Socrates

Arendt distinguished Socratic from Platonic thought. Her distinction is obviously uncertain; Socrates did not write, and we have access to his thought primarily through the testimony of Plato. But Plato’s work is divided against itself. The way of thought articulated in the later works is different from, even inimical to, the way of thought implicit in the works written close to the death of Socrates. Arendt explained this division by assuming Plato’s early works were influenced by Socrates, while in his later works Plato worked out a way of thought more fully his own.Footnote ⁴ “There exists a sharp dividing line between what is authentically Socratic and the philosophy taught by Plato. The stumbling block here is the fact that Plato used Socrates as the philosopher, not only in the early and clearly ‘Socratic’ dialogues but also later, when he often made him the spokesman for theories and doctrines that were entirely un-Socratic.”Footnote ⁵ The difference between Socrates and Plato was not that they held different theories. It was that Plato eventually founded a school and taught a kind of doctrine, while Socrates had no school and claimed he never taught anything, but only asked questions and engaged in dialogue. Socrates and Plato differed not just in what they thought but in their ways of thinking.

Socratic thought starts with the experience of wonder, according to Arendt. It was said that Socrates would sometimes stop and think for hours, struck with wonder and lost in thought. This is a recognizable experience – it sometimes happens that we find ourselves in the presence of something obscure, and this obscurity is not simply a region of the unknown but the depth of the incomprehensible. It is not that we encounter something unfamiliar, but that within what is familiar we sense a side of things that is turned away from us and beyond our grasp. We may still recognize each thing for what it is, but this “what it is” no longer seems entirely clear. If we attend to this obscurity something happens – the strangeness of things becomes apparent and, if we let this strangeness overwhelm us, we are struck by a sense of wonder. To wonder is to be open to the mystery of things.

Socrates is an exemplary thinker for Arendt because of his aptitude for wonder, because he did not claim to know anything noble and good, and because he did not present his opinion (doxa) as doctrine or dogma. What set Socrates apart from other thinkers was his ability to endure perplexity and his willingness to acknowledge his lack of understanding: “His distinction from his fellow citizens is not that he possesses any special truth from which the multitude is excluded, but that he remains always ready to endure the pathos of wonder and thereby avoids the dogmatism of mere opinion holders.”Footnote ⁶ Socrates’ profession of ignorance, his claim that he had nothing to teach, was based on this experience of wonder. Instead of imparting knowledge to others, Socrates imparted his perplexity.Footnote ⁷

This perplexity is speechless, according to Arendt – words fail us when we are overcome with wonder, and when we do begin to speak we articulate our wonder in the form of questions.

The ultimate questions emerge from the experience of wonder, and they remain genuine questions as long as they are rooted in that experience.

These questions ask of each being what it is: “What is X?” This “what it is” we traditionally call an “essence.” Socrates saw that, to be able to see things for what they are, we have to already have some prior understanding of their essence. His questions aim to explicate, clarify, and refine this prior understanding. Essential questions require a kind of inner conversion – to respond to them we have to suspend our usual relation to the world and turn our attention away from particular beings towards the mystery of their nature. The attempt to answer such questions requires a kind of withdrawal from the world, a movement in thought away from beings back towards what allows us to recognize them as such. This effort to grasp and illuminate the essence of things is what Arendt called “thinking.”

In her view, the essences of things never stand fully revealed – it is never entirely clear to us what things are.

We tend to grasp the essence of things most readily through language, by putting our thoughts into words. The activity of thinking is for the most part a kind of inner speech, a silent dialogue with myself. As long as thinking is rooted in wonder – as long as it is attuned to the essential obscurity of things and is aware of its own limitations – it constantly renews itself and so remains interminable.

Arendt explained the nature of thinking with a simple example. A meditation on housing and dwelling can help us to clarify the meaning of the word “house,” she argued, and this clarification can help us to better understand what a house is. (Plato and Aristotle also used the example of a house to illustrate their concepts of essence.) Her discussion is worth quoting at length.

A few points. First, Arendt retained the traditional commitment to essential questions, but interpreted the meaning of essence in an untraditional way. The essence of house is not an ideal form seen with the eyes of the mind as the physical house is seen with the eyes of the body. Nor can a house be defined by isolating a core set of objective properties or functional predicates common to all houses. The essence of house becomes clearer to us only when we clarify the meaning of housing, dwelling, being at home. Arendt implies this understanding of essence is implicit in Socratic thought. Socratic thought does not fix a general definition against which particular houses can be measured; it has instead the effect of dissolving every fixed definition and measure. For Arendt it is in the nature of thought “to undo, unfreeze, as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought-words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines) … The consequence is that thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, in short, on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.”Footnote ¹² Because Socratic thought calls into question the concepts and standards that usually guide our approach to things, Arendt called it “thinking without a bannister.”Footnote ¹³

Arendt also tried to clarify the nature of Socratic thought by contrasting it with what it is not. It is not cognition, since it does not subsume particular beings under general concepts. It is not representative thinking, since it is not a matter of seeing beings from many different points of view. It is not a matter of deliberation, since it does not aim at a decision to act.Footnote ¹⁴ It is not a matter of judgment, since it deals with the nature of things in general rather than with singularities.Footnote ¹⁵

But she insisted Socratic thinking can help other modes of thought. Socratic thought can initially paralyze cognition, since it tends to undo the concepts that we usually take for granted; but it can ultimately strengthen our powers of cognition, since it allows us to transform and refine the terms in which we think. The critical power of Socratic thought can also strengthen our capacity for representative thought, since it attunes us to the limitations of our own views and so helps us to be open to the views of others. Socratic thinking can also paralyze deliberation, since it calls into question the values and criteria that usually guide our decisions; and yet it also allows us to reflect on these criteria and to consider our decisions more carefully. To make this point she returned to the example of housing and dwelling.

