Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Identity
written by Marcell Várkonyi
Master’s Thesis Philosophy
University of Amsterdam
Supervisor dr. Jacques Bos
October 2016
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Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Identity
by Marcell Várkonyi
Hannah Arendt was one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century. Her insights into modernity are essential to our understanding of both the devastating, repressive events of modernity such as the Holocaust and the timeless question of the “human condition”. While politics became the mark and locus of her thought, Arendt refused to accept labels such as that of the theorist or the philosopher. Politics acquired a special meaning for her, hence if we wish to understand the profound insights of Arendt we ought to discard our common contemporary conceptions of politics. Otherwise her most radical and revealing ideas could fall victim to misinterpretation. Through political theory Arendt gave a new definition of the human being to which (self-)reflection was central, and she herself continuously reaffirmed this ideal of the vita activa through her intellectual work. Her unique outlook on human life and modernity already began unfolding in her earlier writings concerning the Jewish Question. The relevance of politics was therefore central to her conception of life from the start in implicit ways. More practically oriented, in these writings we do not yet get a clearly defined meaning of politics, which may lead the reader to a false impression of her groundbreaking ideas. Her more mature and theoretically oriented masterpiece, The Human Condition on the other hand, addresses explicitly the meaning of politics. Her thoughts in this work are unique and important because she offers an alternative conception of politics to the one dominant in contemporary society. In the age of democracy where participation yields questionable results new perspectives are especially helpful. Preventing us from moving in a direction which promotes plurality, Arendt’s ideas offer us plausible alternatives to our ingrained understanding of society and politics.
In Arendt’s thinking identity and politics are connected in unique ways, and it is from the perspective of this relation that I shall explore such key concepts as plurality, action, narrative and the public. Questions of identity address similar issues as politics, especially if we think of politics in the Arendtian sense. In political terms and framed from the perspective of society, identity defines individuals through their interaction and interrelation with each other. In order to see the groundbreaking inventions Arendt made, I shall first present a historical framework of identity. This framework will orient the reader toward the approach I will take to understand identity, which will be essential to my analysis of Arendt. I will show by relying on certain historical accounts that
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instead of being an ahistorical aspect of human life identity is an elusive, changing and contingent phenomenon. This will be essential to my analysis, since this contingency will define what we can say about identity and how we should approach it, thus also defining my attitude towards Arendt’s outlook on politics and identity. Moving on to Arendt, first I will look at her understanding of Jewishness as defined by being the pariah people and the social outcasts. Looking at Arendt’s understanding of Jewishness before moving on to her more explicit and theoretical views about politics and identity will be helpful, because the latter are grounded in Arendt’s experiences of modernity, and of being a Jew in that context. Then I will move on to see what her clearly defined political ideals are, what identity came to mean for her, and how the two are related to each other. Approaching Arendt in this way, moving from the Jewish Question towards the questions of the “human condition” will allow us to discover Arendt’s thought in similar ways as she discovered it herself.
Chapter 1: A Historical Framework and an Approach to Identity
In order to understand how and why the meaning of identity is historical situating it in a specific historical context is necessary. This context will allow us later to see Arendt’s politics of identity in its own context of modernity which will be essential to my interpretation. First let me briefly present the context of the rise of the modern self. Looking at this historical development from a distance we will see that identity is a cultural phenomenon. Although it is often assumed in our modern Western context that independently of historical and cultural contexts each and every individual has a relatively fixed self accompanying him or her throughout their lives, the perception of the human being as a stable entity is in fact only specific to the identity configuration in modernity. Cultural historian Dror Wahrman argues in his book The Rise of the Self by relying on 17th-19th century observational accounts, that the modern phenomenon of the self was preceded
with what he calls the “ancien régime” of identity, in which a radically different configuration of identity was in effect. According to Wahrman there was a rapid and radical break with the way identity was conceived in the course of a few decades at the end of the 18th century, the change
resembling thus a revolution not unlike the scientific revolutions of Thomas Kuhn: the ancien régime of identity preceding the modern perception of the self transformed with a surprising rapidity, which lead to the new configuration of selfhood “so dissimilar , indeed, that […] observers […] looked back at the eighteenth century with expressions of distance, incomprehension, and
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disbelief.”1 Whereas in the modern context it was (and dominantly still is today) the innate traits of
individuals coupled with a certain psychological depth that was considered to be the source of identity, and thus it was also conceived of as relatively fixed and unchanging in a person’s life, the opposite was true of identity in the ancien régime preceding the modern regime of selfhood up until the end of the 18th century. Back then, according to Wahrman, we could witness a configuration
of identity in which “more than a person’s identity, it was masquerading itself that came closest to characterizing the essence of humankind”.2 Preceding the rise of the self it was not the inner
features of individuals, ones that we tend to think of today as biologically determined at birth such as race or sex, but rather the outward reflections of these features that determined who a person was, allowing thus for more mutability. Whereas in the modern regime of selfhood these aspects of identity are usually thought of as factors of biological constitution, cultural aspects therefore being only of the second order, before the 18th century this direction was its reverse. Instead of
moving from scientific essence to factors of appearance and culture, and therefore considering the outward appearance as derivatives of physical and biological constitution, in the ancien régime cultural factors and the factors of appearance were conceived of as primary, first order to the physical ones.3
It should be obvious that such a conception of identity is very different from any commonsensical assumption we have about identity today, to the point of being difficult to believe. This is precisely the point of such an account of “historical epistemology”: to try to reconstruct an epistemological break regarding the perception of identity which took place in the past. Such reversion between physical constitution and outward appearance also meant that identity was not perceived as an affixed feature of a person as it is in the familiar regime of selfhood. That identity was a cultural product and a matter of outward appearance rather than biological and physical constitution gave rise to the idea that one could change one’s identity at will, which, in Wahrman’s account of 18th
century England was in fact a favored practice by people at such events as the popular masquerades.4
Agreeing with Charles Taylor that identity “for the most part exist in our lives through being embedded in practices [… which permeate] all levels of human social life: family, village, national politics, rituals of religious communities, and so on”5, cultural practices become equally important
in Warman’s historical analysis, locating therefore identity at this level of life. Wahrman thus in his anthropologically oriented history focuses on contemporary 18th-19th century observational
1 Wahrman (2004), pp. xiii-xiv 2 Ibid., p. 166
3 Ibid., pp. 294-295 4 Ibid., p. 158
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accounts, which is supposed to mediate the cultural practice of identity without the intermediary of self-conscious intellectual interpretation. The problem with this approach is that it assumes a certain ontology of the human being which is rather specific to modernity. By hoping to “[pick] up the unselfconscious traces, the unintended marks, the signs of those 'unstructured intuitions' that underlay people’s fundamental assumptions about who they were and who they could be”6,
Wahrman employs a certain psychological language specific to the late 19th and 20th century
discourse. Although the duality of reason and experience (synonymous in this context with the unstructured intuition versus self-conscious reflection in Wahrman’s use) is present throughout the history of Western philosophy, the duality of conscious and unconscious mental processes gains explicit articulation in the modern psychological context. Thus it appears that that the epistemological break articulated by Wahrman in his genealogy of identity has left certain fundamental epistemological aspects intact. However, we should see this flaw in Wahrman’s approach not as an obstacle to arriving at an historical understanding of identity, but rather as proof that approaching identity from multiple angles is necessary. Historicity and contextuality is unavoidable even if their deconstruction is the goal. Rather than discouraging us, this fact should serve as an encouragement to approach identity from multiple angles by relying on multiple disciplines.
