the fact that it makes no sense to understand the relation between the earth and the moon solely in terms of the earth exerting a force on the moon or vice versa; rather, they interact by exerting a common force on each other. In other words, the notion of causality involved here is, as Kant says, “not successive but instantaneous.”143 The notion of causality that I believe Arendt had in mind in her notion of non-sovereign action should be understood much more in terms of this sort of dynamic interaction than in the fabricative (i.e., sovereign) conception of cause and effect that arises out of causality’s mechanistic aspect.
It is easy to find examples of dynamic causality in human life. Team sports are an obvious case of dynamic causality. A good quarterback or point guard can never sovereignly and unilaterally enact his will. Rather, his leadership and decision-making abilities in fluid situations enable the team to execute together. There is an interaction and dynamism among the players that seems impossible to reduce to cause and effect. Another example is found in the art of persuasion. People in sales often point out that skilled salespeople know when to stop selling their customers; they have to find the right moment to let customers choose for themselves to buy the product. These are, of course, necessarily simplistic examples geared toward illustration, but the basic idea is easily applied to our relationships in general. The point is that relationships are dynamic: any action requires a very subtle comprehension of the state of affairs the act will bring about between individuals affected by the action. When I relate to another person through action, I do not enact my will on them. Arendt insists throughout her work that the only effect action has is to establish relationships;144 in other words, the moment I act in relation to another person, that person simultaneously reacts to me. What results is not an effect, but a new dynamic state of affairs. Something arises between us, a relationship, that is fundamentally dynamic—what Arendt calls “a space of appearance” that separates and relates us—whose ultimate meaning I could never have exactly predicted and whose outcome I can never be certain of. And that ultimate meaning can only be revealed by the story of the relationship. This is why, as we will see later, Arendt’s conception of practical reason in analogy to artistic judgment is so apposite. In a similar way to great art, the actor can never be completely certain of what their actions will ultimately mean. Yet, it is indicative of a skillful actor—an actor with what Machiavelli called virtù—to be capable of deliberating on a course of action that will end in a meaningful story, a story that reveals the actor’s “whoness,” just as skillful artists will almost always find their work meaning something other than they intended at the beginning.
In truth, Arendt’s articulations of human agency are much closer to phenomenal reality than anything produced in traditional accounts. An action can be the most exhilarating experience of one’s life. For younger people, first dates can be exhilarating and nerve-racking because each one possesses a clear potential for action: the events of the night may set off a life-defining chain of events. Action, in fact, constitutes those rare moments in life—weddings, births, career choices, interventions, conversion experiences—where we know we are “laying it all on the line,” so to speak, risking our life as we currently know it in order to initiate a course of action that expresses our “whoness,” our unique identity, in a richer and deeper way than how our lives existed before. Action is certainly not equivalent to our capacity for free choice:145 whether or not I choose to spend my Sunday morning working out, sleeping in, or going to church is far from an instance of action. Indeed, it is not even clear if there is an unambiguous moment of choice involved in a particular action. Arendt notes that, while action clearly involves some kind of initiation on the part of the actor, it also has to be “carried through,” and this carrying through is just as much a part of the act or event.146 When a recent college graduate acts in undertaking to go to graduate school or decides to start his own business, it is not clear that there was ever one specific moment of choice or initiation; rather, there might be a series of progressive choices and courses of action undertaken that when taken together amount to an action. What matters is not the specific instances, but rather whether there is a self-defining act that the actor can recount in the story of his or her life.
Moreover, while this “carrying through” of the action can be performed by the actor to a certain extent, it can probably never be done completely alone: other actors must also help see the action through with that actor. Since action always occurs in what Arendt calls the “web of human relationships,” the meaning and thus the final outcome of the act is never up to the actor alone—who can at best force events in a particular direction—but probably even more so to other actors with whom he or she interacts.147 Consider the recovery movement. Very often, the fact that addicts or trauma victims were able to transcend their history and begin establishing a meaningful life for themselves and their family could never have been predicted on the basis of existing antecedent causes. In fact, very often those who know them best have long since given up hope that they will ever change. The recovery movement illustrates the profoundly intersubjective nature of action that Arendt continually points to: Addicts are the initiators of the act, they take the first step; but in many ways it is the support—the “carrying through,” as it were—that they receive from their peers in the movement that allows them to, if not overcome completely, at least gain some kind of power over their addictions or traumas.148
But all this does not mean that Arendt understood action to be an unadulterated good—far from it, in fact. Arendt was quite aware that action has dark and dangerous elements: suicide or abandonment, after all, are certainly moments of action.149 Action is often the source of the greatest tragedies of our lives, moments where something precious is lost or destroyed. Indeed, in a variety of places, including The Human Condition, Arendt also points to the burdensome character of action.150 Her polemically laudatory comments in The Human Condition and elsewhere at times obscure the fact that action undertaken in the wrong spirit can be a profoundly dark activity, whose results may be both dangerous and immoral (Hitler’s “final solution,” after all, was no doubt an action).151 Arendt believed humans were generally ambivalent about their freedom, often experiencing it as heartbreaking and overwhelming,152 and in modernity this has led to a “flight into impotency, a desperate desire to be relieved entirely of the ability to act.”153
There in fact seems to be an essential element of the tragic in Arendt’s conception of human agency. The victories achieved in our life stories only have meaning against the experience of failure; moments of joy have a bittersweet depth drawn from the knowledge of griefs that preceded them and that inevitably await us. The heroism and elitism that Arendtian action is often simplistically interpreted with are, in fact, leavened by a recognition of the persistence of sorrow and defeat in a world of profoundly flawed and mortal human beings. It seems that what animated Arendt’s reflections on the limits of the human condition was a desire to give the full scope of human agency its due, to reckon with the fact that it is our sadness and disappointments as much as our accomplishments and moments of joy that make us fully human and thus capable of appreciating others with the courage to act.
This essentially tragic element of human action was the basis for Arendt’s challenge to the modern understanding of politics as sovereignty and its fundamental objective: success. Arendt believed there was something inhuman in the modern obsession with the idea that success defined the fundamental criteria of action. Because of its essential conditioning by speech, the defining characteristic of action can never be the sovereignty of success, but instead non-sovereign political categories such as historical greatness and commitment to the preservation of the common world. This, of course, does not mean that success is not a factor in actors’ deliberations concerning courses of action. But it does imply that success cannot be the fundamental criterion of political judgment, for success can never redeem action. A successful course of action—genocide, for instance—may successfully achieve the short-term intentions of the actors, but it will never be redeemable in speech. The judgment of (authentic) history will inevitably come to view it as despicable. To illustrate this, Arendt often quoted a favorite line from Cato: “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated cause pleased Cato.”154 What she means by this is that, in the course of history,