Finally, Socratic thought can strengthen our powers of judgment. Thinking gives us a critical distance from the terms in which we usually recognize and evaluate things, and so it helps us see each thing for what it is rather than thoughtlessly measuring it against a general standard.

Socratic thinking is not the same as cognition, representative thought, deliberation, or judgment, and yet indirectly it has the power to refine these other modes of thought.

Socratic thinking has its dangers, according to Arendt. One danger is paralysis: since thinking tends to “unfreeze” the assumptions “frozen” into concepts and doctrines, it “inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil.”Footnote ¹⁸ If we are used to following rules and applying set standards, rather than relying on our own judgment, the destructive effect of thinking may leave us paralyzed. Another danger is a kind of nihilism, a rejection of all standards and the unthinking refusal to judge. Arendt thought this danger was exemplified by certain followers of Socrates, who “changed the nonresults of Socratic thinking into negative results,” who mistook the endless questioning of doctrines and standards for a doctrine that rejected all standards, and who concluded that without definitive standards it was impossible to make meaningful judgments. These followers turned out to be a very real threat to the polis, according to Arendt, but that threat did not come from their thinking but from their desire for a doctrine that would relieve them of the need to think.Footnote ¹⁹

But if Socratic thought is dangerous, Arendt argued, thoughtlessness is worse. Evil is often the result not of wickedness but of thoughtlessness, not of the deliberate transgression of common values but of thoughtless adherence to them. (The most significant characteristic of Adolf Eichmann, in her view, was “not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”)Footnote ²⁰ Whenever we simply apply inherited concepts and fulfill conventional responsibilities, we abdicate a deeper responsibility to see things for what they are and to decide on our own what to do. This abdication of responsibility allows us to do evil with a good conscience, since we are secure in the knowledge that our intentions are good and that we are doing what everyone does. Thinking disturbs this good conscience when it calls all values into question and confronts us with the responsibility to judge for ourselves. But the destructive effect of thinking is not simply negative since it allows us to refine our powers of cognition, deliberation, and judgment. “Socrates … seems indeed to have held that talking and thinking about piety, justice, courage, and the rest were liable to make men more pious, more just, more courageous, even though they were not given either definitions or further ‘values’ to direct their further conduct.”Footnote ²¹

Arendt’s reflections on thinking and judging are incomplete. She never explained precisely how thinking liberates the faculty of judgment; nor did she explain what it means to judge something right or wrong; nor did she explain how or why it is that, in moments of crisis, some people are able to judge right from wrong even in that absence of unequivocal standards of conduct.Footnote ²² But this incompleteness is less a flaw in her work than a reticence that leaves open essential questions: What was the connection between Eichmann’s evil and his thoughtlessness? Was there a connection between Socrates’ thoughtfulness and his refusal to obey the dictates of the Thirty Tyrants? What do these examples show about the connection of thought to judgment?

Since deliberation and judgment are central to politics, Arendt argued, Socratic thought has a certain relevance to political life. Socrates himself highlighted this relevance at his trial when he claimed that his public philosophizing was the greatest boon ever bestowed on the city of Athens. He saw himself not as an architect, umpire, or teacher, but as a midwife and a gadfly. His political role as a thinker was neither to design the city, nor to rule it, nor to teach his fellow citizens, but to wake his fellow citizens from the slumber of thoughtlessness.Footnote ²³

Socrates played this role through dialogue. Dialogue was a way to infect his fellow citizens with wonder, to bring to light the truths and errors implicit in their opinions, and so to rouse them into thoughtfulness. The aim of dialogue was not to introduce into the polis truths that would supersede political debate; in Arendt’s view, Socrates “probably did not look upon [dialectic] as the opposite or even the counterpart to persuasion, and it is certain that he did not oppose the results of this dialectic to doxa, opinion.”Footnote ²⁵ His aim was to introduce into political life the art of thinking–the “interminable dialogue between [the mind] and the essence of everything that is.”Footnote ²⁶

Arendt saw Socrates not as a potential ruler who claimed to have returned to the cave of public life from the heights of solitary contemplation, but as a thinker who introduced pure thinking into public life by speaking informally as a citizen to other citizens on essential questions relevant to matters of public concern:

Socrates showed that it is possible to be a politically engaged thinker who reflects on the nature of political things in light of experiences proper to the political realm. Arendt returned to Socrates to retrieve a possible way of doing of political theory – a possibility largely implicit and unrealized in the tradition of Western philosophy.

Plato

For Arendt, the Western tradition of political philosophy began with Plato. The trial of Socrates led Plato to think of the relation of politics and philosophy in a deeply unsocratic way. “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.”Footnote ²⁸ How did Plato depart from Socrates’s way of thought?

Socrates had tried to introduce dialectic into the political discourse of Athens, and his fellow citizens had responded by putting him to death. Plato in turn proposed to use philosophy to transcend political discourse altogether, Arendt argued, and this proposal eventually led him to abandon Socrates’ stance towards politics. But Plato misunderstood the nature of political thought, she argued, so that his political philosophy covered over the original Greek understanding of politics.

The trial of Socrates revealed the weakness of philosophy in the political realm. It showed that in the public realm philosophical truth becomes simply one opinion among others;Footnote ²⁹ that truth could be less persuasive than idle talk and slander; and that credulous and ignorant citizens could be persuaded to do terrible injustices. Plato saw that politics is a matter of appearances, that things appear differently to people in different situations, that differences of opinion can never be definitively resolved through persuasion, and that in politics there is never a firm basis for making reliable decisions. He apparently concluded that a just and thriving city could not be reached through political means–through public debate and common deliberation among citizens. In his Seventh Letter he wrote:

Politics was ruled by persuasion, but persuasion had failed to prevent injustice. There had to be a better way.