Even though the element of contextuality is always at play in our inquiry, it will not serve as an excuse for methodological issues. The fact that there is a counter-intuitive epistemological break in Wahrman’s genealogy should make us more wary of the mistakes made in such an historical analysis, since relying on common sense is not an option anymore. Therefore, we have to be careful with accepting any intuitive idea whose justification relies in part on its very counter-intuitiveness. Wahrman as a historian of cultural practices attempts to prove the validity of his hypothesis by arraying a range of examples that were manifestations of cultural practices, which seems appropriate for anthropological history. However, the sufficiency of these examples is difficult to judge. Examples of such identity practices include, among others, the aforementioned events of masquerades, portray painting habits, literary figures of speech and an immense number of accounts describing (but not analyzing) everyday practices.7 Some of Wahrman’s interpretations
seem out of context or exaggerated like that of the case of the masquerades which plays a central role throughout the book. However, since history only forms a part of the present essay, delving into methodological questions is beyond our reach. It is more important to merely see that
6 Wahrman (2004), p. xv
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deviations from our common perception of identity as self exist. Regardless of whether they stand for a broader historical trend or only for individual differences, the epistemological break between the two identity configurations speaks against essentialist approaches to identity. Wahrman’s cultural history shows us the possibility of other configurations of identity, such as that of the ancien régime. Therefore, we can also see that the immutable self is not an innate aspect of human life; instead it is possible to deviate from our deeply ingrained contemporary practice of perceiving identity in terms of affixed and unchangeable categories. Whether these deviations of the concept of identity from the self are marks of a larger trend in the pre-modern times as Wahrman suggests, or they are marks of certain unorthodox groups and individuals compared to the norms of their time remains debatable, but this is not our focus here. For our purposes it is enough to see that identity as a phenomenon is not an essential, unchanging fact.
However, after turning a blind eye to the empirical aspect of anthropological history, there still remain certain fundamental social-ontological issues in Wahrman’s history of the development of the self which are much more relevant to our present inquiry. Up to this point I have not mentioned the multiple meanings that ‘identity’ can convey; however, it is essential to understand that this term has two meanings in the context of modernity which in certain regards contradict each other: “the question “who am I?””, according to Wahrman, is “a productive tension between two contradictory impulses: identity as the unique individuality of a person (as in 'identity card'), or identity as a common denominator that places an individual within a group (as in “identity politics”).”8 Although Wahrman makes note of this productive tension between the two meanings
of identity, when he ventures into discovering their development, rather than treating them as two interdependent aspects of a single development he demarcates them into distinct phenomena, treating them as more or less unrelated. The reasons for this separation lies in the methodological details of Wahrman’s anthropological history. In his attempt to ground his inquiry in the immediate, intuitional experiences of ordinary people Wahrman takes a position opposite to intellectual history. This is essential for Wahrman because he is interested in identity as experience and not in intellectual reflections on identity. This turn away from theory and towards experience is ensured by the method of “historical epistemology” which, taken over from the discipline of the history of science, tries to unmask “the history of the categories [themselves] that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards of explanation”9 by placing in focus
the “unstructured intuitions” of people. Unique to such method of inquiry into identity is that, as
8 Wahrman (2004)., p. xii
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the name suggests, it attempts to recover the epistemology of people for whom “participation in these cultural practices, even as they reinscribe prevalent notions of identity or self, is unencumbered by self-aware reflection or formulation”.10
All by itself this turn toward the unstructured intuitions as a main source of historical analysis would not be problematic, had it not drawn such a clear distinction between conscious intellectual reflection and intuitive unreflective experience. However, in doing so Wahrman commits the fundamental error of seeing human life as consisting of unrelated areas, which makes his inquiry into the self problematic. The turn to the unreflective experience of people means for Wahrman an equal turn away from any self-conscious reflection on what it means to be a human individual, implying thus a demarcation of explicit, self-aware and rational formulations from the realm of everyday life. Simply put, this means that self-consciousness and apperception is not an inherent part of human life. The verdict on intellectual formulations of the self is thus that they are of little worth to understanding the historical development of identity. Since identity can be seen as reflections of the concerns of given eras, of specific historical and cultural contexts, to separate intellectual ideas of an age from their intuitive content is a mistake. That this is problematic is noticeable in the incongruent treatment of the self in its two meanings throughout Wahrman’s analysis. For although we have seen that Wahrman does lay down the distinct meanings of identity (which they themselves are historical), one that of the identity of categories, and the other that of identity of the unique self, certain aspects of these two meanings are often conflated throughout his historical analysis. Most problematic is the rise of the self so central to his theory, as it refers not to one but two distinct and new configurations of the self, one corresponding to the meaning of the self within cultural practices of modernity around the turn of the 18th century, and the other
corresponding to the intellectual movement of Romanticism.11 The treatment of the two
phenomena as distinct and unrelated is problematic because of their intertwined character: while certain aspects straight on contradict each other, we find many shared features of the two configurations of the self, both situated against the ancien régime of identity preceding modernity. What we ought to conclude from this is that human life, consisting of distinct areas and spheres all of which related to each other, can only be understood in its complexity. This is also manifest in Wahrman’s historical analysis, as although at moments he does address the two selves as distinct, their features often get conflated throughout his elaboration. His theory of the rise of the modern self nevertheless contributes to our understanding of identity, since it provides us with a certain
10 Wahrman (2004), p. xv, emphasis added 11 Ibid., pp. 290-294
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angle of view and framework to see that our contemporary perception of identity in certain regards are specifically modern.
Through Wahrman’s analysis of the rise of the modern phenomenon of the self we see that identity can be conceived in diverse ways. Therefore, we might not necessarily conceive of ourselves as selves, counterintuitive as it may sound. Wahrman’s method of historical epistemology unveiled the epistemological break between the ancien régime of identity and the modern regime of selfhood. By uncovering certain 18th century tendencies he showed us that the aspects of
psychological depth and innate essence we commonly take to be at the heart of our identities are in fact specific to modernity. Instead, in the ancien régime of identity outward appearance was primary. If we are to take Wahrman’s ideas further, there are important implications of the discovery of the contextuality of identity; for not only can we separate the concepts of identity and self, but we may altogether eliminate identity categories. Although Wahrman’s epistemological break is radical, on the other hand we see that there are certain shared aspects of both regimes of identity, as they both pivot around categories. Now that this historical context is set for us, we are ready to move on to Arendt, in whose thinking we will see a similar sort of epistemological break lurking in the background, but in an even more radical form.
Chapter 2: Arendt and the Jewish Question
The thought and writings of Hannah Arendt are linked more intimately with her personal life than in the case of most modern philosophers. Her manifold experiences of 20th century totalitarian
regimes early in her life influenced her intellectual orientation immensely later on, which shows most clearly in her dedication to the Jewish Question. Arendt, following her disappointing experiences of modern society, sought to provide critiques capturing the essence of humanity, and came to define the meaning of being humans through the filter of the political. Seeing that Western philosophical thought and within it political theory throughout its history provided no valuable insight into the possibilities of bettering human life, Arendt tore down the whole construct of Western philosophy. Continuing in the path of his teacher, Heidegger, Arendt remained thoroughly critical throughout her life of the metaphysical tradition, and more so of any ideological tradition. She saw even critical thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche as part of this metaphysical orientation, and as a political thinker she attempted not only to demarcate herself from the previous
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philosophical traditions, but to ground her own political thinking on unprecedented grounds. Emphasizing the relevance of action over alienated intellectual thought, she attributed great importance to political life, and to its intellectual counterpart, the act of narration and storytelling. As we will see, in her criticism of theoretical thinking Arendt did not merely prefer action over thinking. On the contrary, thinking remained an essential element in her political views, however, in unique and unusual ways. Thinking, in a connected rather than alienated manner, enabled humans rather than repressed them, for political action. Her ideal conception of thinking thus converges with modes of narrative, or story-telling, where the absolutist conception of truth was replaced by the pragmatic idea of opinion and appearance. Having this in mind much of her own writings are historically oriented, attempting to tell stories and show perspectives rather to find the truth. Throughout her ‘narratives’ of the totalitarian regimes of modernity, and in her extensive treatment in a likewise manner of the related Jewish Question, Arendt presents us with a unique view on what it means to be a human. Public action acquires a central place in these narratives, which are further emphasized in her more theoretically oriented works such as The Human Condition where the narratives about modern and contemporary society are placed in a broader intellectual and historical context. Reaching back to the ancient Greeks she presents an extensive and exclusively political view of the meaning of humanity. The epitomes of political action, speech and persuasion form the heart of her conception of humanity. The political, forming the locus of Arendt’s thinking, is thus a very specific yet simultaneously elusive term in her vocabulary. Due to its unusual meaning and special significance, it reaches beyond what one would traditionally associate with the boundaries of politics and political theory. It becomes the meaning giving act of human life, and human identity likewise becomes a factor of the political.
Politics and narrative, being a two-way street, therefore inform each other’s meanings. Arendt’s Jewish narratives form not only a particular example of what it is to carry (and to not carry) out action, but, through these narratives the meaning of action itself becomes definite. Her theories of society, such as the clear division of the public and the private domains emphasizes further the meaning of politics, as opposed to the meaning of mere (philosophical) theory. Considering then this intertwined nature of her narratively oriented and her more theoretical writings, Arendt’s conception of Jewish identity that is worked out in her narratives of the Jewish Question has to be considered in the light of her political theoretical framework. Placing her thought in the context of Western thinking will help us in elucidating her adamantly political approach to conceiving modern Jewish identity which unfolds in such writings as The Jew as Pariah and The Origins of Totalitarianism. My analysis of Arendt’s characterization of identity therefore will approach from these two
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complementary directions of narrative and theory. First, in order to understand how Arendt conceived of Jewishness in the modern age, I will examine, by looking at her narratives of repressive society, the crucial relation between violence and Jewish identity. Through looking at some of her Jewish Writings and The Origins of Totalitarianism I will hope to show how, by the very virtue of narrating the story of an outcast people, she attempted to affirm her identity as a Jew. Although her attitude towards dealing with the Jewish Question and with her own Jewish identity through these narratives may seem overly political, through moving on to an analysis of her political theory I will hope to elucidate how Arendt’s political philosophy, in the traditional sense, is neither political, nor philosophical. Looking at her vocabulary with a traditional orientation, one which is still dominant today both in philosophy and in ordinary language, one can easily gloss over the actual meaning of Arendt’s political ideals. Shedding some light on the meaning of such fundamental terms as the public, plurality, action and freedom will thus help us in understanding how Arendt conceives of politics and of identity as such, and in seeing the relation between the two.
The concept of the pariah came to form the locus of Arendt’s thinking. It being the driving force of her thinking, both the narratives of repression and the theoretical articulations of the ideal political action came to pivot around what was most central to her personal experience of Jewishness in the 20th century: being a social outcast. Throughout her historical narratives two main
goals were in sight: to unmask the underlying repressive tendencies of modern society and, through providing valuable critique, to offer an alternative to the ill-functioning society. The most striking element in Arendt’s essays regarding the Jewish Question is the dominance of an overly political attitude and vocabulary. On the one hand this should not surprise us, considering that Arendt was a political thinker. Her writings regarding Jewish matters are responses to political issues revolving around the place of the Jews in modern society, thus it is normal to expect such an approach. However, throughout Arendt’s writings it is easy to get the impression that she delimits Jewish experience as such to political experience, treating therefore Jewish identity as exclusively political. This experience was one of repression and violence, which came to be the mark of modernity for Arendt, the Jewish pariah standing thus as an example, showing what it meant for humanity to enter into the age of modernity, where politics ceased to exist as public action and was replaced by repression.12 Arendt thus treated the modern political aspects of Jewishness, and the events
revolving around them, as exhaustive of its meaning, overlooking other aspects of Jewish identity
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such as religion, nationality and other forms of belonging that emerged gradually and simultaneously with Jewish assimilation. To arrive at an understanding of her conception of identity, then, through engaging with the diversity of the topics she addressed, particularly those that bear the closest relevance to identity and Jewishness, the very conception of freedom and its antithesis, violence will be circumscribed. Moving from her historical narratives to her more theoretically oriented writings, first I will begin by looking at several historical and (to her) contemporary issues which she saw as essential factors to the development of a wide-spread anti-Semitism and to an undesired position of the Jews within society.
Although it is common to seek the causes and origins of anti-Semitism in the history of the majority's acts of repression and discrimination, Arendt, in order to understand the wide-spread phenomena of anti-Semitism, turns to a study of Jewish history.13 Thus rather than just seeing the
discrimination of Jews as a result of a hostile environment, she takes into account the origins of this hostility towards them. Jewish life in modernity, defined above all by anti-Semitism, is seen by Arendt as a repercussion of the apolitical attitude of the Jews in the centuries leading up to the 18th
century, most manifest in their isolation.14 Discrimination against a specific group in situations so
variable as it happened to the Jews (involving different historical periods, places, cultural contexts and societies ranging from the ancient times up to contemporary 21st century) is unprecedented.
However, Arendt distinguishes between two types of anti-Semitism: “Antisemitism, a secular nineteenth-century ideology – which in name, though not in argument, was unknown before the 1870’s – and religious Jew-hatred, inspired by the mutually hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds, are obviously not the same”.15 Arendt’s interest lies in the exclusively modern phenomenon
of the wide-spread secular anti-Semitism, which has its roots in the “hiatus [that] lasted through nearly two centuries, from the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth, during which Jewish-Gentile relations were at an all-time low, Jewish 'indifference to conditions and events in the outside world' was at an all-time high, and Judaism became “more than ever a closed system of thought.”16 Placing
modern anti-Semitism into the context of Jewish history, the emphasis in Arendt’s corpus was thus placed on the initial but long-lasting political isolation of Jews from society which only ceased to define Jewish life at the turn of modernity when the secularization, the Enlightenment and the birth of nation-states necessitated an assimilation into the surrounding societies.
13 OT, 4-8, 12 14 OT, 8 15 OT, xi 16 OT, xii
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The changes that this period brought about necessitated a shift in the way Jews related to society, however, this shift did not follow an ideal curve. The voluntary segregation came to an involuntary end, which was necessitated only by the changing political, social and cultural structure of Europe, as a “ 'nation within the nation' could no longer be tolerated.”17 This meant that assimilation did
not entail integration, and the celebrated emancipation was merely a false, social but apolitical emancipation. Although Jewishness lost its important communal and religious connotations, political involvement did not follow, which in Arendt’s eyes would have been indispensable for true emancipation.18 Consequently, instead of an affirmation of Jewishness and the becoming of
Jew as Jew, emancipation meant an emancipation from being Jewish, which eventually lead to practices of anti-Semitism even on deeply ingrained levels of individual behavior, surprisingly especially on the side of the Jews. Political action would have ideally meant a certain self-assertion through which freedom could unfold. What took place instead was a misfigured assimilation in which the meaning of Jewishness acquired an ambiguous meaning not only for the Gentile society, but even for the Jews themselves. This is how being the social outcast in Arendt’s view became more and more an affixed feature of Jewish identity. Instead of a positive learning curve of a political integration in which the basics and fine details of political interaction would have been gradually mastered, assimilation became the vehicle for bare social emancipation. In Arendt’s eyes this meant not an integration but a further alienation from the world, therefore degrading Jewish life to a struggle for bodily survival, instead of creating human values.19
Besides this collective Jewish narrative of modern anti-Semitism another important line of thought shows up in Arendt’s thinking about the Jewish Question. Complementing the narrative of the Jewish people and their relation to society Arendt laid great importance on the individual behavior of both Jewish and non-Jewish members of anti-Semitic societies. The failures of the political to take root in Jewish history are thus approached from multiple angles. In such writings as The Jew as Pariah Arendt turns to a study of social outcast archetypes in order to provide a typology of individuals’ internal ‘mechanisms’ in relation to having become the outcasts of society. This is an essential aspect of Arendt’s thought weaving through her oeuvre, as in her understanding the pariah became the essence of Jewish identity, standing for the role of the repressed in modern society. Since the transition of the Jews from communistic, isolated ways of living was instigated not by the them but rather by the circumstances, the Jewish people lacked organized groups and
17 OT, 11 18 OT, 11-15
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therefore they did not take possession of any political toolkit.20 Coupled with the demand for
assimilation, this meant that the responses to a hostile anti-Semitic environment developed mostly on the individual level. It is these responses that form a central role in Arendt’s thinking about Jewishness besides the collective line of history.
The archetypes described thus are positioned on a scale of political participation after the breaking up of Jewish religious communities. Since Arendt sees these archetypes as responses on an individual level to the hostile environment, anti-Semitism becomes an essential aspect not only in collective Jewish history, but equally so in the development of Jewish personalities. As mentioned before Arendt places responsibility on both victim and perpetrator for such occurrences in history as anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and the Jewish archetypes are thus lined up as if on a scale not only of politics, but also of responsibility. Arendt’s approach to understanding anti-Semitism is unique in this sense. Sustained by the belief that at the heart of both society and of individuals lies political action, she claims that the Jewish people “does not simply cease to be coresponsible because it became the victim of the world’s injustice and cruelty”21. On the contrary,
the reason Arendt dedicates so much attention to the pariah role of the Jews is their own responsibility in being put, and more, being stuck in such position. Thus it is not only society which has to learn from its mistakes; the individuals who are its constituents are equally responsible for events such as the Holocaust. Providing an analysis of the nature of being the social outcasts is relevant because understanding the mechanisms of individuals is equally important in creating a society based on freedom and equality. It was, in Arendt’s view, the Jews after all who “avoided all political action for two thousand years”22 and “came to conceive of their existence as almost totally
separate and independent from the rest of the world.”23 Arendt’s aim in discovering the origins,
roots and mechanisms of anti-Semitism is not simply to cure this particular illness of modern European society, but, using it as a model for the repressive capacities of modernity, to understand the unprecedented totalitarianism and thus to prevent it from happening again. The “new model of historical understanding”, as Swift points out, was necessary since “totalitarianism was an entirely new and unprecedented event in the history of human society”.24 Arendt’s new model
which she develops and employs throughout her life crosses ways of philosophy, politics, history, art and narration. In her thinking anti-Semitism stands as the epitome of repression, and by
20 Feldman (2007), p. xlix 21 OT, 6 22 OT, 8 23 Feldman (2007), p. xlvii 24 Swift (2009), p. 67
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understanding this particular example she hoped to have developed a society based on equality and freedom.
