-
Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Political Theory.
http://www.jstor.org
Arendt, Identity, and Difference Author(s): B. Honig Source:
Political Theory, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), pp. 77-98Published
by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/191648Accessed: 19-03-2015 13:39
UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the
Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars,
researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information
technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new
forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please
contact [email protected].
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
ARENDT, POLITICS, AND THE SELF
III. ARENDT, IDENTITY, AND DIFFERENCE
B. HONIG The Johns Hopkins University
HANNAH ARENDT'S The Life of the Mind (LOM) is a provoca- tive
and bewildering work. Provocative because it challenges much of
traditional thinking about thinking and the mental experience of
persons. Bewildering because it was written by an author who
through- out her career insisted adamantly that the philosophical
preoccupation with the inner life of the self was misbegotten.
Arendt's commentators have concentrated mainly on the first and
third volumes of LOM, but it is primarily in the second volume,
Willing, that Arendt enhances her theory of action with an
explication of her views on identity and a revision of the earlier
account of the will. Those few who have recently turned their
attention to Willing claim, however, that this account is
incoherent or inconsistent with Arendt's earlier work.' Beginning
with a genetic account of Arendt's view of the will and ending with
a consideration of one of these critiques, I hope to show that
Arendt's account of the will in Willing and the concept of the self
upon which it relies are internally coherent and importantly
consistent with her earlier accounts of action and identity.
In her earlier writing, Arendt is dismissive of the inner life
of the self in part because she believes that knowledge of the
inner self is
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am grateful to Richard Flathman, William
Connolly, Peter Digeser, Tom Keenan, and Charles Euchnerfor their
comments on earlier drafts of this article and to Mrs. Catherine
Groverfor her help in mastering the means ofitsproduction. I am
also indebted to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council
of Canadafor financial support.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 16 No. 1, February 1988 77-98 ? 1988 Sage
Publications, Inc.
77
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
78 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
unattainable. To this "inwardness ... no other has access"
because "the human heart ... is a very dark place. "2 Psychological
accounts of the self and action are illicit, for "feelings,
passions and emotions can no more become part and parcel of the
world of appearances than can our inner organs."3 In short, on
Arendt's account, the psychological (and biological) self is not
the subject of action. Because it dwells in the realm of necessity,
the private realm, dominated by a concern for life- sustenance, it
must be left behind when we enter the public realm to act, for "in
politics, not life but the world is at stake."4
Psychological features of the self are time-bound, limiting,
and, most important, "never unique"5 for, as Arendt says of the
biological self: "If this inside were to appear, we would all look
alike."6 But motives and aims are not only "typical," they are
action's "determining factors"; indeed, "action is free to the
extent that it is able to transcend them."7 In the public sphere
there are universal, timeless counterparts to these inherently
finite motives. "Principles" inspire us "from without" to action,
unlike motives, which determine us from within. Principles are
"fully manifest" in the human world though only when we act upon
them. And they are "too general to prescribe particular goals
although every particular action can be explained in light of its
principle once the act has been started." Unlike the goal of an
action, "the principle of an action can be repeated time and again,
and in distinction from its motive, the validity of the principle
is universal." In other words, principles are neither agent nor
action-specific; they are "inexhaustible.'M
On this early account, drawn primarily from Between Past and
Future (BPF), the faculty of the will is distinguishable from
psycho- logical attributes like motives and intentions but it
shares with them two important features: its sphere of operation is
the inner self and it is determinative. Consequently, action "is
free to the extent that it is able to transcend," not just "motives
and aims," but also the determinism of the will.9
Arendt's late focus on the life of the mind does not signal a
change in her rigorously dismissive approach to the inner life of
the self. Arendt was provoked to treat this subject because she
felt there was a need for such an account written by an author who
did not believe that "what is inside ourselves, our 'inner life,'
is more relevant to what we are than what appears on the
outside."'0" And she devoted a volume to the faculty of the will
because it was crucial to her project that she develop a conception
of the will that could serve as an alternative to traditional
philosophical conceptions of that faculty, one more suited to a
theory
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 79
that privileges action and the world of appearances. In LOM,
Arendt steadfastly maintains her identification of the
psychological self with the biological self. Still hostile to all
psychologisms, she insistently distin- guishes the life of the mind
from psychological life. The life of the mind is made up of three
mentalfaculties-thinking, willing, and judging- each of which
contributes, in its own way, to the performance or meaningfulness
of action. But Arendt remains wary of these mental faculties, for,
in her view, "mental activities, and especially the activity of
thinking, are always 'out of order' when seen from the perspective
of our business in the world of appearances.""I
Willing, however, "although a mental activity, relates to the
world of appearances in which its project is to be realized."''2 In
LOM, Arendt identifies two ways of understanding the will: "as a
faculty of choice between objects or goals, the liberum arbitrium .
.. and, on the other hand, as our 'faculty for beginning
spontaneously a series in time' (Kant) or Augustine's 'initium ut
esset homo creatus est,' man's capacity for beginning because he
himself is a beginning."'3 The latter is the alternative offered in
LOM. Here the will is an autonomous mental faculty that does
nothing less than make action, a beginning, possible. It liberates
us from the trivial preoccupations of the private realm by
overcoming the most important and tenacious impediment to action:
the biological, psychological, and mental self that dwells in the
relative comfort and safety of the private realm. Although willing
is a necessary condition of action in both BPFand LOM, only in
LOMis the will's role in the production of action nondeterminative.
Here action is a beginning not in spite of the will but because of
it for, unlike the will of BPF, the will of LOM does not dictate
action; it commands the self on behalf of action.
While Arendt's account of the will in LOM is not consistent with
her earlier account, the two accounts are marked by important
continuities, in light of which the shift in her view turns out to
be of limited import. In both accounts the will is imperatival, its
"essential activity" consisting "in dictate and command."''4 In
neither account is the will, properly speaking, "free," for the
"power to command . . . is not a matter of freedom, but a question
of strength or weakness."''5 In BPF, Arendt insists that freedom be
identified with action: "Men are free ... as long as they act,
neither before nor after for to be free and to act are the
same."'"6 And she remains true to this in LOM, where freedom is
neither an attribute nor a direct product of the will.
Characterized as the "organ of spontaneity,"'7 the will of LOM
makes action and therefore freedom
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
80 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
possible by staging a "coup d'etat" against those determinative
features of the self that deter us from entering the public realm.
Our concern for our biological needs is overridden by the will;
motives, goals, and inten- tions are swept aside; and the mental
faculties of thinking and judging and even willing are silenced.
Here, as elsewhere, Arendt's account of inner life parallels her
political theory. Just as liberation from necessity sets the stage
for the constitution of freedom in the political world, so the
liberation from the private self, won by the will's coup d'etat,
sets the condition for the appearance of the acting self whose
action makes freedom manifest in the human world. 18 But willing
itself is neither free nor unfree in Arendt's strict sense.'9 And
there is no overlap between liberation and freedom, between willing
and acting. Between each pair there is a hiatus marked by
contingency-for a moment everything is uncertain.