Arendt thought that Plato was guided by the experience not of thought but of measure. Measure is a way to transcend the distortions of appearance. We know things do not appear to our senses as they really are, but that their appearance depends on the perspective from which we see them, so that what is far from us seems small while what is close to us looms large. These distortions of perspective generate differences of opinion. But it is possible to move beyond appearances and to resolve differences of opinion through the use of measure. The size of an object may seem different to us depending on the points of view from which we see it, but we can know its size for sure by measuring it against a constant standard such as a yardstick. Or we might have different opinions about the mass of a piece of gold, but we can resolve those differences by weighing it against a standard unit. Measure lets us transcend the distortions of appearance and to definitively resolve certain differences of opinion.Footnote ³¹

Plato transposed the notion of measure into the realm of thought. This transposition was based on an analogy: just as appearances can mislead our perceptions of particular beings, so too can appearances mislead our understanding of what beings are. And just as we can resolve different opinions about the size or weight of things by measuring them against a fixed standard, so too can we resolve differences of opinions about what things are by measuring them against their essence. If we want to know the relative purity of a piece of gold, for example, it may be impossible to tell on the basis of mere appearance. But since we know that gold in general has certain objective traits, we can test the genuineness of any piece of gold by measuring it against a fixed standard. If we can define the general nature of gold, we can use this general definition as an absolute standard against which we can measure the purity of any particular piece of gold. Essence can be a kind of measure.

Plato extended this notion of measure to all things. Just as we distinguish between genuine gold and fool’s gold, so we also distinguish true friends from false friends, real science from pseudoscience, real virtue from the semblance of virtue, genuine justice from travesties of justice. People have different opinions about what is genuine and what is not – my actions tend to seem especially virtuous to me, while the actions of my enemies tend to seem especially vile and disgraceful. Plato saw that if we could truly define what justice is in essence, we could use this definition as an absolute standard against which to measure the relative justice of any particular act.

Plato introduced this notion of measure into the sphere of politics. The problem of political thought, in Arendt’s words, is that it “relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which [there is] no common measure.”Footnote ³² Without definite measures, we can deliberate endlessly without really knowing what we are talking about. As long as we don’t know what justice really is, we have no certain criteria by which to make political decisions. But if we could grasp the essence of political things, we could devise general definitions that would enable us to definitively resolve political differences and to build a just community. Rather than dealing with political differences through the endless exchange of opinions, we could definitively resolve political differences by transcending opinions altogether. If philosophy could find measures grounded in the essence of things – standards that transcend the political realm – then politics itself would be superfluous. The endless debates essential to political life could be replaced by philosophical understanding.

In a lecture course in 1927, Heidegger tried to critically dismantle the Platonic notion that essences can serve as a kind of measure. He argued that this notion depends on interpreting essences as ideal forms on which actual beings are more or less perfectly modeled, and that this interpretation of essence is not based in the experience of thinking but in the experience of making.

Heidegger argued that Plato conceived of essence as measure through a threefold operation: first he abstracted the words eidos and idea from the sphere of production; then he transposed the words to a philosophical level of thought, so that they named not an aspect of particular beings but their essential nature; and then he applied this expanded sense of eidos and idea to all beings. So Plato conceived of essence in terms derived not from the experience of thinking but from the experience of making: “the chief ancient determinations for the thingness or reality of a being originate in productive activity, the comprehension of being by way of production.”Footnote ³⁴ By tracing the lineage of Plato’s concept of essence back to the experiences from which it was born, Heidegger tried to deprive it of its seeming self-evidence, to clarify its original sense, and to alert us to the ways in which it both guides and misguides thought. This way of thinking – which tries to free thought of inherited prejudices by tracing metaphysical concepts back to the experiences from which they were derived – he called the phenomenological “Destruktion” or “critical dismantling” of the metaphysical tradition.

Arendt appropriated this form of phenomenology in her critique of Plato’s philosophy of politics. She argued that Plato’s interpretation of essence as measure was not grounded in the experience of thought but in the experience of making or poiesis. Plato often used examples drawn from the experience of making to explain the notion of ideas. Implicit in these examples is a simple analogy. Craftsmen understand what their products are, and this understanding guides the design of their products and determines how they will look. Before an architect starts to make a house, for example, she will foresee its final look, and this foresight will guide the actual construction of the house, so that the actual house itself will in some sense be merely the imitation of the foreseen look. In Greek, the word for “look” is idea (ἰδέα or ἔιδος). Since the essence of a product (what it is) is manifest in its general idea (look), Plato used the word to name the essence of products in general. An ideal house, in this sense, is one that perfectly embodies what a house really is. The task of the architect is to understand what houses are in essence, to imagine a house that instantiates this ideal, and to use this ideal image as a model to guide the construction of an actual house. The task of the philosopher is simply to make explicit and to refine the kind of knowledge possessed by craftsmen. The ideal is the measure of the actual.

Arendt concluded that a key part of Plato’s conception of thought – the interpretation of essence as idea – is not actually grounded in the experience of thinking, but is derived from the experience of measure and making.

In this argument Arendt followed Heidegger’s attempt to critically dismantle the metaphysical tradition.