Since in this ‘singular’ line of thought (as opposed to the collective) we see a turn from society to its individuals, we can observe an accompanying shift in the method of inquiry. Whereas in Arendt’s narration of Jewish collective history the focus is on historical events and tendencies, in her turn towards individuals the focus shifts to internal mechanisms. Accordingly, the method moves from a historical analysis of events and facts to the internal worlds of individuals, that is, the way they experienced their own Jewishness in the midst of the social changes that are described in the collective history. For this purpose, Arendt does not examine history, but in order to study the inner worlds of individuals she reaches out for their mirror, the arts. Analyses of the works of artists like Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka and Charlie Chaplin thus occupy an equally important place in her inquiries into individual behavior, and this attitude to complement history with literary and artistic analysis accompanies Arendt throughout her oeuvre.
In order to demonstrate how Arendt conceptualized these aforementioned archetypes I shall now mention but two of the most central archetypes that emerge from her inquiries into the identities of Jewish individuals. The two most central, antithetical archetypes that we see in her works dealing with anti-Semitism and Jewish identity are the conscious pariah and the parvenu, the former of particular importance because Arendt thought of herself as a conscious pariah.25 These two
responses to having the status of social outcasts as Jews stand in stark contrast to each other, which is most manifest in their radically different conception of emancipation. The conscious pariah, through the act of becoming conscious of his outcast role affirms his Jewish identity as the pariah rather than conceals it; in Arendt’s words, the conscious pariahs are those “who tried to make of the emancipation of the Jews that which it really should have been – an admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity”.26 The conscious pariah is the Jew who, contrary to society’s wishes and
aspirations, affirms his Jewishness rather than conceals and sheds it, and by this affirmation tries to turn around the meaning of being the pariah; by becoming conscious of it as an individual, and by unmasking how he, as member of a people came to be in this position attempts to provide a different meaning for being the outcast Jew. In her reply to Gershom Scholem’s letter regarding
25 JW, 283-286, Arendt took her inspiration for the ideal of the conscious pariah from Bernard Lazare, who “could
appreciate at first hand the pariah quality of Jewish existence”, but who also “knew where the solution lay: in contrast to his unemancipated brethren [i.e. the parvenu] who accept their pariah status automatically and unconsciously, the emancipated Jew must awake to an awareness of his position and, conscious of it, become a rebel against it”. (JW, p. 283) What we see throughout Arendt’s works and thought is that she became precisely the sort of rebel promulgated by Lazare, and then later on by Arendt, which is manifest in her attitude towards thinking, speech and deed (see below).
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the ambiguities of Arendt’s perspective on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt emphasizes the importance of “selbstdenken”, or thinking for one’s self, “for which”, she writes, “I think, no ideology, no public opinion, and no 'convictions' can ever be a substitute”.27 Richard Bernstein in
his book Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question captured the essence of the conscious pariah this way: “Independent thinking is vital for the Jew as pariah because, in a world where action, politics, and public freedom are threatened, where twentieth-century totalitarianism sets out to destroy the human conditions required for political freedom, the only 'weapon' left to the pariah is her thinking.”28 Opposed to the conscious pariah stands the parvenu who has an opposite response to
being put in the position of the outcast. He, unlike the conscious pariah, does not deny but affirms his role of the outcast by becoming the schnorrer or beggar.29 By affirming a negative essence
determined by the anti-Semitic society, he discards any positive essence of Jewishness. The parvenu thus contributes to the anti-Semitic discourse of society by acting according to it, further reinforcing the negative meaning of Jewishness. It becomes a stigma not only for the majority society, but even to the parvenu Jew himself. The negative norms are instilled into him, and he too starts to think that Jewishness is an identity to be gotten rid of.
What we see is that the common denominator of the two lines of thought in Arendt’s approach to the Jewish Question, that of collective narrative and of the narrative of individual behavior, is violence, around which Jewish identity revolved for her. We have also seen that Arendt formulated this unifying aspect of violence in political terms, which suggested that in Arendt’s understanding Jewish identity was essentially a political identity. However, out of the categories of identity, fitting into Wahrman’s genealogy of identity, several of them are associated commonly with Jewishness. It is therefore not uncommon to think of Jewish identity as a religious, an ethnic, a national, or a subcultural identity. Out of these categories it is probably nationality that gets closest to a political identity, and therefore it is also easy to think of Arendt’s vision of Jewishness, it being politicized, as a primarily national understanding of identity. While this may seem affirmed by Arendt’s vocabulary in her Jewish Writings, by shedding light on the true meaning of the political in Arendt’s thinking I hope to show that Jewishness, and identity as such, meant for Arendt something wholly different from a mere national identity. Bernstein argues that the question of Jewish identity is ignored throughout Arendt’s oeuvre: “Arendt simply takes the existence of the Jewish people as a historical fact and then concerns herself with the social and political questions about the history,
27 JW, 470
28 Bernstein (1996), p. 41 29 JW, 285
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responsibility, and destiny of that people. But this is to avoid the question of Jewish identity, not to answer it.”30 However, I hope to show that Bernstein misunderstands the way Arendt
approaches identity. Rather, as we are about to see, there is a wholly different configuration of identity at play in Arendt’s thinking, one that is hardly compatible with Wahrman’s genealogy of modern identity. In order to understand why, I shall now turn to the theoretical writings of Arendt, in which the unique and unusual meaning of the public and private domains, of politics as such, and of freedom unfolds.
Chapter 3: Arendt’s Political Theory: Unfolding Identity
The metaphysical tradition and repressive society
Arendt continues to analyze the origins of totalitarian and repressive societies in her later, more theoretically oriented writings. Whereas the works so far discussed, the Jewish Writings and The Origins of Totalitarianism focused on repression through the looking glass of its immediate experience in modernity, later Arendt turns to these issues with the aim of a deeper philosophical understanding which she abandoned after the rise of Nazi Germany in order to turn to deal extensively with the problem of repressive societies.31 Her narratives of violence and totalitarianism,
which we have seen above addressed from the perspectives of collective history and individual behavioral development are in such works as The Human Condition given a more theoretical articulation. In order to understand the way Arendt sees Jewish identity in particular, and identity in general, placing her previously analyzed narratives into the context of her political thought is necessary.
The focus here shifts from the immediate causes and effects of totalitarian societies to the underlying structural causes which made such problematic and apolitical systems as Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union possible. In her return to her “need to understand”, just like her former teacher, Heidegger, she reached back to the foundations of Western philosophy. Different aspects of ancient Greece became pivotal for Arendt’s understanding of the Western philosophical, intellectual and political tradition. Whereas she came to see the metaphysically oriented philosophical tradition originating from Plato as underrepresenting true politics in Western society, the pre-philosophical Greek polis life came to set a positive standard for her division of the public
30 Bernstein (1996), p. 27 31 EU, 6.
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and the private, figuring an important place in her political theory. The “gulf between philosophy and politics [that was] opened historically with the trial and condemnation of Socrates”32 plays a
central role in Arendt’s narrative of Western society. According to Arendt “our tradition of political thought began when the death of Socrates made Plato despair of polis life and, at the same time, doubt certain fundamentals of Socrates’ teachings.”33 Whereas for Socrates philosophy was an
activity of involvement, discussion and dialogue, in Arendt’s view Plato changed this into the by now all too familiar theorizing and idealizing for the sake of attaining abstract ideas and truth.34
Politics in this Platonic turn therefore became subdued to philosophical understanding. In this light, Arendt’s political theory is best described as an attempt at dismantling metaphysics for the purposes of turning politics back to practical life, as if returning to the pre-philosophical polis. While the return to the polis may not be possible, as the following lines will demonstrate, narrating the past like Arendt did is one form of action that promotes an active, involved and political plurality, and can bridge the gap between thought and action.
Arendt in her ambitions to unmask cultural patterns can be seen as part of the critical tradition, looking upon the history of Western philosophy as problematic because of its essentialist approach. Conceiving its goal as the attainment of the ultimate ideas, classical philosophy from a social and political perspective became counterproductive in its disconnection and alienation from human life. Arendt sees world-alienation as a feature originating from this fissure between philosophy and politics in Plato’s thinking, which later through Christian ideology was transposed into the Western cultural amalgam.35 In the dualistic division of the world in his famous allegory of the cave Plato
lay down the foundations not only for his metaphysical notions of the world, but also for the dominant outlook on politics in the West, which in Arendt’s eyes are utterly apolitical. In this dualistic metaphysics Plato emphasized the fallibility of our sensory experiences, and stressed the superiority of reason over experience. Whereas in the bodily and inferior world of replicas we are imprisoned and doomed in our limitations to persuasion and opinion, attending to philosophy can, in Plato’s view, provide access to the realm of the forms or ideas, which corresponds to truth. It is only philosophers who, through the practice of dialectic, can access this realm. Projected onto politics, Plato’s argument for the superiority of rational contemplation over sensory experience meant the preference of an “ideocratic” political system. Therefore, he argues for a political system in which politics itself has no other raison d’être than being in the service of philosophy. This is
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formulated in Socrates’ well known argument for the ruling of philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic: „There is no end to suffering”, says Socrates to Glaucon, “[...] unless either philosophers become kings in our cities, or the people who are now called kings and rulers become real, true philosophers”36; through extending the idealistic abstract metaphysics to politics, only in the
possession of knowledge of the forms can one become the ruler of a city. In Arendt’s view this degrading view on politics was carried on in the Christian tradition, and even in the post-Enlightenment modernity of 20th century.37 Even though intellectual thought has undergone
profound changes since the Ancient Greeks, such as first the birth of Christian monotheistic religion itself, and then the later secularization and enlightenment, this fundamental division between thinking and action, subordinating the latter to the former, remained an unchanged aspect of our culture. What Arendt identifies in Plato’s allegory of the Cave is transmitted through each of the passing stages of society in our Western history, down to modern society and even to the seemingly radical and new intellectual orientations such as those of Marx and Nietzsche. The metaphor of the launching of „an earth-born object made by man [...] into the universe” which was interpreted by Arendt as „the first 'step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth'”38
in the preface to The Human Condition, is but the last and most visible manifestation of the Platonic urge for alienation in modern society.
Arendt found this attitude of world-alienation problematic because of its denial of the public, which was a pivotal element to her political thought. The topics already familiar from her narratives of repressive modern society such as the apolitical behavior and its consequences in the Jewish tradition, and the relevance of plurality and its pillars, speech and persuasion are articulated more explicitly in Arendt’s analysis of the pre-philosophical polis life of ancient Greece, and within that in the indispensable division of life into the spheres of the public and the private. For Arendt, as for the Greeks, this division was essential because only through this could human life be grounded in freedom and thus its essence be realized. The public came to define the essence of the human for her, as opposed to the private which denoted the natural, animal-like and violent side of humans, the one driven by the material necessities of life. Her refutation of the metaphysical tradition for the purpose of restoring politics rests on this previously realized society prior to the appearance of philosophy, which was founded on “freedom experienced in the process of acting and nothing else”.39 The reason why Arendt opposed the metaphysical tradition was that it removed
36 Plato (2000), p. 175 37 HC, 16
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the essence of politics from politics, and thereby also rid the human from its own essence. By reaching back to the pre-philosophical ancient Greek ideal of the polis for inspiration, where the public and the private were perceived as two distinct spheres of life Arendt attempted to provide an alternative conception of politics which opposed Plato’s where the essence of the human was wholly devoid of political, that is, practical and active content. Reaching back to the Greeks the private realm, that of the household and family became the sphere of the involuntary necessities of life.40 Its sole function was to serve the material needs of individuals: “the distinctive trait of the
household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs”41. In the sphere of the private “force and violence are justified […] because they are the
only means to master necessity”42. Delimitating the involuntary aspects of life was necessary in
order to be able to create space for voluntary action. With a contemporary eye towards such conception of the private it may seem as if Arendt had left out essential aspects from her definition of the private. In modernity we associate with it not only the organization of the family as opposed to broader society, but also, the intimate and often the most relevant and valued aspects of life. Therefore, it may seem that Arendt has restricted the meaning of the private to a material conception. However, in the light of the ancient Greek polis life, conceiving of the private in such a way is not an act of restriction, since the idea of privacy and intimacy themselves are inventions of modernity.43 Thus rather than seeing it as restricting, we should see Arendt’s outlook on social
and individual life as reinventing a past tradition.
Freedom, and consequently political life, could only be made sense of if the disturbances of material necessities, which inherently by their very nature stand outside the reach of human volition, do not spill over from the private into the public sphere. Only once the inevitable necessities of life were cast out of the way by delimiting them to the private could the public become the place where the human could realize his essence: his capacity for freedom through speech and political action. In Arendt’s interpretation of Aristotle, language and thought came to form the essence of humans in an unconventional way: “The two famous definitions of man by Aristotle, that he is a political being and a being endowed with speech, supplement each other and both refer to the same experience in Greek polis life.”44 Such meaning of the human is articulated
in Arendt’s theory in opposition to the private realm of necessity. Thinking of violence as 40 HC, 31 41 HC, 30 42 HC, 31 43 HC, 45-50 44 OR, 19
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“incapable of speech”45 Arendt conceptualizes the public as the antagonist of the private realm.
The division of the private and the public is stark to the extent that
“Because of this speechlessness [of the private] political theory has little to say about the phenomenon of violence and must leave its discussion to the technicians. For political thought can only follow the articulations of the political phenomena themselves, it remains bound to what appears in the domain of human affairs.”46 Arendt correspondingly distinguishes three types of activity that humans are capable of: labor, work and action. Such distinction is important for the same reason as the division of life into the public and the private spheres. Labor, the least distinctively human of the three, is the activity of the “slaves and tame animals [who] with their bodies minister to the necessities of life”47, belonging
thus to the private sphere. Whereas in labor we cater to the necessities of nature (i.e. our bodies) the essence of the activity of work lies in its product. Although its realm is still that of the body, the emphasis there lies on durability; the product of work “is almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes.”48 The distinction between work and labor is thus essential, because
whereas one is subdued to nature, the other takes control over it. However, only the activity of (political) action belongs to the public sphere. This means that politics is not and cannot be a solution to violence but rather an overcoming of the conditions of necessity by employing a certain division of life activities. Only by doing so can political action unfold as a genuine activity, the mark of which most of all is that it transcends the necessity of having any goal and the need to produce effects and function as cause.
Preventing political action from being sovereign and an end in itself, Plato’s philosophy and the subsequent intellectual traditions can be seen from Arendt's framework of politics as practicing violence on fundamental aspects of human life. Violence here can be understood in multiple ways. Figuratively speaking, Plato’s theory practiced intellectual repression on political thought by reducing it to metaphysical abstractions, depriving it from its raison d’être as we have seen above. Violence in the most immediate, bodily sense of the term on the other hand is an issue in Plato’s attitude towards politics because through reducing politics to abstract philosophical understanding the sphere of the public is not preserved as a distinct sphere: putting political action in the service of a higher end, it ceases to be the non-dual activity that functions as an end in itself. By putting politics in the use of philosophy Plato conflates the spheres of the private and the public, which
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according to Arendt ought to remain distinct. By converging the two domains the violence previously restricted to the private domain spills over to the public, and thus speech, the mark of the human, becomes contaminated by violence. Since “violence itself is incapable of speech”49, the
public loses its political character and consequently also its human essence.
It is interesting to see, however, that while Arendt’s political theory rests on the dismantling of the metaphysical tradition, at the same time it employs the political ideal of the pre-philosophical polis life as articulated by Aristotle. Thus while her inspiration is taken from the pre-philosophical tradition, Arendt’s argument rests mainly on Aristotle’s understanding and description of it. Arendt’s relation to ancient Greek philosophy is thus duplex. On the one hand, as we have already seen, the refutation of a philosophical tradition starting with Plato was central to her thinking. On the other hand, she also relied on Aristotle’s political ideas, who while having written about politics extensively, also carried on Plato’s metaphysics in an empirically oriented way. Thus as Peter Euben points out, while Arendt “says much more in praise of Aristotle, in the end she thinks he too misrepresents political life”.50 The return to the pre-philosophical understanding of speech was
Arendt’s way of breaking with the metaphysical tradition for the sake of restoring a conception of politics where the necessity of material life’s violence remains an aspect of the private domain. Freedom, the essence of being human, is realized through political speech, and it can only be realized so if the violence inherent in life is restricted and isolated from the exclusively human aspects of life. The division of life into private and public is thus essential because it was a response to the inevitable violence that is inherent in life.
Arendt’s previously described concern with the repressive totalitarian modern societies in her narratives of the Jewish Question translates into this theoretical framework of the public-private as the modern dichotomy between the social and the political. Although the metaphysical tradition is highly problematic from the perspective of politics, in her analysis it was only with the “rise of the social” in the period of modernity that the old division of the private and the public in their conflation disappeared.51 The social in Arendt’s unusual use of the term was a variation and
extension of the private, in that the two served similar if not identical purposes. The social therefore, through its demand that “its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest”52, came to replace the role of the
ancient family; its purpose was to cater to the material necessities of life and to sustain it. On the
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50 Euben (2000), p. 151 51 HC, 39
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other hand, “The emergence of society […] from the shadowy interior of the household right into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms.”53 Therefore the
social realm as such was “unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter.”54
It was the “modern disintegration of the family”55 which caused the social to take over the role of
the private, whereas before “this common interest and single opinion was represented by the household head who ruled in accordance with it and prevented possible disunity among the family members.”56 The issue with such extension of the family into larger groups (i.e. nations) was that
“society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the household.”57 In its plurality society is supposed to act as the surface for the public, i.e. the political.
However, since the violence of the private and the political of the public are contradictory, the essence of being human, including the capacity to act politically, is lost.
Simultaneously with the rise of the social the meaning of the private underwent radical changes. Whereas for the ancients the private meant “a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities”58, in the context of modern individualism “we no
longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word 'privacy'.”59 Rather, it came to denote
a sphere of intimacy, which, just like the sphere of the social, was “certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age.”60 Furthermore, “modern privacy was discovered as the opposite not of
the political sphere but of the social”61. Keeping in mind then that the social sphere of modernity
carried on the role that was previously delegated to the private, we come to the realization that the private in modernity stands in direct opposition to the way it was conceptualized for the Greeks. Its meaning did not only change, but it transformed completely.
Transcending metaphysics: Arendt’s politics of identity
Arendt’s main issue with the rise of the social was its negative influence on containing the violence inherent in material life. The recognition that human life is not devoid of the violence of material necessity, however, is not unique to Arendt, as many of the social theories took it as a
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central issue. Marx is but one such thinker in whose materialist history material life took up a central role. His theory departs from the fundamental assumption that all human phenomena, both intellectual and bodily, can be reduced to material factors.62 Like Arendt, Marx too saw repression
as an inherent aspect of modern society, originating from the historically developed institutions of private property and production. Arendt, however, found both Marx’s approach to the problem and his solution unsatisfactory. In Marx’s thought, which Arendt criticized explicitly, the tension between emancipation and bodily limitations is cast away by essentializing history, and by projecting into the future the utopian communist society where scarcity, unequal distribution and repression are eliminated by appropriate technological and political organization.63 However, Marx
arrived at his solution to repressive society by essentializing history and by foreseeing a certain type of affixed future. Agency, or political action was thus not part of his discourse. Due to these aspects of his theory Arendt saw similar patterns operating in the background of Marx’s communist materialism as in the previous metaphysical ideologies.64 Therefore, contrary to what many political
theorists and economists thought, Arendt found Marx’s thought unoriginal: seeing “politics [as] nothing but a function of society”, Arendt thought that Marx has demoted rather than promoted political action by considering “action, speech and thought [as] primarily superstructures upon social interest, [which] is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economists of the modern age.”65
Opposing Marx’s conception of society, in which Arendt thought he had conflated the social with the political, Arendt’s political theory rested on separating the realm of natural violence from the realm of the public, where the human can be realized. Her solution to the problem of material necessity, as we have seen, was thus to delimit it as the source of all violence to a restricted space where it does not interfere with the sphere of freedom.
In critical theory it is not uncommon to see philosophers (or should we say thinkers, as some, such as Arendt herself refuse the label of the philosopher) arguing explicitly against the deployment of theory as a means of getting a grasp of the meaning of things. Such is the case both with Marx and Arendt, nevertheless, we find some crucial methodological differences in their thinking. While Marx did set out to provide with a genuine foundation for his political thought which was oriented towards the material world, his ideas fell short of his own standards: we saw that his materialist history was essentialist. Arendt, on the other hand, in what could be called a politics of narrative,
62 Marx (2000), pp. 177-181 63 Ibid., pp. 196-200 64 HC, 33
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fulfills her promises of grounding her politics in genuine ways. In order to understand both Arendt’s political theory and her closely related understanding of (Jewish) identity, it is essential to reconsider the centrality of action in her though in its proper manner, that is, in the context of praxis. The unique character of action in Arendt’s political theory lies both in its relevance and in its unconventional meaning. Since offering a theory of action would bring her back to the divided thinking of metaphysics both in its aim and in its method, Arendt was resolved to address the meaning of action in unconventional ways. Instead of grabbing action away from its proper, practical world into the distinct realm of theory by alienated conceptualizing as it was often done in the dualistic ontologies, Arendt hoped to elucidate rather than essentialize the meaning of action. What is unique about her method is its ability to make use of the unmasking of the metaphysical tradition, and indeed abandon the duality of thinking to the extent possible, which is relatively unparalleled in Western thinking. Arendt’s thought revolved precisely around bridging the gap between practice and theory. But if not through theory, how can we arrive at a meaning of action? Arendt’s secret lies in reformulating not only the meaning of action, but that of meaning and language themselves. She moves away from the overly abstract and intellectual, interpretive aspects of language such as that of the analytic tradition, to language as the praxis itself in its manifestation of speech and narrative. Since the emphasis is not on acquiring or arriving at any fixed meaning, the nature of action is captured not by any form of definition. Although in The Human Condition certain aspects and conditions of action are described and circumscribed, its essence cannot be explicitly articulated. Consequently, we find the meaning of action articulated throughout Arendt’s oeuvre infused in it; action, like the meaning of a story, is “originally intangible”.66 In analyzing
Arendt’s way of dealing with the Jewish Question we saw that literature and poetry played central roles. In writings such as the Jew as Pariah she relied heavily on analyzing, or rather, re-narrating some of the literary moments of Europe such as Kafka’s The Trial and Heine’s Hebrew Melodies, using them as tools to capture the intangible. In other works, too, such as The Human Condition and On Revolution, she relies on demonstrating her political and cultural ideals through works of literature. Understanding Arendt’s relation to literature and its narrative element therefore opens up the way to having a clearer conception of action as praxis. Instead of transposing it from its proper realm to that of contemplation, by bringing literary examples and using the tool of narrative Arendt retells stories in order to demonstrate what political action and the absence thereof entails. We have seen that abstraction belongs to the tradition of metaphysics which, by restricting action and politics to alienated theory exerts violence on them. Thus, contrasted to theory, what we find
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unfolding in these narratives is nothing else than the identities of individuals as revealed by the plurality of their actions.
Arendt’s particular conception of action in the light of traditional dualistic ontologies meant that action could not be disclosed by looking at their purposes or intentions. Whereas action has traditionally been conceived as having immediate relations to origins and ends, causes and effects, and to articulable purposes and meanings, for Arendt only the meaning of the activities of labor and work could be exhausted in this way. We saw that labor was concerned with material subsistence of humans, thus it was the activity most immediately related to the violence of the body and nature. Work, an intermediary type of action between labor and action, was still characterized by its concern with the body, however, it is characterized not by natural subsistence but by the subduing of nature. Nevertheless, both activities are immediately connected with their purposes, and their meanings are disclosed by these purposes. Consequently, looking at people as producers does not reveal their uniqueness, but rather their categorical features and hence their sameness; it reveals “'what' somebody is – his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings”67 – thus instead of
describing a person “we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us.”68 Turning to action was essential for Arendt,
because it was seen by her as the uniquely human activity, in its separation from nature, necessity and violence. Whereas the essence of labor and work can be understood by looking at their products and their purpose, action, precisely because it is exclusively human, cannot be understood in such terms. In its causality-drivenness and concern for the “what”, metaphysics can be seen as the intellectual equivalent of labor and work; on the other hand, due to its intangibility action escapes these abstract divisions of reality. This is why Arendt thought that “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.”69 Arendt tried to capture the meaning of action by shifting from
asking the “what” to asking the “who”, thus focusing on the real individual. This is where the previous dismantling of metaphysics acquires practical relevance. Theory, in its restriction of fixating essential meanings is incapable of capturing the meaning of action and of the unique identity of an individual. Arendt thus turns to narratives as a way of capturing the intangible action. Opposed to the work and labor of individuals which reveals not their uniqueness but their sameness, a person and his identity, “who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the
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