This uncertainty is the price we pay for freedom.20 And,
although Arendt understands the price is high,21 she does not think
it beyond our means. She is relentlessly critical of those who,
unprepared or un- equipped to pay its price, resituate freedom,
take it out of the contingent world and internalize it by
attributing it to the will. "The philosophical tradition ...
distorted the very idea of freedom ... by transposing it from its
original field, the realm of politics and human affairs in general,
to an inward domain, the will, where it would be open to
self-inspection."22 As a result, Arendt argues, freedom becomes an
"innerfeeling.... Without outer manifestations and hence ... by
definition politically irrelevant,"23 it has no "worldly, tangible
reality."124 Freedom, Arendt insists, can be manifest only in the
public realm because only there are we capable of calling
"something into being which did not exist before."25
On this reading, Arendt's accounts of freedom and action in
BPFand LOM appear to be consistent. But one important change has
been made. In LOM, the will, an autonomous mental faculty, is the
"organ of spontaneity" and the "spring of action." Here, willing is
a necessary condition of action that does not interfere with
action, for willing does not address itself to action but to the
self on action's behalf. Indeed, willing ceases before action
begins. In BPF, however, the will, in the service of the intellect,
is not autonomous and functions less neatly. There, it is not the
will but the intellect that "grasps" the "desirability" of a
"future aim." The intellect then calls upon the will to do what the
intellect cannot-to "dictate action."126 Thus, willing is a
necessary condition of action but, because the will dictates
action, action is free only insofar as it is not "under the dictate
of the will."s27 On this account,
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 81
the nondeterminative catalysts of actions must be the principles
that inspire us from without and that do not appear to be at all
related to the will nor to any mental faculty. But the inspiration
of the principles is not sufficient to lead us to forsake the
private realm. We must also have courage for "courage liberates men
from their worry about life for the freedom of the world."128 In
LOM, however, no mention is made of courage and principles.29 The
will acts as a catalyst and "de-sensed" thought-objects provided by
thinking give it content. These thought- objects are somewhat
reminiscent of Arendt's earlier "principles": both are universal,
timeless, and general.
Unlike the will of BPF, the will of LOM is self-generating and
can be counted upon to see to it that its own activity is brought
to a timely end, thus ensuring that it does not determine action.
According to Arendt,
no willing is ever done for its own sake or finds its
fulfillment in the act itself. Every volition ... looks forward to
its own end, when willing something will have changed into doing
it. In other words, the normal mood of the willing ego is
impatience, disquiet and worry (Sorge) ... because the will's
project presupposes an I-can that is by no means guaranteed. The
will's worrying disquiet can be stilled only by the I-can-and-I-do,
that is by a cessation of its own activity and release of the mind
from its dominance.30
The will's role as liberator of the self from, among other
things, the mental faculties including itself, allows it to serve
as an antecedent or condition of action without tainting or
determining its consequent, thereby preserving action's
spontaneity, novelty, and unpredictability.3'
The best way to understand the shift in Arendt's view and to
identify the roots of the later account in the earlier text is to
focus on Arendt's debt to two thinkers cited in both accounts:
Augustine and Kant. In BPF, Arendt adopts an Augustinian view of
the will as divided and self-sabotaging. She speaks of "an
acquaintance with a will which is broken in itself, which wills and
wills not at the same time."32 This much is unchanged in LOM. Here,
each mental activity is "reflexive," recoiling "back upon itself,"
but this reflexivity is strongest in "the willing ego," where the
"I-will is inevitably countered by an 1-nill. " In the conflict
between willing and nilling the victor never completely van-
quishes its opponent. "There remains this inner resistance."33 But
Arendt now sees this view as incomplete and she criticizes
Augustine for not having gone further. Augustine should have
allowed his belief, that "every man, being created in the singular,
is a new beginning by virtue of his birth," to inform his view of
the will. Had he done so, Arendt argues,
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
82 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
"he would have defined men, not, like the Greeks, as mortals,
but as 'natals' and he would have defined the freedom of the will
not as the liberum arbitrium ... but as the freedom of which Kant
speaks ... the freedom of spontaneity."134
In BPF, however, Arendt herself had not yet drawn this
conclusion. There, indebted to Kant, she speaks of a "faculty of
freedom," which she defines as "the sheer capacity to begin,"35
but, still true to Augustine, she does not link this faculty or
capacity to the will. Only in LOM, where the term "faculty of
freedom" is replaced by "organ of spontaneity," does Arendt
identify this organ as the will. "The freedom of spontaneity is
part and parcel of the human condition. Its mental organ is the
will."s36 Thus Arendt promotes the will from a subservient and
determinative faculty-which, though necessary to action,
necessarily taints it-to an autonomous organ of spontaneity that
serves as a necessary condition of action without corrupting it.
But Arendt's fundamental commitments to action as novel, to acting
as spontaneous, and to the identification of freedom with action in
the public realm remain unchanged.
These fundamental commitments depend upon a particular concept
of the self, articulated in detail for the first time in Willing,
and challenged by one of the first of Arendt's commentators to
focus on that volume.37 In "Hannah Arendt and the Will," Suzanne
Jacobitti claims that Arendt's concept of the self is "incoherent."
Jacobitti argues that the elements of Arendt's theory that she is
"impressed with" and "would like to save" require "a strong concept
of self," a self that is "firmly in charge of all mental, psychic
and bodily capacities,"38 a "self which has continuity over time,
which lives with its past actions, which is capable of commitment
and which can be held responsible, judged and forgiven."39 In what
follows, I hope to show that Arendt's concept of the self is not
nearly as untenable as Jacobitti believes and that it is therefore
unnecessary to amend Arendt's account in the manner suggested.
Moreover, these amendments are, in my view, deeply incompatible
with Arendt's project from her theory of action in The Human
Condition to her account of identity in LOM.
In The Human Condition, Arendt describes a self that is discon-
tinuous, a self fundamentally divided. A life-sustaining,
psychologically determined, trivial, and imitable biological being
in the private realm, this self attains identity-becomes a 'who'-by
entering the public realm and acting. In so doing, it forsakes the
psychological features that define it in the private realm, the
very features that more conventional theorists of identity believe
to be among the basic elements of personal identity.40
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 83
This self is relatively complacent in the private realm,
reluctant to leave because terrified of risking its biological
life. And yet, somehow, sometimes, fortified with courage and
inspired by a principle, it enters the public realm and is reborn
through action. "With word and deed we insert ourselves into the
human world and this insertion is like a second birth. "41 The
metaphor of rebirth, a constant theme throughout Arendt's work, is
related to her claim that our "capacity for beginning is rooted in
natality."42 Because we were once new in a world that preceded us,
we can be the vehicles of the introduction of novelty into the
world. Because we were born once, we can be born again. But we can
be reborn only if we sever the umbilical cord that ties us to womb
of our biological and psychological existence.