But Arendt saw what Heidegger failed to see: the implications for political theory of this Destruktion of the Platonic notion of essence. The interpretation of essence as idea sets the task of the political philosopher, which Plato laid out most clearly in the allegory of the cave. The philosopher should not waste time in the darkness of the political realm arguing with fellow citizens over what is singular, ephemeral, and contingent. He should turn away from the world of becoming and turn towards the realm of Being. Only by leaving the ephemera of political life and ascending in thought to the ideas will he be able to see what things really are. Once he has seen what political things are – once he knows what justice is, what man is, what the polis is – he has to return to the cave, not in order to engage in political debate with his fellow citizens, but to educate them through reasoned argument; that is, to turn them away from worldly things, to guide them up out of the cave, and to let them see the ideas for themselves.

The task of the political philosopher is analogous to the task of the architect: to understand what a city is; to design an ideal city on the basis of this understanding; to measure the actual polis against this ideal; and to use this ideal as a model to guide the remaking of the polis. Political philosophy is a matter of finding absolute standards grounded in the essences of things, and translating these standards into principles, laws, and blueprints for institutions that could ensure justice in the polis. Arendt argued that this view has influenced the whole tradition of political philosophy.

The task of the political philosopher for Plato is not to be a gadfly, like Socrates, but to be the teacher, umpire, architect, or even ruler of the polity.

The notion of essence as idea led Plato to mistake the nature of political thought, according to Arendt. If we interpret essences simply as what beings are, we can look for the essences of things in the flux of the political realm – a politician grasps the essential when he understands the nature of a singular and ephemeral event, just as the philosopher grasps the essential when he understands the nature of a general phenomenon. But if we interpret essences in Platonic terms as eternal and general ideas, then political thought only touches on the essential to the extent that it discovers the eternal and the necessary beneath the ephemeral contingencies of politics. To focus on the ephemera of political life, for Plato, is to focus on the inessential.

The interpretation of essence as idea also distorted Plato’s view of truth. On this point Arendt acknowledged a debt to Heidegger, who argued that Plato’s thought had obscured an authentic understanding of truth implicit in the Greek word aletheia. In his view, aletheia meant not just a correspondence of thought to reality, but in a deeper sense meant the illumination of beings that first makes such correspondence possible. But since Plato thought of essences as ideal forms, to which particular beings corresponded and against which they could be measured, Plato foregrounded the sense of truth as correspondence and obscured the more basic sense of truth as illumination. Arendt noted her debt to Heidegger in an essay on political authority:

But Arendt again saw what Heidegger failed to see: the implications of Plato’s notion of truth for political philosophy. If truth is a matter of illumination or unconcealment (ἀλήθεια), the nontheoretical insights of political thought can lay claim to truth. One can look for truth in the ephemera of human affairs, since there is truth in an opinion that sheds light on a specific situation, or a judgment that illuminates the nature of a singular act, just as there is truth in a definition that clarifies the nature of a general phenomenon. But if truth is a matter of correspondence, and if beings are true only insofar as they correspond to their ideal form, then only theory can lay claim to truth. Theory is true insofar as it is informed by and corresponds to these eternal forms, while political thought is concerned with semblances of the forms rather than the forms themselves. In Platonic terms, political thought is true only to the extent that it recognizes in the ephemera of politics the generality and eternity of the ideas.

Arendt’s critique of Plato implies a stark conclusion: Plato’s interpretation of essence, and his notion of truth, led him to systematically distort the phenomena of political life and the faculties of political thought. Four distortions stand out:

1. 1. The notion of truth as correctness entailed a simplified notion of appearance. In the allegory of the cave, essences do not appear in the outward look of particular beings; beings are merely semblances of the ideas. So appearance is interpreted not as the self-showing of beings themselves, but as mere semblance or illusion.

2. 2. This Platonic notion of appearance implied a demotion of opinion. Opinion is seen not as a faculty of reason but as an inferior form of philosophical theory. Just as the craftsman uses weights and measures to move beyond appearance to an objective knowledge of the mass and size of things, so the philosopher should use the ideas to move beyond opinions about things to an objective knowledge of what they are. The task of the political philosopher is to replace opinion with knowledge.

3. 3. The demotion of opinion goes with a simplified notion of judgment. Judgment is interpreted not as the ability to see and evaluate beings as singularities, but as the ability to apply the general to the particular, or to subsume the particular under the general (determinant or reflective judgment). Plato assumed all judgment requires a reference to a general standard, without which judgment becomes either arbitrary guesswork or subjective preference. To judge correctly one must know the true standards, and the true standards are those grounded in the essence of things. To judge is to measure the actual against the ideal, so that the ability to judge is ultimately based on a knowledge of the ideas.Footnote ³⁸ In this way Plato confused impartial judgment with objective knowledge. Objectivity for him was not a matter of seeing things from many perspectives, but of moving beyond the distortions of perspective to a comprehensive grasp of reality, a view from nowhere. Judgments should be based not on weighing many opinions, but on a knowledge that transcends the realm of opinion altogether.

4. 4. The attempt to replace opinion with philosophical knowledge also entailed a demotion of deliberation. For Plato, the ends of communal life are not a matter of incommensurable perspectives and opinions; they are a matter of definite philosophical knowledge. Deliberation is no longer understood as debate over the ends of communal life, but merely as debate over the best way to achieve the ends that can be known through philosophical contemplation. The most basic level of political debate is largely superfluous. The polity should ultimately be ruled not by the opinions of citizens but by the wisdom of philosophers.

In short, Plato interpreted political thought as a defective form of philosophy. His philosophy of politics aimed to replace opinion with truth, judgment with knowledge, rhetoric with dialectic. It aimed to transcend the public debate that is the essence of politics, and to replace the plurality of opinions with single truth that is valid for all. The ultimate aim of his political philosophy was to replace politics with philosophy.

For Arendt this is the decisive point: Plato founded a tradition of political philosophy that is basically anti-political.Footnote ³⁹ He derived basic concepts from nonpolitical experiences; he interpreted political phenomena in nonpolitical terms; and he sketched a form of government that dispensed with politics altogether. So Plato’s view of politics distorted and concealed the original Greek understanding of the political.

