groundlessness in death. Historicity, in other words, is for him rooted in the condition of mortality.85 Though certainly unimaginable without a recognition of the condition of mortality, Arendt nevertheless finds historicity to be rooted in a condition that is diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s account: in birth, or what Arendt calls the condition of natality.86 Arendt equates human natality, the ability to be born, with the human capacity for action, which she defines as the ability to begin something new:87 “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world.… The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.”88 In other words, it is this capacity to act and to begin that Arendt believes forms the content of our life stories. Our lives are made up of a series of unique happenings—events and deeds that constitute our “whoness.” While, like Heidegger, this relationship between action and historicity becomes the condition of history for Arendt, it affords a very different sensibility than Heidegger gave it. In Arendt’s words: “But the reason why each human life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind … is that both are the outcome of action.”89 And as a result, because Heidegger’s conception of history deals not merely at a psychological but instead at an ontological level, Arendt’s account of action carries extraordinary potency, in a way Heidegger’s contemplative notion of action probably never could, offering unique potential to radically alter our existing circumstances every time we perform an act.90
Arendt believed that part of the reason Heidegger arrived at these conclusions was that, especially in Being and Time, Heidegger drew his phenomenological conclusions from modern society and politics, a context that in her view greatly resisted potent human agency. In The Human Condition, Arendt set out to use Heidegger’s “pearl diving” approach against him, attempting to unearth authentic experiences of historically potent human political agency that had been lost in the past. What she discovered was that Heidegger’s view of the public realm and common world remained deeply bound to the philosophical tradition’s historical prejudices against it. This refusal to leave those prejudices behind meant that while his existentialism may have successfully escaped the metaphysics of presence, his philosophy could not truly achieve an understanding of authentic human agency and, as a result, could never truly ground historical reflection.
Arendt’s only significant published discussion of her theory of history comes in her essay “The Concept of History.” While the essay contains a clear indication that politics was essentially related to history, Arendt makes much more explicit statements about the relationship in her 1969 lecture course “Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?”; in what follows, I want to use the 1969 course to supplement “The Concept of History” in order to better understand how she related politics and history. In the 1969 course, Arendt suggested that a fundamental tension exists in each human being between the faculty for thought and the faculty for action. It is, of course, relatively common in the modern era to understand there to be a gap of sorts between theory and practice, which must be bridged or reconciled. The idea that there is an essential tension between them is much more perplexing. However, Arendt argued this was not a flaw in humanity; in her view, it made human beings intensely interesting creatures, capable of combining faculties and engaging in activities that, from a phenomenological perspective, appear to have almost nothing in common.
This tension between thought and action arises out of their respective predominance in two fundamentally distinct and mutually exclusive spheres of experience. While action’s sphere of experience was our engaged activity in the world, thought’s sphere of experience took place in a mysterious gap in time between past and future that was utterly and existentially withdrawn from the common world. These spheres of experience gave rise to two authentic ways of life, each directed toward the realization of either thought or action. The vita activa sought to actualize action, and the activity it developed to do this was politics. The vita contemplativa sought to actualize thought, and the activity it developed was philosophy. These pursuits were anchored in competing conceptions of the Greeks’ highest aspiration, captured in the mysterious Greek word athanatizein. In the 1969 course, Arendt notes that athanatizein was virtually impossible to adequately translate, as it was open to multivocal interpretations and took in a variety of disparate practices, but settles for rendering it as “to immortalize.”91 “The common root of politics and philosophy is immortality … not in the sense that the philosophers finally defined it, but only in the sense that both endeavors spring from the same desire of mortals to become or, since that is impossible, to partake in immortality, to get their share of it.”92
Arendt asserts that a kind of competition developed among the Greeks over the best path to athanatizein.93 For the philosophers, athanatizein meant contemplation, “to dwell in the neighborhood of those things which are forever.”94 Philosophy was oriented by the condition of mortality, since it pursued the things that exist beyond human life and its world, “the things which are eternal.”95 This philosophical orientation, she claimed, begins as far back as Plato’s argument in the Phaedo for the immortality of the soul. Since death was the separation of the soul and body, and the philosophers pursued the eternal, the philosophers were therefore in love with death: “the philosopher qua philosopher will wish to die … those who hold fast to philosophy will pursue only dying and having died.”96 According to Arendt, the philosophers sought to live their lives in this gap between past and future and to realize the activities of the gap without reference to human affairs. And from out of this pursuit of immortality, the philosophers found a kind freedom all their own, a “philosophical freedom,”97 which was elevated far beyond the activities of the world of acting women and men. Thus, in this respect Heidegger’s contemplative account of human action and identity, far from distancing him from the philosophical tradition, was what bound him most closely to it.98
In competition with the philosophers, the Greek political actors pursued a very different kind of athanatizein. The tradition of political thought was formulated and structured by the philosophers, and Arendt therefore believed that their contemplative approach to immortalizing had in one way or another framed Western political theories. The problem with this, she argued, was that politics had its own unique and foundational practice of athanatizein, which had nothing to do with contemplation, but instead had to do with action, with free activity in the concrete circumstances of the human world.99 Political actors did not strive to immortalize themselves through contemplation but instead through the performance of great deeds in a public realm where their peers could judge the acts, deciding whether those deeds deserved to become the content of history.100 Thus, the essential characteristic of political action was its concern with the specific kind of immortality that comes from historical greatness in the human world.
However, the historical problem with this uniquely political form of athanatizein was that those who actually lived and took part in this activity—the “men of action,” as she called them—rarely took the time to theorize about it. As a result, most of Western political thought was done by philosophers who disdained the political form of immortalizing and the activities of the men of action.101 Philosophers could not grasp the actors’ obsession with fame and power, since in their view it was “absurd” to think that humans could ever live up to what was highest in the cosmos,102 and came to view political theory, in the words of Pascal, as like “laying down rules for a lunatic asylum.”103 “Hence,” she writes, “the old paradox was resolved by the philosophers by denying to man not the capacity to ‘immortalize,’ but the capacity of measuring himself and his own deeds against the everlasting greatness of the cosmos.”104 Arendt’s political writings were an attempt to provide the fullest articulation yet given of what the Western men of action had actually been doing in their pursuit of immortality.105 To do this, she focused on what she believed were the three originary attempts to achieve political athanatizein in Western politics:
