Since Arendt thought that Western philosophy had never had a pure concept of the political, in her attempt to work out her own concept of politics she looked not just to the theories of classical philosophers but also to the nontheoretical insights of classical historians and poets
This distinction may seem naïve. The ubiquity of theory is now a cliché. Theory is supposed to be inescapable. People who think they are free of theory, it is said, are under the influence of theories of which they are unaware. This cliché has a grain of truth: every way of thought is guided or misguided by prior assumptions. But to call all such assumptions “theoretical” is to expand the concept of theory to the point where it loses any precise meaning. If we want to understand the heterogeneity of different ways of thought, we have to distinguish what is traditionally called “theory” – the kind of thought that philosophers have aimed at since Plato – from nontheoretical forms of thought. This distinction is essential to understanding the differences between the kinds of thinking central to politics and philosophy.
What then are the differences between political and philosophical thought?
Philosophers have traditionally understood these differences in terms of simple oppositions: the philosophical life is contemplative; the political life is active. Philosophy is theoretical in the sense that it is concerned with the eternal, necessary, and general; political thought is nontheoretical in that it is concerned with the ephemeral, contingent, and singular. Philosophy is the realm of truth, while politics is the realm of appearance. Philosophy is a matter of knowledge and wisdom, while political thought is a matter of opinion, imagination, and judgment.
The differences between political and philosophical discourse are commonly understood in these same oppositions. The philosopher tries to clarify and to show, while the citizen tries to convince; philosophical differences are resolved through logic and evidence, while political differences are resolved through persuasion. Philosophers reject the kinds of arguments (appeals to emotion, to authority, and to common sense) that prevail in political debate. The art of philosophical speech is dialectic, while the art of political speech is rhetoric. Political discourse is a matter of deliberation rather than dialogue; it ultimately aims not at acquiring wisdom but at making decisions. Dialogue is endless, since philosophical questions are never definitively closed, while deliberation is finite, in that it is bound to the time frames of specific situations.
Arendt made a simple point: these oppositions belong to the philosophical tradition – we understand political thought and discourse in philosophical terms and from a philosophical perspective. Politicians and activists tend to think and speak in nontheoretical ways, and so have never articulated in theory their experiences of thought and discourse. Political thought and discourse have been understood not in light of their role and their powers in the political realm, but in light of their weakness and inadequacy in the realm of philosophy. Philosophers have measured political thought and discourse against philosophical standards, and so have tended to think of them as merely crude or defective forms of philosophical discourse and thought. Precisely because philosophers view politics from a philosophical perspective, they have conceived political thought and discourse in a distorted way.
Arendt tried to rethink the nature of political thought and discourse from a nonphilosophical point of view: “I want to look at politics, so to speak, with eyes unclouded by philosophy.”Footnote 1
At the center of this task are a few essential questions: What is opinion? What is judgment? What is persuasion? What is rhetoric? What are the nontheoretical forms of thought that prevail in politics?
Faculties of Political Thought
The central faculties of thought in politics are opinion, judgment, and imagination, according to Arendt. But because they are not theoretical, she thought, philosophers have tended to neglect them or to see them as crude forms of theory. “Opinion and judgment obviously belong to the faculties of reason, but the point of the matter is that these two, politically most important, rational faculties had been almost entirely neglected by the tradition of political as well as philosophical thought.”Footnote 2 To rethink the nature of political thought, we have to reconceive the faculties on which it relies.