The key to this distortion for Arendt was the concept of rule. Politics in the original sense excluded any form of rule; the polis “was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between ruler and ruled.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Plato assumed politics was a matter of rule, and this assumption obscured the absence of rulership essential to political life.

The assumption that politics is a matter of rule (archein) is still implicit in common definitions of different forms of government: monarchy (rule by one), oligarchy (rule by a few), theocracy (rule by God) and democracy (defined as the rule of the people).

Arendt argued that for the Greeks rulership was prepolitical and belonged to the private sphere of the household or oikos rather than to the public sphere of the polis. “All Greek and Latin words which express some rulership over others, such as rex, pater, anax, basileus, refer originally to household relationships and were names slaves gave to their masters.”Footnote ⁴² To introduce the concept of rule into political thought was thus to confuse the polis and the oikos:

This confusion effaced the differences between leadership and rulership, and obscured the distinction between political and nonpolitical forms of power: “According to Greek understanding, the relationship between ruling and being ruled, between command and obedience, was by definition identical with the relationship between master and slaves.”Footnote ⁴⁴ So the introduction of the concept of rule into political thought had the effect of effacing the specificity of the polis in particular and the political realm as such.

While Plato took the concept of rule from the realm of the household, Arendt argued, he generalized it to encompass any relation of power.

What Plato wanted for the polis was a form of rule that relied on free obedience rather than on persuasion or threats of violence. He saw that free obedience was proper to any power relation in which followers recognize that a leader has superior expertise. Patients freely obey doctors, just as sailors freely obey a captain in whom they recognize superior seamanship, and as apprentices freely obey the orders of a master-craftsman. In the ideal city, Plato thought, the citizens would recognize the political expertise of the philosopher-king and would freely obey his laws:

The argument that philosophers were naturally fit to rule the polis derived its plausibility especially from the analogy between the philosopher and the craftsman.

Arendt argued this analogy took its plausibility from the interpretation of essence as idea, which itself was derived from the experience of making. Once the wisdom of the philosopher-king was interpreted as analogous to the technical expertise of the craftsman, the relation of ruler to citizens could be likened to the relation between a master craftsmen who gives commands and the workers who carry them out. The interpretation of essence as idea thus supported the analogy between governing and making, and this analogy reinforced the interpretation of politics as a matter of rule.

To equate politics and rule, and to understand the ruler as a master craftsman, is to see politics as a matter of technical expertise and management rather than of considered opinion and common deliberation.

The analogy of the philosopher and the craftsman distorted the nature of political action, according to Arendt. Since Plato thought of the essence of the polis as an ideal city of which actual cities were merely imperfect copies, this ideal could serve as a model to guide the philosopher’s effort to remake the city, just as the idea of the house guides the architect’s effort to build any particular home.

The analogy between philosopher and craftsman led Plato to confuse action with making, and to think of political action on the model of production.

The confusion of action with making degraded politics into a means to higher ends. Making is usually merely a means to an end, while action is an end in itself. This is an essential difference between political action (debating what to do and how to live together) and production (working to realize ends given in advance), between the deliberation essential to politics and the instrumental reasoning essential to production. With Plato, however, political action was understood not as the act of deliberation over final ends, but as the attempt to realize an end discovered in advance by philosophical knowledge. Arendt argued this instrumental conception of political action has dominated the whole tradition of political philosophy.

In Plato, political life was no longer an end in itself, but simply a means to an end.Footnote ⁵⁰

The confusion of acting and making also made it possible to justify violence in politics, according to Arendt. Plato himself never condoned violence, but once politics is subordinated to a higher end it is always possible to justify violence as a means to that end. “Violence, without which no fabrication could ever come to pass, has always played an important role in political schemes and thinking based upon an interpretation of action in terms of making.”Footnote ⁵¹ The interpretation of politics as a means to an end outlived Plato, and this interpretation made it possible for later thinkers to justify and glorify violence. “Only the modern age … brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of human affairs as a sphere of making … As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybody’s using all means to pursue recognized ends.”Footnote ⁵² Justifications for violence in the political realm today still rely on the confusion of acting and making (“If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.”).

The confusion of acting with making, Arendt argued, also separated knowing from doing. In the act of deliberation, thought and action are indissociable. But in the process of making something, there is an obvious gap between formulating a project and carrying it out. The one who knows what to do does not have to do it herself, and the ones who follow her instructions do not have to know what they are doing.

The separation of knowing and doing makes plausible a hierarchy between ruler and ruled. Once insight into political matters is understood as analogous to technical expertise, it follows that experts should direct the actions of the others. The dissociation of knowing and doing thus undermines the principle of political equality. The equality of citizens is replaced by a hierarchy in which those who are capable of philosophical insight are naturally fit to rule, and those who are incapable of rational discourse are naturally fit to be ruled.

Arendt concluded that Plato’s political philosophy was essentially anti-political. Plato’s aim was not to introduce essential questions into political discourse, as Socrates had done, but to replace political discourse with philosophical knowledge. Plato thought of politics in terms of experiences proper to nonpolitical spheres of life. The effect of his thought was to efface the original understanding of politics, and the result of this effacement was that politics was reduced to a matter of rule, so that the basic question of political philosophy became “Who rules whom?” This question is central to the Republic: “τὸ δὴ μετὰ τοῦτο τί ἄν ἡμῖν διαιρετέον εἴη; ἆρ’οὐκ αὐτῶν τούτων οἴτινες ἄρξοθσί τε καὶ ἄρξονται; What would it be that we must determine? Isn’t it who among these men will rule and who will be ruled?”Footnote ⁵⁴ This tradition of political philosophy still persists today, most clearly in the work of Leo Strauss:

Arendt suggests that this question is not a fundamental problem of political life, that it does not belong to a “permanent” and “natural horizon of human thought,” but that it belongs to a specific tradition of political philosophy, and that this tradition has misunderstood the nature of politics from the ground up.

