, and in events which are talked about,
remembered, and turned into stories before they are fmally incorpomted into the great
storybook of human history. Whatever occurs in this space of appeamnces is political
by definition, even when it is not a direct product of action."22 In this context of
publicity, then, the web of political relationships is structured by actions commenced
in it, worldy discourse about it, and the political biographies that arise out of it.
Political natality is a response to and a confirmation of our first birth to the extent
that we freely insert ourselves into the plurality of the world through distinctive
action and speech. Hence, birth into the political order is the correspondence of

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 Patricia Bowen Moore

politics and freedom, plurality and natality, deeds and words. In Arendt's view,
freedom is the essence of politics, action is rooted in the faculty for beginning, and
speech requires the presence of others (plurality) for its distinctiveness. But if
political life is dependent upon the interplay of these experiences, these experiences
are made possible by the condition of natality in which each activity is rooted. This
is why Arendt can claim that "the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself
felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity for beginning
something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action,
and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action
is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central
category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought "23
Political natality, and so freedom, is a demonstrable fact made possible by the
actions and speech of citizens. When deeds and words are seen, heard, and remem -
bered by others, political actors commence a biography of freedom which eventually
becomes a part of the chronicle of history. In this way, political actors achieve a
type of earthly immortality. Arendt believes that the ability to secure a p"lace of
historical prominence in a mortal cosmos distinguishes a pre-eminently human life
from mere existence:

The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species
itself: only the best (aristOl), who constantly prove themselves to be the best
(aristeuein, a verb for which there is no equivalent in any other language) and
who 'prefer immortal fame to mortal things: are really human; the others,
content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like
animals.24

Obviously unable to remain content with the condition of mortality which they share
with biological life, political actors give meaning to the fact of birth by
appropriating individual natality in a political and ultimately historical way. An
example of this taken from our own historical past would be the achievement of
Jefferson or Adams. Here we have an instance of people who were drawn out of their
private ambitions for the taste of freedom and the public sense of virtuosity and
happiness by participating directly in the beginning of a new nation. The political
actors' excellence in words and deeds set them apart from other men. Hence, they are
judged by Arendt as among those leading the most thoroughly human life--that is,
those whose "second life" becomes a matter of history about whom the story of
greatness of their deeds and excellence of speech is told again and again long after
they have departed from earthly life.

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 Natality. Amor Mundi and Nuclearism

It would be indefensible to suggest or to imply that natality, of itself, is charged

with moral content or that the history of political action is an account of only great
and exemplary deeds. Experience and common sense refute this. For example, we
need only recall the event of twentieth century totalitarianism or the criminal actions
of the Nazi functionary, Adolf Eichmann, to remind us of the evil we are capable of
injecting into this world. Yet, political natality, as Arendt understands it, should be
characterized by a care for the world; it should be capable of calling us to moral and
political courage. Arendt conceives of genuine political natality as essentially in -
spired and sustained by the attitude amor mundi--an attitude which says: where action
or speech are decisive for the fate of the world, worldly love demands that we take a
position on the side of its commonly shared reality. Amor mundi is the political
attitude par excellence; it is, in other words, political-mindedness.
From the perspective of Arendt's political philosophy, to be politically-minded
means "to care more for the world... than for ourselves, for our immediate interests
and for life ... "25 With respect to the reality of the world, political actors act out of a
devoted concern for the preservation of its future. Because "politics is never for the
sake of life," that is, never at the service of biological existence, the peculiarly
human quality of this type of love is defined by the condition of plurality: the
formation of the "we" of action through consent, and the demonstration of excellence
before one's peers through revelatory action and speech.26 Political-mindedness, in
the last analysis, is "amor mundi : love or better dedicated to the world into which we
were born, and this is possible because we shall not live forever. To be dedicated to
the world means among other things: not to act as though we were immortal. "27
Earthly immortality is an honor only the world can grant: the bestowal of this honor
should be preserved solely for those who have dedicated themselves to the futority of
the world.
Amor mundi is an act of dedication to and for the world of human plurality on
the part of natal/mortal beings; through it they bequeath the world as a political
reality to those who will follow and, by acting and speaking in public, commemorate
the world of human affairs. Yet, however much it relies on the condition of plurality
for its articulation, the attitude amor mundi is derived always from the experience of
natality. Love for the world, finally, is an assertion of its existence: "There is no
greater assertion of something or somebody than to love it, that is to say: I will that
you be--Amo,' Volo ut sis."28 This assertion is also a public commitment on behalf
of the world's actors that their actions will advance the reality of the world for
generations to come. Without this assertion of the world's existence and a promise
to preserve its continued existence, neither the realm of human affairs nor its citizens
have much hope for a truly human life. In addition to this, and equally as important
for the concept of political natality, without a mutual consent to affirm the world as
a stage for action, human beings have little hope for the experience of freedom as a
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 Patricia Bowen Moore

"living, political reality. "29 Freedom and politics are decisive for human life and the
future of the world.

Tertiary Natality: the Nascent Character of the Life of the

Mind

While political action is the exhibition of our freedom, our gift for beginning,
human natality has a third manifestation in the realm of thought. This is tertiary
natality or the reconstruction of the theoretical life from the aspect of the nascent
qualities to be discovered in the thinking, the willing, and the judging activity.
Arendt speaks of the mental faculties as possessing a kind of "life." Each of these
activities has an autonomous function, yet, together, they form a unified experience.
Arendt understands this as the mental "sensation of being alive. "30 Tertiary natality,
then, designates the mind's characteristic vitality: its descriptions are drawn
appropriately from the metaphor of life.
Arendt distinguishes the thinking activity from cognitive processes. Where the
former is particularized by its endless quest for meaning, the latter is content to find
results. 31 Thus, thinking is to meaning what knowing is to cognition. Arendt
agrees with Heidegger's insight that thinking is an activity which does not anticipate
knowledge as in the sciences or practical wisdom or action, but rather, it is the
mind's endowment for meaning which never yields tangible results. Proceeding in
"the form of a silent dialogue," the thinker inquires into the meaning of existence and
attempts to reconcile himself to it. 32 But this reconciliation is not an indifferent,
passive response to the spectacle of the world; it is, rather, trying to understand the
world as it comes to bear on our own reality. "Understanding," Arendt explains, "is
unending and therefore cannot produce end-results; it is the specifically human way of
being alive, for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he
was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always
remains a stranger. Understanding begins with birth and ends with death." 33 From
the viewpoint of its quest for meaning and not for factual data, understanding belongs
to the faculty of thought. It is, Arendt tells us, "a complicated process ... by which,
in constant change and variation, we come to terms with, reconcile ourselves to
reality, that is, [it is the process by which we] try to be at home in the world."34
Because the thinker is also a beginner, and, because the world itself undergoes
constant changes, then that which is given to thought is always "new" and can never
be exhausted wholly so long as the world and the reality of human beginnings
endure.
While thinking asserts itself in understanding, that is, in reconciling ourselves
to the world we share in common, its experience is represented by those who "teach

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by example." In this way, understanding connects the theoretical to the political

realm. By setting an example and by "'persuading' the multitude in the only way
open to him, [the thinker] has begun to act."35
The teaching method of Socrates is an exemplification of this experience
inasmuch as it represents the political implications of thought itself. For while
action performed in the public space can be directly political, thinking can never be
performed publicly:

Neither thinking nor acting are specialities, all men do it insofar as they are
human. But action can be directly political if performed in the public realm.
The trouble with thought is that it cannot be performed publicly. If it is to
have political relevance, the assumption would be that he who thinks will act
differently from those who do not.... How is that possible? Or: What are the
political implications in the activity of thinking?36

The Socratic metaphors for thinking's quest for meaning and understanding's "attempt
to reconcile the world to us and us to the world" provide examples of thought's
political implications.37 These metaphors are the gadfly, the electric ray, midwifery,
and the wind of thought. For example, the sting of the gadfly (e.g., Socrates)
arouses unthinking men from their mental lethargy by posing to them another and
different viewpoint; the electric ray appears to paralyze the thinker by the many
perplexities inherent in the thinking activity, but its function is really the capacity to
interrupt oneself--to stop and think--so that new thoughts, new realities may
interpose: the electric ray, like Socrates, affects and infects others with thinking's
difficulties; Socratic midwifery is the maieutic procedure which delivers others of
their thoughts only after the mind has been purged of its prejudices; and, the silent
wind of thought is the mind's "sensation" of being alive; its function is to "unfreeze"
what language has frozen into thought. 38 These experiences rejuvenate the mind's
life so that the thinker can re-examine each perplexity as it arises. Contrariwise, the
individual who fails to form the habit of thinking "is not fully alive":

Thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-materialized quintessence of

being alive; and since life is a process, its quintessence can only lie in the
actual thinking process and not in any solid results or specific thoughts. A
life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own
essence--it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men
are like sleep- walkers.39

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By way of these metaphors, therefore, Arendt shows us that thinking, too, is another
form of birthing.
Arendt posed two questions at the beginning of her analysis of the life of the
mind. These were: What is thinking? and What makes us think? Both questions
were answered respectively by the mind's quest for meaning and its "natural urge" to
reinsert itself in the world of appearances. 40 From the perspective of its nascent
experiences, thinking, though it appears to paralyze the thinker with all kinds of
perplexities, is actually one of the highest activities known to humans; willing is the
"spring of action" or the potentiality to break into history in the form of the I-can,
and judging is the activity which bridges thought and action in the realm of human
affairs. Judging is the most public and so political of the mental activities. Because
it always particularizes the mind's life and gives concrete expression to what it has
observed in word and deed, the faculty of judgment actualizes thinking's content by
publicizing, so to speak, its thoughts. For this reason, the faculty of judgment "im -
plies a political rather than a merely theoretical activity."41 On the other hand,
willing can never be political because in its frenzied activity of now choosing, now
revoking, it cannot "do" anything until its activity ceases. But at the moment it has
ceased, the will actually is no longer "willing". Hence, the will anticipates action
only so far as its spontaneity resembles the experience of freedom.42
Judging has the closest connection to the political because it takes the plurality
of the world into account when it makes its pronouncements. In this way, the world
itself acquires a publicity of its own: "[T]he capacity to judge is a specifically
political ability ... to sec things not only from one's own point of view but in the
perspective of all those who happen to be present... [J]udgment may be one of the
fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient
himself in the public realm, in the common world ... " 43 To judge, then, is to give
public witness to the human enterprise of thinking and doing; its experience is a type
of incarnation of the mental life in the publicity of the world. While it shares with
thinking and willing the factors of withdrawal, invisibility and reflexivity, jUdging's
real "home" is in the public. Where judgments begin, a biography of action, speech
and thought commences.44 Together, thinking, willing and judging constitute the
mind's characteristic life: its "sensation of being alive."

From Natality to Worldliness

Arendt held the conviction that our birth into the world carries with it a
responsibility to love the world, to cherish its promises and to create the conditions
which would allow for its stability and durability for generations who will follow.
The conjunction of world and natality--that is to say, the constellation of the event of

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 Natality Amor Mundi and Nuc1earism

our birth into a world which antedates and which should outlast our individual
appearance in it--this conjunction of experiences fonns the condition by which the
miracle of human birth can restore our faith and hope in the world and the world's
faith and hope in us. Why? Because this miracle is the potentiality for worldly
promises insofar as human beings possess the gift to change the course of events as
they now stand, to interrupt things through speech and action, and to challenge old
and new verities through critical thinking. Arendt's philosophy of natality is
concerned always with "what is at stake." And in our century, what is at stake is the
world itself and the recovery of our unique capacity to commence new beginnings in
it through thought and action. If Arendt's challenge to modernity is a call "to think
what we are doing," this injunction is formulated and sustained by the constellation
of two realities: natality and world. In contemporary life, the crisis of nuclearism
poses the most imminent threat to these two worldly experiences.
In Hannah Arendt's philosophy, "what is at stake," first and last, is the world
and our love for it: "Amor mundi : love or better dedicated to the world into which
we were born ... " With the attitude of amor mundi there is a clear intimation of a
profound and lively bond between natality and the world which first welcomed us into
it as strangers. The most obvious connection between these two realities is provided
by the fact that the world itself antedates the experience of individual birth and death.
The world greets all newcomers who arrive in it; it should outlast their mortality:

The birth and death of human beings are not simple natural occurrences, but
are related to a world into which single individuals, unique, unexchangeable,
and unrepeatable entities, appear and from which they depart. Birth and death
pre-suppose a world which is not in constant movement, but whose durability
and relative pennanence makes appearance and disappearance possible, which
existed before anyone individual appeared into it and will survive its eventual
departure. Without a world into which men are born and from which they die,
there would be nothing but changeless eternal recurrence, the deathless
everlastingness of the humans as of all other animal species.4S

World is natality'S ftrst point of reference; hence, natality is a thoroughly worldly

phenomenon. The constellation of these experiences is articulated by the worldly
stance amor mundi, or, to state it another way, "Amo: Volo ut sis: I love you: I
want you to be."46 Viewed from its special affIliation with natality, the world is a
common touchstone of reality for those who inhabit it and who take their bearings in
it The world's hope for futurity hinges on the promise inherent in natality expressed
as love for the world and a dedication to its potential immortaIity. Thus, what is at
stake, according to Arendt, is world conceived not as a static reality but one identifted

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by its nascence and the attending promise to "reckon with" the never-ending
appearance of the new. Moreover, since the world is natality's first point of reference
it is also the phenomenon which refers human beings to a lived-past, to pre-existent
realities which precede the life of each newcomer. These realities include other
human beings, to be sure, and the stories handed down through the centuries
commemorating their words and deeds, but it also includes those durable artifacts
made by human hands: works of art, the various traces of civilization's handiwork and
those contributions which outlast its mortal inhabitants. The world, in other words,
is a monument to human beginnings; its enduring reality is dependent entirely upon
the fact of natality:

Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work
and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and
relative durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of
human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving
political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history.
Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they
have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with,
the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers.47

In Arendt's view, the world is a humanly endowed reality defined by those beginnings
made in it which have withstood the passage of time. It is a world characterized
through and through by the condition of natality. From the perspective of its
worldliness, the world is an honor oor natality imposes on us; from the perspective
of natality, beginning is an honor we impose on the world. Natality endows the
world with its worldliness while the world bestows upon natality its specifically
worldly dimension: the human context for the manifestation of factual, political and
theoretical beginnings.
Natality's special fondness for the world, articulated as amor mundi, is more
than a promise binding human beings to a common world. Worldly-love is, at
bottom, an imperative for action: Volo ut sis: I want you to be. This imperative
obligates human beings to act favorably on behalf of the common world: to affIrm
its existence through basic activities and to confirm its worldliness through
thoughtful action. But if worldly-love recognizes this ineluctable bond between
natality and world, it recognizes, too, that when this union is threatened, our capacity
for worldly beginnings in thought and in action must defend it against all dangers to
it. In our century, this threat is a world defined now by its penchant for self-
destruction. In short, natality's deadliest enemy is nuclearism.

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 Natality. Amor Mundi. and Nuclearjsm

Natality and its Challenge to Nuclearism

Nothing stands in such contrast to Arendt's philosophy of natality as the present

crisis of nuclearism. Under the Cloud of the possibility of nuclear extinction, the
worldly attitude, arnor mundi, and its concomitant imperative, Volo ut sis, seem a
weak if not superfluous recommendation for a world bent on its own demise. In
light of the fact that human beings themselves, we, have made this ominous
possibility our present reality speaks eloquently about our failure to appropriate the
meaning of natality and its bond with the common world. After living nearly four
decades in an age of atomic and nuclear weaponry, we can hardly rely on the so-called
"experts" to assure us that the world is a safe place in which to live and to continue
to live. As early as 1935--ten years prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki--Walter Benjamin wrote the following comment as if anticipating the final
absurdity of which humankind is capable:

Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this condition
of the world. On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in
blood and horror. Naturally, one must wish for the planet that one day it will
experience a civilization that has abandoned blood and horror; in fact, I am ...
inclined to assume that our planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly
doubtful that El. can bring such a present to its hundred--or four-hundred-
millionth--birthday party. And if we don't, the planet will finally punish us,
its unthoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgment.48

If it is not enough to "wish" for a change in things, neither is it productive nor

advisable to wait for the planet's "last judgment" without legitimate protest. To the
extent that we believe in our gift for action, speech and thought, we are encouraged to
anticipate new types of political action, to think the "unthinkable" and to speak of it,
and against it, with confidence. As Lessing once said: "We humanize what is going
on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking
of it we learn to be human." 49 And while there is, of course, no substitute for ac -
tion, perhaps "ta1ldng about" this pressing dilemma, from the standpoint of natality,
is an activity which will contribute to ushering this planet into its "hundred or four-
hundred-millionth birthday party."
Although Hannah Arendt never devoted an entire essay or book to an
examination of the crisis of nuclearism, her critique of modern worldlessness in
general and her concern for the status of "the human condition" in particular provide
ample evidence for her thoughts on this matter. For example, Arendt's category of
world and its worldliness along with the profound value she attributes to the human
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 Patricia Bowen Moore

capacity for beginning (in thought, word, and deed) form the basis from which an
analysis of the modem situation could be articulated at all. If this century's crisis is a
political one of the fIrst magnitude, it was preceded by the recognition that the
philosophical and political tradition failed to grasp and hence to sustain the true
nature of political action and freedom. This state of affairs came about when
"thought and reality ... parted company," when it was realized that

reality has become opaque for the light of thought and that thought, no longer
bound to incident as the circle remains bound to its focus, is liable either to
become altogether meaningless or to rehash old verities which have lost all
concrete relevance ... The situation ... became desperate when the old
metaphysical questions were shown to be meaningless; that is, when it began
to dawn upon modem man that he had come to live in a world in which his
mind and his tradition of thought were not even capable or asking adequate,
meaningful questions, let alone of giving answers to its own perplexities.50

The tradition is as inadequate to a full understanding of the crisis of nuclearism as it

was to the crisis posed by totalitarianism. Both defy the structore of interpretation
and moral valuation formerly provided by Western philosophical and political
thought. If twentieth century totalitarianism managed to suspend from human hearts
and minds the quality of temptation by which evil could be recognized (Le., the
reversal of the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill to mean Thou Shalt Kill as the
law of the land during war-time Nazi Germany), then twentieth century nuclearism
epitomizes the substitution of thinking's quest for meaning and action's propensity
for political freedom by calculative thought and the triumph of science as the new
mode of "action" and "speech."51 But this victory, protests Arendt, is manifestly
worldless because it "lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to
produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from
which meaningfulness springs and illuminates human existence."52 In short, our
future must not be left solely to the "actions" of the scientists nor must our political
sensibilities be numbed by the persuasiveness of cognitive theories. Unless the
political realm, and, by extension, the reality of citizenship, is preserved as political,
thought and thinking itself stand to be defeated:

Thought, finally ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live
under the conditions of political freedom .... [N]o other human capacity is so
vulnerable [as thinking], and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of
tyranny than it is to think. As a living experience, thought has always been
assumed, perhaps wrongly, to be known only to the few. It may not be

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 Natality Amor Mundi and Nuclearism

presumptuous to believe that these few have not become fewer in our time.
This may be irrelevant, or of restricted relevance, for the future of the world; it
is not irrelevant for the future of man.S3

Thought requires the existence of political freedom; this is possible only to the
extent that the plurality of the world and the diversity of opinions are permitted to
assert themselves through political action and speech and then, ultimately, be
remembered and re-formulated as worldly stories articulated as the fInal triumph of
human specialities over all obstacles to them.
The possibility of re-creating the structure of human affairs and the stories to
which they give rise holds out a hope for the renewal of the "worldliness" of the
world In the words of Isak: Dinesen, "All sorrows can be borne if you put them into
a story or tell a story about them .... When the storyteller is loyal ... to the story,
then, in the end, silence will speak. When the story has been betrayed, silence is but
emptiness."S4 Under present conditions, of course, the last silence is the one none of
us will "hear" if it is betrayed by the "fInal solution" of nuclearism. And yet, while
the events of totalitarian domination and nuc1earism are the bitterest of contemporary
worldly sorrows, their meaning can be transcended, if not entirely redeemed, by a call
for the rejuvenation of the life of thought and political action. This challenge is
formulated by the Arendtian commitment to natality and the validity of its promises
for the re-birth of the world
Nuclearism is the most dramatic and tragic metaphor for worldless-ness. Its
potentiality for ultimate and complete annihilation of all living things makes a
mockery of mortality no less than of natality insofar as it threatens the very condi -
tions by which life's cycle is "naturally" terminated. This dilemma is perplexing
because, on the one hand, it signifies a radical objection to the experience of natality
and, on the other hand, it forms an absurd alliance with the condition of mortality.
The possibility of a nuclear holocaust not only mocks and trivializes the fact of
mortality as at least the "natural" end of individual human life, but its threat of total
extinction also determines the fate of those yet to be born. In a nuclear world, the
constellation of natality and world is inescapably linked to the ontological inter -
dependence between the born and the unborn. Jonathan Schell underscores this fact in
his book The Fate o/the Earth:

In a nuclear holocaust great enough to extinguish the species, every person on

earth would die; but in addition to that, and distinct from it, is the fact that the
unborn generations would be prevented from ever existing. However,
precisely because the unborn are not born, they cannot experience their plight,
and its meaning has to be sought among the living, who share a common

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 Patricia Bowen Moore

world with the unborn as well as with the dead, and who fmd that if they tum
their backs on the unborn, and deny them life, then their own lives become
progressively more twisted, empty, and despairing.55

While "its meaning has to be sought among the living" is undeniably certain, the
living need to feel confident in their gift for beginning anew in thought, action, and
speech when circumstances demand it. Yet, if nuclearism is a fundamental assault
upon the condition of natality, natality is the path back to worldly hope and
promises.
A world defmed by its nuclearism is one not necessarily irrefutably shattered. If
this were the case, the gift for beginning again would be an artificial and cruel hope.
It is nothing less than an irony of history that the condition of extreme worldlessness
would be the most susceptible to uniting us by a commonly shared concern for the
"fate of the earth": the whole planet is menaced by the threat of extinction; all
human realities, past, present, future, are at the mercy of this tragic possibility;
every human excellence ever to appear, every capacity ever brought to fruition would
suddenly be non-existent because there would be no one left "to put them into a
story." Yet, if our common world is structured by this form of worldlessness, its
future reality is dependent upon the worldliness of our actions and the concomitant
pledge: I will that you be. In other words, the nuclear situation need not be our last
reality precisely because we are the meaning of the promise of birth and rebirth. This
fact alone is the human resource out of which we may feel confident in asking
pertinent questions about the "meaning of our actions" for those who have preceded
us and, too, for those who (we must continue to insist on this) will follow. Again,
we quote from Schell:

[Ilf instead of asking what the act of extinction means we ask what the act of
survival means--and in the nuclear world survival has, for the first time,
become an act-owe fmd the relationship between the generations reconstituted,
and we can once again ask what the meaning of our actions will be for people
directly affected by them, who now, because they have presumed to exist, can
be presumed to have a response. By acting to save the species, and
repopulating the future, we break out of the cramped, claustrophobic isolation
of a doomed present, and open a path to the greater space--of past, present, and
future. 56

The key which can "open a path to the greater space" is the fact of uatality honed by
the spirit of amor mundi. Only a belief in the promises inherent in this experience--
factual, political, theoretical--can begin to guarantee a future as well as a past and a
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 Natality Amor Mundi. and NucIearism

present. It is natality therefore which can renew our hope in the world and which can
give both us and the world reliable assurance that we need not act as if we were
already "doomed" to certain obliteration. Because we are born to speak and to act··
born into a pre·established world which we learn to love··we possess the gift which
opens the path leading back to the world's specifically human dimension. For if
nuclearism is the potential dismantling of the realities of world and natality, its
rehabilitation is dependent wholly upon the "recovery of the public world" through
the unique capacity to begin again in thought and action.57

Whether she is speaking of the pre·politicallife, the life of action, or the life of
the mind, the category of natality guides Hannah Arendt's perspective. In each case,
the boundary experience of birth and the capacity for beginning which this experience
announces, is the structure out of which the dimensions of natality can be articulated.
Herein lies Arendt's original contribution: she introduced the condition of human
natality as the central category of philosophical and political thought. With Hannah
Arendt, the meaning of our birth is, at botton, birth into the "worldliness" of thought
and action. If Hannah Arendt's philosophy of natality is "romantic," it is because her
romance was with the world, its plurality, and its dependence upon the miracle of
natality. Directed always to the world we hold in common, Arendt's philosophy can
be nicely summarized in the language of worldly love: "Amo: Volo ut sis: I love
you: I want you to be." And this can be appreciated fully by embracing Arendt's
conviction regarding the capacity to begin even if··perhaps despite the fact··that the
contemporary situation has shattered our trust in the enduring reality of the world.
But the miracle of natality should give us confidence in our unique ability to speak
and to think and to act on behalf of the world because there remains the truth that
every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning: this beginning is the
promise, the only "message" which the end can ever produce. Before it becomes a
historical datum, Beginning is the supreme human capacity; politically, it is identical
with our freedom. "Initium ut esset homo creatus est," said Augustine. This
beginning is guaranteed by each new birth. Indeed, it is every man and woman.58

1. "An Exchange of Letters Between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt," in

Hannah Arendt, The Jew As Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, Inc.,
1978), p. 246.
2. From Arendt's 1964 interview with Gunther Gaus, "Was bleibt? Es bleibt die
Muttersprache," included in Gaus, Zur Person (Munich: Feder, 1964) as cited in

153
 Patricia Bowen Moore

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arend:: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982), pp. 11-12.
3. Gaus interview (1964) as cited in Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, pp. 11-12.
4. Hannah Arendt, "Martin Heidegger At Eighty," New York Review of Books,
October 21, 1971, p. 51.
5. Arendt, "Martin Heidegger At Eighty," p. 51.
6. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, vo!' 2, translated by E.B. Ashton (Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 100.
7. Hannah Arendt, "What is Existenz Philosophy?" Partisan Review 13/1 (Winter,
1946) 53.
8. Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegrijf bei Augustin (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer,
1929). English translation of this text, "The Concept of Love in St. Augustine," from
the Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, Washington. D.C.
9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace &
Jovanovich, Inc., 1973, 1956), p. 479.
10. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 479.
11. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1958), p. 177f.
12. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 177.
13. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 178.
14. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 247.
15. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965, 1963), p. 206.
16. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education," Between Past and Future: Eight
Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 174.
17. Arendt, "Crisis in Education," Between Past and Future, p. 196.
18. Arendt, "Crisis in Education," Between Past and Future, p. 192.
19. Arendt, "Crisis in Education," Between Past and Future, p. 189.
20. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking
Press, 1965, 1963), p. 279.
21. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 176.
22. Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?", Between Past and Future, pp. 154-155.
23. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 9.
24. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 19.
25. Hannah Arendt, "Introduction to Politics." Course lecture (Fall, 1963), Chicago.
Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 023803.
26. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 37.

154
 Natality. AmoT Mundi. and Nuclearism

27. Arendt, "Introduction to Politics," 023803.

28 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind/Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978), p. 104.
29. Hannah Arendt, "Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?," Men In Dark Times (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 82.
30. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind/Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978), p. 123.
31. Arendt, The Life of the Mind/Thinking, pp. 13-14.
32. Arendt, The Life of the Mind/ Thinking, p. 187.
33. Hannah Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," Partisan Review 20/4 (July-August,
1953), p. 377.
34. Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," p. 377.
35. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future, p. 248.
36. Arendt, "Introduction to Politics," 023846.
37. Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," p. 377.
38. Arendt, The Life of the MindlThinking, pp. 172-177.
39. Arendt, The Life of the Mind/Thinking, p. 191. (The mental "sensation of being
alive" requires habituation and constant renewal. Eichmann is an example of the anti -
thesis to this kind of life such that the performance of his actions exhibits the absence
of thinking. Eichmann's indifference to the many criminal acts to which he was party
may be due to his indifference to the life of the mind. And, of course, this failure of
the life of the mind was a preparation for the banality of evil: the "interdependence
between thoughtlessness and evil.")
40. Arendt, The Life of the MindiThinking, p. 129ff.
41. Arendt, 'The Crisis in Culture," Between Past and Future, p. 219.
42. Arendt, The Life of the Mind/Willing, p. 101.
43. Arendt, ''The Crisis in Culture," Between Past and Future, p. 221.
44. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 95.
45. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 96-97.
46. Arendt, The Life of the Mind/Willing, p. 136.
47. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 8-9.
48. Quoted by Arendt, "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940" in Illuminations. Edited and
with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 37-38.
49. Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing," Men in Dark
Times, p. 25.
50. Arendt, "Preface," Between Past and Future, pp. 6, 8-9.
ISS
 Patricia Bowen Moore

51. Arendt, Eich11lllnn in Jerusalem, p. 150.

52. Arendt, The HU11IIln Condition, p. 324.
53. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 324-325.
54. Arendt, "Isok Dinesen: 1885-1963," Men in Dark Times, pp. 104, 97.
55. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p.
172.
56. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 172.
57. This phrase is borrowed from Melvyn A. Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery
of the Public World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979).
58. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 478-479.

156
 HANNAH ARENDT'S CONSTITUTIONAL
THOUGHT

Robert Burns

I. Introduction

Hannah Arendt's legal thought is subtle, complex and in many ways undevel-
oped. She was fIrst, of course, the philosopher of politics, and of politics as a way
of life, the "lost treasure" of the 18th century revolutionary tradtion. 1 She was, too,
a master of critique, in the pre-Marxist sense of delimitation of theoretical and practi -
cal realms, each with its own irreducible principle? or, more accurately its own
"spirit." The subtlety of her legal thought, however, lies in her account of the legal
world, constitutional and legislative, as interpenetrated in different ways, at different
points by the more "principled" realms of ethics, politics, and "fabrication." The
legal world itself seems like an old city: "a maze of little streets and squares, of old
and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this sur -
rounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform
houses. "3 In some neighborhoods, we fInd "the processes of persuasion, negotiation,
and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics"4 as well as the "actual
content of political life -- the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in
company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of
inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed.. ." 5 Other boroughs, importaut
though perhaps more somber, house, in different ways, "those things which men can -
not change at will,6 which show that the political sphere, its greatness notwith -
stauding, is limited -- that it does not encompass the whole of man's and the world's
existence. "7 "Lawfuluess sets limitations to actions, but does not iuspire them; the
greatness but also the perplexity of laws in free societies is that they only telJ what
one should not, but never what one should do."8

Bernauer, J. W. (ed), Amor Mundi. ISBN 90·247-3483-5.

© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands. 157
 RobertBuros

II. Law and the Protection of Civil Rights

Arendt often chided the political left for its denigration of the importance of
"bourgeois" civil rights. The latter form the "preliminaries of civilized government"9
and it is for her, a "sad fact" that "most so-called revolutions ... have not even been
able to produce constitutional guarantees of civil rights and liberties, the blessings of
'limited government."'IO Though her central concern is political freedom, she recalls
that "the distance between tyranny and constitutional, limited government is as great
as, perhaps greater than, the distance between limited government and freedom."11
She cites Blackstone for the proposition that these civil rights are the outcome
of the "three great and primary rights: life, liberty, and property."12 They are not the
"content of freedom," which exists only in political participation, but rather the
results of liberation from long-past tyrannies. 13 They come by "reform," however
forceful, not revolution. Common action that begins with the goal of restoring
"ancient liberties" becomes "revolutionary" only when it seeks to establish the public
"spirit of freedom. "14 What the American union accomplished in the sphere of civil
liberties was to extend the historical "rights of Englishmen" to all, that is to ensure
that "all men should live under constitutional, 'limited' government" Although they
are "pre-political," civil liberties are not "natural" rights. There seem to be several
reasons for Arendt's insistence on this point
The first is analogous to her more general project of reestablishing the founda -
tions of political life and the meaningfulness of human life as political in the face of
a nihilism fueled by the erosion of religious belief and confidence in metaphysical
philosophy. If the justification of civil liberties lies solely in their status as objects
of the mode of rationalist intellectual intuition invoked by Grotius and Liebnitz lS and
belief in the possibility of that kind of intuition has been abandonedl6 then those
crucial civil liberties may themselves be in danger of erosion. In a strange sense
Arendt's "Burlcean" reliance on a secular tradition of civil liberties endorses the tradi -
tional attitude toward property rights. Blackstone tells us that an Englishman will
refuse to look for "the original [sicl and foundation of this right," for "we seem afraid
to look back to the means by which it is acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our
title; or at best we rest satisfied with the decision of the laws in our favor[.],,17
The second basis of Arendt's "historical" account of pre-political civil rights lies
in her account of the fate of "rightless" people in the twentieth century. This account
illustrates for her the "pragmatic soundness" of Burke's insistence that these basic
rights, not as foundations but as limits on government, 18 are best conceived as "en -
tailed inheritances" from one's ancestors, not as "natural" rights, the "inalienable
rights of man. "19 Arendt describes both the practical acuity as well as the pathos

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with which displaced persons clung to their national identities, convinced as they
were that "loss of national rights was identical with loss of human rights"20 and
notes how fruitless were the attempts "by a few international jurists without political
experience or professional philanthropists supported by the uncertain sentiments of
professional idealists" to establish effective bills of human rights.21
The plight of the rightless is "not that they were not equal before the law, but
that no law exists for them." Their loss of legal status occurred well before, and
paved the way, to the loss of life itself.22 "We became aware of the existence of a
right to have rights (and that means to life in a framework where one is judged by
one's actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized com-
munity, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain
these rights because of the new global political situation. "23 Without a "community
willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever" man is effectively deprived of
his right to effective speech and of all human relationships," two characteristics of
human beings which, until the twentieth century, were thought to be beyond the
reach of the worst tyrannt: "only the loss of a polity itself expels him from human -
ity,"24
This historical experience is, however, inextricably tied to intellectual develop -
ments. In Arendt's view the proclamation of Rights of Man rested on a conviction
that "nature" was "less alien than history to the essence of man,"2S and that rights and
laws could be deduced from the "laws of its growth. "26 This conviction has been
eroded on two fronts. First, the atrocities of the twentieth century have "shown the
potentialities in human 'nature' beyond the darkest suspicions of Western religion and
philosophy." Second, the advance of physical science has raised doubts about the
very existence of 'laws of nature.'" In sum, nature has itself assumed a "sinister
aspect" and twentieth century man "has become as emancipated from nature as
eighteenth century man was from history." Thus both history and nature have be -
come "equally alien to us, namely, in the sense that the essence of man can no longer
be comprehended in terms of either category:1:I Further, without the guarantees of the
"older traditions" embodioo both in constitutions and in the Christian theology that
provided "the framework for all political and philosophical problems," it is not at all
clear that even a world government which might secure the "right to have rights"
would not collapse the very category "right" into "good" or "useful" for a collectivity
of one sort or another: "Hitler's motto that 'right is what is good for the German
people' is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found every -
where.28
Civil rights embodied in bills of rights, then, guard the borderland between the
public and the private, a boundary all the more fragile in the modern age where the
rift between ruler and ruled has been closed.29 These rights protect "those spheres

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where man cannot act and change at will" and point out the "limitations of the
human artifice." These are the spheres of personal differentiation revealed only to
"friendship and sympathy, and to the great and incalculable grace ofloven3O not to the
formal constructed equality of the nomoi. Still, it is true:

No doubt, wherever public life and its law of equality are completely
victorious, wherever a civilization succeeds in eliminating or reducing to a
minimum the dark background of difference, it will end in complete
petrifaction and be punished, so to speak, for having forgotten that man is
only the master, not the creator of the world.31

Arendt thus seems to combine an almost religious reverence for the importance
of human dignity and its effective place in the public sphere through protection of
"pre-political" civil rights with an extreme theoretical reticense about the "bases" of
that dignity. This may stem in part from an Hegelian aversion for the assertion of
"rights" without effective institutional embodiment, combined with her consistent
hostility to the Hegelian modes of thought which may be the most powerful
theoretical expression of a generalized "Burkian" vision she endorses. It may also,
however, have a partial "theological" basis in her apparent acceptance of Augustine's
argument that only a god could know the "human nature" that might ground such
rights, and such knowledge would either have to be revealed or be gained through a
kind of philosophical thought which attains a point of view which is literally di -
vine.32 In denying such a perspective, she stands with the Kant of the Paralogisms
of Pure Reason, and against both Plato and HegeL

In. Fundamental Law and Political Power

"The great problem in politics, which I compare to the problem of squaring the
circle in geometry ... [is]: How to find a form of government which puts the law
above man."33 Arendt presents a sustained argument that the thinkers and men of
action of the French Revolution, and derivatively of the European revolutionary
tradition, have disasterously misconceived the relationship between law and political
power. As none of the French revolutionary assemblies had sufficient authority to
lay down the fundamental law, so the revolutionaries' theoretical error was "their
almost automatic, uncritical belief that power and law sprung from the selfsame
source. "34 In part this was their inheritance of absolutism stretching back to the late
Roman Empire. The revolutionary denial of the proposition that the king, in ruling
by divine right, "incarnated on earth a divine origin in which law and power
coincided," a coincidence "that made law powerful and power legitimate," was for
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Arendt an all too determinate negation.35 As the royal power was a true potestas
legibus soluta, so the revolutionaries, having "put the people in the seat of the king"
proceeded to deify the people.36 And the people were no longer conceived as a
multitude, but, under the rubric of the general will, as one person, in the "image of
God whose will is law. 37 In practice, without a "grass-roots" political structure of
constitutive assemblies where the real multiplicity of opinion could be expressed and
debated, "the very process of Revolution itself...became the source of all 'laws: a
source which relentlessly produced new 'laws,' namely, decrees and ordinances, which
were obsolete the very moment they were issued, swept away by the Higher Law of
the Revolution which had just given birth to them."38 Such a revolution could never
be completed: "In theory as in practice, only a counter-movement, a contre-revolu -
lion, could stop a revolutionary process which had become a law unto itself. "39
The American founders were, by contrast, "never even tempted to derive law and
power from the same origin," though they were aware that they had to "establish a
new source of law and to devise a new system of power." 40 The foundation of the
American republic rested "on a radical separation of law and power, with clearly re -
cognized different origins, different legitimations, and different spheres of applica -
tion."41
Constitutional government is government limited by law.42 The republic
which the founders created was a form of government under which (majoritarian)
decisions are made "within the framework and according to the regulations of a
constitution which, in turn, is no more subject to the will of a majority than a
building is the expression of the will of its architect or subject to the will of its
inhabitants. "43 The written constitution is, then, an "elementary, objective, worldly"
thing, a "tangible worldly entity," which, though surely subject to interpretation, has
far more durability than a "subjective state of mind,like the will." It expressed the
founders' basic conviction, the inheritance of centuries of self-governance in a hostile
land, that "human worldliness ... will save men from the pitfalls of human nature"
since "whatever men might be in their singularity, they could bind themselves into a
community which, even though it was composed of 'sinners,' need not necessarily
reflect this 'sinful' side of human nature."44 They knew from experience what Kant
later formulated: not, with Aristotle, that a "good man can be a good citizen only in a
good state" but that a "bad man can be a good citizen in a good state. "45 For the
Founders, power "springs from below, the grass-roots" of the assembled people,
while the "source of law, who [sic] seat is above" is "in some higher and transcendent
region."
Thus, in framing the Constitution, the founders could actually aim to create
more power, to follow Montesquieu in relying on the principle of the separation of
powers to build "into the very heart of government" a device "through which new

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power is constantly generated, without, however, being able to overgrow and expand
to the detriment of other centers or sources of power. "46 Power and freedom could be
combined without relying solely on law (as a guarantor of rights) rather than on
power itself, to limit power, a reliance that would inevitably lead to a reduction of
power, and so of public freedom.