Like freedom then, identity, according to Arendt, is not given;
it must be attained through action. Until we act, we know only
'what' we are. What we are is composed of the roles we play in the
private realm and of our "qualities, gifts, talents and
shortcomings, which [we] may display or hide." Through action and
speech, "men show who they are, reveal actively their unique
personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human
world." But this disclosure of 'who'we are cannot be done
deliberately. It "can almost never be achieved as willful purpose
as though one possessed and could dispose of this 'who' in the same
manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it
is more than likely that the 'who,' which appears so clearly and
unmis- takably to others, remains hidden from the person
himself."43
Thus we are incapable of being "in charge of" ourselves or our
actions. But, in Arendt's view, our inability to master our actions
is not due only to our inability to master ourselves. Action takes
place in the public realm where, falling into an "already existing
web of human relationships," it is affected by "innumerable
conflicting wills and intentions." Consequently, "action almost
never achieves its purpose."44 Action does have consequences,
however, "boundless" consequences that, again, we are unable to
control. Indeed, "one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to
change every constellation" and "the process of a single deed can
quite literally endure throughout time."45 Action, moreover, is in
a predicament, the "predicament of irreversibility." One is "unable
to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have
known what he was doing. "46 The only way out of this predicament,
Arendt argues, is through "forgiving, dismissing, in order to make
it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what
they have done unknowingly."47 Jacobitti claims, approvingly, that
"the
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
84 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
attribution of responsibility for action is, for Arendt ... a
prerequisite of forgiving."48 But, in Arendt's process of "constant
mutual release," the attribution of responsibility is
unnecessary.49 Indeed, Arendt goes so far as to congratulate Kant
for having "had the courage to acquit man from the consequences of
his deed," claiming "this saved him from losing faith in man and
his potential greatness."50
But Arendt's insistence that actors not be held responsible for
their actions, though clearly indebted to her belief that action is
contingent, uncontrollable, and irreversible, is more fundamentally
related to her claim that action is unique and sui generis. She
believes that the application of responsibility to action
compromises this uniqueness by subjecting action to judgment
according to standards external to it, standards derived "from some
supposedly higher faculty or from experiences outside action's own
reach."5'
Unlike human behavior-which the Greeks, like all civilized
people judged according to 'moral standards,' taking into account
motives and intentions on the one hand and aims and consequences on
the other-action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness,
because it is in nature to break through the commonly accepted and
reach into the extraordinary where whatever is true in common and
everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is
unique and sui genern.52
Action, according to Arendt, has two "moral precepts" of its
own: forgiving and promising. Both, she argues, serve "to counter
the enormous risks of action."s53 Promising enables us to "set up
in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition,
islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone
durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships
between men."154 Thus, Jacobitti is right to note that, in Arendt's
view, promising "permits whatever stability exists in human
affairs."55 But, although Jacobitti means to endorse this element
of Arendt's view, she ultimately subverts it by amending Arendt's
concept of self to a "strong concept of self' that has "the
continuity and capacity which Arendt's concept of action re-
quires."56 On the amended account, promising is no longer the
source of "whatever stability exists in human affairs." This credit
can now be given to Jacobitti's revised conception of the self that
is nothing if not a source of stability. And promising no longer
"partially dispels" the "unpredictability" of the human world that
is partly due to "the basic unreliability of men who never can
guarantee today who they will be tomorrow."57 On the contrary,
promising now postulates promisers,
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 85
men who are reliable and well able to guarantee who they will be
tomorrow independently of any stability created by promising.58
Arendt valorizes the contingency of the human world because only
in a contingent world can action be truly novel and unpredictable.
Contingency, then, "is the price human beings pay for freedom." And
this contingency includes "man's inability to rely upon himself or
to have complete faith in himself (which is the same thing)."59 Man
cannot rely upon himself partly because he cannot be self-knowing.
Introduced as an epistemological claim, Arendt's belief that
self-knowledge is unattainable has normative implications. Theories
of action that postulate an agent in charge of itself, coherent
because to some extent self-knowing, impose upon the self an
unwarranted coherence. They thereby deny the self the opportunity
to seek the coherence appropriate to it-an identity attainable
through the performance of actions worthy of being turned into
stories. And they undermine the contingency of the human world by
seeing in their 'coherent' self a source of stability. Arendt
agrees that human beings cannot live in a completely contingent
world, and she understands that sources of stability must be
sought. But she insists that promising be the source of stability
in the human world because "the function of the faculty of
promising is . . . the only alternative to a mastery which relies
on domination of one's self and rule over others."60 Unlike the
strategy of self-mastery or autonomy, promising creates limited and
isolated areas of stability in the in- between of the public realm.
Consequently, it does not require the excessive and comprehensive
ordering of the self that autonomy demands.6' In Arendt's view,
autonomy is neither a form of freedom nor an ideal worthy of
pursuit, for self-domination leaves no space for contingency to
be.62
Arendt's characterization of autonomy as a form of
self-domination is indebted to her view, articulated fully for the
first time in LOM, that there is "difference in identity."63 The
self of LOM is a plurality whose parties, in the absence of any
hierarchical ordering, often engage in struggle. Once again,
Arendt's account of inner life mirrors her political theory. In 7he
Human Condition, Arendt argues that plurality, which "has the
twofold character of equality and distinction," is the "condition
sine qua non for . .. the public realm."64 Just as that plurality
is an ineliminable feature of human existence not to be denied, so
too is our inner multiplicity an ineliminable feature of ourselves,
not a weakness to be mastered. Attempts to overcome plurality or
multiplicity, Arendt warns, will result in "the abolition of the
public realm itself" and the
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
86 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
"arbitrary domination of all others," or in "the exchange of the
real world for an imaginary one where these others would simply not
exist."65
Arendt, therefore, is critical of philosophers who, confronted
with the "autonomous nature" of thinking, willing, and judging,
attempt to unify the self's multiplicity. "What is so remarkable in
all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the
claim that . . . behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties
and abilities, there must exist a oneness."'66 On this point,
Arendt's debt to Nietzsche is unmistakable. In The Will To Power,
Nietzsche suggests that "the assumption of one single subject is
perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a
multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the
basis of our thought and our consciousness-in general? . . . My
hypothesis: the subject as multiplicity."67
Thus, when Jacobitti attributes Arendt's refusal to endorse a
concept of the self that is "firmly in charge of all mental,
psychic and bodily capacities" to her (unnecessary) commitment to a
"spontaneous will,"68 she mistakes symptom for cause. Arendt
refuses to endorse a concept of a self in charge of itself because,
like Nietzsche, she is committed to a view of the self as
multiplicity. Arendt's self is the locus of several struggles and
divisions: among its biological, psychological, and mental needs;
among the three mental faculties; and within each of the mental
faculties. Arendt's characterization of the internal division of
the mental faculty of thinking is particularly enlightening in this
context.