Aristotle

Arendt’s relation to Aristotle was complex. In her view, Aristotle’s political philosophy is internally divided: he was guided in part by the nontheoretical understanding of politics implicit in the language of Athens; but he was misguided by the metaphysical concepts with which he tried to grasp political phenomena. There is a tension in Aristotle’s work between an authentic understanding of politics, and the metaphysical framework in which he worked out his practical philosophy. This tension is the source of blind spots, incongruities, and contradictions in his thought.Footnote ⁵⁶ Arendt’s work on Aristotle is thus guided by a few key questions: What are the terms in which Aristotle conceives the nature of politics? What was the original provenance of these terms? How do his concepts illuminate or obscure the nature of political action? How well do they capture the essence of politics?

Aristotle divided knowledge into three branches: productive, practical, and theoretical. Productive knowledge deals with making; practical knowledge deals with ethics and politics; theoretical knowledge deals with math, physics, and metaphysics. In his metaphysics Aristotle laid out his understanding of essence, and tried to define in precise and definite terms what we are asking for when we ask of something what it is. Metaphysics in this sense has a certain priority over the other sciences, since our approach to beings is always guided in advance by a prior understanding of what they are, and any attempt to grasp what beings are is always guided in advance by a prior interpretation of the meaning of essence. To study democracies, for example, we have to have some prior understanding of what democracy is; and any attempt to say what democracy is will be guided by a prior understanding of this essential “what-it-is.” Questions of political philosophy are in this way implicated in questions of metaphysics. What then are the basic concepts of Aristotle’s metaphysics?

Metaphysics for Aristotle is the science that contemplates Being as Being (ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ἣ ὄν).Footnote ⁵⁷ In his view, every being is essentially a substance (οὐσία) with essential and accidental properties (συμβεβηκός).Footnote ⁵⁸ The word “substance” has four meanings: (a) the essence of a thing, “the what it is” (τὸ τί ἢν εἲναι); (b) the universal, what belongs to all such things (τὸ καθόλου); (c) the genus to which such things belong (τὸ γένος); and (d) the underlying ground that precedes the appearance and survives the destruction of actual beings (τὸ ὑποκείμενον).Footnote ⁵⁹ These four meanings converge not on the idea (εἴδος) of things, but on their principles and causes (ἡ οὐσία ἀρχὴ καὶ αἰτία τις ἐστίν).Footnote ⁶⁰ The word “principle” or arche (ἀρχή) comes from the verb archein (ἄρχειν), which means “to begin,” “to lead,” and “to rule.” Aristotle combined these meanings in his concept of arche: the arche of something is both the origin from which it begins and the underlying ground that governs the way it is. The arche of philosophy is wonder, for example, since wonder is both the origin of questioning and the underlying pathos that grounds and guides philosophical thought. The word “cause” (αἰτία) means what is responsible for something being the way it is; for Aristotle every being has four causes: its form (τὸ εἲδος καὶ παράδειγμα); its matter (ἡ ὕλη); its source of motion (ὅθεν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς μεταβολῆς); and its end or telos (τὸ τέλος).Footnote ⁶¹ The telos of a being is that for whose sake it exists, the work or ergon (ἔργον) towards which it moves or is moved. When things reach their telos – when they achieve their end (ὃις ὑπάρχει τὸ τέλος) – they are perfect or teleion (τέλειον).Footnote ⁶² As long as something has not reached its telos it exists in the mode of potentiality or dunamis (δύναμις); when it reaches its end and performs its proper work or activity, it exists in the mode of working, actuality or energeia (ἐνέργεια).Footnote ⁶³

Aristotle often used two kinds of examples to explain these basic concepts.

The first example is building a house.Footnote ⁶⁴ To truly know what a house is we must know not only its form but also its matter, its source of motion, its end, and its principle. The principle of a house is the human need for dwelling; its matter is the stuff from which it is made; its source of motion is the architects and the builders; and its telos is the house’s work or function. When the house is being designed and constructed it is merely potential, in the sense that it is moving towards its final form. It becomes actual when it reaches its final form and fulfills its function. A perfect (teleion) house is one that fully achieves its end (telos).

Aristotle also explained these concepts using the example of living beings. What is essential to an acorn, for example, is not its properties but its underlying causes: the matter of which it is made; the form of the mature tree it contains; the source of its growth; and the end towards which it grows. The oak exists potentially in the acorn, and it exists actually when the movement of growth has reached its end.

Where do these concepts come from? To what region of beings did they originally belong? In light of what experience does Aristotle understand all beings in these terms?

Arendt argued that Aristotle’s examples point to the provenance of his concepts. The examples of living things suggest that Aristotle worked out his metaphysics by generalizing concepts that originally belonged to the sphere of animal and plant life. In The Life of the Mind, she claimed the concepts of actuality and potentiality were derived from the experience of living things and then transposed into the sphere of production:

It would seem Aristotle derived his categories from the experience of living things.

But this derivation is incomplete. In The Human Condition, Arendt argued that the word “form” or eidos originally belonged to the sphere of making, and this implies that Aristotle conceived of living beings themselves in terms that are ultimately derived from the experience of production.Footnote ⁶⁶ The development of living beings is understood in terms of the making of products. This analogy is explicit in the Metaphysics: “It is the same with natural formations as it is with the products of art. For the seed produces [ποιεῖ] just as those things that come from art [τὰ ἀπο τέχνης]. It contains the form potentially [ἔχει γὰρ δυνάμει τὸ εἲδος].”Footnote ⁶⁷ Both natural and artificial things are products; the difference between the natural and the artificial is simply that what is natural has its eidos and its source of motion within itself, while the eidos and source of motion of artificial things lie outside themselves in the one who makes them.