Opinion
Arendt’s view of political thought drew on her understanding of appearance. Philosophers have traditionally juxtaposed appearance to being. The way things appear is opposed to the way they really are. Appearance in this sense is secondary and derivative – a mere seeming or semblance that conceals beings themselves. Arendt argued that appearance in this sense depends on appearance in a more basic sense – appearing in the sense of beings showing themselves as such, as when something “appears” over the horizon, or when actors are said to “appear” on stage. Mere appearances, in the sense of seeming or semblance, depend on this originary level of appearing, in the sense of the self-showing of beings themselves:
Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. The stage is common to all who are alive, but it seems different to each species, different also to each individual specimen. Seeming – the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi – is the mode, perhaps the only possible one in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators.Footnote 3
This passage distinguishes several senses of appearance. Like actors on a stage, beings may seem to be something they are not, and they may seem different to different points of view. But both kinds of seeming depend on beings making an appearance in the world and showing themselves as such. This basic sense of appearing is implicit in the word “phenomenology.” The word “phenomenon” comes from the middle-voice present participle of the verb φαίνειν, which means “to come to light,” “to enter the world,” “to reveal oneself,” “to show oneself,” “to shine,” and “to appear,” as when a new person comes into being and appears in the world. Phenomena in this sense are not mere appearances; they are beings themselves as they appear in experience. To be a phenomenon means to appear as such. The being of phenomena is precisely their appearing. In this basic sense of the word, Arendt argued, to be means to appear. “In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.”Footnote 4
This concept of appearance enabled Arendt to rethink the nature of opinion, which is commonly understood in four senses. In one sense, opinion is belief based on second-hand reputation rather than first-hand experience. In another sense, it is belief based on surface appearances rather than underlying realities. In a third sense, opinion is belief based on the limited and distorted appearances beings offer to particular points of view. And lastly, it can mean belief about beings that is devoid of any true understanding of what they are in essence. In each sense, opinion is opposed to true knowledge, as appearance is opposed to true being. Opinion is seen as a defective or inferior form of understanding, rather than a distinctive way of accessing truth. The task of theory has traditionally been to leave behind the sphere of opinion in order to move towards truth.
As Arendt expanded the concept of appearing, she also expanded the concept of opinion. Opinion can give us access not just to mere appearances, she argued; it can let us see beings as they appear in the world and show themselves in actual experience. This understanding of opinion is implicit in the Greek language, she suggested, where the word for “opinion” and “appearance” are the same – doxa (δόξα). My opinions (δόξαι) about phenomena are based on the way they appear to me (δοκέουσιν μοί).
To Socrates, as to his fellow citizens, doxa was the formulation in speech of what dokei moi, that is, “of what appears to me.” This doxa had as its topic not what Aristotle called the eikos, the probable … but comprehension of the world “as it opens itself to me.” It was not, therefore, subjective fantasy and arbitrariness, but it was also not something absolute and valid for all. The assumption was that the world opens up differently to every man according to his position in it …Footnote 5
Our opinions are grounded in the way things appear to us, where appearance means not just semblance or mere appearance but the self-showing of beings themselves. So opinion is not just a kind of pseudo-knowledge that must be left behind in order to move towards truth. Truth is not necessarily opposed to opinion. Opinion in this sense may be a source of truth. Socratic dialectic may bring to light the grains of truth implicit in unexamined opinions: “dialectic brings forth truth not by destroying doxa or opinion, but on the contrary by revealing doxa in its own truthfulness.”Footnote 6
Here we have to be careful. Arendt insisted opinion is different from factual or mathematical truth: “The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion belongs among the many forms that lying can assume.”Footnote 7 But she also insisted that opinion is not simply opposed to truth. She understood the truth of opinion in the most basic sense – opinion as openness to the appearing of phenomena – as a matter of truth in the sense of disclosure or unhiddenness: “This truth – a-letheia, that which is disclosed (Heidegger) – can be conceived only as another ‘appearance,’ another phenomenon originally hidden.”Footnote 8 Everything depends on understanding how different kinds of opinion are opposed to or compatible with different kinds of truth.
Opinion in this basic sense is a matter of perspective. The way things appear to us depends in part on the stance we take and the place we occupy in relation to them. We see different aspects of the same things depending on our different degrees of involvement or detachment, distance or proximity, pathos or apathy, concern or indifference, experience or naïveté. Our perspective depends on the standpoint proper to our place in the world – the groups to which we belong, the traditions we have inherited, the languages in which we think, the criteria by which we judge, the standards by which we measure things. It is only within a free and open public realm that a plurality of perspectives can appear.
The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measure or denominator can ever be devised. For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations within it, and the locations of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.Footnote 9
No “common measure” can be devised that would let us transcend the play of perspectives. Her claim is not that we cannot in fact try to devise such common measures, but simply that any such measure will itself always constitute one perspective, whose limitations will be apparent only from a different point of view. Philosophy and political thought are both caught in this play of perspectives.