Thinking, like willing, is a "two-in-one." According to
Arendt,
the specifically human actualization of consciousness in the
thinking dialogue between me and myself suggests that difference
and otherness, which are such outstanding characteristics of the
world of appearances as it is given to man for his habitat among a
plurality of things, are the very conditions for the existence of
man's mental ego as well, for this ego exists only in
duality.69
Arendt goes on to argue: "This original duality... explains the
futility of the fashionable search for identity. Our modern
identity crisis could be resolved only by never being alone and
never trying to think."70 In short, when we think we activate the
two-in-one of thinking, thus making present this "original duality"
and making a mockery of our quest for an identity that is original
unity. But Arendt does believe that we can attain an identity,
hence her claim that our "modern identity crisis" can be
"resolved." This resolution can be achieved, she says cryptically,
"only
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 87
by never being alone and never trying to think." Since,
according to Arendt, the only time when we are most assuredly not
alone and not trying to think is when we are acting in the public
realm, it seems that here Arendt is reiterating her claim that
identity is the product of action.
Jacobitti suggests that when he acts, "the 'person' who ... is
the subject of all this [mental] activity" will "disintegrate
entirely."7' But there is no disintegration here, for there was no
unity to begin with. The person simply does not present his private
self in the public realm, and his inner life is not on display. In
the public realm he actually ceases to be aware of himself as a
mental being because he is "aware of the faculties of the mind and
their reflexivity only as long as the activity lasts." They
"disappear" when "the real world asserts itself."72 Indeed, entry
into the public realm is the first step towards the selfss
attainment of identity. Reborn upon entering the public realm, the
self achieves identity through action, through the "spontaneous
beginning of something new."73
The will is the midwife of this second birth. As the "organ of
spontaneity," it enables the self to act spontaneously by
liberating it from the determinism of the private realm. From this
perspective, Arendt's commitment to an autonomous faculty of the
will does not appear to stand in the way of her "having a coherent
sense of self or person."174 On the contrary, the will is the agent
of the production ofjust such a self, a self who is not defined by
multiplicity but is identitied and whole. The actor's momentary
engagement in action in the public realm grants him an identity
that is fixed and constant, lodged forever in the stories told of
his performance. As George Kateb puts it: "Political action
introduces coherence into the self and its experience. Such
coherence is redemptive. Narrative, dramatic or poetic art perfects
the coherence."75 The actor's identity is derivative of his action;
action is privileged over the actor.
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche challenges our conceptual
and practical commitment to the notion of agency:
It is only the snare of language ... presenting all activity as
conditioned by an agent-the 'subjects-that blinds us to this
fact.... popular morality divorce[s] strength from its
manifestations, as though there were behind the strong a neutral
agent, free to manifest its strength or contain it. But no such
agent exists; there is no 'being' behind the doing, acting,
becoming; the 'doer' has simply been added to the deed by the
imagination-the doing is everything.76
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
88 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
Arendt agrees with Nietzsche that we have no essence, no given
unity awaiting discovery or realization. "There is no 'being'
behind the doing." And, like Nietzsche, Arendt believes that we
should adopt an artistic approach to our multiplicity; for Arendt,
our action is our art and identity the reward for a virtuoso
performance.77
On Arendt's account, the self characterized by multiplicity
never leaves the private realm. In the public realm there is only
action, for there "the doing is everything." Here the actor is, to
remain with Nietzsche, "not something given." He has, after all, no
identity until he has acted. The actor or hero "is something added
and invented and projected behind what there is.j"78 According to
Arendt, this invention is the work of the spectators who create and
relate the actor's story. The "identity of the person, though
disclosing itself in act and speech, becomes tangible only in the
story of the actor's and the speaker's life."79 Thus the "appearing
self' is not, as Jacobitti claims, "determined by the autonomous
will"; the former is merely born of the latter. Nor is the actor
determined by "what other people think."80 He simply relies on his
spectators to grant meaning and identity to his action and himself
by bearing witness to his performance.
Without spectators the world would be imperfect; the
participant, absorbed as he is in particular things and pressed by
urgent business, cannot see how all the particular things in the
world and every particular deed in the realm of human affairs fit
together and produce a harmony which itself is not given to sense
perception and this invisible in the visible world would remain
forever unknown if there were no spectator to look out for it,
admire it, straighten out the stories, and put them into
words.81
Jacobitti implies that Arendt's account of action as free is
threatened by Arendt's claim that the actor "is not his own master,
not . . . autonomous; he must conduct himself in accordance with
what spectators expect of him."82 But this is consistent with
Arendt's insistence on severing the connection between autonomy and
freedom.83 And it is not a qualification of the freedom of action
but a condition of its meaningfulness and intelligibility that it
be comprehensible to its audience.84 Throughout her work, Arendt
insists that the meaning of action is exhausted by its
"perlocutionary force," as it were. And "the final verdict of
success or failure is in [the spectators'] hands."85 So, even in
the public realm, where we do have a coherent, identitied self, we
do not have a self in charge of itself. The stories reveal an
actor, but this actor is not "an author or producer." His story and
identity are
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 89
community property, for "the essence of who somebody is" cannot
be "reified" by himself.86 And this seems fitting to an account
that views the self as multiplicity, privileges action over actor,
insists that identity is not the condition but the product of
action, refuses to identify freedom with autonomy, grants only to
spectators a vantage point from which action can be witnessed
fully, and assigns to them the task of immortalizing the event by
turning it into a story.
These elements of Arendt's view, albeit controversial, are, in
my opinion, more vital, powerful, and fundamental to Arendt's
position than those Jacobitti wants to save. And they, along with
other basic elements of Arendt's view, cannot survive Jacobitti's
revision of Arendt's concept of self to a stronger, more continuous
self in charge of itself. As evidenced by her metaphor of rebirth,
Arendt's public/ private distinction postulates a discontinuous
self. Jacobitti's revisions under- mine this discontinuity by
relieving the will of its role as the organ of spontaneity. On her
revised account, the will merely "reflects" the "selfs character"87
as identity becomes a given, not something we strive episodically
to attain. As the self is made stronger, the contingency of the
human world, so valued by Arendt, is diminished, and so are the
possibilities for the introduction of novelty into the world.
Actions performed by a self in charge of itself might sometimes go
awry, but they would not be unpredictable in Arendt's sense.