IV. The Problem of Law's Legitimacy in Revolutionary

Government

What was the "higher and transcendent region" from which law, especially
fundamental law, drew its legitimacy? This is the vexing question which the
American framers solved only in practice, not in theory, and on which the French
Revolution itself foundered.
Neither Greece nor Rome felt the need for a divine origin for their laW.47 By the
time of the revolutions of the eighteenth (and twentieth) centuries the intellectual
recourse to an absolute authority in order to "bestow legality upon positive, posited
laws" and "legitimacy upon the powers that be" was inescapable, even in America. 48
First, there was the impact on man's imagination of the appearance in the Christian
era of the "word...become flesh," "an absolute that had appeared in time as a mundane
reality, "49 for Augustine, source of the only true novelty in the dreary political cycles
of ancient thought Second, there was the legacy of absolutism, itself "heir to those
long centuries when no secular realm existed in the Occident that was not ultimately
rooted in the sanction given to it by the Church, and when, therefore, secular laws
were understood as the mundane expression of a divinely ordained law."5o Third,
there was, despite the influence of a contrary Roman understanding, the dominant
Hebrew conception of laws as commandment: "Only to the extent that we understand
by law a commandment to which men owe obedience regardless of their consent and
mutual agreements, does the law require a transcendent source of authority for its
validity, that is, an origin which must be beyond human power. "51
The modern revolutions posed the problem of the legitimacy of law with a new
starkness. The "necessity of making new laws and of founding a new body politic"
revealed as facile expedients and subterfuges the early modern solutions to the
"perplexities of a secular political realm": "the hope that custom would function as a
'higher' law because of a 'transcendental quality' ascribed to its vast antiquity, or the
belief that the exalted position of the monarch as such would surround the entire
governmental sphere with an aura of sanctity, as in the often quoted appraisal of the
British monarchy by Bagehot: "The English monarchy strengths our government
with the strength of religion.'''52 The problem was, in Rousseau's words, "that to
put the law above man and thus to establish the validity of man-made laws, iI

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faudrait des dieux, 'one actually would need gods.'" If the essence of law was
command, fundamental law, constitutional law, was a command that only a god
could issue. Robespierre was as theoretically acute as he was politically first
desperate, then ridiculous, in his attempt at founding the cult of the Supreme Being.
What he needed was "an ever-present transcendent source of authority that could not
be identified with the general will of either the nation or the Revolution itself, so
that an absolute Sovereignty -- Blackstone's despotic power -- might bestow
sovereignty on the nation, that an absolute immortality might guarantee, if not
immortality, then at least some permanence and stability to the republic, and, finally
that some absolute authority might function as the fountainhead of justice from
which the laws of the new body politic could derive their legitimacy. "53
The American colonists had escaped, though only in practice, the problem of
the absolute, of the tradition in which Popes then kings then the nation itself claimed
to rule by divine right, "not when they crossed the Atlantic but when, under the
pressure of circumstances -- in fear of the new continent's unchartered wilderness and
frightened by the chart1ess darkness of the human heart -- they had constituted
themselves into 'civil bodies politic: mutually bound themselves into an enterprise
for which no other bond existed, and thus made a new beginning in the very midst of
Western mankind."54 What saved the American republic from the "onslaught of
modernity" and the loss of the religious sanction was "neither 'nature's god' nor self-
evident truth, but the act of foundation itself. "55
This was true, however, only practically, a limitation which has sharply limited
the global siguificance of the epochal originality of the American revolution and
constitution. On the level of theory the founders remained imprisoned in the
"absolutist" vision, shackled precisely by the traditioual concept of law. 56 Though
the Constitution itself is silent on the ultimate source of its authority as law of the
land, Arendt argues that it may be read with the Declaration of Independence as
relying on the "self-evident truths" that Jefferson had earlier invoked. It was not
solely "reason that Jefferson promoted to the rank of the 'higher law' which would
bestow Validity on both the new law of the land and the old laws of morality; it was
a divinely informed reason .. : No matter, then, that Jefferson dimly perceived that
the truths announced in the Declaration could never claim the "self-evidence" then
thought to inhere in mathematical propositions, or that self-evidence was not
convertible with right-reason, the practical reason manifest in legal or political
deliberation.57 The wonder for Arendt is that this theoretical limitation did not
prevent the founders from successfully finding and establishing a new basis for the
legitimacy of fundamental law .

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V. Constitutional Law Without Higher Law

The American framers' success in "placing the law above man," had two
elements: (I) a new source of authority (2) an institutionalized device for its exercise.

1. The Source of Authority

The experience of self-government in the colonies and the enormous power

which manifested itself in the colonial assemblies "taught the man of the Revolution
the real meaning of the Roman potestas in populo, that power resides in the
people."58 They were also aware that this principle was "capable of inspiring a form
of government only if one adds, as the Romans did, auctoritas in senatu, authority
resides in the senate, so that government itself consists of both power and authority,
or, as the Romans had it senatus populusque Romanus."59 The poignant problem for
the American Revolution was "the foundation not of power but of authority."60
Power, "rooted in a people that had bound itself by mutual promises and lived in
bodies constituted by compact, was enough to go through a revolution (without
unleashing the boundless violence of the multitudes)." It was insufficient however
"to establish a 'perpetual union,' that is, to found a new authority ... to assure perpe -
tuity, that is, to bestow upon the affairs of men that measure of stability without
which they would be unable to build a world for their posterity ... "61 The deepest
problem lay in establishing the fundamental (constitutional) law of the land, but,
derivatively, it affected even the authoritativeness or legitimacy of legislation. For
"the laws owed their factual existence to the power of the people and their representa -
tives in the legislatures; but these men could not at the same time represent the
higher source from which these laws had to be derived in order to be authoritative and
valid for all, the majorities and the minorities, the present and the future
generations."62 Even Machiavelli, who insisted on the inevitability of violence and
violation in the founding of a new polity ("Romulus slew Remus, Cain slew Able"),
was constrained to call upon divine authority and inspiration to accomplish the
concomitant "task of law giving, of devising and imposing upon men a new
authority ... "63
It turned out, in Arendt's view, that "it would be the act of foundation itself,
rather than an immortal legislator or self-evident truth or any other transcendent,
transmundane source, which eventually would became [sic] the foundation of
authority in the new body politic."64 The "'absolute' lies in the very act of begin-
ning itself." The vain search for a transcendent "absolute" is driven only by the
"measure of complete arbitrariness" which attends any true beginning.65 The "con-
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 Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thought

stitution-worship" which has survived historical criticism of the document and

philosophical destruction of the "self-evident truths" of the founders, rests in a well-
placed "reverent awe" for the act of foundation, itself "outside" our ordinary notions
of linear time and causality. This leads Arendt "to predict that the authority of the
republic will be safe and intact as long as the act itself, the beginning as such, is
remembered whenever constitutional questions in the narrower sense of the word
come into play. "66
America, then, survived the end of the religious sanction for the political realm
(something Arendt takes to be an "accomplished fact") by the authority of the act of
foundation itself.67 The power which sprang up amoug the colonists in the course of
the Revolutionary war's "liberation" was kept intact long enough to enable them to
constitute "a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of
action"68 and thus to constitute "the foundation of freedom, that is, the foundation of
a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear."69
Arendt speculates that the founders

... might have been faintly aware that there exists a solution to the perplexities
of beginning which needs no absolute to break the vicious circle in which all
fIrst things seem to be caught. What saves the act of beginning from its own
arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more
precise, that beginning and principle, are not only related to each other, but
are coeval. The absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own
validity and which must save it, as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness is
the principle which, together with it, makes its appearance in the world. The
way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action
for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise ....7o

Both the etymological root of our "principle" from the Latin principium, and the
coincidence of "beginning" and "principle" in the Greek arc he suggest the same
solution to the problem of the absolute in the inherently relative world of human
affairs. Plato caught the identity in the Laws, in a sentence which Arendt
paraphrases: "For the beginning, because it contains its own principle, is also a god
who, as long as he dwells among men, as long as he inspires their deeds, saves
everything. "71 Polybius rendered the same experience: "The beginning is not merely
half of the whole but reaches out toward the end."72 Thus the "worship" which
Woodrow Wilson decried in the attitude of Americans toward their constitution was
not the Hebraic and Christian worship of a transcendent god or lawgiver but the
Roman piety consisting in "religare, in binding themselves back to a beginning"
which could provide both stability and authority.73

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2. Authority Institutionalized: The Supreme Court74

Because the American Senate exercised power, it was unfit to be a seat of

authority, as had the very different Roman institution with the same name. What
was continuous with the "Roman spirit was that a concrete institution was needed
and established which, in clear distinction from the powers of the legislature and
executive branches of government, was especially designed for the purpose of
authority."75 Since it "possessed neither force nor will but merely judgment. .... the
"majesty of national authority must be manifested through the medium of the courts
of justice."76 "Institutionally, it is lack of power, combined with permanence in
office, which signals that the true seat of authority in the American Republic is the
Supreme Court." 77 In America, "this authority is exerted in a kind of continuous
constitution-making, for the Supreme Court is indeed, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase,
'a kind of Constitutional Assembly in continuous session."'7s The principal differ-
ence between the Roman and American models, a difference which Arendt does not
fully explicate, is that .. [i]n Rome the function of authority was political and it
consisted in giving advice, while in the American republic the function of authority
is legal, and it consists in interpretation." 79 Arendt argues that this "Constitutional
assembly in continuous session" derives its own authority not as in Rome by
"reincarnating" the founders, but "from this Constitution as a written document,"so
"an endurable objective thing[,] ... a tangible worldly entity of greater durability than
elections or public opinion polls. "SI Yet the written Constitution remains a docu -
ment that "one could approach from many different angles and upon which one could
impose many different interpretations, which one could change and amend in
accordance with the circumstances ..... S2
The Court, of course, exercises judgment and issues opinions. In placing an
institution whose task was to judge at the center of the Constitutional edifice, the
Founding Fathers transcended "the narrow and tradition-bound framework of their
general concepts" in order to "assure stability to their new creation." For only Kant,
and not the philosophical tradition with which they were familiar, had something to
teach about its "essential character and amazing range in the realm of human af -
fairs." s3 In America, constitutional courts are also "oligarchic" forums in the sense
that they have come to embody the processes of deliberation about the public good,
.. the public happiness and public freedom [which] have become the privilege of the
few." For Arendt, the people themselves, under modern conditions, do not usually
have opinions at all, only "moods" for "[o]pinions are formed in a process of open
discussion and public debate." s4 Indeed, even contemporary legislators, in her view,
are likely not to have opinions because they do not often deliberate, rather they

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represent those interests which through "pressure groups, lobbies, and other devices"
which "blackmail" legislators into representing their interests in a bargaining game
in which some win and some lose.85 For Arendt, then, it is specifically the process
of deliberation and opinion formation which is resistent to anyone-dimensional
ideology and which provides the contexts within which authority and judgment may
be exercised.

VI. Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Constitutional

Thought

1. Introduction: Thinking What We Do in Constitutional

Law

What Arendt offers then is a set of metaphors for thinking the legal world. This
is no small thing: "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." 86 And,
indeed, Arendt suggests that older metaphors have held and can hold men prisoners in
disastrous ways. Her metaphors suggest that the actual life of constitutional law is
very complex. She insisted generally on the importance of distinctions and opposed
a functionalism in social theory that would efface the distinctions which provide
genuine understanding. If she is right in this, it suggests that jurists and lawyers
must understand that they are about distinct tasks which bear only family resem -
blances to each other and, for historical reasons, these diverse things have come to be
housed in "legal" institutions.
It is striking that Arendt's account raises in a theoretically rich context the very
issues which have become central in contemporary American constitutional thought:
What is the source of human rights for which the constitutional text offers little
support? Is there a constitutional tradition made possible by our being "tied back" to
an authoritative founding, (or perhaps "foundings"), and carried by a tradition which
legal interpretation sustains? What is the significance of "precedent" and what is the
interrelationship between legal reasoning "based" on the "worldly thing" of constitu -
tional text and precedent, on the one hand, and universalist moral reasoning, on the
other? Is the "original" understanding of the constitutional text controlling? Is law
pmctice a "craft," building and repairing the stable "house" within which political
action may take place, or is it "political action" itself, or moml dialogue? Have the
bonds which tie us back to the act of foundation been so weakened that legal
interpretation by the best jurists has itself become "pearl fishing": can our texts and
precedents be "saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their
contexts"? In losing the thread may we also lose our chains? Or, to the contrary and
as Arendt suggested in commenting on Watergate, was it our legal tradition which

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saved us? Is the jurist's task to judge from some higher viewpoint, embodied in legal
rules or "principles," or rather to judge with impartiality, but from "within" the
common sense of her community? These are precisely the questions on which
Arendt's thought is most suggestive.

2. Constitutionalism Without Transcendence: Philosophical

Pluralism in Foundations.

All of Arendt's metaphors for thinking constitutional law are "horizontal": they
seek to found law's legitimacy on something that persons can do without
transcendent sanction, and without the need to view the legal world sub specie
aeternitatis.87 This rests in part on her conviction, expressed in a conversation with
Hans Jonas in 1972 that:
...if our future should depend on [whetherl ... we will get an ultimate
which from above will decide for us (and then the question is, of course, who
is going to recognize this ultimate and which will be the rules for recognizing
this ultimate -- you really have an infmite regress here, but anyhow) I would
be utterly pessimistic. If this is the case then we are lost. Because this
actually demands that a new god will appear... Because this [godl had disap -
peared [after the Middle Agesl Western humanity was back in the situation in
which it had been before it was saved. .. by the good news -- since they didn't
believe it any longer. That was the actual situation... I am perfectly sure that
this whole totalitarian catastrophe would not have happened if people had still
believed in god, or in hell rather -- that is, if there still were ultimates. There
were no ultimates. And you know as well as I do that there were no ultimates
that one could with validity appeal to. One couldn't appeal to anybody. 88

Arendt thus relentlessly seeks to cut the traditional ties by which thinkers have
sought to join the Constitution as "higher law" to metaphysical philosophy or to
religious belief. Now, it is certainly true that a large measure of conviction prevailed
on these matters among the Founding Fathers and among those jurists and statesmen
most responsible for the foundation and development of Constitutional Law. There
were many who saw the religious sanction as crucial for fundamental law as well as
virtuous citizenship.89 It was the author of Federalist 10 who, as President, in the
depths of the War of 1812, spoke with full sincerity of 'the sacred obligation of
transmitting entirely to future generations that precious patrimony ...held in trust by
the present by the goodness of Divine Providence.'" 90 And the Missouri Supreme
Court could confidently assert in 1854 that "[tlhe Constitution on the face of it
shows that the Christian religion was the religion of its framers."91

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What Arendt's account seeks to demonstrate is that there is no necessary

relationship between the continued vitality of a constitutional tradition and that of
metaphysical philosophy and politically relevant religious belief. Persons who
continue to think about human rights in a religious tradition, may understand her
work as an attempt to reconceive practical accomplishments of the Founders and of
American Constitutional Law on what Richard McKeon92 called reflexive or actional
principles (founding as self-founding, grounded in itself) and given a phenomenal
interpretation (law not as the command of or emanatiou of a transcendent realm but
as "the rapport, the relation subsisting between different entities," relations "which
exist and preserve different realms of being. ") This was again the Roman notion,
which had a special aspect: the entities related by the laws were generally former
enemies. "The people of Rome itself, the populus Romanus, owed its existence to
such a war-born partuership, namely, to the alliance between patricians and plebians,
whose internal civil strife was concluded through the law of the Twelve Tables."93
Roman wars ended only when the former enemy had become a socius. an "ally."
Indeed the "original meaning of lex is intimate connection, or relationship, namely
something which connects two things or two partners whom external circumstances
have brought together."94 Laws become necessary only where a treaty of peace needs
to be established. Arendt thus tries to make available a notion of lawfulness even
where the processes of law are understood as "civil war carried on by other means."95
Arendt argues, then, that neither comprehensive principles nor ontological
interpretation of law is necessary for a coherent understanding of the accomplish -
ments of the Constitutional tradition. Since she concluded that neither is theoreti -
cally available to the intellectual community, she seeks to protect a treasured inheri -
tance against the erosion of its traditional intellectual supports. Now, of course, the
latter is subject to philosophical controversy of several kinds. It is possible to argue
that the specific "metaphysical" philosophy that she rejects is not the highest form of
that mode of thought, and more specifically that the theory of natural rights in its
modern version is not the most powerful expression of "natural law" philosophy.
John Courtney Murray so argued twenty years ag096 and John Finnis so argues
today.91 It is possible that thinkers within natural law traditions may argue that
their normative theory of Constitutional law is more firmly "grounded" than is
Arendt's and involves less "violence" to the self-understandings of the Founders and
to the actual tradition of Constitutional adjudication. Yet it seems true that even the
center of the Catholic tradition has moved from the natural law of neo-scholasticism
with its strong epistemological claims about a determinate human nature, to what
one author has called a "dialogically universalist ethic," an ethic of "pluralistic
theological realism," dialogic and pluralistic in both the plural methods of the
various human sciences and on the religious beliefs and doctrines of Christianity," 98
that is, on non-universalist beliefs. If so, then the relevance of an understanding of
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the foundation of judicial authority consistent with "post modem" philosophical

convictions may be more urgent, even for those who themselves stand within
religious traditions.

3. Human Rights and the Limits of Traditionalism

Constitutional courts protect the civil liberties, the inalienable, pre-political

rights, and thus protect those things "that man cannot change at will." Here they
guard the borderland between the political and the private. These rights include, of
course, the traditional "rights of Englishmen", but Arendt suggests that they may
now include "our claims to be free from want and fear." 99 She sometimes suggests
that in this sphere the courts deal with matters which are not intrinsically debatable,
or "political." The pressing questions for Arendt are whether these now include (1)
protection of zones of privacy which were not traditional "rights of Englishmen" and
(2) "social" and economic rights. These questions seem specifically not political for
Arendt; and both "privacy rights" and basic economic rights should specifically be
matters of constitutional law as protective of pre-political rights.
What is unclear in this context is the extent to which Arendt sees constitutional
adjudication protecting civil rights as a matter of textual interpretation at all. To a
large extent such rights are embodied in the bills of rights of the United States and
state constitutions, the tangible worldly things subject to "legal interpretation" of a
traditional or "violent" sort. The thrust of Arendt's thought here, however, seems to
be that while this embodiment in the written constitution is important to achieve
stability, it is secondary to the historical inheritance of these basic rights which
almost pass "through" the Constitution. Indeed the text of the Ninth Amendment to
the United States Constitution seems to support this view: "The enumeration in the
Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others
retained by the people." Several of the justices relied on the Ninth Amendment in
Griswald v. Connecticut,lOO one of the leading cases in contemporary constitutional
law in the human rights field. There the Supreme Court reviewed a Connecticut
statute which made it a crime to use any drug or device to prevent conception and
thus "presented the question of whether a married couple could be sent to jail for
using birth control."IOI As one commentator wrote, "it was not so much a case that
the law tests as a case that tests the law." Despite the lack of any clear textual
foundation for the right to marital privacy, the Coort struck down the statute. One
commentator defended the decision in the following terms:

If our constitutional law coold permit such a thing to happen, then we

might as well not have any law of constitutional limitations, partly because

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the thing is so outrageous in itself, and partly because a constitutional law

inadequate to deal with such an outrage would be too feeble, in method and
doctrine, to deal with a very great amount of equally outrageous material.
Virtually all the intimacies, privacies, and autonomies of life would be
regulable by the legislature -- not necessarily by the legislature of this year or
last year, but, it might be, by the legislature of a hundred years ago. or even
by an administrative board in due form thereunto authorized by a recent or
long-dead legislature. I02

These are precisely rights of "the private" which Arendt places beyond the reach of
the public realm yet which must be protected by concrete institutions. Yet such
rights to "privacy," for example, which have characterized recent developments in
constitutional law and which I expect, Arendt would applaud, can hardly be called
"historical."
A similar problem presents itself in the area of distributive justice, or "social
and economic" rights. Constitutional theorists have argued that basic welfare rights.
or a right to a minimum annnal income with which basic needs could be met, ought
to be of constitutional dimension. The court itself has been far more restrained in
this area. for complex reasons, though it has extended some rights, mainly of a
procedural nature, to the "new property" in government benefits whose substantive
source is statutory (and so subject to "conservative" political tides). Such rights
would, again, hardly be numbered among the historic "rights of Englishmen" and
could hardly be found "in" the constitutional text. at least if it were given an
"originalist" interpretation, that is, one limited to the original understanding of
Constitution.
Arendt's own convictions in this area seem clear: "[tJhere shouldu't be any
debate about the question that everybody should have decent housing... .'·I03 "To
make a decent amount of property available to every human being ....then you will
have some possibilities for freedom even under the rather inhuman conditions of
modern production."I04 Arendt, of course, viewed "obsessive concern" with the "so -
cial question" to the exclusion of political issues as spelling the death of the French
Revolution, and through Marx, of the European revolutionary tradition. It is true.
too, that the Founding Fathers, especially in their private correspondence, expressed
abiding fear of a certain kind of redistribution through democratically enacted law, a
concern which arguably came to be expressed in bQth the Contracts Clause and the
Just Compensation Clause of the United States Constitution. Arendt saw that fear,
however, as a fear not of a more eqnal distribution, but of an instability which would
destroy the "house" for freedom, an instability which would seem less a danger if
rights were extended through the incremental processes of judicial action. 105 In her

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cryptic remarks on the subject, Arendt seemed to favor a kind of "distributism," an

integration of propertyless people ultimately into the political world by an extension
of individual property. She thus believed that the meeting of certain "welfare" needs
was essential.
The issue which the ongoing nature of constitutional law presents in both areas
of "pre-political" rights, is whether the legal tradition Arendt celebrates can survive
an end to the public aspect of moral tradition with which it was once closely inter -
twined,l06 often under the rubric of "higher law" or "natura1law." To put it another
way, if there is no such perspective as that of social ethics (with equal emphasis on
both terms) other than a purely historical one, and new "pre-political" claims must be
given some legal embodiment, and they precisely concern issues which should not
be subject to debate, thus to the processes of deliberative politics, by which mode of
thought may they enter the public forum at all? Arendt would seem to suggest that,
given her philosophical agnosticism about human "nature," the ultimate non-public
source of such claims in the West may well be the incalculable grace of love for each
person disclosed in Biblical religion, where we are told that the hairs on our heads are
numbered. Of course, this is the perspective which, for Arendt, cannot generate
"lasting institutions." Those modes of thought are ruled out of the public forum in
secular states and their legal and political implications are controversial. One thread
of contemporary constitutional theorizing thus attempts to justify the court's
"successful" fostering of basic -- though not "traditional" -- human rights by basing
it directly on evolving moral judgment unrelated to constitutional text or the
intentions of the founders, but frankly admits that this would require a kind of moral
"knowledge" that Arendt thinks unavailable. I07 Others respond that this enterprise is
illegitimate in principle or that it does not capture the differences which in fact exist
between legal discourse (attention to text and precedent, for example) and moral
thought and speech. IOS
The undeveloped suggestion in Arendt's thinking seems to be that a moral (or
religious) consensus as to "new" pre-political rights would appropriately be the
subject first of political action in the interests of a new "liberation" (not "freedom")
then of constitutional amendments or perhaps constitutional interpretation. The
"spirit" of this kind of political action would seem to be not individual compassion
but "solidarity," the disposition by which persons "establish deliberately and, as it
were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited." For
her, "solidarity, because it partakes of reason, and hence of generality, is able to
comprehend a multitude conceptually, not only the multitude of a class or a nation or
a people, but eventually all mankind: ...though it may be aroused by suffering, [itl is
not guided by it, and it comprehends the strong and the rich no less than the weak and
the poor..."109 One thinks here especially of the non-violent and religiously inspired
politics of Gandhi and King, especially in their attitude toward opponents. At some
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 Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thought

point such "prophetic" political action might convince men of judgment, persons
who were judging as members of their communities, who would have "turned the
issue over and over," who had seen it from every side within an "enlarged mentality"
not from a Rawlsian higher viewpoint but from a transformed consensus which does
not eradicate plurality of viewpoint. 110 Thus prophesy and wisdom would be joined.

4. The Nature of Constitutional Interpretation: Traditional

or Violent?

Since many issues of constitutional interpretation do not directly concern

"individual rights," since the bills of rights are themselves written, and since the
authority established by the founders is exercised through "legal interpretation," a full
understanding of Arendt's constitutional theory seems to require an analysis of her
notion of constitutional interpretation. Though she generally insists that the Roman
triad of authority, tradition, and religion are inextricably tied together, in the case of
American constitutionalism she seems to recognize the unique possibility of another
kind of authority. She seems to suggest that the necessary stability to "house"
action may be provided by "legal interpretation" by an institution, "a Constitution
Convention in continuous session," which has the capacity to found and found again.
What seems unclear is the continuity of the American "solution" to the "crisis of the
present world" with the Roman traditionalist ethos. On the one hand she seems to
suggest that this authority is intact only because the tradition which "ties back" to
the foundation still lives.

For if I am right in suspecting that the crisis of the present world is

primarily political, and that the famous "decline of the West" consists
primarily in the decline of the Roman trinity of religion, tradition and
authority with the concomitant undermining of the specifically Roman
foundations of the political realm, then the revolutions of the modern age
appear like gigantic attempts to repair these foundations, to renew the broken
thread of tradition, and to restore through founding new political bodies, what
for so many centuries had endowed the affairs of men with some measure of
dignity and greatness.
Of these attempts, only one, the American Revolution, has been suc-
cessful: the founding fathers as, characteristically enough, we still call them,
founded a completely new body politic without violence and with the help of
a constitution. And this body politic has at least endured to the present day,
in spite of the fact that the specifically modem character of the modem world

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has nowhere else produced such extreme expressions in all nonpolitical

spheres of life as it has in the United States.1I1

This is the more "traditional" thread in Arendt's legal thinking, and it suggests a
"conservative," though by no means a reactionary understanding of the Court's role,
stressing continuity with foundations and a tradition in which "precedents, the deeds
of the ancestors and the usage that grew out of them, were always binding."112 In her
view, the Court functioned this way in its crucial role in the Watergate crisis, and its
significance may be more apparent to theorists at a time when the radicalism in legal
philosophy tends to be of the right
In some areas, our constitutional law may provide the "framework of stability
to provide the wherein for the flux of change necessary for any civilization." This is
a traditional role for law to play: "[f]oremost among the stabilizing factors, more
enduring than customs, manners, and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate
our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other." 113 Here "[t]radition trans -
forms truth into wisdom, and wisdom is the consistence of transmissible truth. "114
Even this conservative understanding, however, does not imply an ossified legal
traditionalism. For the Founders had understood from "being nourished by the
classics and... having gone to school in Roman antiquity" that foundation and con -
servation were intimately related to "augmentation":

For auetoritas, whose etymological root is augere, to augment and increase,

depended upon the vitality of the spirit of foundation, by virtue of which it
was possible to augment, to increase and enlarge, the foundations as they had
been laid down by the ancestors. I IS

This "traditionalist" notion of interpretation may lead her to put less emphasis
on the extent to which a classic text such as a constitution is "prophetic" as well as
"commemorative": the extent to which "[t]he text can become a classic for the reader
only if the reader is willing to allow that present horizon to be vexed, provoked,
challenged by the claim to attention of the text itself."116 This emphasis on stability
seems to dominate her notion of legal interpretation, despite the relationship of
augere to conservare, and despite the "open-ended" character of much of the textual
language. What seems most valid in her thought is that this process of
augmentation be conducted in a non-ideological spirit, subject to the discipline of real
judgment. Indeed, vigorous exercise of constitutional authority seems to have done
the most harm when it was conducted in a spirit which Arendt would call ideological,
in which judges could literally avoid making judgments.117

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There is. however another thread in Arendt's remarks. one which relies on the
notion that the Court retains the authority to refound based on its interpretation of
the constitutional texL Recall too that what differentiates the American solution to
the problem of authority from the Roman is that authority is based on "the
Constitution as a written document" that could be approached from many angles and
"upon which one could impose different interpretations." If our constitutional
history has been one at least as much of discontinuities as continuities -- and it has --
perhaps constitutional interpretation of the text requires "that remarkable sense for
living eyes and living bones that had sea changed into pearls and coral. and as such
could be saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their contexts in
interpreting them with 'the deadly impact' of new thoughts."118
In some areas. the "thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of the
past" may indeed have been "the chain fettering each successive generation to a
predetermined aspect of the paSL" In such areas. Arendt warns that "this power of
well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its
living force and the memory of its beginning recedes; it may even reveal its full
coercive force only after its end has come and men no longer rebel against it."119
This does not counsel a forgetfulness of legal history: "for memory and depth are the
same. or rather. depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance."120
Rather it suggests that the mode of authority which stems from interpretation of a
constitution may. to some extent. in some areas. survive the "loss of worldly
permanence and reliability" without the loss "at least not necessarily •... of the human
capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and
remain a place fit to live in for those who come after US"121 Again, the counsel
seems only to be for a kind of prudence which allows jurists to understand which
kind of interpretation is called for in the specific case before them.

S. Justice, Politics, and Stability

Many of the metaphors which Arendt applies to the legal world are from the
world of homo faber: the notion of the "making" of a stable "structure," a "tangible
worldly thing" to lend durability and stability to the public world and to limit
political action. The occasion for her emphasis on stability seems to be the
contempt that totalitarian regimes showed for the relative permanence of positive
law. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia all laws became "laws of movement" in
the interests of the higher law of Nature or History, endangering the boundaries, the
"hedges" which make possible "channels of communication between men whose
community is continually endangered by the new men born into it."

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Now the limitations of the perspective of homo faber is that he operates solely
under humanly "meaningless" instrumental categories, those of ends and means. In
Kant's philosophy the legal and political world is precisely instrumental in the
"homage" it pays to morals and the indirect cultivation of the only thing of absolute
value, the good will. It was for Kant the good will, the moral life, that was the
locus of that meaning. The good will alone saved the very existence of the world
from meaningless-ness, the depressing tale of greed and violence that was human
history and the indifferent mechanics that was phenomenal nature. It has been
objected that this Kantian vision necessarily gives to politics only instrumental
value, empties it of "meaning."
Arendt revolts against this denigration of the political. For her it is political
experience that contains the most plausible reply to the nihilism of Silenian wisdom.
The problem is that in so doing, she may have pushed the categories of ends and
means, those of homo faber, back one step into the legal world. There is a broad
movement in contemporary legal thought which focuses precisely on the dangers of a
purely instrumental "spirit" pervading legal doctrine and legal practice. Though
Arendt was suspicious of politics conducted under these ends-means categories
justified by a philosophy of history and with radical intention, she may have
overlooked the dangers of just those categories in the legal world, especially where
parts of a legal tradition had truly become "Burkean," that is, already dying. This is
one reason why her reticence about recovering the modes of thought within which the
historical rights of Englishmen might make sense may be a limitation of her legal
thought.
Perhaps what Arendt's typology suggests is that jurists, lawyers, and juries are
simultaneously, to different degrees in different contexts, acting both instrumentally,
as "architects" of the relatively durable institutions within which political action can
take place (even in "legal" institutions such as appellate panels and lay juries) and
politically. The issues often presented allow, indeed require, legal actors to engage in
a kind of rhetoric which is distinctively political -- deliberative, not forensic, in
Aristotle's terms. The reason is precisely that we do now fight our civil wars by
other means: the "basic structure" of society which defines what is "due" to each, and
informs the background institutions within which the ordinary processes oflaw work
their "commutative justice," is continually and consciously defined and redefined in
legal institutions. Bruce Ackerman has argued persuasively122 that the massive
restructuring of legal doctrine which occurred during the New Deal renders practically
unavailable any legal philosophy which would tell us that we are not responsible for
this "basic structure." In almost every legal context then, both commul<1tive justice
and distributive justice are at stake, both forensic rhetoric and deliberative rhetoric arc
employed.

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 Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thought

Something very close to deliberative politics does occur in many legal pro -
ceedings. The process of persuasion and characterization of facts, it is true, is always
limited by "the law," substantive and procedural. And a legal proceeding establishes
a "right" which then is the source of some stability for the future. But the "politi -
cal" and the "legal" moments exist in a very delicate and shifting balance in different
forums and in different substantive areas of the law. Legal standards themselves can
explicitly rely on extremely open-textured criteria, such as the "reasonable man"
standards with which the law abounds and which as Arendt noted after her jury
service, create "really debatable" issues. Here, persuasion is limited more by the
"factual truth," and anti-political value which lawyers often seek to overcome in the
interests of "political" willfulness, than by rille. Even where legal standards are more
precise, juries are given large areas of practical power to disregard the "law" embodied
in the instructions from the court. This process is not wholly unrestrained by law:
rules of procedure and review will preclude some causes from "getting to a jury,"
though the recent movement is toward removing the "legal" barriers to what Arendt
explicitly claimed was a "political" forum. 123 At the appellate level as well, there
are deliberative procedures -- the oral argument and the conferences among judges --
which are limited to widely varying degrees in different sorts of adjudication, though
never absolutely, and certainly not only to Supreme Court adjudication. If "judges
rule America," then they do so largely by processes of deliberative politics somewhat
limited by "legal" rules. Indeed it has often seemed to me that the more a court
protests that a holding was required by binding precedent, the less likely it is that it
has bound itself even by the exacting discipline of true deliberation and judgment.
John Dewey agreed l24 that "[tlhere is every reason why rules of law should be
as regular and as definite as possible," and yet he saw that, where social and economic
change brought about "new forms of human relationship," the amount of antecedent
assurance of outcome was necessarily limited, and certainly could not be increased by
additionallegaljormalism. The latter could only produce the consoling appearance
of stability for those, to quote Holmes, who are eager to think words and not things.
It seems far more likely that what stability there is where the "basic structure" is at
stake, stems largely from the fact that most judges do judge as members of a specific
community whose sensus communis is brought to bear in a deliberative process
disciplined to ensure that the court will "tum the case around so that it can be seen
from every side." Where the process works, it is not because a single "antecedent"
legal (or ideological) standard, applied modo geometrico, provides an Archimedean
point from which to resolve an issue, but rather because of the exercise of an
"enlarged mentality" which can truly consider an issue from many (irreducibly plural)
points of view and issue a judgment which can reshape (not merely "reflect") a
somewhat indeterminate consensus.

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What Arendt seems to counsel here is a sensitivity to the difference between the
tasks and the exercise of judgment as to what the "particular" case is -- mainly
forensic or mainly deliberative. It is in the criminal law, for example, that the
stabilizing doctrine of nulla crimen sine lege and the rule against ex post facto law
operates most strictly. It is there that one can perceive the "grandeur of court
procedure that ..is concerned with meting out justice to an individual, and remains
unconcerned with everything else -- with the Zeitgeist or with opinions that the
defendant may share with others."llS Here, too, when the institutions work, there is
a decidedly "anti-political" focus in ascertaining the simple factual truth, a reverence
precisely "for those things which men cannot change at will." In other areas of the
law, at other times, in other kinds of proceeding, the participants may be deliberating
not about what is "due" an individual but about how we shall be and how we shall
live together. Indeed, the richness of Arendt's phenomenology of political experience
and her, sadly unfinished. philosophy of judgment seem to have much to offer here,
especially as an alternative to more ideological philosophies of law, from both left
and right. She suggests that there is a human capacity to proceed here which does
not need standards sub specie aeternitatis :nor an "Archimedean point" from which to
derive them. In fact, interest in Arendt's thinking has grown among constitutioual
theorists as confidence in the success of John Rawls' attempt to identify such
standards has waned. The question is, however, whether a theory which is so
"situated" in tradition and the sensus communis of the communities which law
"houses" can provide the normative guidance that Rawls at least promises.
Both law and the reality revealed by love limit political action, the former in the
interest of stability, the latter in the interest of respect, or better reverence, for those
things that man cannot change at will, contempt for which leads to "petrifaction" of
public life. The unavoidable question is then the relationship between the world
"which men cannot change at will" -- the world ultimately revealed only through love
and fully to Love -- and the stable, durable structure oflegal institutions. Neither is
political, in Arendt's terms, though the quest for justice can be a motive of political
action. What seems theoretically unresolved is the relationship between the value of
stability and the other traditional aspiration of law, justice. The thrust of her thought
is that there is an antipathy between the private and public worlds, and that the
artificial character of the nomoi, of any "lasting institutions," their formal equality,
sharply limits the degree to which the unworldly, though perhaps "ultimate" vision
of Jesus and Billy Budd, can be legally incarnated. She expresses here an "Helenic"
respect for the miracle of worldly legal institutions which may save men from "the
dark world of differences," the world of violence and blood feud, together with a
Sophoclean reconciliation with the sometimes tragic consequences of the laws. It
seems that her respect for each sphere and its autonomy and her sense that the human
condition must be "broken" in order to provide its various "spaces" -- domestic,
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 Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thought

political, legal, moral, religious -- which precludes a mode of thought which seeks to
relate the political, moral, and religious spheres, the worlds of "objective spirit" and
"absolute spirit." For such a relationship would have to be from an Hegelian,
"contemplative" philosophical point of view, the very assumption of which would
almost necessarily denigrate the spheres, and elevate one human interest, that of
reconciling thought, over the others. 1u In this, she remained within the Kantian
tradition, perhaps as she received it from Karl Jaspers. The problem this "respectful -
ness" leaves, however, seems precisely to be her reticence in framing a theory of jus -
tice, the virtue which does exactly relate private need and action to publicly
recognized "desert."127

6. Conclusion

Arendt, like Wittgenstein, sought to return concepts to their "natural homes" to

the experiences "behind even the most worn out concepts" which "remain valid and
must be recaptured and reactualized if one wishes to escape certain generalizations that
have proved pernicious."128 As Max Weber noted, in comparison with those of other
world religions, Judaeo-Christian ideals are not so easily confined. 129 Traditional
Catholic morality, in coming to grips with "the irrationality of the world" found a
place for the life of the evangelical counsels, but also that of the pious burger who
seeks gain and the Christian knight who sheds blood. (Aquinas adds the good lawyer
who strategizes short of lying in a just cause.) 130 Weber also noted, however, that
the Judaeo-Christian vision has an inherently prophetic "instability" and that
"domestic" ideals of brotherhood, for example, can easily break out of the territory to
which a "critical" thinker may assign them. Without this spirit Arendt's typology
can degenerate into a kind of legal positivism where amoral stability is the only
value. The "aspiration" to justice is an aspiration internal to constitutional
interpretation 131 and stands in tension with the goal of stability, whose rationale
Arendt states so profoundly. In the "repoliticization of the Biblical inheritance,"132
the rage of the false prophet is a danger to peace, but the false wisdom of the sage
may lead to injustice as surely as does the violence of the powerful. 133

1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963, revised 1965) pp.
215 ff.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, I. H. Bernard, trans. (New York, Hafner
1951) pp. 3-12.
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 Robert Burns

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. by G.E.M. Anscombe (New

York, Macmillan, 1968) par. 18 (describing the nature of language).
4. On Revolution. pp. 86-87.
5. "Truth and Politics" in Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, Penguin, 1977)
p. 263; see also Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Melvin
Hill (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), p. 318 (service on juries as political
action); On Revolution, p. 112 (legislation as political action).
6. "Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, pp. 263-264.
7. ibid.
8. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1973) p. 467.
9. On Revolution, p. 218.
10. ibid.
11. ibid., p. 218 (emphasis added). As civil rights afford substantive protections to
zones of privacy so do the traditions of the common law trial embody a respect to the
particular individual "on trial" and, relatedly, a highly "unpolitical," even "anti-polit -
ical" concern for the factual truth:

It is, indeed, the grandeur of court procedure that it is concerned with

meting out justice to an individual, and remains unconcerned with every-thing
else -- with the Zeitgeist or with opinions that the defendant may share with
others.

Arendt, "Civil Disobedience" in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1972) p. 99; See "Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future; H.
Arendt, Eichmann in Ierusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 1965) pp. 3-9.
12. On Revolution, p. 32.
13. Arendt enticingly includes our contemporary "claim" to be free from want and fear
with these basic civil rights. ibid. She also notes that it is only in the twentieth
century, when large numbers of people are without property, that it has become
necessary to protect persons and freedoms directly, not through their property. ibid.,
p. 180.
14. ibid., pp. 32, 133-35.
15. Ernest Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press,
1955), pp. 243 ff.
16. On Revolution, pp. 192-93, The Life of the Mind: One/Thinking (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 8-14.
17. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England n, '2. Blackstone's
own weak attempts to make good this defect would certainly underscore the wisdom of
traditional attitude.

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 Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thought

18. On Revolution, p. 148.

19. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 299. She notes, however, that Burke's notion,
uncorrected by the American extension of these "rights of Englishmen" to all, con-
tained the seeds of English "race-thinking." ibid, pp. 175-76.
20. ibid., p. 292.
21. ibid.
22. ibid., p. 296.
23. ibid., p. 297.
24. ibid.
25. ibid, p. 298.
26. This effort has been revived, it seems, in the work of Piaget and Kohlberg.
(F.R.S. Peters, Psychology and Ethical Development (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1974), Lawrence Kohlberg, "From Is to Ought: How to Conunit the Naturalistic
Fallacy and Get Away With It" in Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 1, The
Philosophy of Moral Development (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).
27. ibid., p. 298.
28. ibid., p. 299. A third basis for Arendt's historical notion of the civil rights
seems to lie in her suspicion that those who conceive of civil rights as natural rights
more easily misconceive the basic relationships of law and politics, with potentially
disastrous consequences for both realms in a post-Christian era. See infra text at
notes 33 to 46.
29. On Revolution, p. 252.
30. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 301.
31. ibid., p. 302.
32. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958)
pp. 10-11.
33. Rousseau in a letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau, 26 July 1767, quoted in On
Revolution, p. 183.
34. On Revolution, p. 165.
35. On Revolution, p. 156.
36. ibid., pp. 156, 183.
37. ibid., p. 183.
38. ibid.
39. ibid.
40. ibid., p. 157.
41. ibid., p. 166.

