argues that action is essentially conditioned by speech, claiming that without speech action would be meaningless. They are like two sides of a coin: action creates new realities, and speech discloses those new realities.127 She writes that action “is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word.”128 Readers often find this fundamental association of speech and action odd, since clearly labor and work can involve the use of speech. What Arendt appears to mean by this is that action is the activity humans possess to create stories, and thus meaning. Storytelling would be inconceivable without speech, while the products of work and the abundance of labor seem not necessarily so.129 Arendt refers to them as essentially speechless because, in her view, while work and labor may use speech in contingent circumstances, each could be performed without speech and would still maintain its same essential character.130 These distinctions should not be interpreted too literally, however, as if there is necessarily a strict dichotomy between instances of work and action: there is no reason the same act may not be both a moment of work and a moment of action. The distinction between the two activities does not occur at a logical level, but instead at an essential and ontological level. To take a relatively recent example, the invention the personal computer, for instance, demonstrates characteristics of both work and action.
The only other activity that Arendt believes is essentially conditioned by speech is thought, which she argues takes place in the “two-in-one” dialogue of the thinking ego, and which we use to frame and make sense of the events of our life stories.131 Arendt recognized this essential relation of thought and action to speech as far back as her first manuscript in 1954, which confronted the question of the relation of thought and action, saying that to partake in thought and action “meant to be aware of being human in an articulate, specific sense. Action without speech was violence; since it could not disclose its meaning in words, it remained senseless and meaningless. Thought, on the other hand, [could be so little conceived as proceeding without] speech that one single word, logos, was used for both ‘word’ and ‘thought or argument.’”132 Arendt, in other words, came to believe that human freedom and the capacity for speech—whether expressed in the context of the philosophical freedom of thought or in the performance of great actions in the human world—were so essentially related that it was literally impossible to comprehend one without the other.
Excursus: The Concept of Non-Sovereign Agency
This essential relationship between human agency and speech led Arendt to attack one of the central pillars of traditional political thought: the concept of sovereignty. The notion of non-sovereign freedom takes its bearings from Arendt’s insight that political action is misconceived when it is articulated in terms of the sovereign engagement of a unified and unconditioned will.133 She insisted that this understanding of political action inevitably leads to the identification of political action with violence, since, in her view, only violence could unilaterally enact the intentions of a unified will.134 It was this sovereign understanding of action that led to the tradition of political thought’s fabricative model of political judgment, which imagines the relationship between thought and action to involve the execution by those who are ruled of a preconceived idea produced by a ruler. Arendt believed that the moment action is conceived in unilateral terms of willful execution, it has lost contact with the phenomenal evidence associated with action, which always involves the creation of new realities and moves within a human web of relationships that responds to and creates a new, unintended set of circumstances other than what the actor intended. Arendt’s insights into the non-sovereign conditions of human agency have inspired recent scholarship by Joan Cocks, Sharon Krause, Patchen Markell, Dana Villa, and Linda Zerilli.135 These scholars have sought to explore how agency must be reconceived when such conditions as its essential relation to speech, plurality, worldliness, relational relativity, and unpredictability are taken into account. I want now to pause and explore this notion of non-sovereign agency, paying special attention to the unique insights I believe Arendt can offer it.
It is vitally important to understand that—based as it is on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology—Arendtian action is not merely epiphenomenal. Each act of human agency carries tremendous potency. Arendtian agency asserts that action is not retroactively achieved through contemplative reflection or located outside phenomenal reality in a noumenal realm, but instead has the potential to monumentally impact the concrete human world. As such, action is incredibly rare, happening at best only a few times in any given human life. As the subject matter of the narrative of a human life, action forms the content—the acts, deeds, events—their stories recount. It is the specific, concrete, and sui generis actions an actor undertakes that reveals the “whoness” of the actor, their unique identity. Only that actor and that actor alone would have summoned up that unique, particular response to the circumstances that were presented to them in the world. The action is something completely original to the actor, something that could never have been predicted on the basis of antecedent causes. Arendt argues that action is exclusively characterized by its extraordinariness, and thus human historical reality is the story of events enacted by human agents.136
Arendt’s notion of action has both inspired and perplexed her readers. Many struggle with how her account of human agency can be intelligible once our ability to predict the outcome of our acts becomes so ambiguous. If we have no control over the outcome of our actions, does this not render our agency moot? I want to argue here that this is not necessarily so. Instead, it only significantly attenuates and complicates it, that the actor’s agency involves trying to, in Arendt’s words, “force things into a certain direction.”137 Because action is something that is essentially intersubjective, it appears as if any description of the causality of action could never be characterized in terms of a simplistic cause/effect logic.138 Thus, the first presumption that has to be abandoned is any easy understanding of the causality occurring in human agency in terms of fabrication—of an effect achieved by our acts that is the result of an antecedent mechanical or efficient cause.
If human ontology truly is at its basis a narrative or story that conditions our epistemological and historical frameworks in the way Heidegger suggests, then the sense of causality associated with it has to be reconceived in a much more sophisticated manner. Contemporary philosophers such as Charles Taylor, for instance, have noted the likely impossibility of ever performing a complete reduction of historical phenomena to physical mechanism.139 But even beyond the metaphysically contested nature of causality, our phenomenal conception of causality has always been marked by much more sophistication than the mechanistic conception of cause and effect. Aristotle, for instance, famously theorized a fourfold phenomenology of causality, none of which—not even causa efficiens—coheres exactly with the modern mechanistic conception of causality. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger embraced this conception of causality, arguing that authentic human causality is never sovereign causality: it recognizes that human action never truly enacts its will, but instead has the sense of cultivating and abetting that which proceeds out of physis or Being, for example, in parenting, advising, or farming.140 Arendt, however, developed a more dynamic notion of the causality of human agency. Unlike Heidegger and Aristotle, Arendtian action does not just abet what is already proceeding out of Being; it is itself natal. It is the beginning of something new.
In order to conceptualize this dynamic conception of causality, we might preliminarily refer to Kant’s discussions of causality in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant understood mechanism (cause and effect) to be only one category of a threefold categorical account that included both “substantia et accidens” and what he calls “community” or “interaction.”141 This last category of interaction is much closer to the kind of causality Arendt understands human action to have, although her version is much more dynamic and potent. Kant refers to it as the notion of “a dynamic community,” that is, the fact that within a given community of phenomena they all are reciprocally interacting and determining each other and this interaction has to be understood dynamically
