Marx and Arendt could not be further apart on the question of freedoms relationship to economics. Marx sees the two as inte

Karl Marx, Fragment on association from “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” translated by Martin Mulligan.

“When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”

HANNAH ARENDT

Between Past and Future EIGHT EXERCISES IN

POLITICAL THOUGHT

Introduction by JEROME KOHN

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Copyright © Hannah Arendt, 1951, 1956, 1957,1958, 1960, 1961, 1963. 1967, 1968 Introduction copyright © Jerome Kohn, 2006

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The selections in this book are revised and expanded versions of es..ys first published in magaztlles, some under different titles. "Tradition and the Modern Age,' a portion of "The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,' and "The Crisis in Education" appeared in The Parti… " Review; a portion of "The Concept of HIStory: Ancient and Modern" and a portion of "What is Authority?" in The Review of Politics; "What is Freedom?" in Chicago Review; a portion of "The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Irs Political Significance"

in Daedalus (Copyright e 1960 by by American Academy of Arts and Sciences); "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker; and "The Conquest of Space and the StatUre of Man" in American Scholar.

A portion of "What is Authority?" was first published in Nomo. I: Authority, edited by Carl J. Friedrkh for the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy, copyright e 19 S8 by the President and FeUows of Harvard Coliege, pubhshed by The Liberal Arts Press, a division of The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

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Contents

Introduction by JEROME KOHN Vll

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future 3 I. TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 17 2. THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY: ANCIENT

AND MODERN 41

3. WHAT IS AUTHORITY? 91

4. WHAT IS FREEDOM? 142

5. THE CRISIS IN EDUCATION 170

6. THE CRISIS IN CULTURE: ITS SOCIAL AND ITS POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE 194

7. TRUTH AND POLITICS 223

8. THE CONQUEST OF SPACE AND THE STATURE OF MAN 260

Notes 275 Index 295

__________……………………………….. ..

4

WHAT IS FREEDOM?

I

To raise the question, what is freedom? seems to be a hopeless enterprise. It is as though age-old contradictions and antino­ mies were lying in wait to force the mind into dilemmas of log­ ical impossibility so that, depending which horn of the dilemma you are holding on to, it becomes as impossible to conceive of freedom or its opposite as it is to realize the notion of a square circle. In its simplest form, the difficulty may be summed up as the contradiction between our consciousness and conscience, telling us that we are free and hence responsible, and our every­ day experience in the outer world, in which we orient ourselves according to the principle of causality. In all practical and espe­ cially in political matters we hold human freedom to be a self­ evident truth, and it is upon this axiomatic assumption that laws are laid down in human communities, that decisions are taken, that judgments are passed. In all fields of scientific and theoretical endeavor, on the contrary, we proceed according to the no less self-evident truth of nihil ex nihilo, of nihil sine causa, that is, on the assumption that even "our own lives are, in the last analysis, subject to causation" and that if there should be an ultimately free ego in ourselves, it certainly never makes its unequivocal appearance in the phenomenal world, and therefore can never become the subject of theoretical ascer­ tainment. Hence freedom turns out to be a mirage the moment psychology looks into what is supposedly its innermost do­ main; for "the part which force plays in nature, as the cause of motion, has its counterpart in the mental sphere in motive as

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WHAT IS FREEDOM? 1 43

the cause of conduct."1 It is true that the test of causality-the predictability of effect if all causes are known-cannot be ap­ plied to the realm of human affairs; but this practical unpre­ dictability is no test of freedom, it signifies merely that we are in no position ever to know all causes which come into play, and this partly because of the sheer number of factors involved, but also because human motives, as distinguished from natural forces, are still hidden from all onlookers, from inspection by our fellow men as well as from introspection.

The greatest clarification in these obscure matters we owe to Kant and to his insight that freedom is no more ascertainable to the inner sense and within the field of inner experience than it is to the senses with which we know and understand the world. Whether or not causality is operative in the household of nature and the universe, it certainly is a category of the mind to bring order into all sensory data, whatever their nature may be, and thus it makes experience possible. Hence the antinomy between practical freedom and theoretical non-freedom, both equally axiomatic in their respective fields, does not merely concern a dichotomy between science and ethics, but lies in everyday life experiences from which both ethics and science take their re­ spective points of departure. It is not scientific theory but thought itself, in its pre-scientific and pre-philosophical under­ standing, that seems to dissolve freedom on which our practical conduct is based into nothingness. For the moment we reflect upon an act which was undertaken under the assumption of our being a free agent, it seems to come under the sway of two kinds of causality, of the causality of inner motivation on one hand and of the causal principle which rules the outer world on the other. Kant saved freedom from this twofold assault upon it by distinguishing between a "pure" or theoretical reason and a "practical reason" whose center is free will, whereby it is im­ portant to keep in mind that the free-willing agent, who is prac­ tically all-important, never appears in the phenomenal world, neither in the outer world of our five senses nor in the field of the inner sense with which I sense myself. This solution, pitting the dictate of the will against the understanding of reason, is in­ genious enough and may even suffice to establish a moral law

144 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

whose logical consistency is in no way inferior to natural laws. But it does little to eliminate the greatest and most dangerous difficulty, namely, that thought itself, in its theoretical as well as its pre-theoretical form, makes freedom disappear–quite apart from the fact that it must appear strange indeed that the faculty of the will whose essential activity consists in dictate and com­ mand should be the harborer of freedom.

To the question of politics, the problem of freedom is crucial, and no political theory can afford to remain unconcerned with the fact that this problem has led into "the obscure wood wherein philosophy has lost its way."2 It is the contention of the following considerations that the reason for this obscurity is that the phenomenon of freedom does not appear in the realm of thought at all, that neither freedom nor its opposite is experi­ enced in the dialogue between me and myself in the course of which the great philosophic and metaphysical questions arise, and that the philosophical tradition, whose origin in this re­ spect we shall consider later, has distorted, instead of clarifying, the very idea of freedom such as it is given in human experience 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. As a first, prelimi­ nary justification of this approach, it may be pointed out that historically the problem of freedom has been the last of the time-honored great metaphysical questions-such as being, nothingness, the soul, nature, time, eternity, etc.-to become a topic of philosophic inquiry at all. 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 experience of religious conversion-of Paul first and then of Augustine-which gave rise to it.

The field where freedom has always been known, not as a problem, to be sure, but as a fact of everyday life, is the politi­ cal realm. And even today, whether we know it or not, the ques­ tion of politics and the fact that man is a being endowed with the gift of action must always be present to our mind when we speak of the problem of freedom; for action and politics,

WHAT IS FREEDOM? 145

among all the capabilities and potentialities of human life, are the only things of which we could not even conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists, and we can hardly touch a single political issue without, implicitly or explicitly, touching upon an issue of man's liberty. Freedom, moreover, is not only one among the many problems and phenomena of the political realm properly speaking, such as justice, or power, or equality; freedom, which only seldom-in times of crisis or revolution­ becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at alL Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d'hre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.

This freedom which we take for granted in all political theory and which even those who praise tyranny must still take into ac­ count is the very opposite of "inner freedom," the inward space into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free. This inner feeling remains without outer manifestations and hence is by definition politically irrelevant. Whatever its legiti­ macy may be, and however eloquently it may have been de­ scribed in late antiquity, it is historically a late phenomenon, and it was originally the result of an estrangement from the world in

t which worldly experiences were transformed into experiences f within one's own self. The experiences of inner freedom are de­ i

,rivative in that they always presuppose a retreat from the world, i

where freedom was denied, into an inwardness to which no other has access. The inward space where the self is sheltered against the world must not be mistaken for the heart or the mind, both of which exist and function only in interrelationship with the world. Not the heart and not the mind, but inwardness as a place of absolute freedom within one's own self was discov­ ered in late antiquity by those who had no place of their own in the world and hence lacked a worldly condition which, from early antiquity to almost the middle of the nineteenth century, was unanimously held to be a prerequisite for freedom.

The derivative character of this inner freedom, or of the the­ ory that "the appropriate region of human liberty" is the "in­ ward domain of consciousness,"3 appears more dearly if we go back to its origins. Not the modern individual with his desire to

14 6 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

unfold, to develop, and to expand, with his justified fear lest so­ ciety get the better of his individuality, with his emphatic insis­ tence "on the importance of genius" and originality, but the popular and popularizing sectarians of late antiquity, who have hardly more in common with philosophy than the name, are representative in this respect. Thus the most persuasive argu­ ments for the absolute superiority of inner freedom can still be found in an essay of Epictetus, who begins by stating that free is he who lives as he wishes,4 a definition which oddly echoes a sentence from Aristotle's Politics in which the statement "Free­ dom means the doing what a man likes" is put in the mouths of those who do not know what freedom is. 5 Epictetus then goes on to show that a man is free if he limits himself to what is in his power, if he does not reach into a realm where he can be hindered. 6 The "science of living"? consists in knowing how to distinguish between the alien world over which man has no power and the self of which he may dispose as he sees fit.

8

Historically it is interesting to note that the appearance of the problem of freedom in Augustine's philosophy was thus pre­ ceded by the conscious attempt to divorce the notion of free­ dom from politics, to arrive at a formulation through which one may be a slave in the world and still be free. Conceptually, however, Epictetus's freedom, which consists in being free from one's own desires, is no more than a reversal of the current an­ cient political notions; and the political background against which this whole body of popular philosophy was formulated, the obvious decline of freedom in the late Roman Empire, man­ ifests itself still quite clearly in the role which such notions as power, domination, and property play in it. According to an­ cient understanding, man could liberate himself from necessity only through power over other men, and he could be free only if he owned a place, a home in the world. Epictetus transposed these worldly relationships into relationships within man's own self, whereby he discovered that no power is so absolute as that which man yields over himself, and that the inward space where man struggles and subdues himself is more entirely his own, namely, more securely shielded from outside interference, than any worldly home could ever be.

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WHAT IS FREEDOM? I47

Hence, in spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, nonpolitical freedom has exerted upon the tradition of thought, it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner free­ dom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves. Before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man's status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word. This freedom clearly was preceded by liberation: in order to be free, man must have liberated himself from the necessities of life. But the status of freedom did not follow automatically upon the act of liberation. Freedom needed, in addition to mere liberation, the company of other men who were in the same state, and it needed a common public space to meet them-a po­ litically organized world, in other words, into which each of the free men could insert himself by word and deed.

Obviously not every form of human intercourse and not every kind of community is characterized by freedom. Where men live together but do not form a body politic-as, for ex­ ample, in tribal societies or in the privacy of the household­ the factors ruling their actions and conduct are not freedom but the necessities of life and concern for its preservation. More­ over, wherever the man-made world does not become the scene for action and speech-as in despotically ruled communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm-freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be sure it may still dwell in men's hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called a demonstrable fact. Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter.

Yet it is precisely this coincidence of politics and freedom which we cannot take for granted in the light of our present

149 i4 8 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

political experience. The rise of totalitarianism, its claim to having subordinated all spheres of life to the demands of poli­ tics and its consistent nonrecognition of civil rights, above all the rights of privacy and the right to freedom from politics, makes us doubt not only the coincidence of politics and free­ dom but their very compatibility. We are inclined to believe that freedom begins where politics ends, because we have seen that freedom has disappeared when so-called political considera­ tions overruled everything else. Was not the liberal credo, "The less politics the more freedom," right after all? Is it not true that the smaller the space occupied by the political, the larger the domain left to freedom? Indeed, do we not rightly measure the extent of freedom in any given community by the free scope it grants to apparently nonpolitical activities, free economic en­ terprise or freedom of teaching, of religion, of cultural and in­ tellectual activities? Is it not true, as we all somehow believe, that politics is compatible with freedom only because and inso­ far as it guarantees a possible freedom from politics?

This definition of political liberty as a potential freedom from politics is not urged upon us merely by our most recent experiences; it has played a large part in the history of political theory. We need go no farther than the political thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who more often than not simply identified political freedom with security. The highest purpose of politics, "the end of government," was the guaranty of security; security, in turn, made freedom possible, and the word "freedom" designated a quintessence of activities which occurred outside the political realm. Even Montesquieu, though he had not only a different but a much higher opinion of the essence of politics than Hobbes or Spinoza, could still occa­ sionally equate political freedom with security.9 The rise of the political and social sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth cen­ turies has even widened the breach between freedom and poli­ tics; for government, which since the beginning of the modern age had been identified with the total domain of the political, was now considered to be the appointed protector not so much of freedom as of the life process, the interests of society and its individuals. Security remained the decisive criterion, but not the

WHAT IS FREEDOM?

individual's security against "violent death," as in Hobbes (where the condition of all liberty is freedom from fear), but a security which should permit an undisturbed development of the life process of society as a whole. This life process is not bound up with freedom but follows its own inherent necessity; and it can be called free only in the sense that we speak of a freely flowing stream. Here freedom is not even the nonpolitical aim of politics, but a marginal phenomenon-which somehow forms the boundary government should not overstep unless life itself and its immediate interests and necessities are at stake.

Thus not only we, who have reasons of our own to distrust politics for the sake of freedom, but the entire modern age has separated freedom and politics. I could descend even deeper into the past and evoke older memories and traditions. The pre­ modern secular concept of freedom certainly was emphatic in its insistence on separating the subjects' freedom from any direct share in government; the people's "liberty and freedom con­ sisted in having the government of those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own: 'tis not for having share in government, that is nothing pertaining to them"-as Charles I summed it up in his speech from the scaffold. It was not out of a desire for freedom that people eventually demanded their share in government or admission to the political realm, but out of mistrust in those who held power over their life and goods. The Christian concept of political freedom, moreover, arose out of the early Christians' suspicion of and hostility against the public realm as such, from whose concerns they demanded to be ab­ solved in order to be free. And this Christian freedom for the sake of salvation had been preceded, as we saw before, by the philoso­ phers' abstention from politics as a prerequisite for the highest and freest way of life, the vita contemplativa.