Judgment
The traditional aim of philosophy is to move from opinion to knowledge. To know something philosophically means to grasp what it is by subsuming it under a precise and definite concept, a concept that captures the essence of what it conceives. The formulation of definitive concepts is a traditional task of theory. While theory has a long and complex genealogy, for much of the tradition it meant to contemplate the eternal and necessary essences of things, and to try to construct general forms or formulae that gather and articulate their essential traits. Political thought is nontheoretical in this sense. For the most part it does not focus on what is general, necessary, and timeless, but deals with what is ephemeral, contingent, and unique – it aims to illuminate the nature of singular situations and to understand the course of action they demand. Theoretical knowledge is of limited use in the political realm since (as Aristotle said) the singular and contingent are beyond the scope of theory (ἔξο τοῦ θεωρεῖν γένηται); that is, since theory cannot grasp what is singular except insofar as the singular can be subsumed under a general form.Footnote 10 So thought in the political realm has to rely on a faculty of reason other than theoretical knowledge.
This other faculty is judgment or phronesis (φρόνησις), according to Arendt: “Political thought is essentially founded on the faculty of judgment.”Footnote 11 She followed Kant in distinguishing two kinds of judgment: determinant and reflective.Footnote 12 In a determinant judgment we start with a general rule or concept and apply it to a particular case. In a reflective judgment we start with a particular case, and try to find the general rule or concept under which it may be properly subsumed. In both cases, Arendt argued, judgment is a matter of fitting something particular into a general form.
[Judgment] designates first and foremost the act of subsumption by which we place the individual and the particular under something general and universal; the act of following a rule and applying criteria by which the concrete is recognized or justified, and on whose basis it will be possible to make a decision.Footnote 13
Both forms of judgment let us see things as examples of a type, as instances of something general. Both determinant and reflective judgments are compatible with theory, in the sense that they rely on universally applicable concepts.
But Arendt argued there is a third kind of judgment, through which we see things in their singularity without relying on general concepts or rules.
But to judge can also signify something altogether different, and it is always this judgment we must use when we are confronted with something that we have never seen before and for which we have no available criteria. This judgment, which is without criteria, cannot be based on anything other than the evidence of the object itself, and it has no presupposition other than the aptitude of this human capacity to judge which is much closer to the capacity to decide than to the capacity to place and to subsume … We experience this kind of judgment in everyday life each time that, confronted with an unknown situation, we deem that somebody has judged the situation well or poorly.Footnote 14
A situation is never just a particular example of a general phenomenon. Every situation is singular and has to be judged in its singularity. To be judicious in this sense is to respond appropriately to what is unique without relying on general forms or rules.Footnote 15 Political judgment is for the most part not theoretical in the sense that it is not based on a general knowledge that can be applied indifferently to many different things; it is the ability to understand each thing in its singularity.Footnote 16
Imagination
In addition to opinion and judgment, political thought relies on imagination, which lets us remove ourselves from our immediate situation and enables us to put ourselves in the place of others. Imagination allows a certain distance and perspective on our own affairs, and helps us sense the gravity and magnitude of situations that otherwise would seem remote and unreal.
Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias or prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair. This distancing of some things and bridging the abysses to others is part of the dialogue of understanding, for whose purposes direct experience establishes too close a contact and mere knowledge erects artificial barriers.Footnote 17
Imagination is not the same as empathy: empathy lets us sense what others are feeling, but it does not necessarily let us see things from their perspective. Imagination allows us to detach ourselves from our situation and to try to put ourselves in the place of others, to see the world from other points of view.
Forms of Political Thought
If political thought differs from philosophy in the faculties of reason it uses (opinion, judgment, imagination), it also differs from philosophy in the forms it takes. Arendt focused on three forms of thought – usually ignored by philosophers – that predominate in the sphere of politics: thinking in examples; thinking in stories; and what she called “representative” thought.
Thinking in Examples
Examples do menial work in philosophy. At its best, philosophy starts by reflecting on concrete examples, but this reflection is merely a preliminary step on the way to theoretical knowledge. In Plato’s dialogues, for example, when Socrates asks essential questions he always rejects as inadequate answers that merely give examples. Our ability to give apt examples shows that unexamined opinions already contain a degree of insight into the essential. But this insight is indefinite. The task of theory is to move beyond examples to a precise and definite comprehension of a general essence.