Moreover, as the degree of control that the self has over itself
and its actions is increased, so too is the responsibility it bears
for its actions. The uniqueness of action, a critical feature of
Arendt's view, is thereby compromised, as action is subjected to
moral judgment and the primacy of the self, together with a certain
kind of inner-directedness, are reestablished. But the greatest
challenge to Jacobitti's revisions is Arendt's provocative and
perspica- cious characterization of autonomy as self-domination.
This ideal of self-rule, in Arendt's view, destroys the internal
plurality and difference that are as much conditions of action as
are the external plurality and difference of the human world of
appearances.
Jacobitti's views of the self, identity, and action are
fundamentally at odds with those of Arendt and are more akin to
those given succinct expression by Rebecca West's Richard Yaverland
in The Judge. Upon reviewing some of his past deeds, Yaverland
was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions and
that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.
They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing
better than the exultation of the actor, who loses his
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
90 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
value and becomes a suspended soul, unable to fulfill his
function when the curtain falls. 'But you are condemning the whole
of human action!' he expostulated with himself. 'Yes, I am
condemning the whole of human action,' he replied tartly.88
Ultimately, then, Jacobitti's criticisms of Arendt must lead to
this grave and problematic charge: that Arendt condemned the whole
of human action even as she tried to save it. Consequently, it is
impossible for Jacobitti to "profitably build" upon elements of the
Arendtian corpus. Indeed, since a revision of Arendt's concept of
the self to a self "in charge of" itself is nowhere endorsed by
Arendt,89 and since such a revision creates far more problems than
it solves, the terms of the engagement need to be recast. Contained
in Jacobitti's paper are the seeds of an important and timely
debate on the nature of the self, identity, and action, a debate in
which Arendt must be Jacobitti's opponent, not her ally.
NOTES
1. Jean Yarbrough and Peter Stern note briefly that Arendt's
revised account of the will in LOM entails an important change in
Arendt's theory of freedom for, in LOM, "political freedom"is
complemented (for the first time) by "freedom of the will"(346).
See "Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa: Political Thought in The
Life of the Mind," Review of Politics (July 1981), 323-354. Ronald
Beiner, in an essay on Judging, notes in passing that Arendt's
later view of the will differs from her earlier account, but he
does not attempt to account for the change. He points to one
difference only between the two accounts, seemingly the same one
remarked by Yarbrough and Stern. On Arendt's early account, Beiner
argues, "action but not the will is said to be free.... In her
later formulation, by contrast, [the] will ... [is] seen to be
free." But Beiner places the Yarbrough and Stern claim in question
by noting that in this context, free, for Arendt, means merely "not
subordinate to the intellect" (pp. 126-127). See "Judging in a
World of Appearances: A Commentary on Hannah Arendt's Unwritten
Finale," History of Political Thought (Spring 1980), 117-135. (I
discuss the claim made by Yarbrough and Stern in more detail below.
See n. 19)
In one of the only sustained treatments of Willing, Suzanne
Jacobitti argues that the self of LOM is so fragmented, it is
"incoherent." See "Hannah Arendt and the Will," Political Theory,
in this issue. I respond to Jacobitti's criticisms in detail below
and thereby to some of the criticisms of Arendt made by J. Glenn
Gray; Gray too is provoked by the fragmented character of the self
of LOM. His concern, however, is not that this fragmented self is
incoherent, but that it offers little security against evildoing
(p. 240). Moreover, he worries that, in embracing contingency,
Arendt embraces meaninglessness (p. 233). See "The Abyss of
Freedom-and Hannah Arendt," in The Recovery of the Public World,
ed. by Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979),
225-244.
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 91
2. "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future (henceforth
BPF), enlarged ed. (New York: Penguin, 1977), 146, 149; cf. On
Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1981), 95-96 (henceforth OR).
3. The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, ed. Mary McCarthy (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 31 (henceforth LOM 1).
4. BPF, 156. 5. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958), 206
(henceforth THC). 6. LOMI, 29. 7. BPF, 157. 8. BPF, 152. 9. BPF,
151-152. 10. LOM I, 30. 11. LOM II, 12. 12. LOM II, 35-37. 13. LOM
II, 158, emphasis original. 14. BPF, 145; see LOMI, 155; LOM II,
58. 15. BPF, 152. Criticizing Kant, Arendt says it is "strange that
the faculty of the will. . .
should be the harborer of freedom" (BPF, 145). 16. BPF, 153. 17.
See, for example, LOM II, 110. 18. See LOM II, 203 and OR, 142. It
is worth noting in this context that the simile
Arendt uses to describe the will's activity, a coup d'itat, ("in
Bergson's felicitous phrase" LOM II, 101) is itself drawn from the
vocabulary of politics.
19. In LOM, Arendt does occasionally use the term "free
will,"but it is important to be clear about what she means (and
does not mean) by this. At times, as Ronald Beiner points out, she
simply means that the will is autonomous, undetermined by other
faculties and free of the rule of the intellect to which it was
subject on her earlier account. (See n. 1 above.)
For the most part, however, something more fundamental than mere
semantic carelessness is involved. Indeed, Yarbrough and Stern are
correct when they note that, in Arendt's view, "political freedom"
is complemented by "freedom of the will"; their error is to see
this as a new development in Arendt's last work for, already in
BPF, Arendt says, "Freedom as related to politics is not a
phenomenon of the will" (BPF, 151, emphasis mine). What Arendt
implies here, she makes explicit in LOM when she distinguishes
"philosophic freedom" from "political freedom" (LOM II, 200).
Moreover, Yarbrough and Stern also misleadingly imply that, in
her later account, Arendt is no longer hostile to inner or
philosophic freedom, having developed a new respect for the freedom
of the will. But on both of Arendt's accounts, philosophic freedom
is, in a fundamental sense, not real because it is incapable of
expression or manifestation in the world of appearances which
Arendt privileges equally in both BPFand LOM. In BPF, Arendt argues
that "inner freedom" is "politically irrelevant" because it lacks
any "worldly tangible reality" (146, 169). And, in LOM, her wording
barely changes: only political freedom is a "stable tangible
reality" (LOM II, 203). Consequently, Arendt, for the most part,
does not describe the will as free. In LOM, the will is described
as a "faculty of beginning" (LOM II, 217), "our mental organ for
the future," "a possible harbinger of novelty" (LOM II, 18), and
the "spring of action" (LOMII, 155). And, when she does use
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
92 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
the termfree will, Arendt explains that she means by this "the
freedom to start something unpredictably new" (LOM II, 32).
20. Arendt is critical of both philosophers and revolutionaries
for attempting to militate against the contingency of this hiatus.
See BPF, 145 and LOM II, 203-217.