The basic terms of Aristotle’s metaphysics ultimately come from the experience of making, Arendt argued. His concepts are derived from terms most appropriate to one sphere of beings – products. Although Aristotle carefully distinguishes between nature and art, his basic concepts lead him to conceive all beings on the model of products.

How did Aristotle use these metaphysical concepts in his practical philosophy?

The concepts of the Metaphysics provide the framework of Aristotle’s ethics, since he understood human existence in the same terms with which he understood everything else. To grasp what it is to be human is to grasp the substance of “man” – his form, his matter, his source of motion, and above all his telos.Footnote ⁶⁸ The telos of human life is happiness, and the highest happiness depends on the highest work of human beings.Footnote ⁶⁹ Since Aristotle articulated his metaphysical concepts in terms derived from the sphere of making, the basic terms of his metaphysics led him to think of “man” on the model of the artist and craftsman. This model is explicit in the Nicomachean Ethics:

The work of man turns out to be a way of life (ζωήν τινα) in which, through the practice of the virtues, he actualizes his nature as man.Footnote ⁷¹ Man becomes what he is by doing the work proper to man.

The concepts of the Metaphysics also provided the framework for Aristotle’s political thought. In the Politics, Aristotle conceived the polis in the same metaphysical terms. The material of the polis is its population and its territory.Footnote ⁷² The form of the polis is its constitution. Its sources of motion are the statesman and the natural impulse of human beings to live together.Footnote ⁷³ And the telos of the polis is living well, the happiness of its citizens.Footnote ⁷⁴ In other words, the telos of the polis is to allow men to reach their telos, to become what they are, to live the best life, to achieve the highest happiness.

Aristotle’s most basic ethical and political question is the question of human nature: What is man? What is his telos? What is his proper work? What is the best life?

Aristotle answered these questions in the Nicomachean Ethics. In his view, the highest work of man is philosophical contemplation, since contemplation provides the highest happiness available to man. So the best life is the life devoted to philosophy. Ethics and politics have their raison d’être in something that transcends the ethical and political sphere. The political life ultimately aims at something beyond politics – the contemplative life of the philosopher.Footnote ⁷⁵

How did Aristotle’s metaphysical thought guide or misguide his view of politics?

Arendt objected not just to Aristotle’s answer to the question of human nature, but to the terms in which the question was framed: What are the eidos and telos of man? In her view, these concepts fail to grasp what is distinctive to human beings. She did not say Aristotle misunderstood human nature, or that man has no distinctive way of being. Her argument was that Aristotle’s concept of essence cannot fully grasp what is proper to human beings. While his concepts may allow us to grasp the essence of nonhuman beings, they can only distort our understanding of ourselves when they are applied to human existence.

Arendt did not deny there are universal and necessary structures of human existence. She only doubted we have an essence “in the same sense as other things.” We cannot assume that humans can be understood with concepts proper to nonhuman beings. Nor can we assume that humans have a specific work and telos in the same sense that other things do. Aristotle’s teleological view of man does to some extent illuminate the basic structures of human existence, but it distorts our existence by interpreting it in terms of concepts derived from other kinds of beings. It is not that Aristotle has the wrong answer to the question of human nature, but that the question itself implies a misconception of human being. To ask about the natural ends of human life, Arendt thought, is “to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what.’”Footnote ⁷⁷

Aristotle’s teleology thus led him to misconceive the nature of political action, Arendt argued. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle drew a clear distinction between action and production, doing and making, praxis and poiesis. Poiesis is any activity that is not done for its own sake, but that has its end beyond itself in the product to be made. Praxis is any activity that has its end in itself in the sense that it is done for its own sake.Footnote ⁷⁸ Poiesis is a means to an end, whereas praxis is beyond the means/end schema in the sense that acting well (εὐπραχία) is its own end. For most of the Nicomachean Ethics it seems that the work of man is to excel in politics and ethics, since excellence in the political and ethical spheres is an end in itself.Footnote ⁷⁹ But at the end of the book it turns out that the happiness of the political life is only a second-rate happiness, and that the highest happiness is achievable only in the philosophical life. The telos of man can only be reached outside the ethical and political sphere. Philosophical contemplation is the only activity loved wholly for its own sake, whereas all praxis aims at something beyond the action itself.Footnote ⁸⁰ So political action can no longer be understood as having its end in itself; it has to be understood as ultimately a means to a higher end.

Aristotle’s metaphysical concepts led him to think of political action on the model of production, and to think of the polis as a kind of product: politicians are like manual workmen (χειροτέχναι) who do the labor of forming the polis;Footnote ⁸¹ while the philosopher is like the architect (ἀρχιτέκτων) who understands the essence of the city and who is therefore fit to design its form.Footnote ⁸² This technical analogy is explicit in the Politics:

Just as, for the architect, the form of a house follows from its work, which is to shelter and sustain the way of life proper to its inhabitants, so too, for the political theorist, the form of best city will follow from its work, which is to make possible for its citizens the best way of life – the life of contemplation.Footnote ⁸⁴

Aristotle’s metaphysics reinforced the confusion of praxis and poiesis already implicit in Plato, Arendt thought, and this confusion led him to accept some of the assumptions underlying Plato’s philosophy of politics. Like Plato, Aristotle saw politics as a means to an end. Like Plato, he separated knowing and doing. And this separation of knowing and doing led him, like Plato, to think of politics as a matter of rule.