Examples play a different role in political thought, according to Arendt. In political life we are to a large extent concerned with judging singularities (persons, events, situations), and to that extent our judgments cannot rely for guidance only on general concepts and theories. In politics, general concepts tend to be less illuminating than singular examples. In Arendt’s view, most political and moral thought is less a matter of theory than a matter of “thinking in examples.”Footnote 18
Most political virtues and vices are thought of in terms of exemplary individuals: Achilles for courage, Solon for insight (wisdom) etc … We judge and tell right from wrong by having present in our mind some incident and some person, absent in time or space, that have become examples.Footnote 19
Such examples are singular. They do not exemplify general rules. Nor are they models to be imitated or standards by which to measure our own lives. Nor do they have value merely as instances of more general phenomena. Instead, the works and lives of exemplary individuals illuminate the possibilities of human existence and function as points of reference that allow us to orient ourselves in the darkness of human affairs.
The role of examples in political thought was essential to two of Arendt’s books, Men in Dark Times and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Both contained profiles of singular individuals, and these profiles were exercises in judgment in the sense that their first aim was to do justice to each person in his or her singularity. Arendt emphasized this singularity in her report on the trial of Eichmann: “The focus of every trial is upon the person of the defendant, a man of flesh and blood with an individual history, with an always unique set of qualities, peculiarities, behavior patterns, and circumstances.”Footnote 20 Her profiles had two aims. They could serve as a starting point for theoretical reflection. Eichmann in Jerusalem was a profile of a single man rather than a theory of evil, and yet in Arendt’s view any theory of evil would have to come to terms with Eichmann in his singularity. But she also thought her profiles could serve as portraits of exemplary lives. In Men in Dark Times she wrote: “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and … such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and will shed over the time span that was given them on earth.”Footnote 21
Thinking in Stories
Exemplary thought is related to thinking in narrative. Arendt stressed that narrative is a way to think about what is singular – what eludes the generality of conceptual thought precisely because it is unique.Footnote 22 Thinking in narrative is a way to grasp the singular essence of persons or events.
By “person,” Arendt meant not what we are but who we are. What we are is a question of the roles we play or the traits we share with others; who we are is a question of our irreplaceable singularity. We can describe what we are in general terms – the qualities we possess, the groups to which we belong, the roles we have chosen or into which we were born. But general terms cannot capture who we are as persons. “The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; 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.”Footnote 23 General descriptions fail to do justice to who we are, even when we try to describe ourselves.
But if we only grasp what we are in general terms, we show who we are in our actions and words. Whenever we act or speak we risk revealing what matters to us, what we really think, what we do and do not know, what we are made of – everything that makes us the person we are. “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.”Footnote 24 The revelatory power of actions and words is not something we can fully control. I can of course try to control the image I show the world by carefully choosing what I say and do, but whenever I have to speak and act spontaneously my improvised words and bungled actions reveal who I am more clearly than the most carefully crafted persona. Words and actions are meaningful in ways we don’t intend. This is the insight implicit in the clichés that “action reveals character” and that “nothing reveals a person more than her words.” We understand what people are in general terms; but we understand who they are in light of their actions and words.
A human life is a sequence of more or less meaningful actions and words that, for Arendt, between birth and death make up a more or less coherent story. A life story is meaningful, not because it expresses our intentions but because it reveals who we are. “Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer.”Footnote 25 If we want to understand who someone is we have to know her life story. “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero.”Footnote 26
To think of a person in narrative is to construct a story that aims to illuminate who she is. Thinking in narrative is obviously a form of construction – a storyteller tries to select the hero’s most revealing words and actions and to arrange them in a sequence that brings out their inner connections and contradictions. But this kind of narrative thinking at its best does not aim to impose meaning on meaningless raw material, but aims to make explicit the meaning of the hero’s own actions and words, to gather and multiply their revelatory power. When we try to tell someone’s life story, our aim is not just to produce a well-made narrative but to grasp and illuminate a “human essence – not human nature in general (which does not exist) nor the sum total of qualities and shortcomings in the individual, but the essence of who somebody is.”Footnote 27 Narrative thought in this case aims at a kind of essential truth.
