cannot defend himself against the blows of fate, against the chicanery of the gods, but he can resist them in speech and respond to them, and though the response changes nothing … such words belong to the event as such. If words are of equal rank with the event, if, as is said at the end of Antigone, “great words” answer and requite “great blows struck from on high,” then what happens is itself something great and worthy of remembrance and fame … our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish.155
If we consider defining political moments of recent memory, it is indeed evident that success or failure is not what defines the significance and meaning of the event itself and its consequences for our world. The election of Barack Obama may have been a moment of success in American race relations, but it was not merely the success of the endeavor that bore its meaning: it was what the event disclosed to and about American politics at that moment. Yet historically, certain moments of defeat in American race relations were at least as world defining: the violence done to the peaceful protesters of the civil rights movement or the assassination of Martin Luther King probably did more to force American politics to consistently recognize the question of race than anything Barack Obama will ever do. This, of course, does not mean that success is not often a necessity; it does, however, mean that success could never be the essential criterion of human agency.
Political Athanatizein
I turn now to how Arendt reintroduced human agency back into historical reflection, a project that centered on reviving political athanatizein. Benjamin Constant famously drew the distinction between the liberty of the moderns and the liberty of the ancients. The liberty of the moderns, perhaps best exemplified by Rawls currently, is a private liberty that politics protects through the guarantee of certain basic rights and liberties and, increasingly, on certain baseline conditions of social equality. Arendt remains the most prominent modern proponent of the liberty of the ancients, which located the arena of free human action not in a private sphere made secure by politics but in the arena of politics itself. According to Arendt, political action had once afforded a much more profound, meaningful, and consequential realm of human freedom than modern private liberty, which, having located freedom in private life, in her view rendered freedom impotent and insignificant and therefore unremarkable.
Many readings of Arendt’s political thought focus on what she calls the “condition of plurality”: her current Wikipedia page (ca. 2015), for instance, characterizes her political thought by pointing to her statement of the “conditio per quam … of all political life”: the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”156 Though broadly accurate, I argue here that focusing on plurality does not capture the full meaning of what Arendt had in mind by the notion of the political, that the political for her was better described as an articulation of the conditions of political athanatizein. The condition of plurality is based on the fact of the narrative agency of human beings and expresses the fact that the world is filled with a plurality of unique life stories. As we’ve seen, like Heidegger, Arendt believed this narrative ontology of human beings was the primordial source of history: “That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with a beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end.”157 The deep question this condition poses is how these stories, which in her view are so distinctive that they are literally sui generis,158 can escape the isolation and solipsism this absolute individualism implies and be related to each other in a way that could afford the possibility of historical immortality. She sought to do this by articulating the activity, action, that humans perform to provide the content of these stories and by defending the ability of a common world and public realm to provide an intersubjective space of reality where actors can enact their life stories before their peers. I argue in the following that only action performed in a public realm, political action, is capable of achieving historical greatness, that is, political athanatizein.
The interpretation of Arendtian political action offered here implicitly takes a position on a point that has been somewhat ambiguous in the literature on Arendt: to wit, whether there could be any kind of action performed in the private realm, that is, nonpolitical action. I believe the notion that Arendt thought action could only take place in the political arena is largely based on a lack of precision in her writing in The Human Condition, imprecisions she clarifies elsewhere. In The Human Condition, Arendt draws a sharp distinction between the public and the private realm. Because of her interest in reasserting the significance of the public realm, she is often thought to have taken a dim view of the private realm. This notion is reinforced by the fact that when she initially discusses the public realm in The Human Condition she seems to identify it with the idea of the “common world.” 159 The “common world” is the general concept Arendt develops to explain how the absolute plurality of individual “whos” can be related to each other. The common world, in Arendt’s words, has the power “to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.”160 Thus, if the common world is indeed identical to the public realm, then it seems true that there could be no action in the private sphere. However, there is good reason to believe that this section of the book was either not fully thought through or simply badly written.
To begin with, Arendt is not nearly as contemptuous of the private realm in The Human Condition as is often thought. Her concern, rather, was that the distinction between the public and private realms had become muddled in the modern era, and it was this “social realm” to which she directed her contempt. She believed, in fact, that the private realm was a sacred space withdrawn from the world that humans needed desperately, a realm that sheltered them from the cold light of the public realm, and indeed it was the role of politics to protect this realm as much as it was to protect the public realm.161 She believed one of the tragedies of modern capitalism was the redefining of private property away from the idea of a “privately held place within the world” and toward the idea of capital accumulation.162 Moreover, in later writings she clearly distinguishes between “the [common] world and its public space,”163 and repeatedly indicates the existence of action in the private realm. In her lecture course, “Some Questions Concerning Moral Philosophy,” written a few years after The Human Condition, she explicitly indicates the existence of “nonpolitical action, which does not take place in public.”164 And even in The Human Condition there are indications suggesting the existence of this kind of action in privately situated settings, such as when she states of “action and speech” that the modern era has “banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private.”165 Thus, the common world is better understood as including both our public and private relationships. While it is probably the case that truly private action is impossible—since action necessarily must be performed with and before others—it is likely that most action is of a kind of quasi-public nature. Most of our relationships probably involve some kind of informal public realm or space of appearance.166 In “Introduction into Politics,” Arendt states that “wherever human beings come together—be it in private or social, be it in public or politically—a space is generated that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another.… Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-between space that all human affairs are conducted.”167
This is most clearly evident in how Arendt describes the idea of a “space of appearance.” Arendt identifies a space of appearance with reality as such: a space between the actors where phenomena can intersubjectively appear to them.168 This space of appearance is a broad phenomenon and can appear wherever people act and speak together: “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.… Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.”169