21. See, for example, THC, 233. 22. BPF, 145. 23. BPF, 146. 24.
BPF, 169; cf. LOM II, 203. 25. BPF, 151. 26. BPF, 151. This shift
in Arendt's view of the will is paralleled by a shift in her view
of
judgment as it is characterized by Ronald Beiner. Noting that in
BPF, "judgment is associated with the intellect," while in LOM
"judgment is seen to be free . . . not subordinate to the
intellect"(p. 127), Beiner argues that, in Arendt's last work,
"judging as an activity is placed exclusively within the life of
the mind rather than being assigned a more equivocal status" (130,
n. 37).
27. BPF, 152. 28. BPF, 156. 29. As Richard Flathman has
suggested to me, Arendt's early characterization of
courage as a necessary condition of action is problematic
because courage is a disposition and dispositions, on Arendt's
account, cannot be conditions of action. Objections of this sort
may have provoked Arendt to revise her account and assign to the
will in LOM the function earlier entrusted to courage in
combination with the principles.
30. LOM II, 37-38. It should be noted in this context that,
ultimately, action, unlike willing, involves not an 'I-can' but a
'we-can'; for action, on Arendt's account, always takes place in
concert: "Action, in which a We is always engaged in changing our
common world, stands in sharpest possible opposition to the
solitary business of thought.... the We [is] the true plural of
action" (LOM Il, 200).
31. Throughout her writings, Arendt is uncompromising in her
insistence that novelty and unpredictability are fundamental
features of action. This leads Michael Oakeshott to note, in an
obvious reference to Arendt, that her stories will
characteristically open, not with "a conditional 'Once upon a time
. . . " but "with the unconditional 'In the begin- ning . . .' " On
Human Conduct (Oxford University Press, 1975), 105. (Cf. LOM II,
202-203.)
It is crucial to Arendt's theory of action that willing cease
before action begins for, in Arendt's view, all antecedents have a
causal quality. "A power to begin something really new could not
very well be preceded by any potentiality which then would figure
as one of the causes of the accomplished act" (LOM II, 29; cf. LOM
II, 110). Hence the importance of the revised will's coup d'6tat
which vanquishes all possible antecedents of action and ensures
that action will be a "beginning" characterized, like all
beginnings, by "startling unexpectedness"(THC, 178); hence, too,
the importance of the revised will's autonomy. In response to the
question "What sets the will in motion?" Arendt answers with
Augustine "'Either the will is its own cause or it is not a will,"'
for, in Arendt's own words, "The will is a fact which in its own
sheer contingent factuality cannot be explained in terms of
causality" (LOM II, 89).
32. BPF, 159. 33. LOM II, 69. 34. LOM II, 109-110. 35. BPF, 169;
cf. The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (Cleveland: Meridian,
1958),
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 93
473. "Freedom as an inner capacity is identical with the
capacity to begin." 36. LOM II, 110. 37. Jacobitti is the first to
examine Willing as a contribution to Arendt's theory of the
self and action. Ronald Beiner's brief remarks on Willing come
in the context of an essay on Judging. Others, like Yarbrough and
Stern, and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, discuss Willing only briefly as
part of a general discussion of The Life of the Mind. (See
"Reflections on Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind," Political
Theory [May 1982], 277-305.) And although J. Glenn Gray does
discuss Willing at length, he is less concerned with Arendt's
concept of the self per se than with her theory of freedom.
38. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," Political Theory
(this issue), see under "Arendt's Concept of the Self," emphasis
mine.
39. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," see under
"Conclusion." 40. The claim that the self's psychological
attributes have nothing to do with its
identity-that they in fact obscure identity and hinder the
self's efforts to attain it-has no part in the modern debate on
identity. All parties to this debate, whether indebted to Locke and
Hume or to Descartes, see psychological features of the self as
somehow related to personal identity. They disagree, in this
regard, only on the degree of significance they assign to these
features. See, for example, Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons
(Oxford University Press, 1984); and Bernard Williams, Problems of
the Seyl (Cambridge University Press, 1973).
41. THC, 176. 42. LOMII, 217, emphasis original. Cf. "On
Violence"in Crises of the Republic(New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 179. Arendt's
description of the actor as, in effect, "born again"is typical of
the Christian tone of her rhetoric whenever discussing our
"capacity for beginning." She describes "the fact of natality" as
"the miracle that saves the world" (THC, 247); she says: "The
purpose of the creation of man was to make possible a beginning"
(LOM II, 217). Arendt's rhetoric is likely influenced by her belief
that freedom and "religious conversion" are historically connected.
"There is no preoccupation with freedom in the whole history of
great philosophy from the Pre-Socratics up to Plotinus, the last
ancient philosopher. And when freedom made its first appearance in
our philosophical tradition, it was the appearance of Paul first
and then of Augustine which gave rise to it" (BPF, 145-146 and see
LOM II, 6).
43. THC, 179. 44. THC, 184. 45. THC, 190, 233. 46. THC, 236-7.
This view is unchanged in LOM. "In the realm of action . .. no
deed
can be safely undone" (LOM 1!, 30). 47. THC, 240. On Arendt's
account, forgiveness shares many features in virtue of
which action is valorized. This is partly because Arendt
understands forgiveness to be "one of the potentialities of human
action itself" (THC, 237). According to Arendt, "the act of
forgiving can never be predicted.... Forgiving is the only reaction
which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly,
unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing
from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is
forgiven"(THC, 241); Here, as elsewhere, Arendt is likely indebted
to Nietzsche, who also distinguishes the merely reactive from the
spontaneous and active and valorizes the latter. See The Will To
Power (henceforth WP), ed. by Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968), 916; and The Genealogy of Morals (henceforth GM),
trans. by Francis Golffing, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1956),
xi-xii.
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
94 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
But Arendt overestimates the power of "forgiveness." Even if we
accept her claim that forgiving frees both parties from the
consequences of the original trespass, the act of forgiving has
consequences of its own which Arendt does not consider. The parties
involved become, respectively, "the one who forgives" and "the one
who is forgiven." As such, the former has cause to feel virtuous or
generous, and the latter grateful and indebted. Thus relations of
equality, crucial to Arendt's account of politics, are undermined
by forgiveness, just as, in Kant's view, they are by philanthropy.
See Doctrine of Virtue, trans. by Mary J. Gregor (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 434, 472.
48. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," see under
"Conclusion." 49. THC, 240. Indeed, nowhere in Arendt's discussion
of forgiveness in The Human
Condition does the term responsibility appear, and its absence
is problematic, for the attribution of some form of responsibility
is a postulate of forgiveness. Arendt would have done better to
avoid the term forgiveness altogether and to substitute
"dismissing" for "forgiving" instead of treating the two as
synonyms. (Had she done so, she might have avoided the problem
noted above in n. 47.) Alternatively, she might have relied more
heavily on her own description of the process as one of "constant
mutual release" (THC, 240). In all likelihood she did not do this
because she relied on Jesus'formulation in which the "reason for
the insistence on a duty to forgive is clearly 'for they know not
what they do"' (THC, 239).
