Honig Arendt Self

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 provocative 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 throughout 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


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 psychological 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


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 distinguishes 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



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 intentions 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,



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 vanquishes 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,



"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 discontinuous, 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 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



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,



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



"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



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



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



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 undermine 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



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.



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



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 beginning . . .' " 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),



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.



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



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



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."



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



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."


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

Honig Arendt Self

Documents

Transcript of Honig Arendt Self