But the attempt to understand politics in terms of his metaphysics had several other consequences for his political philosophy, according to Arendt.

1. 1. Aristotle reduced deliberation to instrumental thinking. Arendt noted that for Aristotle, “we deliberate only about means to an end that we take for granted, that we cannot choose … ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The ends of political life should not be endlessly debated but determined once and for all by philosophical knowledge; political deliberation should only concern the best way to achieve ends given in advance by philosophy.

2. 2. Aristotle dissociated political action from happiness, and located the highest happiness outside the sphere of politics: “From practical pursuits we look to secure some advantage, greater or smaller, beyond the action itself … The activity of the politician is unleisured, and aims at securing something beyond the mere participation in politics – positions of authority and honor, or, if the happiness of the politician himself and of his fellow-citizens, this happiness is conceived as something distinct from political activity.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Even when philosophers discarded Aristotle’s teleology, Arendt argued, they generally retained the assumption that we engage in politics only to secure happiness outside political life.

3. 3. Aristotle’s metaphysics obscured the specific temporality of human existence. Arendt argued that the concepts of actuality and potentiality were drawn from the sphere of organic growth rather than from the experience of action. “When Aristotle holds that ‘coming-into-being necessarily implies the pre-existence of something which is potentially but not actually,’ he is applying the cyclical movement in which everything that is alive swings … to the realm of human affairs.”Footnote ⁸⁷ But the concepts of actuality and potentiality fail to grasp the radical openness of free action. What exists “potentially” always moves towards an end given in advance, so that the future it aims at is in some sense already present, according to Arendt: “The view that everything real must be preceded by a potentiality as one of its causes implicitly denies the future as an authentic tense: the future is nothing but a consequence of the past.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Aristotle’s metaphysics effaces the possibility of radical novelty – of actions or events that bring about something unprecedented, something that was not foreseen or even imagined.Footnote ⁸⁹

4. 4. Aristotle’s philosophy devalues the whole realm of action, since his understanding of essence consigns all action to the realm of the inessential. For Aristotle, what is essential is what is necessarily the way it is – the unchanging and underlying ground (ὑποκείμενον). Whatever could be otherwise is not essential but accidental or contingent (συμβηβεκός). Arendt noted that since any free action is something that could be other than it is, the whole sphere of action is not essential.

   In the framework of these categories, everything that happens in the realm of human affairs is accidental or contingent (“πρακτὸν δ᾽ἐστὶ τὸ ἐνδεξόμενον καὶ ἄλλος ἔχειν” “what is brought into being by action is that which could also be otherwise”): Aristotle’s very words already indicate the realm’s low ontological status.Footnote ⁹⁰

   This is why poetry is more serious than history for Aristotle: poetry deals with the universal (τὰ καθόλου) – what is likely or necessary (τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον) – while history deals only with particulars (τὰ καθ᾽ἕκαστον).Footnote ⁹¹

5. 5. This devaluation of the sphere of action entails a demotion of political thought. Since deliberation and judgment deal with what is contingent and therefore inessential, they occupy the lowest rung in the hierarchy of different kinds of thought, Arendt argued: “Thus Aristotle, in a discussion of the different kinds of cognition in his Metaphysics, places dianoia and episteme praktike, practical insight and political science, at the lowest rank of his order, and puts above them the sciences of fabrication, episteme poietike, which immediately precedes and leads to theoria, the contemplation of truth.”Footnote ⁹²

In short, Aristotle’s political philosophy distorts and debases political life, according to Arendt. The decisive point is not that Aristotle valued the contemplative life above the active life; nor that he tried to understand politics in teleological terms. What is decisive for Arendt is the task that Aristotle set for political philosophy: to derive the goals and standards of political life from a knowledge of human nature. This task outlasted Aristotle’s teleological approach to politics and his evaluation of the contemplative life. Any attempt to derive the aims and standards of political life from a knowledge of human nature is ultimately an attempt to replace politics with philosophy. It assumes that the question of how to live together is not a matter of opinion but of knowledge; it is not to be addressed through the endless deliberation of politics, but to be answered through philosophical argument. Aristotle’s political philosophy is ultimately an attempt to replace politics with philosophy.Footnote ⁹³

Later Political Theory

Classical political theory is silent on matters that now seem essential to politics, according to Arendt. While the first philosophers spoke of freedom, for example, they never really asked what it is: “There is no preoccupation with freedom in the whole history of great philosophy from the pre-Socratics up to Plotinus.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Nor did they ask about the nature of authority: “Neither the Greek language nor the varied political experiences of Greek history shows any knowledge of authority and the kind of rule it implies.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Nor did they look for a transcendent source to sanction human law: “Neither the Greek nomos nor the Roman lex was of divine origin, [and] neither the Greek nor the Roman concept of legislation needed divine inspiration.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Why were these questions ignored by the first philosophers? How were they introduced into political theory?

The answer for Arendt lies in the distance between ancient philosophy and politics. The citizens who led a political life didn’t need a theory of politics, and so never fully articulated their understanding in theoretical terms. The philosophers, who had withdrawn from politics, tried to grasp the nature of the polis in theory, not by working out concepts on the basis of their own political experience, but by drawing on terms and models from other spheres of life. Classical political philosophy thus obscured the nature of politics in two ways: it transposed into political theory models and concepts foreign to politics, which could grasp political realities in only a crude and misleading way; and it ignored political phenomena that resisted its concepts and that were foreign to its concerns.

In her approach to ancient political philosophy, Arendt set herself three tasks: to explicate the nontheoretical understanding of political phenomena neglected by philosophers; to show how this understanding was distorted by later concepts; and to trace these concepts back to the original experiences from which they emerged.