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 Robert Burns

42. ibid., p. 143.

43. ibid., p. 164.
44. ibid., pp. 174-75.
45. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982) p. 17.
46. On Revolution, p. 152.
47. ibid., pp. 186-88.
48. ibid., p. 160, see Benjamin Wright, American Interpretations of Natural Law: A
Study in The History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1931).
49. On Revolution, p. 160.
50. ibid., p. 189.
51. ibid.
52. ibid., p. 162.
53. ibid., p. 185.
54. ibid., p. 194.
55 ibid., p. 196.
56. ibid., p. 195.
57. ibid., p. 193.
58. ibid., p. 178.
59. ibid.
60. ibid., p. 182.
61. ibid.
62. ibid.
63. ibid., pp. 38-39.
64. ibid., p. 204. Just as Arendt shifts the locus of "human meaning" from the
Kaotian "good will" (the only thing of "absolute value") so she shifts the locus of
':spontaneity" and autonomy from moral willing (Wille) to political foundation.
65. ibid., p. 206. See The Life of the Mind: Two/Willing, pp. 109·110, 212, 217 on
"Natality" as the root of our capacity to begin anew. See also The Human Condition,
pp. 8·9, 177-78, 191, 247.
66. ibid., p. 204.
67. ibid., p. 196.
68. ibid., p. 175.
69. ibid .. p. 125.

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 Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thou~t

70. ibid., pp. 212-13.

71. ibid., p. 213.
72. ibid.
73. ibid., p. 198.
74. Arendt speaks of authority residing in the Supreme Court, presumably as the court
of last appeal in constitutional matters. It would seem, however, that, given the de -
gree of freedom which even "binding" precedent gives lower courts, that authority
resides in all courts, state and federal, at the very least insofar as they make constitu -
tional decisions. See Edward Levy, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1949).
75. ibid., p. 199.
76. ibid., p. 200, quoting Alexander Hamilton.
77. ibid.
78. ibid.
79. ibid.
80. ibid.
81. ibid., p. 157.
82. ibid.
83. ibid., p. 229. See Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).
84. ibid., p. 268.
85. ibid., p. 269.
86. Aristotle, Poetics. 1459a.
87. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p.
587.
88. Melvin Hill (ed.), op. cit, pp. 313-14 (Arendt speaking).
89. George Armstrong Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness in America (New
Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983) pp. 42ff.
90. ibid., p. 54.
91. ibid., p. 55, quoting State v. Ambs, 20 Mo. 216-17 (1954).
92. Richard McKeon, Freedom and History: The Semantics of Philosophical
Controversies and Ideological Conflicts (New York: The Noonday Press, 1952).
93. On Revolution, p. 188.
94. ibid., p. 187.
95. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981), p. 236.

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 Robert Burns

96. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the
American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960)
97. John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington: Georgetown University Press,
1983).
98. David Hollenbach, Claims in Conflict: Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic
Human Rights Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 131.
99. On Revolution, p. 32.
100. 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
101. Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law (Mineola, N.Y.: The Foundation
Press, Inc., 1978) p. 570.
102. Charles Black, "The Unfinished Business of the Warren Court," 46 Washington
Law Review 3, 32 (1970).
103. Melvyn Hill, op. cit, 318, 320, Arendt speaking. See "Thoughts on Politics and
Revolution" in Crises of the Republic, p. 214.
104. ibid., p. 200.
105. On Revolution, p. 225. See Robert P. Burns, "The Federalist Rhetoric of Rights
and the Instrumental Conception of Law", Northwestern Univeristy Law Review (1985).
Frank Michelman, "In Pursuit of Constitutional Welfare Rights: One View of Rawls'
Theory of Justice," 121 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 962 (1973); "Welfare
Rights in a Constitutional Democracy" Washington University Law Quarterly 9 (1979).
106. See, e.g., B. F. Wright, The Growth of American Constitutional Law (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967); Edward Corwin, Liberty Against Government
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948); Robert Faulkner, The
Jurisprudence of John Marshall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); John E.
Nowak, Ronald D. Rotunda, J. Nelson Young, Constitutional Law (St. Paul: West
Publishing Co. 1983) pp. 425-496.
107. Michael Perry, The Constitution, the Courts, and Human Rights: An Inquiry into
the Legitimacy of Constitutional Policy Making by the Judiciary (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982) pp. x, 1.
108. Robert W. Bennett, '"The Mission of Moral Reasoning in Constitutional Law" 58
Southern California Law Review 647-659 (1985).
109. On Revolution. pp. 88-89.
110. Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ppoo 42, 67.
111. H. Arendt, ''What Is Authority?" in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking
Press, 1977), p. 140.
112. ibid., 123.
113. H. Arendt, "Civil Disobedience" in Crises of the RepUblic, p. 79.
114. H. Arendt, "Walter Benjamin" in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1968) p. 196.

184
 Hannah Arendt's Constitutional Thought

115. On Revolution, p. 201.

116. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981) p. 105.
Michael Perry, "The Authority of Text, Tradition, and Reason: A Theory of
Constitutional Interpretation", 58 Southern California Law Review, p. 551 at 559.
117. See, e.g., Benjamin Twiss. Lawyers and the Constitution: How Laissez-Faire
Came to the Supreme Court (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942) and Sidney
Fine, Laissez-Faire and the General Welfare State: A Study in Conflict in American
Thought 1865·1901 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1956).
118. "Walter Benjamin," p. 201.
119. H. Arendt, "Tradition in the Modem Age" in Between Past arui Future, p. 26.
120. "What is Authority?", p. 94.
121. ibid., p. 95.
122. Bruce Ackennan, Reconstructing American Law (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984).
123. The leading Supreme Court case is Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41 (1957). The
(overstated) import of that case is "everybody gets a jury." The more usual statement
of its holding is a case ought not to be dismissed as a matter of law "unless it appears
to a certainty that plaintiff would not be entitled to recover under any state of facts
which could be proved in support of his claim." Cf. Cook & Nichol, Inc. v. Plumsoll
Club, 451 F. 2d 505, 506 (5th Cir. 1971). Of course not all cases go to juries and
there is appellate review of "questions of fact," but the latter tend to be deferential.
124. John Dewey "Logical Method and Law", 10 Cornell Law Quarterly, pp. 17,25
(1924).
125. "Civil Disobedience," p. 99.
126. Richard Kroner, Kant's Weltanschauung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1956) (John Smith, trans.)
127. Hanna Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating Private and Public," Political Theory 9
(1981).
128. E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982) p. 325, quoting Arendt.
129 . Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation" in From Max Weber (H. H. Berth & C.
Wright Mills trans. & eds.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
130. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae '·II, Q. 71, art. 3.
131. Michael Perry, op. cit., pp. 572-76.
132. J. Habennas, Legitimation Crisis, (Thomas McCarthy, trans) (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1973) p. 212.
133. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Job.

185
 THE BANALITY OF VIRTUE
Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Reinterpretation of Political Ethics

Francis X. Wmters

It was ten years ago on December 4 that Hannah Arendt abruptly departed our
conversation about American politics. As did all her earlier words, so did her fmal
ones leave us in suspense. In her typewriter after her death was found the title page.
of her long-awaited volume on judgement, carrying only two enigmatic citations. l
Until the last moment, she was engaged fully in the life of the mind, engaging our
curiosity as well about her last will and testament What finally did she make of the
role of judgement in the city of man she loved so dearly?
Nor is this curiosity idle. For judgement is what we have been wanting for half
a century or so. Arendt herself had witnessed the demolition of her beloved homeland
for want of judgement Sbe had barely escaped the crusade to eliminate an entire race
--her race--from the memory of man. Why in those days did so pitifully few of those
who knew the truth dissent? Why is it so easy to tally the resisters, and so endless a
task to enumerate the victims? Why was it that man's capacity to judge went into
hiding for the duration? Judgement, in short, has been wanting for half a centnry
now. Arendt had promised to account for that dismal record of dereliction between
1935 and 1945. She had promised to lay bare the philosophical miscalculations in
Western culture which had sapped the capacity to judge when judgement counted the
most. Her own campaign, left inchoate, was to rethink political philosophy by
taking into account the unaccountable collapse of political judgement in the recent
crisis.2 Meditating continuously on the two components of political judgement
(truth and power), she left a legacy which may see us through the next crisis, perhaps
already besetting us without our being aware. Or may not. As we pause to com -
memorate the tenth anniversary of her death, it may not be premature to offer a judge -
ment on her stature as a political philosopher for this age which is unlike any other.

Bernauer, J. W. (ed), Amor Mundi. ISBN 90-247·3483-5.

© 1987. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrechl. Printed in the Netherlands. 187
 Francis X Winters

Totalitarianism

When, in 1961, Arendt offered to William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker,
her services as reporter-at-Iarge for the magazine at the tria1 of Adolf Eichmann, soon
to be held in Jerusalem, she was fulfilling a portion of her fate. 3 Having narrowly
escaped the clutches of the executioner herself, she had not flinched from studying the
causes of the Final Solution. Her fIrst undertaking in the haven of the Upper West
Side of Manhattan was an historical study of the origins of totalitarianism, published
in 1951.4 A decade later, the unique chance arrived to look totalitarianism in the face
in a Jerusalem court. Cancelling earlier commitments, she set out to record the
defense and prosecution of a man who had boasted that he would leap into his grave
merrily because he had killed millions of Jews. One of those few he had been unable
to touch would now study him in the prisoners' dock in Jerusalem.
She brought to the courtroom a singular acuity for the task. Her personal stake
in the execution of justice in the trial goes without saying. More important from
our point of view was her ability to locate Eichmann not only in the dock, but in the
context of the twentieth century, for she had, immediately on arriving in the States,
begun stitching a tapestry of the evolution of totalitarianism in modem Europe.
Vast erudition had enabled her to make "sense" of many extravagant facets of the Nazi
(and Stalinist) movements that had beggared explanation. Central to her inter -
pretation of Nazi totalitarianism was its anti-political character. Arising in a context
of shattered political hopes after the peace of Versailles, Nazism adopted an agenda
that repudiated politics altogether. Rather than setting out to vindicate Germany's
honor, and rehabilitate its economic and social life, it would jettison German
political (state) hopes entirely in favor of broader, more ambitious, racial ones: the
reconstitution of the Aryan race in purity, power, and perpetuity. Envious, as Arendt
argued, of the Jewish sense of election and universal citizenship, and driven at the
same time by traditional European anti-Semitism, Hitler envisioned the reshaping of
mankind in the self-chosen image of the Aryan race. To this meta-political project,
all other values could be sacrifIced: non-Aryan races, who would be exiled or, failing
that solution, eliminated; German state interests, which were only a beach-head for
the advance of the racial movement; truth, which would serve instrumental purposes
for the advance of the movement; party policy, which enjoyed no permanence since
its very objective was movement; even party officials, who would not be spared the
call for self-sacrifIce to the overarching objectives of racial reconstruction. Making
the new race was the autonomous "politics" of Nazism: it admitted no inner
constraints except those of perpetual motion. S The movement could be constrained
only from without, as it was, barely in time, by the tardy and costly Atlantic-Soviet
alliance. Now that it was fInally stilled, this unprecedentedly powerful "political"

188
 The Banality of Virtue

movement could be studied. The final step in Arendt's post-mortem on totalitarian -

ism would be the clinical examination of one survivor of the regime, Eichmann, by
another, Arendt. In her record of the trial we have the analysis of history's most
awesome display of unprincipled power, made by one of history's most subtle philo -
sophers of power. 6
Paradoxically, Arendt, the political philosopher who nearly did not live to
philosophize, elaborated a theory of power which many believe to mirror totalitarian
claims to the autonomy of politics.? Especially in her early works, but with remark -
able consistency until very late in her career, Arendt taught that politics knows no
inner constraints. Her philosophical crusade to absolve politics of goal-seeking or
moral questioning seems almost to have been fashioned in the same modem context
which shaped the totalitarian programs themselves. 8 The meeting in the Jerusalem
courtroom, then, was the meeting of modem consciousness with itself. Both in its
depraved and defeated racial ambitions and in its learned theorizing, modernity was on
trial. Is there in Arendt's refining of the modem ethos a value theory adequate to
judge this thing before her? Can the philosopher judge twentieth century "politics"
on its own autonomous terms and find it guilty? Or does Arendt's political theory
per force fall silent when Eichmann stammers out his own childish and cliched
defense? The answer to this question is found in the closing verdict of her essay on
Eichmann, when she judged what the court should have said in sentencing
Eichmann.

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the
earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations--as
though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and
who should not inhabit the world--we find that no one, that is, no member of
the human race, can be expected to share the earth with you. This is the
reason, and the only reason, you must hang. (9)

The banality of this judgement disturbs us, a simple tit for tat: "you didn't want
to share the earth with the Jews, so we can't be expected to share it with you," as
though he were a simple murderer, and the Jerusalem court acting in understandable
retaliation. As though no issue of civilization, of humanity's survival, were at stake.
Disturbingly, it is a judgement which could have been meted out to the Jewish
officials who took orders from the likes of Eichmann for the execution of the Final
Solution, as Eichmann did from Goering. No distinction between victim and execu -
tioner, an I for an I,10
It is recorded that the banality of this judgement disturbed Arendt herself.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl claims that her subsequent intellectual career--apart from

189
 Fran<&is X Winters

fending off attacks on the Eichmann book itself--was devoted to a re-examination of

her earlier vindication of the autonomy of politics: of its immunity from ethical
judgement.ll Surely the annals of totalitarianism, including the life and crimes of
Eichmann, called out for such a reassessment. In her Chicago and New School
classes in 1965 and 1966, she set out to study the nature of moral judgement. 12 In
the course of these lectures, Arendt modified her earlier eagerness to banish ethics
from the public life of the city only enough to allow for conscientious withdrawal
from politics in times of "emergency" .13 Although she never took up the exacting
and properly philosophical task of delineating a theory which would help future
citizens to detect such an emergency, during which they could conscientiously refuse
to take part in politics, she did admit that the occurrence of such emergencies is
endemic to man. In such circumstances every man, even Eichmann, is responsible
for detecting the signs of moral emergency and for refusing to lend a hand in carrying
through the perverted enterprise of the "politicians" of the time. Every man must
judge. She cites Eichmann's excuse ("Who was I to judge [when all of the most
prominent people of the day approved, and cooperated in, the Final Solution]?"), only
to argue that such modesty is unbecoming a human being. In emergencies one may
resist, that is, withdraw. In her 1964 BBC (Third Programme) address "Personal
Responsibility Under Dictatorship", she speculates on the lost opportunity to stop
the Nazi death machine that offered itself to Germans who would have been willing
to act "irresponsibly" in those times of emergency, forsaking obedience for the
dictates of conscience.14
She had, of course, explored the theme of the contribution made, (and converse -
Iy the obstacle not offered) to the Final Solution by the Jewish Councils them -
selves. IS In this characteristically candid chapter of her book--which precipitated the
violent controversy from which she never fully recovered--Arendt drew this stark
conclusion on the results of the collusion of the Jewish Councils in the assault on
the Jews.

In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could

be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure
money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and
extermination, 1D keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to
help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed
over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final
confiscation.(16)
The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been
unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery

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 The Banality of Virtue

but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a
half and six million people. (17)

Of the Jewish councils then, as of Eichmann, Arendt surely believed--although in

neither case did she ever articulate this judgement--that they should have acted
"irresponsibly," that is, refused to obey the genocidal orders. Even at the cost of
their own lives, conscience can intervene to divert the power of the state from its
perverse designs by requiring that citizens withdraw from "politics".
For the most part, conscience did not manifest itself in this time of emergency.
The dismal record of the near-extinction of the European Jews is an almost unbroken
record of the collaboration by those--like Eichmann--who rapidly carne to cooperate
without scruple, and by others--notably the Jewish Councils--who hoped to the end
that cooperation was the path to escape from the Final Solution. Without--and with
--taking thought, almost everyone lent a hand in the Final Solution. But some did
not. Another of the compelling vignettes sketched by Arendt on the canvas of Nazi
depravation in Europe is the stellar tale of the Danes who refused to lend a hand in
this enterprise. 18 Almost alone among the conquered nations, the Danes resisted
every wily effort to enlist them in the ranks of the executioners. The king set the
standard by announcing. that he would be the first to wear the yellow star if this
sinister badge were decreed for the Jews in his land. More crucially, the Danes
refused the ruse of handing over the non-national refugees they harbored. No
distinction between Danish and foreign Jews would be recognized. Such public
resistance triggered remorse among the German forces themselves, who warned the
Councils of the impending New Year's pogrom. The Councils in turn passed along
the word for flight. Only the 477 Jews who refused to go into hiding went into the
inferno. Resistance work~d. Arendt herself drew this obvious lesson of power of
resistance.

Hence, nothing can ever be "practically useless," at least, not in the long run.
It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today, not merely for her
prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more
such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within
everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror
most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the
countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen"
in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no
more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to
remain a place fit for human habitation.(19)

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 Francis X Winters

Later, in the BBC address, she drew the theoretical conclusion about the meaning of
power, even in totalitarian regimes. No one, not even Hitler, was omnipotent. Even
under totalitarianism, everyone retains a share of power if he is willing to pay the
price of its exercise. For no grand scheme can be carried out by a single man; the
most totalitarian ruler requires accomplices, without whom he is powerless: " .. ,No
man, however strong, can ever accomplish anything good or bad without the help of
others who will see the enterprise through."(20)
The Danes, inspired by their king, refused for their part to carry the enterprise
through. Therefore, the enterprise failed in Denmark. Resistance is not merely a
moral force but a palpable form of power. Here, then, lay the lesson that might
allow Arendt, in her subsequent courses on ethics, to refine the political theory that
she had bravely tested in the flre of contemporary politics, the charnels of Auschwitz.
Politics, she seemed about to conclude, is not autonomous. At least in emergen -
cies, such as the unprecedented one which befell the Danes, politics is shaped deci -
sively by conscience; resistance reversed the fate of those marked for death, like the
blood of a lamb sprinkled on the doorway.
Oddly, Arendt was unable to learn this elementary lesson about power.
Steadfastly, in the full light of the record of the power of resistance to ward off the
executioner's blow, she continued to belittle the contribution of conscience to
politics, speaking of efforts such as the heroic one of the Danes as "the ethics of
impotence. "21 Unhappily for political theory, one of its greatest practitioners was
unable to recognize power in one of its most dramatic and distiuguished manifesta -
tions. To the end, Arendt was unable to renounce the Machiavellian axiom of the
irrelevance of conscience to politics.
An anachronism. That Machiavelli's apotheosis of power should have survived
Auschwitz and Hiroshima is astonishing. For the ominous implications of the
Florentine's absolution of the powerful from all scruple are by now finally palpable,
one would imagine, even to the least reflective. More astonishing still is the sur -
vival, indeed preference, for Machiavelli's formula in the political theory of Hannah
Arendt, herself a survivor of the Final Solution,22 Nor can her life-long expulsion of
conscience from the realm of politics be explained by any mechanism of amnesia.
One could easily have understood if, having taken up the second life of the survivor
in the new world, she never looked back to the terrors of the old world, but had dwelt
on the more remote philosophical topics of metaphysics and epistomology. On the
contrary, she elected to devote her remaining professional career to examining the
grim visage of Nazism. She looked at it from afar, tracing its resemblance to its
antecedents in the tribal politics of 19th and 20th century Europe,23 and up close,
studying as a reporter the lines iu Eichmaun's face as he explained his own
contribution to the Fiual Solution which failed, but barely, to touch her, sparing her