Despite the enormous weight of this tradition and despite the perhaps even more telling urgency of our own experiences, both pressing into the same direction of a divorce of freedom from politics, I think the reader may believe he has read only an old truism when I said that the raison d'etre of politics is freedom and that this freedom is primarily experienced in action. In the following I shall do no more than reflect on this old truism.

15 0 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

II

Freedom as related to politics is not a phenomenon of the will. We deal here not with the liberum arbitrium, a freedom of choice that arbitrates and decides between two given things, one good and one evil, and whose choice is predetermined by motive which has only to be argued to start its operation­ "And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,! To entertain these fair well-spoken days,! I am determined to prove a villain,! And hate the idle pleasures of these days." Rather it is, to remain with Shakespeare, the freedom of Brutus: "That this shall be or we will fall for it," that is, the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known. Action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a pre­ dictable effect on the other. This is not to say that motives and aims are not important factors in every single act, but they are its determining factors, and action is free to the extent that it is able to transcend them. Action insofar as it is determined is guided by a future aim whose desirability the intellect has grasped before the will wills it, whereby the intellect calls upon the will, since only the will can dictate action-to paraphrase a characteristic description of this process by Duns Scotus. IO The aim of action varies and depends upon the changing circum­ stances of the world; to recognize the aim is not a matter of freedom, but of right or wrong judgment. Will, seen as a dis­ tinct and separate human faculty, follows judgment, i.e., cogni­ tion of the right aim, and then commands its execution. The power to command, to dictate action, is not a matter of free­ dom but a question of strength or weakness.

Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will-although it needs both for the execution of any particular goal-but springs from something altogether different which (following Mon­ tesquieu's famous analysis of forms of government) I shall call a principle. Principles do not operate from within the self as

WHAT IS FREEDOM? 15 1

motives do-"mine own deformity" or my "fair proportion"­ but inspire, as it were, from without; and they are much too general to prescribe particular goals, although every particular aim can be judged in the light of its principle once the act has been started. For, unlike the judgment of the intellect which precedes action, and unlike the command of the will which ini­ tiates it, the inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself; yet while the merits of judgment lose their validity, and the strength of the commanding will exhausts itself, in the course of the act which they execute in coopera­ tion, the principle which inspired it loses nothing in strength or validity through execution. In distinction from its goal, the principle of an action can be repeated time and again, it is inex­ haustible, and in distinction from its motive, the validity of a principle is universal, it is not bound to any particular person or to any particular group. However, the manifestation of princi­ ples comes about only through action, they are manifest in the world as long as the action lasts, but no longer. Such principles are honor or glory, love of equality, which Montesquieu called virtue, or distinction or excellence-the Greek dei dpunroEzv ( "always strive to do your best and to be the best of all"), but also fear or distrust or hatred. Freedom or its opposite appears in the world whenever such principles are actualized; the ap­ pearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coin­ cides with the performing act. Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom-as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.

Freedom as inherent in action is perhaps best illustrated by Machiavelli's concept of virtu, the excellence with which man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him in the guise of fortuna. Its meaning is best rendered by "virtuosity," that is, an excellence we attribute to the performing arts (as dis­ tinguished from the creative arts of making), where the accom­ plishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into exis­ tence and becomes independent of it. The virtuoso-ship of Machiavelli's virtu somehow reminds us of the fact, although Machiavelli hardly knew it, that the Greeks always used such

153 15 2 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

metaphors as flute-playing, dancing, healing, and seafaring to distinguish political from other activities, that is, that they drew their analogies from those arts in which virtuosity of perfor­ mance is decisive.

Since all acting contains an element of virtuosity, and be­ cause virtuosity is the excellence we ascribe to the performing arts, politics has often been defined as an art. This, of course, is not a definition but a metaphor, and the metaphor becomes completely false if one falls into the common error of regarding the state or government as a work of art, as a kind of collective masterpiece. In the sense of the creative arts, which bring forth something tangible and reify human thought to such an extent that the produced thing possesses an existence of its own, poli­ tics is the exact opposite of an art-which incidentally does not mean that it is a science. Political institutions, no matter how well or how badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being. Independent existence marks the work of art as a product of making; utter depend-. ence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a product of action.

The point here is not whether the creative artist is free in the process of creation, but that the creative process is not displayed in public and not destined to appear in the world. Hence the ele­ ment of freedom, certainly present in the creative arts, remains hidden; it is not the free creative process which finally appears and matters for the world, but the work of art itself, the end product of the

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