Arendt's reliance on this formulation and her use of the
termforgiveness obscure the extent to which this part of her
account is indebted to Nietzsche. Nietzsche sees no virtue in
forgiveness, only weakness disguised as strength: In the "murky
shop" where "ideals are manufactured . . . to be unable to avenge
oneself is called to be unwilling to avenge oneself-even
forgiveness ('For they know not what they do-we alone know what
they do)" (GMI, xiv). The truly strong, in Nietzsche's view, have
no need of forgiveness nor of punishment. "Indifferent" to
trespasses, they dismiss them without ceremony in what might well
be called a process of "constant mutual release" (see GM II, xi).
"It is a sign of strong, rich temperaments that they cannot for
long take seriously their enemies, their misfortunes, their
misdeeds; for such characters have in them an excess of plastic
curative power, and also a power of oblivion." They are "unable to
forgive" because they have "forgotten" (GM II, x-xi). This is
characteristic not just of strong individuals but also of strong
communities. According to Nietzsche,
whenever a community gains in power and pride, its penal code
always becomes more lenient.... It is possible to imagine a society
flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its
offenders go unpunished. What greater luxury is there for a society
to indulge in? 'Why should I bother about these parasites of mine?'
such a society might ask. 'Let them take all they want. I have
plenty' [GM II x].
50. THC, 235, n. 75. 51. THC, 246. Arendt's use ofthe term
"suigeneris"to describe action is not careless.
It follows from her controversial claim that "the faculty of
action is ontologically rooted" in "the fact of natality" (THC,
247, emphasis mine; cf. LOM II, 217).
52. THC, 205. Compare Nietzsche, "In Pericles'famous funeral
oration... he tells the Athenians: 'Our boldness has gained us
access to every land and sea, and erected
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 95
monuments to itself for both good and evil'!" Nietzsche notes
with approval, "This 'boldness' of noble races, so headstrong,
absurd, and incalculable, sudden, improbable ... their utter
indifference to safety and comfort" (GM I, xi). This short passage
contains within it many of the essentials of Arendt's view of
action: Disdain for our concern for (physical) safety and comfort;
the glorification of performances which are spontaneous and
surprising; and the claim that the glory of action is not a
function of its goodness.
53. THC, 245. 54. THC, 237. Again, compare Nietzsche: "To breed
an animal with the right to make
promises-is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set
itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding
man?"(GMII, i). The process by which the "problem"has been
"resolved" historically is the object of Nietzsche's scathing
criticism in the second essay of the Genealogy. (Cf. "The Four
Great Errors," in Twilight of the Idols, 7-8). Arendt might be seen
as attempting to resolve this problem by giving an account of
promising which she believes is less demanding and coercive, and
less bloody, than the historical practice of which Nietzsche is so
critical.
55. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," see under
"Conclusion." 56. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," see
under "Conclusion." 57. THC, 244. 58. Jacobitti's treatment of
Arendt's concept of promising is an instanceof the way in
which her reading of Arendt is complicated by her conviction
that any theory of action must postulate a 'coherent' agent.
Moreover, her assumption that this conviction is shared weakens her
criticisms of Arendt. For example, though Jacobitti believes that
Arendt's claim "that people will judge us by how we appear in the
world and that in this sense only others can truly say 'who' we
are, is an important and valid theme in much of Arendt's earlier
thought," she insists that this "does not obviate the need for a
self who is the agent of action" (Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the
Will," see under "Notes," n. 60, emphasis mine). But she stops
short of a broader critique of Arendt's theory of action in which
the central issue must be the fact that one of the central aims of
the Arendtian project is, precisely, to "obviate the need for a
self who is the agent of action."
59. THC, 244. Arendt's valorization of the contingency of the
human world echoes Nietzsche's:
In the inner psychic economy of the primitive man, fear of evil
predominates. What is evil? Three things: chance, the uncertain,
the sudden.... [But] a state is possible in which the sense of
security and belief in law and calculability enter consciousness in
the form of satiety and disgust-while the delight in chance, the
uncertain and the sudden becomes titillating [WP 1019].
60. THC, 244. 61. Nietzsche, too, is critical of autonomy
because it demands too comprehensive an
ordering of the self. He claims that "the terms autonomous and
moral are mutually exclusive" (GM II, ii) and argues "that ethics
has never lost its reek of blood and torture-not even in Kant,
whose categorical imperative smacks of cruelty" (GM II, vi).
62. Once again an analogue to this view can be found in Arendt's
political theory:
The danger and the advantage inherent in all bodies politic that
rely on contracts and treaties is that they, unlike those that rely
on rule and sovereignty, leave the
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
96 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
unpredictability of human affairs and the unreliability of men
as they are.... The moment promises lose their character as
isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty ... they
lose their binding power and the whole enterprise becomes
self-defeating [THC, 244].
And, once again, Arendt echoes Nietzsche, who says: "To accept
any legal system as sovereign and universal-to accept it, not
merely as an instrument in the struggle of power complexes, but as
a weapon against struggle. . .-is an anti-vital principle which can
only bring about man's utter demoralization and, indirectly a reign
of nothingness" (GMII, xi).
63. LOM I, 187. 64. THC, 175,220; cf. THC, 234 and LOMII, 200
("Political freedom is possible only
in the sphere of human plurality'). Because Arendt sees
difference as a postulate of politics, she mistrusts compassion in
the public realm, for compassion, in her view, abolishes the
distance between persons, and this "in-between" is essential to
political life. This recalls Kant's view that respect, the
expression of our cognizance of the distance which separates us, is
the appropriate attitude of the political realm. In The Human
Condition, Arendt's debt to Kant on this matter is hard to miss.
"Respect ... is a kind of 'friendship' without intimacy and without
closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which
the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is
independent of qualities which we may highly esteem" (THC,
243).
65. THC, 220, 234. 66. LOM I, 70. 67. WP, 490. 68. Jacobitti,
"Hannah Arendt and the Will,"see under"Arendt's Concept ofthe
Self"
and "Conclusion." 69. LOM I, 187. Compare OR, 102: "The identity
of this person [who is both "agent
and onlooker'], in contrast to the identity of the modem
individual, was formed not by oneness but by a constant
hither-and-thither of two-in-one; and this movement found its
highest and purest actuality in the dialogue of thought."
70. LOM 1, 187. Note that it is not the self which is an
"original duality," but its thinking faculty. This faculty is just
one of many features of a self which is an original multiplicity.
Arendt emphasizes the "original duality" of thinking in this
context because she aims to challenge, not just the assumption that
we have an original unified identity, but also the conviction that
that identity can be discovered through thinking and
introspection.
71. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will,"see under"Arendt's
Concept of the Self." 72. LOM I, 75. 73. THC, 234. 74. Jacobitti,
"Hannah Arendt and the Will," see under "Conclusion." 75. George
Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil(Totowa, NJ:
Rowman
and Allanheld, 1983), 8. 76. GM I, xiii. 77. For Nietzsche's
views on how multiplicity is to be approached, see WP, 912,
928,
966, 1049, 1050; The Gay Science (henceforth GS), trans. by
Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), 299, 355, and esp.
290.
78. WP, 481. 79. THC, 193. Cf. LOM II, 155 ("Not the record of
past events but only the story
makes sense'). 80. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will,"see
under "Arendt's Concept of the Self."
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Honig / IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 97
81. LOM I, 132-133. Compare Nietzsche:
What should win our gratitude-Only artists, and especially those
of the theater, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with
some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself,
desires himself; only they have taught us the art of viewing
ourselves as heroes-from a distance and, as it were, simplified and
transfigured-the art of staging and watching ourselves. Only in
this way can we deal with some base details in ourselves [GS
78].
82. Jacobitti, "HannahArendt and the Will,"see under"Arendt's
Concept ofthe Self," quoting LOM I, 94.
83. "If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same,
then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of
uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to
the very condition of plurality. . . . only under the assumption of
one god ... can sovereignty and freedom be the same" (THC,
234-235).
84. Arendt says that "our sense of unequivocal reality is so
bound up with the presence of others that we can never be sure of
anything that only we ourselves know and no one else" (OR 96). Cf.
LOM 1, 19-20, 50; THC, 58.
85. LOM II, 94. 86. THC, 184-193. 87. Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt
and the Will," see under "Conclusion." 88. Rebecca West, The Judge
(New York: Dial Press, 1980), 64. 89. In support of her claim that
"one can find glimpses of ['a strong concept of'] self in
Arendt and that, indeed, at times she is struggling to develop
it," Jacobitti cites Arendt's characterization "of the person as
the 'who' that is revealed in a lifetime of words and deeds, a
'who' known better by others than by itself, the hero of a life
story, who is also more than the specific words and deeds" ("Hannah
Arendt and the Will," see under "Conclusion'). As Jacobitti notes,
however, this is a "who ... known better by others than by itself."
Indeed, this "who," on Arendt's account, is the subject of a
"biography,"(THC, 186) not an autobiography. This is not a "self
firmly in charge of" itself but a self whose story (and therefore
identity) is in the hands of others. If this self is "more than
specific words and deeds," it is because it has been turned into
"the hero of a life story" by the spectators. More to the point,
this is not a continuous self. Action is inherently episodic and
each episode begins anew, undetermined by previous actions and
disclosures. Because each exercise in self-disclosure is unique and
unrepeatable, even a self which has disclosed itself before is
unable to predict 'who' it will disclose the next time it acts. In
part for this reason, action is always risky.
Jacobitti goes on to argue that Arendt gestures towards a strong
concept of the self when she says, "Just as thinking prepares the
self for the role of spectator, willing fashions it into an
'enduring-I' that directs all particular acts of volition. It
creates the self's character" (Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the
Will," see under "Arendt's Concept of the Self," quoting LOM II,
195). Jacobitti places great emphasis on this reference to an
"enduring-I", as does Elizabeth Young-Bruehl ("Reflections on
Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, "p. 283-284), but this
emphasis is misplaced. Recall that Willing is written as a history
of understandings or, for the most part, misunderstandings of the
will. This account of the will as the creator of the self's
character is cited by Arendt as an example of one of these
misunderstandings. The sentence which begins "It [i.e., the will]
creates the
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
98 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1988
selfs character," goes on as follows: "and therefore was
sometimes understood as ... the source of the person's specific
identity"(LOMII, 195, emphasis mine). "Understood," that is, not by
Arendt but by others in the history of philosophy. Note, too, that
this passage is introduced only after Arendt issues her familiar
warning that "everyphilosophy of the will is conceived and
articulated not by men of action but by philosophers, Kant's
'professional thinkers"' (LOM II, 195). See also in this context
Arendt's critique of J. S. Mill's reliance on, what she terms, an
"enduring-I" (LOM nI, 96-97).
This reading is buttressed by a passage in Thinking which
clearly refers to the passage here in question. After setting out
the course she intends to follow in tracing the history of the
will, Arendt says:
At the same time I shall follow a parallel development in the
history of the will according to which volition is the inner
capacity by which men decide about 'whom' they are going to be, in
what shape they wish to show themselves in the world of
appearances. In other words, it is the will, whose subject matter
is projects, not objects, which in a sense creates the person that
can be blamed or praised or anyhow held responsible not merely for
its actions but for its whole 'Being,' its character. The Marxian
and Existentialist notions, which play such a great role in
twentieth-century thought and pretend that man is his own producer
and maker, rest on these experiences, even though it is clear that
nobody has 'made'himselfor 'produced'his existence; this, Ithink,
is the last of the metaphysicalfallacies (LOM I, 190, emphasis
mine).
Relying exclusively on the second sentence of this passage,
Jacobitti asserts that Arendt "follows tradition in arguing that
because the will is the faculty by virtue of which we are free and
by virtue of which we act, it is also the faculty by virtue of
which we are held responsible and morally accountable" (Jacobitti,
"Hannah Arendt and the Will," see under "Arendt's Concept of the
Will'). On my reading, however, Arendt does not endorse this view
of the will; she vehemently opposes it.
B. Honig is completing a dissertation titled "Virtue and
Virtuosity: Politics in a Post-Kantian World."
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 19 Mar 2015
13:39:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Article Contentsp. 77p. 78p. 79p. 80p. 81p. 82p. 83p. 84p. 85p.
86p. 87p. 88p. 89p. 90p. 91p. 92p. 93p. 94p. 95p. 96p. 97p. 98
Issue Table of ContentsPolitical Theory, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Feb.,
1988) pp. 1-172Volume InformationFront Matter [pp. 1-52]From the
Editor [pp. 3-4]Spirit's Phoenix and History's Owl or the
Incoherence of Dialectics in Hegel's Account of Women [pp.
5-28]Arendt, Politics, and the SelfJudgment and the Moral
Foundations of Politics in Arendt's Thought [pp. 29-51]Hannah
Arendt and the Will [pp. 53-76]Arendt, Identity, and Difference
[pp. 77-98]
Foundings of AmericaThe Ghostly Body Politic: The Federalist
Papers and Popular Sovereignty [pp. 99-119]Thomas Paine: Ransom,
Civil Peace, and the Natural Right to Welfare [pp. 120-142]
Books in ReviewReview: untitled [pp. 143-148]Review: untitled
[pp. 148-150]Review: untitled [pp. 151-154]Review: untitled [pp.
154-159]Review: untitled [pp. 159-163]Review: untitled [pp.
163-167]Review: untitled [pp. 167-170]
Announcements [pp. 171-172]Back Matter