192
 The Banality of Virtue

to record the trial.7A Her fascination with the phenomenon of Nazism is indeed a
factor in her statore as a leading American political philosopher of the century. She
dared to descend into the inferno which our century can visit without the aid of a
masterful imagination like Dante's. In our day, the facts suffice to weave a moral
allegory. Having mastered the facts, however, the survivor never grasped the
allegory. Emerging from the dark labyrinth of totalitarianism, she hymned the bril -
liance of the political realm, never betraying in her theory of politics the dark truths
of modem politics which she fully knew from the vantage points of her own escape
and her vast erudition. Reading her political theory, one would date it from another
century, not the twentieth.25 An anachronism.
But not untimely. Her mission, the rehabilitarion of politics, was sorely needed
after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. She set her philosophical training to work on this
task as vigorously, hopefully and opportunely as the victorious Allies gathered in
San Francisco in 1945 to establish the United Nations. Both had the same ambi -
tions: to cleanse politics of the slime left in the wake of the Axis powers' twisting of
the hallowed institution of the state to advance tribal, racial, and venal designs.
Vindicating the honor of man's political creation was the urgent task of the hour.
With this hope, Arendt went back to the roots of Western politics, to glimpse the
city at its beginnings, unencumbered by the dross of the ages. There she found, as
we know, in the brilliance of the Athenian sun, the newly minted institution of
citizenship, the untroubled equality of a few free men gathering daily in the Agora,
to deliberate about the affairs of the city, to offer views and counter-views, to debate,
deliberate, and decide. Without the coercion of material concerns and free of the
weight of the despotism they had overthrown, the men of Athens lived in the pure
light of freedom. It was this idyllic past which Arendt sought to retrieve as an
antidote to despair about the human condition. In her zeal to restore the lustre of
political life, however, she glossed over not a few of the less glamorous features of
politics, both Athenian and American, such as its debt to the indentured labor creat -
ing the leisure required for debates about the public happiness. The more tedious
aspects of political existence, the administrative, economic, and security concerns of
any city, are likewise swept aside into the shadows of "necessity." The dramatic
light of democracy blinded her to the peripheral activities which did not allow for
equality and freedom. "Politics" became in her reconstruction a figure of speech, an
image of episodic equality standing for the whole structure of political existence.26
This imaginative reconstruction of political reality held a powerful appeal. It
corresponded to an urgent human need to believe in politics, its recent record
notwithstanding. In such moments of crisis, myth-making is probably an indispens -
able mechanism for the process of social reconstruction. Nor was the myth a total
fabrication. For its image of power (the joint capacity of equal partoers to examine
all the available options, choosing what appears best and so calling that future into
193
 Francis X Winters

existence) is a dimension of human creativity often overlooked in political theory,

with its pseudo-scientiIlC "laws" of human behavior. Creativity is a part--perhaps the
archetypal part--of the experience of power. But it remains a part. No theoretical
sleight of hand can transform it into the whole spectrum of human power. Left as an
image, illuminating the whole range of human capacities, her image of the city
would indeed have brightened the age and lighted the path to political reconstruction.
Unhappily, Arendt took the image for reality. She insisted that this admirable
human capacity for collaborative choice waS identical with human destiny. Whatever
did not match this experience of unfettered freedom to create the future was banished
to the netherworld of necessity--that extensive sphere of human experience which is
not distinctive of man and is therefore unworthy of cultivation.27
Of the many splendid aspects of human experience thereby exiled from the
genuine life of the city, one unfortunate refugee was conscience.28 With varying
degrees of severity during her career, Arendt banished conscience from the light of the
public space. Initially, ethics was the enemy of civic virtue, almost as dangerous a
foe as vice.29 Gradually, she came to admit conscience to an honored, even illus -
trious place outside the city's wal1s.30 But to the end of her career, she never admitted
that conscience, too, is a legitimate dimension of human creativity. It can delineate
by its own presence the limits of politics, setting limits that mere deliberation
among equal partners may never legitimately transgress. Conscience itself, however,
is powerless to generate a genuinely human choice. Conscience limits power; it can -
not produce it
Politics, in her defiuitive reconstruction, is an enclosed city, man's habitat.
Truth and conscience are recognized as neighbors, affecting the city indirectly, by
maintaining their own secure borders where the city may not expand. The space for
change in the human condition, the realm of freedom, is not unlimited but is bordered
by the imperatives of truth and morality. 31 But these neighbors, however honored,
remain aliens to the city. Their only power, beyond definition, is negation: they
may refuse to join the life of the city if invited, but they are allowed themselves no
initiative.
Leaving to others the inquiry into the doctrine of truth in Arendt's philosophy, I
turn below to her treatment of the relation between conscience and politics.
Specifically, the inquiry will focus on the theoretical adequacy of a political
philosophy which exiles ethics from the city. Can an amoral interpretation of poli -
tics meet the test of coherence: does it give an adequate account of the functiouing of
power? Or is Arendt's autonomous polis finally a chimera?

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 The Banality of Virtue

Revolution

Arendes escape from the clutches of Nazism was by chance. Interned briefly in
France under the Vichy regime, she happened to be among the hundred "intellectual
Jews" rescued by the awarding of visas authorized by President Roosevelt. Leaving
France with her husband Hans Blucher and her mother, she made her way to
America 32 Perhaps it was that harrowing brush with death, left behind in a hurried
Atlantic passage, that sensitized her to the history of the founding of the American
republic. She sailed, as it were, in the wake of the Mayflower. Driven from the old
world by despotism, she knew what it was to sight the shores of the new one where
one could build a life secure from the ravages of tyranny.
As Arendt settled into the unfamiliar routine of life in New York, she bit by bit
assembled the pieces of an intellectual project that would occupy the rest of her life.
The project would be a historical and conceptual study of the two poles of her
migration: from Germany to America, from totalitarianism to democracy. After her
study of the evil genius of totalitarianism from which she fled, she would trace the
steps which led to the founding of the American democracy, her haven. This
chiaroscuro study of modern politics, with all its ominous shadows and dazzling
lights, was to be her witness to modern political consciousness. Having followed
her through the depths of the Inferno, we now mount with her the heights of her
political Paradiso, Jeffersonian democracy.
This progress from the dirge over the ravages of totalitarianism to the paean of
the genius of democracy represents not merely a chronological sequence mirroring the
unfolding of her own political experience. Rather, the interpretation which she will
present of democracy was fashioned precisely to demonstrate that democracy is the
antidote to totalitarianism. The project, then, is not merely autobiographical, nor
even historical. It is rather professedly philosophical; she teaches that Jeffersonian
democracy is the "last, best hope of mankind," because all other political systems
known to history harbor the seeds of totalitarianism, namely, obedience. Politics
must, in the future, do without, and do away with, obedience.
It was not until 1964, a year after the publication of On Revolution, that she
articulated this leitmotif of her life's work. In her BBC address of August of that
year, entitled "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship," she summarized the les -
sons of her now completed diptych on totalitarianism (The Origins of Totalitarianism
and Eichmann in Jerusalem) in this passage:

Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word 'obedience'

from our vocabulary of moral and political thought.33

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 Francis X Winters

If unthinking obedience by the perpetrators and the victims alike of the Final
Solution was the indispensable instrument which allowed crazed leaders to almost
attain their perverse goals of remaking mankind in the Aryan image, obedience must
be expunged from the language of politics. Man might yet survive, if only the will -
ingness to cooperate in evil schemes through obedience could be effectively pro -
scribed for all future time.
This exorcism of the human instinct to obey would involve a wholesale
reinterpretation of politics, a novel political philosophy. For, as she well knew,
power (the essential ingredient of politics), had been universally understood by
philosophers up until her day and by politicians alike as "the capacity to command
and be obeyed." Arendt's project was to exorcise power from politics in this sense at
least. Only the waking nightmare of totalitarianism could have provoked such an
implausible project, the separation of politics from the use of power. But
nightmares there were aplenty in her personal and scholarly experience to spur this
project. Not only nightmares, but pleasant dreams as wen, likewise distinctive of
the modem world, required the reinterpretation of politics. For, as it happened,
Arendt had exchanged a nightmare for what for her was a lived dream: arrival in a
nation organized on the practical philosophy of "no rule".34 That is, she arrived in a
land not long freed from the ancient continental political philosophies which
understood power vertically, as the power to command and to be obeyed.35 Only
three centuries before her own frightened escape from the old world of European
power politics, other refugees had preceded her on a voyage of political experimen -
tation, which tested the hypothesis that consent could replace obedience as the source
of power.36 In her imaginative reconstruction of the striking of the Mayflower
covenant, just before the Pilgrims set foot on the New England shore, she saw the
political garden of Eden where man and woman set out to recreate politics on the
basis of promises, replacing the obsolete model of government by coercion.37
Arendt first saw America as it must have looked from the tiny deck of the
Mayflower: an opportunity for mankind to start afresh politically, to reinvent
politics. In the studies that led up to On Revolution, she traced the evolution of
government through the town meetings of the separate colonies, whose eqnal citizens
deliberated about the political measures needed to protect their townships from
harm.38 Here she found the secret to a new political order, which would eventually
be articulated in The Federalist Papers : power is the capacity to cooperate, to act in
concert toward the achievement of a commonly chosen goal. 39 Since, at the town
meeting, there was no one to give orders, they awoke to the nature and dynamics of
genuine politics: the dialectic of competing opinions on the path to be followed in
the present crisis. From the clash of opinions at the local level emerged the power to
construct the town's life. Power the colonists found lying not in the streets but in

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the pews of the austere congregational church buildings that doubled as town-meeting
halls at that time.
From these scattered and spontaneous experiences of power emerged a colonies-
wide ethos of power, ready-made for the great crisis which would arise later in the
struggle for independence. Confident on the basis of their 150 years of covenanting
to subdue the wilderness (within and without the town), the colonists were the ouly
ones not surprised at the unlikely outcome of their conflict with Great Britain.4o
Sure that they possessed the secret of genuine power, namely, its production out of
the clash of dissenting opinion of equals, and facing a monarch fettered by the tired
ways of coercion, they never doubted the issues of their conflict. Power, as they
understood it, was on their side; mere force on King George's. (In addition to power,
they may have been peripherally cheered by their advantage in geography, and after
1780, by their French connection, which Arendt ignored.)
It was perhaps inevitable that Arendt would be drawn to study revolution.
Convinced as she was that power was the energy of politics, she gravitated toward a
single political experience where obedience is unknown: in the few exhilarating mo -
ments that trigger a revolution. For in this exceptional phase of political life, all the
actors are equals, co-conspirators against the weight of the past. Weightlessness is
the political condition of revolutionaries: no one gives orders and no one obeys.
Revolution is politics, absent obedience.
Revolution, then, was the obvious answer to Arendt's quest for a new political
order which would eschew the giving and taking of orders. Revolution was the wall
which would bar totalitarianism from the city of man. Politics is revolution. The
rest, the antiquated politics of the Western tradition whose glorification of obedience
had led inexorably to the recent Nazi (and Stalinist) pestilences, all that was doomed
Here, in the new (geographic and political) world, revolution and politics are
identical. For this reason, the United States should naturally find itself in an ideal
position of intematioualleadership in the latter half of the present century, which is
an era of global, largely post-colonial, revolution. If only Arendt could remind
Americans of their revolutionary (historical and philosophical) heritage, they could be
freed of their obsession about the Marxist threat of a permanent revolution which was
undermining American foreign policy at the time (as it does today). By remembering
its own revolution, America could become the magnet for the new nations, as the
founding Fathers had expected. Reflection on revolution would give America back to
itself, and at the same time commend her to the emerging nations, which were
looking for a model in a nation which had once been a colony and which was now a
superpower.41
Revolution is not, in Arendt's analysis, primarily the use of force by the
victims of tyranny to reverse the roles of ruler and ruled. Indeed, in her lengthy

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 Francis X Winters

account of the American revolution, not a single shot is fired. The armies on either
side never make an appearance on the revolutionary stage. Revolution is a clash of
ideas, pure and simple. Revolution flows smoothly, then, into the subsequent period
of constitution--which is the culmination of the earlier ideological struggle.
Revolution-making and constitution-making alike reveal Arendt's paradigm of human
excellence, which is the assembling of men in the open spaces of public life to
deliberate, decide, and act upon the common project42 A few years after the with -
drawal of the British forces, the self-same revolutionary personalities assembled once
more in Philadelphia, to deliberate once more, this time on the form of government
required to replace the central imperial administrative machinery that had been driven
from the continent Rebelling at the impotence experienced under the Articles of
Confederation, the delegates to the constitutional convention set about designing a
form of government that would fit their condition and manifest their understanding of
politics.
Arendt treasured the memory of the seminar in politics that ensued in
Philadelphia. Drawing down from their shelves tomes of ancient constitutions, they
invented a form of government never before dreamed of in the philosophies of
Europe. They opted to build sound government on the principle of creative conflict:
to establish three equal branches of government which would divide among them the
separate functions of legislation, execution and adjudication. To this federal triangle
of Congress, president and Supreme Court, they then created a counterweight,
sovereign state governments,likewise decentralized into the competing competencies
of legislation, execution and adjudication. Finally, to carry out the triplication
strategy already built into the distribution of governmental power, through the
appended Bill of Rights they raised the individual (both in his singularity and in his
associations) to the level of equal partner with the two levels of state and federal
government This elaborate division of power among competing centers of initiative
was no mere replica of previous Western check-and-balance arrangements, which had
traditionally worked to assure their designers' desire to limit the central administrative
power. For, as Arendt insists, the inspiration of previous constitutional structures of
limited government have been to limit power. But the newly independent colonists
were seeking to escape from the opposite exigency; they needed to generate power in
order to secure the common good. Given their predicament of powerlessness, it was
startling that they resisted the ancient urge to centralize authority, which should have
recommended itself to them as an instrument to produce power. Instead, they
relentlessly and symmetrically parcelled out power, to the distant and diverse organs
of each new state, and beyond them to individuals, while taking care not to aggregate
even the residual federal power in one body. The new constitution enshrined the
paradox that power is enhanced by diffusion.43

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 The Banality of virtue

In this reversal of Old World patterns of organization is revealed the inventive -

ness which is the hallmark of humanity, the capacity to begin something utterly
novel. For Arendt, this characteristic of freedom is the distinctive human quality: the
capacity to love something which does not yet exist, and so to bring it into
existence. Man--insofar as he is man--is the creator. It is only this imaginative fe -
cundity which is worthy of man; all else, all mere reproduction and sustenance of the
species, all of the engrossing effort to survive and prosper, counts for nothing. Only
in changing his world is man himself.44 Revolution is humanity come to term.
Arendt, appalled by modem European politics which had come perilously close
to consuming itself, rediscovered the Western tradition of revolution. At least since
the seventh century, whenever the political order deviated beyond the point of the
manifest interests of citizens, Western political philosophy has provided the requisite
remedy in the right to revolution. 45 But, over and over, men manage to forget this
tradition. Even the worst excesses of power often fail to shock men into
remembering their right to revolt As Arendt had painfully recalled, the Final Solu -
tion did not widely incite even European Jews to revolution, futile as it may have
been. Moreover, Aryan ideology, which conspicuously subjugated the concerns of
Germany to the demands of fashioning a new race, failed to rouse Germans to resist
Order, even perverse order, continued to enjoy a prerogative in fact that had no
justification in the European political tradition.
To her credit, then, Arendt rediscovered the fire of revolution. She brought to
light the central paradox of the Western tradition of politics: its merely conditional
respect for the regime in place. The mystery of revolution is more profound than the
philosophical puzzle of capital punishment, the murder of criminals which the
tradition allows in the name of justice. For the right to revolution includes the right
for brother to rise against brother and put him to the sword, in the name of changing
the political system. In a culture which prides itself on its solicitous concern for the
sacredness of innocent life, (which it seeks to shield from wanton destruction even in
the midst of war), it is astonishing to confront the traditional right of revolution,
which gives moral sanction to mutual slaughter and social mayhem in the name of
justice. No wonder that popular sentiment revolts against this stem lesson of the
political tradition, which teaches that rulers often are so hostile to the welfare of their
own people that they may have to be driven from power even at the point of a sword.
Surely it takes some schooling in the subtleties of Western values to sympathize
with this cultural instinct which harbors revolutionaries within the city's walls.
Even in the absence of an external enemy, devotion to the city may thrust a sword
into the hands of the citizens to put the city's life aright.
So paradoxical is the right to revolution that it was somehow overlooked in the
wake of the Nazi regime, with its unprecedented excesses, when the United Nations

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 Francis X Winters

met in solemn assembly to blazon in its charter the list of universal human rights.
Under the leadership of the United States (and later somewhat reluctantly the USSR),
each recently enough a revolutionary regime itself, the statesmen, still reeling from
the evidence of the depravity to which civilization could sink, set out to enumerate
those rights of individuals and peoples which no future government could transgress
without censure of the international community. The right of revolution is found
nowhere in this catalogue.46 Arendt was not mistaken, then, to judge that the right
of revolution needed to be retrieved for Western civilization. If, after Hitler, the inter-
national community had not learned this elementary lesson, maybe the West was
indeed in danger. Hence her mission to spread the gospel of revolution.
But, having recovered revolution, which she called the lost treasure of the
Western political tradition, Arendt seems to have been bedazzled by her discovery.47
After following the progress of the Founding Fathers from the deck of the Mayflower
to their mutual farewells following completion of the Constitution, she argues that
the very act of adopting a Constitution robbed America of its political heritage.48
Since the establishment of a constitution imposes certain obligations on citizens,
that is, the requirement of obeying its statutes, Arendt could not tolerate the
imposition of these legal obligations following upon the act of foundation, that is,
constitution-making. Here she rebels. Even friendly critics have been unable to ex -
cuse this antinomian, even anarchical, accent in Arendt. 49 Her only historical argu -
ment for refusing the constraints of constitutional existence are found in her almost
frantic appeals to the wisdom of Jefferson, who, once away from the federal
government, began to demand more national power for the townships, where he
would still have some personalleverage.50
In sum, she regarded the whole post-1789 experience as a betrayal of the
revolution. Unable to follow her along this idiosyncratic path, critics have sought to
explain this unexpected and admittedly exasperating turn of thought. Indeed it is
profitable to study this revolutionary monism, for it stems from a major philosoph -
ical blind spot which is characteristic of much modern political theory and practice.
That lacuna is imaginary, that is, the absence of an analogical imagination, the
capacity to glimpse justice in either revolution or constitution (change or stability),
depending on varying circumstances. While many, including those who overlooked
the right of revolution when cataloging the universal human rights, easily affmn the
validity only of constitutional existence, while cavalierly repudiating the revolu -
tionary dimension of political history (including, of course, their own nation's
political history), so a few, including conspicuously Hannah Arendt, value only
revolution, chafing under any constitutional constraints. 5! Each form of political
myopia leads to certain quandaries in political theory and political living. Without
the depth perception conferred by the analogical imagination, political monists (of
the constitutional or revolutionary sort) are always bumping into reality. The
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 The Banality of Virtue

analogical imagination. which can tolerate by turn either the upheaval of revolution
or the stability of constitution. is open to the rhythm of political existence. 52 It does
not seek to exorcise the tides from political existence. For constitution is the end of
revolution. That is. revolution inevitably brings to birth a new order of political
existence. some stable set of arrangements with provision for enforcement.
"Permanent revolution" is a myth which no historical regime could possibly realize.
Constitution. then. is the end of revolution teleologically; fmally it reaches the goal
of a new order toward which the revolutionaries themselves were at least blindly
moving in their struggle against the past. Constitution is also inescapably the end
of revolution legally. Constitutions naturally enough brand revolution a crime
beyond any other. Constitution and revolution. then. are the eternal tides of politics.
Seeking to reconstruct politics without allowing for the legitimacy of constitution
and revolution is a project about as promising as seeking to reorder the ocean with a
single tide.
Arendt's essay. which seeks to reduce the human experience of politics into the
confmes of permanent revolution. represents a formidable. but finally futile. effort to
absolve man of the obligation to obey.53 To argue the plausibility of this new
political formula. she was forced to shut her eyes to the whole federal experience
occurring between 1789 and 1968. when the worldwide political tremor triggered by
Vietnam reached her new home in America. With the outbreak of demonstrations at
universities and government installations. burning of draft cards. pouring of blood on
bombs and other manifestations of political rage. Arendt saw the rebirth of the
political ardor which had disappeared with the ratification of the Constitution. This
contagion of civil disobedience f\fed her imagination to another sustained effort at
political philosophy. What attracted her to the protest movement was its spontane -
ous eruption in communal lawbreaking. "Civil disobedience." as she chose to call
this phenomenon. was to her an invitation to rewrite the "spirit of the American
laws." in order to recaptore securely the lost treasure of the Revolutionary period.
She aspired to amend the Constitution in order to legalize law-breaking if it is under -
taken by groups of dissidents.54 That is. to square the circle.
Arendt carefully distinguished such genuine political actors from their
opposites. conscientious objectors. whose single and singular withdrawal from
politics on the grounds of conscience she relegated to the periphery of political life. 55
Some people simply could not go on living with themselves if they went along with
political fashion. Since such acts of conscience are "anti-political." she did not delay
over their meaning.56 She focused rather on group actions. not of mere withdrawal.
but of intervention in political life through joint public violation of the laws,
perpetrated for the sake of publicity: to draw public attention to their dissent. Since
these cooperative crimes were revolutionary acts. both in intention and in effect. they
met her stem standard for genuine politics: the protestors were taking their places in
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 Francis X Winters

the light of the public space in order to change the life of the community. Shared
lawbreaking, however, is not an act of conscience, which is singular and incommuni -
cable; rather, it is politics at its purest. How then could governments justify politi -
cal punishment for these acts? Evidently because their constitutional powers allow
and require that the public authority establish and enforce the law. For if well-
intentioned and public-spirited citizens were allowed to choose among the laws they
accepted as binding, some of their less magnanimous fellow citizens might also take
the law into their own hands, perhaps even meting out private punishment to the
demonstrators themselves. Apparently accepting this logic, Arendt then proposed her
solution for the impasse into which she had been led by her political philosophy: the
legalization of communal lawbreaking for political statements.
Despite her advocacy, no groundswell appeared to support such a constitutional
amendment to legalize lawbreaking. Universal dismissal of this constitutional
initiative of Arendt's was due no doubt to the commonsense awareness that constitu -
tion is the end of revolution; once a constitution has been adopted, its prohibitions
legally bind everyone equally, no matter how well-intentioned their disobedience. In
this commonsense understanding of the rhythm of political life, which knows tides
of revolution and constitution, there is moral room for disobeying the law, but not
with legal immunity. Those who refuse obedience to the law of the land may do so
in good conscience, but they may have to pay the legal penalty for the act. What
they are doing in breaking the law may well be morally correct, but it is illegal.
Common sense sees that in emergency situations, morality and legality may
diverge. This common sense awareness unhappily eluded Arendt to the end. For her,
what is right must be legal, even if this requires the constitutional paradox of an
amendment to legalize lawbreaking. Wanting the analogical imagination which
structures Western political philosophy, Arendt was never able to give moml
justification to illegal acts.
The monological political imagination, which identifies justice with the law, is
hard-pressed to make sense of civil disobedience, as Arendt's tortured study of that
phenomenon amply illustrates. It is even more hard-pressed to make sense of revolu -
tion, which is in essence the destruction of the legal order. To justify revolution
while maintaining the identity of law and justice requires a certain theoretical wizard -
ry. For Arendt, who made revolution the central political value, the task is still
more daunting. Since she had adopted America as her home, and mised our revolu -
tion to the normative status which earlier philosophers had reserved for the virtue of
justice, which transcends history, Arendt's intellectual task was yet more exacting. 57
For in their own explanation of their revolution, the drafters of the Declaration of
Independence had unfurled the ancient banner of the analogical imagination, the
tradition of natural (that is, meta-legal) rights. The agenda, then, of the essay on

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 The Banality of virtue

revolution was to make sense of the American revolution without taking seriously
the interpretation of it bequeathed by the Founding Fathers themselves.
Arendt's own awareness of the complexity of this enterprise is evident in her
characteristically candid presentation of the evidence that the American revolutionaries
did not share her own positivistic temperament. Given her own (unhappily
misinformed) understanding of the natural law tradition of political ethics, it is not
surprising that she is surprised to find in the preamble to the Declaration of
Independence inexpungable evidence of the revolutionaries' belief in inalienable rights
conferred by "the law of nature and nature's God," which justified their own revolt
against the King's authority. Her astonishment is not masked.

For we may lose all desire to laugh at the circus clown when we fmd the same
notions, stripped of all ridicule, in John Adams, who also demanded worship
of a Supreme Being which he, too, called 'the great Legislator of the
Universe,' or when we recall the solemnity with which Jefferson, in the
Declaration of Independence, appealed to 'the laws of nature and nature's God.'
Moreover, the need for a divine principle, for some transcendent sanction in
the political realm, as well as the curious fact that this need would be felt
most strongly in case of a revolution, that is, when a new body had to be
established, had been clearly anticipated by nearly all theoretical forerunners of
the revolutions--with the sole exception, perhaps, of Montesquieu. Thus even
Locke, who so firmly believed that 'a principle of action [has been so planted
in man] by God Himselr (so that men would only have to follow the voice of
a God-given conscience within themselves, without any special recourse to
the transcendent planter), was convinced that only an 'appeal to God in
Heaven' could help those who came out of the 'state of nature' and were about
to lay down the fundamental law of a civil society. Hence, in theory as in
practice, we can hardly avoid the paradoxical fact that it was precisely the
revolutions, their crisis and their emergency, which drove the very
'enlightened' men of the eighteenth century to plead for some religious
sanction at the very moment when they were about to emancipate the secular
realm fully from the influences of the. churches and to separate politics and
religions once and for all.

As the subsequent analysis (p. 185-93) reveals, this linking of the revolutionary
manifesto of 1116 to the invocation of an absolute moral standard disconcerts her.
This unease is due to her (historically indefensible) linking of the doctrine of natural
law and natural right to the era of political absolutism, itself the grim harvest of
medieval Caesaro-papism.s8

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 Francis X Winters

Because she was unaware of the Stoic (frrst century A.D.) genesis of the natural
law tradition to which the Founders appealed in their preamble, she was shocked to
see revolutionaries appealing to the ideology of political repression in the name of
revolution. For more historically sophisticated intelligence, however, the Declara-
tion's appeal to the natorallaw is perfectly natural. For the Western political tradi -
tion requires that revolutioi1aries justify their acts of murder and mayhem in the name
of political-moral values to be vindicated by the acts of destruction required for
revolution. In order to make moral sense of (that is, to justify) the evils to be
unleashed through revolution, one is required to demonstrate for the "candid world"
the injustice of the present legal order. Before proclaiming the revolution, one must
prove that the present regime is incorrigibly violatiug the inalienable rights of the
populace, even though the government may be acting with the full sanction of the
positive legal system. Revolution is the studied response of citizens to the
contradiction between the law of the realm and the law of nature, whose requirements
the Western tradition has always held to be self-evident. Before this natorallaw, the
law of the realm, and its custodians in the regime, can be indicted for malfeasance. S9
The proclamation of revolution is often the judgement passed down in this forum of
the natorallaw. That Arendt regarded such a moral argument as "curious" indicates
how remote the Western political tradition has become to our contemporaries' period.
Happily, Jefferson and his co-signers were nearer in time and in political sensibilities
to that tradition than Arendt was.60
Indeed, it is hard to imagine, not merely because of the anachronism, Arendt
signing the Declaration of Independence: the ringing of that Philadelphia bell might
have been delayed for weeks if Arendt, (or some of her ideology) had per impossible
been a delegate to the convention. For the debate in Philadelphia was about political
--moral and legal--rights. To awaken consciences, along the banks of the Delaware,
the Charles, the Potomac, the Thames and the Seine--they were seeking to spell out
the moral syllogism of revolution in a form that would be recognized when the sound
of this document was heard around the world. The syllogism of rights was a
common one, repeated in periodic times of social crisis. It was the arguplent made
by Stephen Langton and the barons assembled at Runnymede when they exacted at
swordpoint the signing of the charter of the rights of Englishmen.61 It was an
argument based on the premise--not shared by Arendt--that politics is merely a means
to an end. Regimes have no inalienable rights; only men and women have
unalterable title to rights. For Western culture had held, for at least a thousand years
by the time the convention opened in Philadelphia, that men and women have a
destiny beyond time, a divinely appointed destiuy of endless evolution toward fuller
humanity and happiness. That limitless horizon of human development, however,
can be effectively obscured by political systems which operate for the selfish interests
of rulers rather than for the common good. Tyranny, in the familiar words employed
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 The Banality of Virtue

in the Declaration, is a perpetual menace to man. In such an event, the tradition

holds, men may, in the interest of their own eternal destiny (which is decisively
determined by their development in history), have the right to throw off despotic rule.
This tradition treasures the right to revolution along with the right to a constitution.
Informed by that tradition, the delegates deliberating in Philadelphia about
independence experienced no doubts about the justice of their rebellion. The delegates
were none of them--happily--believers in the autonomy of politics as Arendt was.
Quite to the contrary, they were believers in the instrumentality of politics, in the
thesis that political structures which are not serving the human purpose of the
citizens must be destroyed. The difference between these two political philosophies
(the autonomy versus the instrumentality of politics) is a revolutionary one.62
Whatever the merits of Arendes argument in favor of political autonomy--its absolu -
tion from purpose and moral imperative--one of its decisive weaknesses is its
inability to explain revolution, which is the perennial response to regimes which
have become autonomous, severed from the aspirations of the people and impervious
to moral appeal.
Even in the most mature stage of Arendt's political theory, there is no
theoretical room for the inexorable fact of revolution. For the political role she
finally conceded to conscience, namely, the exceptional experience in social
emergencies when individuals can no longer contribute to political life, is an
extremely passive, negative role.63 She selected as an explanation of the political
function of conscience a denigratory term: "The ethics of impotence. "64 When one
tries to apply this a11egation of impotence to the brilliant and eminently successful
conspiracy of the American colonists, the inadequacy of her theory is startling.
Revolutions do not arise, or succeed, out of impotence. On the contrary, the
revolutionary energy of history's malcontents is one of the two fundamental forms of
political energy, alongside the energy of constitutional cooperation. Revolution is,
in short, a tide in the sea of politics which is controlled by the energy of conscience.
Perhaps the conceptual inadequacy of reducing politics to a purely autonomous
human activity--unadorned by ulterior questioning or moral passion--is most evident
when one asks about the views of Arendt's intellectual guide to political autonomy,
Machiavelli, for whom power was the absolute (autonomous) value. If one can
speak of him in the same breath as Jefferson, one sees immediately what his views of
the American revolution would have been. In 1776 he would have been devoting his
considerable political sophistication to the cause of the Prince--George III--with
perhaps disastrous results for our Revolution.

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 Francis X Winters

Rights

Machiavelli repeated for the benefit of the princes of his day the comforting
axiom that power need recognize no rival. But he did not originate the philosophy of
realism. Thucydides was the first 10 have formalized its axiom when he put it on the
lips of the Athenian ambassadors sent to announce the annexation of the tiny island
of Melos. When the Melian delegates to the conference brandished their only
defensive armor, a doctrine of natural rights, the Athenians brushed the defense aside,
appealing 10 the older natural law of the prerogative of force.

'For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences--either of

how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Medes, or are
now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us--and make a long
speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead
of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the
Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong,
will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both;
since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in
question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the
weak suffer what they must.'(65)

According 10 the Athenians, (and later to Machiavelli's fellow Florentines) as long as

they continued to enjoy a preponderance of force, rights were the prerogative of
superior power. It is only the weak, as long as they remain weak, who appeal to a
doctrine of natural rights, which they hope will hobble the powerful. While Melians
claim that rights are a function of shared humanity, the Athenians of every age
consider them a function of available force. The unending debate about rights, then,
is as ineradicable from political philosophy as the disparity of power is from political
experience.
Unhappily, this very debate itself is often unfair. For it often happens, as in
the case of Machiavelli, that the powerful are endowed as well with spokesmen more
articulate than the defenders of the weak. Even in philosophy, power sometimes tips
the scale. For this reason, the life-work of Arendt was particularly auspicious for
redressing this philosophical imbalance. As a near victim of the Holocaust and a
gifted philosopher, she was in the tragic but promising position to articulate at last
the claims of the victims with an eloquence to rival that of the "Realists". One
hoped to hear in her words the voice of the powerless contesting the powerful over
the prerogatives of power. One looked at last for a truly modern interpretation of
political rights, which would be impervious to the distortions inevitably affecting the
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 The Banality of virtue

vision of the mighty. One expected that the philosophy of right would fmall y find a
champion adequate to its defense. One looked in her teaching for a modem
interpretation of human rights.
It is missing. A careful search by scholars of the corpus of political philosophy
bequeathed us by Hannah Arendt has uncovered no doctrine of rights. Even in the
archives deposited with the Library of Congress, which contain her unpublished
lecture notes of University courses on political ethics, there is no trace of a doctrine
of rights. This discovery is as surprising as it is sad. Surprising because Arendt's
unique situation as a political philosopher, who was the erstwhile target of totalitar -
ianism, promised something more. Surely her public expected that the personal
threat which drove her across the Atlantic would have triggered reflection on the
relevance of human rights to the exercise of political power. For one of the perennial
characteristics of Western political culture (including institutions and theory) has
been the paradoxical proclamation by the powerless of their rights against the
powerful. Indeed, there are those, such as Carlyle, who believed that this invincible
quest for the vindication for meta-legal rights is the definitive characteristic of
Western culture. 66 That, in the three decades of philosophical reflection allowed lier
after her escape from Nazism, she never turned to the philosophy of rights is
surprising. She seems almost to have brushed aside this dimension of political life
with disdain. In one of her few explicit comments on the role of rights in political
history, when she is studying the revolutionary worldview of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence, she seems mystified by their unabashed appeal to the
notion of inalienable rights. 67 Her puzzlement is precisely that they were appealing
to the support of immutable truths when they were about to pull down the structure
of imperialism which pinioned them. Calling this appeal to "the law of nature and
of nature's God" 'curious,' she moves on to the less mystifying language of the Con -
stitution, relieved to find there no disconcerting references to standards beyond the
law. 68 In the Constitutional language oflegal rights and prohibition, she is more at
home. But when she heard the founders touting a doctrine of rights, she confessed
her incomprehension. Not surprisingly, then, in her 300 pages on revolution, she
only glancingly discusses the eternal philosophical question of whether there is a
right to revolution, as the signers unmistakably believed.69
This oversight is a sad one. For the recourse to a doctrine of rights has been the
instinctive (political and philosophical) response to tyranny ever since the dawn of
our culture. Indeed, one may justifiably date the birth of Western civilization from
the first cry of "tyranny."70 In every Western land and on every Western tongue has
arisen the appeal to rights. When the signers met at Philadelphia to decry tyranny,
they borrowed the language of Stephen Langton and the barons at Runnymede, who
dared to throw in the face of the king this treasonous taunt The language of rights
has ever been the shield and buckler of the oppressed. Now it seems, in late 20th
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 Francis X Winters

century, when tyranny has escalated to totalitarianism, the cry of ina1ienable rights
has been stilled.
The missing file on rights is a troubling discovery to the student of Arendt.
For a doctrine of power, unconstrained by rights, is a doctrine of political absolut-
ism. Arendt herself, of course, preferred the term "autonomy". But the reality is the
same. If power recognizes no ends outside itself and admits no moral limits to its
sway, power is king. Tyranny is beyond cavil. Rule is the law, not reason. The
appeal to political rights, that is, the appeal of the powerless against the incumbent
regime, has been outmoded by the autonomous claims of authority.
It was not always so. For a thousand years in the West, from Augustine to
Machiavelli, power was thought to be provisional. A regime's legitimacy was
thought to be contingent upon its answering imperatives grander than its own contin -
uation. Politics was assumed to be instrumental, a mechanism for obtaining the
common good.71 Machiavelli, then, was not just another in a long line of political
philosophers. He was a towering figure, an ideological Turk at the walls of
Christendom. Unlike the Turk, the Florentine prevailed. Without doubt, the swift
victory of the new culture of political autonomy was not merely due to the
philosophical assault of Machiavelli: his agents were everywhere within the city, and
anxious to proclaim his rule. For Machiavelli was not merely an alien power in the
city. Rather he was the eloquent spokesman for a new historical epoch, successor to
the Church-dominated culture of scholasticism. Emancipated from the tutelage of the
Church, the Italian city-state was on its own. The new secularism required a charter
which was found in The Prince, whose publication was as decisive an event in the
evolution of Western civilization as the publication of Luther's theses at Wittenberg.
European culture has finally struggled free of the old order.72
There are those who believe that this era too has passed, that it perished in the
flames of the Final Solution. There, in the noxious fumes of human liquidation, the
modern experiment in autonomous politics was finally seen for what it was. A post-
Holocaust world would demand retrenchment from the spendthrift theories of power
unfettered by rights. Thus, the expectation that Arendt would show the way toward
reconstruction in political philosophy by elaborating a fully secular doctrine of in -
alienable political rights. The missing file on human rights confounds their expecta -
tion.
More poignant still is the discovery among the unpublished lecture notes for her
course in political ethics (1965-1966) that Arendt never repudiated the doctrine of
Machiavelli. Indeed, both in these lectures and in her published works, she repeatedly
appeals to his leadership in assessing the place of politics in the human situation.
Machiavelli remained for her until the end an intellectual hero. 73 While he has long
enjoyed this aura in the work of those who enjoy the patronage of the powerful, it is

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 The Banality of Virtue

disconcerting to discover Arendt's reverence for the philosophy of The Prince. For
recourse to a doctrine of inalienable rights has ever been the response of the
disenfranchised of successive political eras. Doctrines of right are as conspicuous a
feature of Western political history as are tyrannical rulers. The genuine novelty of
Arendt, the self-conscious pariah, in championing the Machtpolitik of Machiavelli
is, then, an ominous development. Even Dachau has failed to raise doubts about the
adequacy of autonomous politics.
The missing file on human rights is explained in turn by the missing volume
(of the planned trilogy Life of the Mind) on judgement. Snatched away from the
world by death just after she had typed the title page of the long-awaited treatise,
Arendt left us wondering about her final judgement about the relevance of ethical
judgements to politics. Fortunately, however, a former student has painstakingly
projected the probable doctrine of judgement by a study of her lecture notes on
Kant.74 In substituting an aesthetic model of political judgement for the classical
(Greek and medieval) rational model, Arendt inevitably undermined the ancient
philosophy of rights. After the repudiation of rational standards, action cannot be
constrained, as it is in western political thought, by recognition of the antecedent
claims of other actors, called "rights",75 Judgement, she concluded, was the irreduci -
bly idiosyncratic and retrospective act of pronouncing a prior deed "good" or "bad".
Such judgements are not made by political actors themselves, but only by the subse -
quent spectators for whom such political choices are displayed in their continuity and
consequences. Moreover, those who are privileged to judge must do so without
benefit of moral principles or standards, all of which have dissolved in the modern
world. Judgement is finally a matter of taste, which one hopes will find a com -
munity of the similarly sensitive citizens to ratify it by consent. Judgement, includ -
ing ethical judgement, is merely a matter of aesthetics.
This doctrine on judgement which eschews both cognitive content and practical
effect, whatever its perhaps considerable intellectual merits, is manifestly incompati -
ble with any doctrine of human rights. For all Western notions (and legal embodi -
ments) of rights presuppose both cognitive content and political utility. A right is
precisely the capacity to act in the present, with moral immunity on the grounds of a
rational claim that such action is inextricably linked to authentic human develop -
ment. Rights have never been construed as mere matters of retrospective and idio -
syncratic taste.76 Indeed, one may make the case that the genesis of rights is pre -
cisely the opposite, namely, the resolute insistence by those claiming their existence
that the mere preference of the powerful is no adequate rationale for choices detri -
mental to others. 'Taste' and 'right' are eternal protagonists in Western history.
Their fusion in Arendt is profoundly troublesome.

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 Francjs X Winters

Conclusion

Perhaps the ancients aren't so anachronistic after all in their efforts at political
theory. For, traditionally, Western philosophers who took power seriously enough
to design a theory about it sought at least to render an account of how it works. In
doing so, they invariably felt drawn to include in their theory an account of
conscience, proposing criteria of how they believed power should work, raising up
standards of political behavior beyond the mere calculation of feasibility. Not
without reason. For, in the face of two prominent political phenomena, namely,
totalitarianism and tyranny, the power of conscience can intervene in the day-to-day
functioning of the city, weakening the grip of the despot and overwhelming him.
Conscience, pace Arendt, is not always a merely marginal actor in politics: in "emer -
gency situations" it is precisely and unambiguously a power factor. Political theory
was wont, then, to take account of the power of conscience within political life. Or
did so at least up until the time of Machiavelli, the Renaissance philosophical
revolutionary, who eliminated ethics and revolution from the vocabulary of
respectable political thought, to the everlasting pleasure of princes. ills radical chal -
lenge to the political heritage of the West remains the regnant theory of politics:
realism. 77 What counts is rule. Hannah Arendt, the 20th century revolution in
political experience (including her own) notwithstanding, has accepted the realist
model in which conscience is disenfranchised, but has turned Machiavelli's theory on
its head, contending that what counts is "no-rule".78 Where Machiavelli had insisted,
in verisimilitude to the Florentine political patterns of his day, that power is control,
Arendt was no less true to the political paradigm of 18th century America (in which
she lived on the upper West Side) in depicting the new power paradigm of consent.
The bridge between these two apparently remote political models is their exclusion of
conscience from the city's walls.
The failure of the realist theory to account for the facts, namely, that the cjty is
continually transformed precisely by the refusal to accept the ruling paradigm of the
day, "rule" or "no-rule", is manifest. Resistance and revolution do not evanesce for
want of a theory. Any comprehensive account, then, of the dynamics of political life
will have to reinstate conscience on the city's rolls. But we are not yet ready for such
a political theory, that is, an explanation of political life that will commend itself to
citizens as an explanation of their lot together in the city. For people generally
accept the realist thesis on the incompatibility of ethics and politics. What counts is
the capacity of people in charge to set the rules, however whimsically. Political
theory is usually expected to explain who can (in the short run) do what to whom.
Whether the mechanism is control or consent, it is the currently functioning
mechanism which must be explained by any credible theory of politics today.

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 The Banality of Virtue

Political theory was foreshortened in the Renaissance to include only the theory of
governments, not people. Thus their practical appeal to rulers.
Putting aside the question of whether political theory was more properly
understood by the ancients to comprehend both the dynamics of government and its
replacement by revolution, we come to assessing Arendt's work on its own,
thoroughly modern, ambition: to render an account of the current functioning of the
political realm. Does autonomous politics make sense? To judge by the tone of
recent political commentary on one pervasive issue in modem American foreign
policy, it would seem that Arendt is speaking for the majority of informed American
opinion in insisting on the autonomy of politics, that is, its immunity from moral
judgement. Realism holds virtually unchallenged sway in America's "public space"
on the primordial policy issue of the day: nuclear deterrence.
The prevalence of realism in the policy (and political theory) debate on
deterrence was revealed quite strikingly during the last several years when the alien
figures of Roman Catholic bishops appeared at the city gate asking to be heard on the
issue of the morality of nuclear deterrence. Quite like exotic savages from a remote
land, the bishops were momentarily media stars in November (1982) and May (1983)
when they publicly debated and later promulgated their pastoral letter on war and
peace.79 When the subtle and radical argument of the pastoral was finally deciphered,
however, the reaction on the part of political elites was overwhelmingly negative.
Not only were most commentators chagrined by the curious and unsettling
conclusions of their intervention, namely, the comprehensive condemnation of mill -
tary use of the nuclear arsenal (without prejudice to its maintenance as an instrument
of deterrence), as might have been expected in response to an unprecedented attack on
the foundations of the American security structure. But, more revealingly, there was
a widespread feeling of indignation (more easily sensed in conferences and conver -
sations than by the publications elicited by the pastoral letter) at the very audacity of
churchmen in questioning the foreign policy consensus behind nuclear deterrence.
While in certain quarters the reaction was surely tinged with religious bigotry, its
principal animus was due to incomprehension: what has ethics got to do with
deterrence? If Arendt had been spared a few additional years for this revelatory mo -
ment in American politics, she would undoubtedly have echoed the puzzlement of
those accustomed to the separation of ethics and public policy. Her instincts were for
once completely in tune with public sentiment on the relation between ethics and
politics, which was one of the principal tenets of her doctrine of the autonomy of
politics.
A recent review of articles generated by the pastoral letter in scholarly journals
and journals of opinion reveals that the bishops' intervention has decidedly changed
the focus of the discussion of deterrence without changing any minds. 80 Their

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 Francis x Winters

decisive impact has been to force commentators to articulate their own judgements
about the compatibility of recognized ethical standards for the conduct of war and
present (or proposed) deterrence strategies. Most commentators agree that execution
of any of the present deterrent strategies would be ethically indefensible. Yet most
argue that the resolution to unleash such violence-- an act after which the memory of
genocide (and perhaps all else) would pale into insignificance --is the condition of
survival for political autonomy. Now, more than ever, security is incompatible with
moral scrupulosity. Morality is a luxury that governments--even the most affluent--
can ill afford. The final freedom offered to citizens is the choice to renounce morality
in favor of security. All the world, it seems in the wake of the pastoral, is Machia -
vellian: politics has its own laws, which are antithetical to those of conscience.
Civilization depends on their rigorous separation.
Public reaction to the pastoral has been uniformly critical. But what is going
on in the minds of those political and military officials who would be required to
execute the deterrent threat, (in Arendt's word about Eichmann, "to carry the
enterprise through") is not yet revealed. Hidden, as is appropriate perhaps for the
individual debate of each one with himself, is that judgement to which Arendt so
often returned: "if I did that act, I couldn't live with myself." Hidden perhaps is the
secret resolve not to lend a hand to the discontinuation of history. How many in the
chain of command to execute the strategy have already judged that they will act
"irresponsibly" if they are ordered to set the macabre machinery in motion? Political
theory cannot reach so far. All that theory--or at least Arendt's theory of autonomous
politics--can reveal is the "impotence" of such an ethical refusal to participate.
Those, she believed, who held back their hand were renouncing power, thus,
excusably perhaps, condemning themselves to the shadows of impotence in a world
where power alone shines.
In the autonomous city of Arendt, it is entirely possible that the splendor of the
public space will itself be extinguished in time by the very desire to shine before
men, to allow power to be a law unto itself. For, unless the scrupulous decide in
sufficient numbers to act "irresponsibly" (and impotently), autonomous politics may
finally prevail. At the end of the broad boulevard of autonomous politics, one may
yet discover merely the end of politics.

1. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannllh Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 467-68. The citations are cited and exe-
geted in Michael Denneny, "The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,"
in Melvyn A. Hill (ed.), Hanntlh Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 245-74.
2. Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy
(Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), pp. x. 1,2. Cf. Margaret Canovan, The

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 The Banality of Virtue

Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York and London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974), p. 11.
3. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 328.
4. The Origins of Totalitarianism, revised and expanded (New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
5. Origins, pp. 232, 239, 357-60, 389-459, 465. For a commentary, see George
Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & AIlanheld,
1983), pp. 29-30, who points out the paradoxical resemblance between totalitarianism
and the radically untraditional notion of "autonomous politics," to which Arendt de-
voted her intellectual energies.
6. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised and enlarged
Edition (New York. Penguin Books, 1984):
7. Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, pp. 29-36. Cf. Canovan, The
Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, p. 79.
8. Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, pp. I, 19, 23. Cf. Parekh,
Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy, pp. xii, 3, 51, 176,
181, 182. Notable texts in Arendt's work which have evoked these critiques include
that in the essay "On Violence," Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovsnovich, 1972), pp. ISO, 151: Power... is as they say, "an end in itself."
9. Eichmann, p. 279.
10. Arendt's ironic banishment of conscience from political judgment led her to the
impasse of equating, or seeming to some to equate, the role of executioner and victim-
cooperator in the Holocaust. This inexcusable equation inevitably involved her in
continuous controversy. Cf. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 337-78. Her own ac -
count of the controversy is found in the Postscript to the 1965 edition (and subsequent
editions) of Eichmann, pp. 280-84.
11. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 374-78.
12. Lectures on Basic Moral Propositions, the New School for Social Research, 1965
and The University of Chicago, 1966, in Containers #40, 41, The Library of Con-
gress, Manuscript Room.
13. Arendt's most extended published treatment of political ethics is found in
"Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture," Social Research, vol. 38, no. 3 (Fall,
1971), 417-46.
14. The Listener, Aug. 6, 1964. pp. 185-87 and 205.
15. Eichmann, pp. 123-26.
16. Ibid., p.llS.
17. Ibid., p. 125.
18. Eichmann, pp. 171-75.
19. Eichmann, p. 233.

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 Francis X Winters

20. The Listener, Aug. 6, 1964, p. 205.

21. In New School lectures on Basic Moral Propositions Arendt remarked: "(Thinking)
can and does put obstacles in our way of acting, it does not lead into it. It is entirely
negative, it does not tell you what to do but where to stop. To put it differently: It is
the ethics of impotence: ....In the sense of emergency situations in which I go away
from the many and don't want to participate in what they are doing, renouncing all
power. It tells me when this point has been reacbed. Namely, when thinking beings
can't go along any longer." (Emphasis added to indicate a passage added by hand to the
typewritten text of the lecture.) (Ninth session, p. 024619) The same thesis is
developed in "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing," (1959), Men in
Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968), pp. 17-23.
22. Parekh has pointed to this anomaly (pp. 30-32). Arendt claimed that Machiavelli
repudiated moral criteria in politics because morality contemns recognition while poli -
tics is defined as the search for glory. For example, cf. The Human Condition (Chi-
cago: U. of Chicago, 1958), pp. 35 and 77; and "What is Authority?" in Between Past
and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1978),
pp. 136-41. Kateb argues (p. 90) that Arendt was totally sympathetic with the view
that goodness and political action are mutually exclusive. Machiavelli also provided
her interpretation of freedom in ''What is Freedom?" Between Past and Future, pp. 151-
56.
23. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
24. Eichmann in Jerusalem.
25. Her political romanticism remained undiminished from its earliest articulation (The
Human Condition) to the essay 'Truth and Politics," (1967) in which she qualified her
earlier enthusiasm for autonomous politics only by admitting the limited dimensions
of the political realm: "However, what I meant to show here is that this whole sphere,
its greatness notwithstanding, is limited -- that it does not encompass the whole of
man's and the world's existence. It is limited by those things which men cannot
change at will. And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we
are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping
its promises." (The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967, p. 88)
26. Parekh, Hannah Arendt and The Search for a New Political Philosophy, p. 82
27. The consequences of this methodological error can be seen in Arendt's dismissal
of French political experience since 1789 (and for that matter before 1789) as sub-
political. Cf. On Revolution, pp. 88-98.
28. Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, (pp. 107, 110-112) studies her
exclusion of conscience from politics throughout her work. Cf. also pp. 25-39 and
85-88.
29. The Human Condition, p. 77: "Goodness ... not only impossible within the
confines of the public reaim, it is even destructive of it." Equally sweeping gestures of
dismissal are found on pp. 60-68 of the essay "Civil Disobedience," in Crises of the
Republic.
30. 'Thinking and Moral Considerations", Social Research, 1971, pp. 445-46.
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 The Banality of Virtue

31. "Truth and Politics," The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967, p. 88.
32. YOlwg-Bruehl, Hanrlllh Arendt, pp. 148-63.
33. The Liste""r, Aug. 6, 1964, p. 205.
34. Arendt's most explicit treatment of this theme is found in the essay, liOn Via-
lence," in Crises of the Republic, pp. 134-55. Cf. On Revolution, pp. 30, 68, 72.
Cf. also Kateb, p. 15.
35. On Revolution, pp. 169-70; "Civil Disobedience," in Crises of the Republic, pp.
82-94.
36. "Civil Disobedience," in Crises of the Republic, pp. 92-95.
37. On Revolution, pp. 167-69.
38. On Revolution, pp. 165-67.
39. "On Violence," in Crises of the RepUblic, p. 143.
40. On Revolution, p. 176.
41. On Revolution, pp. 216-17, 219-20.
42. ''Truth and Politics," The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967, p. 88. Cf. On Revolution,
p. 237, and The Human Condition, pp. 50, 57, 58.
43. On Revolution, pp. 151-54.
44. ''Truth and Politics," The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967, p. 88. Cf. Between Past
and Future, pp. 143-71, esp. p. 167. Cf. also Canovan, The Political Thought of
HanMh Arendt, pp. 72, 74.
45. Exemplary studies of the role of revolution in medieval political thought in the
west can be found in: R.W. and A.I. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in
the West (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1915), m, 122-46. Cf. also Otto von Gierke,
Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. with an Introduction by F.W. Maitland
(Cambridge: University Press, 1938), pp. 34-35. A similar treatment can be found in
Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge:
University Press, 1963), esp. p. 154.
46. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations General
Assembly may be found in any western encyclopedia.
47. On Revolution, Ch. 6 ''The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure," pp.
215-81.
48. On Revolution, p. 239: "Paradoxical as it may sound, it was in fact under the
impact of the Revolution that the revolutionary spirit in America began to wither
away, and it was the Constitution itself, this greatest achievement of the American
people, which eventually cheated them of their proudest possession."
49. Kateb, Hannah Arendt; Politics, Conscience, Evil, pp. 143-44.
50. 0 n Revolution, pp. 248-51.

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 Francis X Winters

51. Among philosophers, it is perhaps Immanuel Kant who most unambiguously

repudiates the right of revolution. See his essay, "On the Old Saw: That May Be Right
in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice," trans. by E.B. Ashton, in Works in
Continental Philosophy, ed. John Silber, (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania), section
IT: "On the Relation of Theory to Practice in Constitutional Law (contra Hobbes)" pp.
57-74.
52. A representative articulation of this approach is found in Heinrich Rommen, The
Natural Law, trans. by T.R. Hanley, (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1947).
53. Canavan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, pp. 78-79.
54. "Civil Disobedience," in Crises of the Republic, pp. 99-101. Cf. Kateb, Hannah
Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, p. 143.
55. "Civil Disobedience," in Crises of the Republic, p. 56. Cf. Kateb, Hannah
Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, pp. 99-100.
56. The antithesis between conscience and politics is treated most explicitly in "Civil
Disobedience," in Crises of the Republic, pp. 60-65.
57. The transcendent stature of justice in medieval political thought is ably presented
by Ernest Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 97-192.
58. On Revolution, pp. 185-94.
59. On the natural law foundations of the Declaration of Independence, see Carl L.
Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, A
Vintage Book (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 133-34.
60. Garry Wills argues that the link between the medieval tradition and the
Declaration is to be found in the college textbooks on moral theory used in the colo -
nies and inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment. Cf. Inventing America: Jefferson's
Declaration of Independence (Garden City: Doubleday & Co, 1978), passim, esp. pp.
229-39.
61. Joseph Clayton, Innocent 1lI and His Times (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1941), pp. 168-
70.
62. Two of the leading commentators on Arendt have directed their attention to the
untraditional character of her insistence on the autonomy of politics. Parekh, Hl11VU1h
Arendt and The Search for a New Political Philosophy, pp. xii, 3, 5, 176, 181, 182,
and Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, pp. I, 19, 23, 39.
63. In moments of supreme emergency, men of conscience may withdraw from
politics, refusing to join in some abhorrent action. They thereby become conspicuous
and thus willy-nilly perform political action by negation. "Thinking and Moral Can -
siderations," Social Research, (1971), pp. 445-56.
64. Belittling the political role of conscience still further, Arendt chose in her
lectures on "Basic Moral Propositions" the image of impotence to represent such acts
of withdrawal. For example, cf. the New School Lecture series of 1965, the ninth
session (#024619), as excerpted in footnote 21 above.

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 The Banality of virtue

65. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. by J.H. Finley, Jr. (New York: Modem
Library, 1951), p. 331.
66. R.W. and A.J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1936), vol. VI, 506.
67. On Revolution, pp. 185-87. The sorne puzzlement is evident in "The Perplexities
of the Rights of Man," in Origins of Totalitarianism, wbere she reveals her inability
to grasp the notion of meta-legal rights, valid even wben denied by the law and
unvindicated by authority. (pp. 290-302).
68. On Revolution, pp. 193-94.
69. In the passage where she meditates on the belief of the Signers themselves that
there is such an inalienable right, on pp. 185-93. Even in her lectures on Kant, where
she points to the ironic combination in Kant of admiration for the French Revolution
and condemnation of its perpetrators, she fails to mske explicit her own view.
70. Carlyle. A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, m, pp. 122-46.
71. An eloquent contemporary political analysis made from the classical
philosophical perspective of the common good may be found in Bertrand de Jouvenel,
Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, trans. by J.F. Huntington (Chicago:
University Press, 1957). Cf. esp. pp. xiii-iv, 92-98, 165. Cf. also Maritain, Man and
the State (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 11-14, 23-24, 54, 67, 101, 142,
193, 202-09.
72. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, trans. by J.F.
Huntington (London and New York: Hutchinson, 1948).
73. Parekh (pp. 30-31) and Kateb (p. 90) have studied this predilection of Arendt for
Machiavel1i. For texts in Arendt, cf. footnote 22 supra.
74. Ronald Beiner, Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. with
an Interpretive Essay (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1982).
75. Beiner summarizes Arendt's reconstroction of political ethics as follows: Political
judgment, tutored in the western philosophical and religious traditions which spesk of
ultimate moral standards of political behavior (rights and obligations), failed to
recognize the crisis of conscience presented by the rise of totalitarianism earlier in
this century. Respectable society almost uniformly set aside their moral qualms,
accepting the Nazi transvaluation of morals which turned the commandment "Thou
shalt not kill" into "Thou shalt kill." After the defeat of Nazism, the reverse process
took place, restoring legitimacy to traditional standards of political and moral
judgment. Alarmed by the facile adaptability of social norms, Arendt set out to articu -
late a theory of judgment that would be immune to political fashion. Paradoxically,
she chose "taste" as the paradigm of the new morality, hoping that such a suggestive
and idiosyncratic standard would withstand political pressures. Since social consensus
had failed to withstand political pressures, one would have to rely on ethical solip -
sism, hoping for the emergence of a chorus of consonant judgments without reliance
on a score. (pp.97-116) E. Young-Bruehl had earlier developed the same argument as
the implicit logic of Arendt's own preference for the position and the perspective of
the 'pariah' in her essay, "From the Pariah's Point of View: Reflections on Hannah
217
 FrMcjs X Winters

Arendt's Life and Work," in Melvyn A. Hill (ed.) Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the
Public World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 3-26.
76. Beiner's own, rather weak, critique of Arendt's theory is found on pp. 137-42.
77. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace
(New York: A. Knopf, 1966), 4th edition, constitutes the classic statement of the
theory.
78. Beiner, Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, p. 141.
79. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise
and Our Response (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1983).
80. Francis X. Winters, "Bishops and Scholars: the Peace Pastoral Under Siege," The
Review of Politics, Winter, 1986.

218
 About our Contributors

James W. Bernauer, Sol., is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston

College. After pursuing philosophical and theological studies in New York, St.
Louis, Tiibingen and Paris, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the State
Uuiversity of New York at Stony Brook. He has published studies on the thought of
Hannah Arendt and of Michel Foucault.

Patrick M. Boyle, Sol., holds a Licence en theologie from Centre Sevres, Paris.
He began his exploration of the relationship between Augustine and Arendt while he
was a student at the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
is currently completing his graduate studies in political theory and African politics in
the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

Robert Burns is a Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School and

practices criminal and civil rights law in its legal clinic. He eamed both his law
degree and his doctorate from the University of Chicago where he was a National
Science Foundation Graduate Fellow in the History and Philosopohy of Science and
Danforth Foundation Kent Fellow in the philosophy of law.

Patricia Bowen Moore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Nazareth College

in Rochester, New York. She earned a Master's degree in theology from Duquesne
University and a doctorate in philosophy from Boston College where she specialized
in the thought of Hannah Arendt.

William J. Richardson, S.J., Professor of Philosophy at Boston College,

holds the doctorate and Maitre Agrege from Belgium's Louvain University. He is the
author of Heidegger:Through Phenomenology to Thought and, with John P. Muller,
of Lacan and Language:A Reader's Guide to Hcrils.

Timothy S. Roach graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate
in 1981 from the Department of Religion at Duke University. In his graduate studies
he specialized in the work of Hannah Arendt and wrote a dissertation entitled
Appearance in History:Hannah Arendt's Metaphorical Lagic of the Person.
Bernauer, 1. W. (ed), Amor Mundi. ISBN 90·247·3483·5.
© 1987. Martinus NijhoJJ Publishers, Do,drecht. Printed in the Netherlands. 219
 About our Contributors

Fr. Francis X. Winters is currently Associate Professor of Ethics and

International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in
Washington, D.C. His writings on ethics and foreign policy have appeared in over
twenty journals in the United States and Europe. In 1985, he was elected to the
Council on Foreign Relations.

220
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