Just as narrative lets us think of people in their singularity, for Arendt it is also a way to think the singularity of events.
An “event” is not just anything that happens, in her view, but a happening that interrupts the usual course of things and that exceeds the possibilities we can foresee and imagine. A revolution is an event in this sense, while the rising and setting of the sun is not. A real event is not a link in a calculable chain of causes and effects, but an occurrence that transcends the intentions and expectations of those who live through it. An occurrence is not an event if it happens repeatedly or if can be produced and reproduced at will. Every event is unique.
On this point Arendt was critical of three common assumptions of modern philosophies of history.
First, the assumption that history is not a series of events but a process. Conceiving history as a process assumes that “nothing is meaningful in and by itself,” and that events have meaning only as part of a larger whole.Footnote 28 Historical processes are supposed to be the contexts within which events are significant, so that to understand the historical significance of an event is to understand its place within a whole process. In this regard, Arendt criticized Kant and others for whom “the process as a whole appears to be guided by an ‘intention of nature’ unknown to acting men but comprehensible to those who come after them.”Footnote 29 In this conception of history, the task of the thinker is to focus not on singular events – which by themselves are historically meaningless – but on the processes (development, evolution, progress, or regress) within which they take place. “What the concept of process implies is that the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning, have parted company. The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and significance.”Footnote 30 The concept of process effaces the meaning of events in their singularity.
A second assumption is that human history is meaningful to the extent that it is causally determined, so that to understand events is to explain them in causal terms. These causes may be of two kinds: history may be seen as a progression governed by a final cause or telos (such as freedom); or historical events may be seen as links in a chain of causes and effects governed by laws of efficient causality. But Arendt argued that to think of human history in causal terms is to efface the distinctive nature of events, which is precisely to break unforeseeably and unpredictably with what has come before: “Causality … is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences.”Footnote 31
Whoever in the historical sciences honestly believes in causality actually denies the subject matter of his own science. He denies by the same token the very existence of events which, always suddenly and unpredictably, change the whole physiognomy of a given era. Belief in causality, in other words, is the historian’s way of denying human freedom which, in terms of the political and historical sciences, is the human capacity for making a new beginning.Footnote 32
The concept of causality distorts our understanding of human history because it effaces the novelty and singularity of events.
A third assumption is that humans “make” their own history. This assumption draws on the insight that human history is the result of action, but it misconceives action on the model of production or making. In Marx’s thought, this misconception leads to the idea that the telos of history, which for Kant and Hegel was revealed only in retrospect to the contemplative gaze of the philosopher, can become the ultimate aim of human activity, revealed to the visionary foresight of the revolutionary. Arendt thought this misconception – which conceives events as means to an end – distorts our understanding of history in several ways: it denies the inherent unpredictability of human action; it generates the illusion that we can understand events in light of a historical process whose end is known in advance; and it leads to the delusion that we can control our historical destiny.Footnote 33 Above all, by subsuming events within a process subject to human control, it effaces both the radical novelty of events and their singular significance: “Single events and deeds and sufferings have no more meaning here than hammer and nails have with respect to the finished table.”Footnote 34
These three assumptions are grounded in a contemplative stance toward history: the stance of one who sees through the flux of singular, contingent, ephemeral events to an underlying ground of eternal, necessary, and general essences. This “essentially contemplative philosophy,” according to Arendt, has led thinkers to conceive of history in categories foreign to the experience of action. This is true even of Marx, who, despite inverting the traditional hierarchy of contemplation over action, drew his basic terms from the experience not of action but of fabrication: “the age-old identification of action with making and fabricating was supplemented and perfected, as it were, through identifying the contemplative gaze of the historian with the contemplation of the model (the eidos or ‘shape’ from which Plato had derived his ‘ideas’) that guides the craftsman and precedes all making.”Footnote 35 Precisely because they are not derived from the experience of action and historical change, these general categories dictate an approach to history that allows only a limited and distorted view.
Such generalizations and categorizations extinguish the “natural” light history itself offers, and by the same token, destroy the actual story, with its unique distinction and its eternal meaning, that each historical period has to tell us. Within the framework of preconceived categories, the crudest of which is causality, events in the sense of something irrevocably new can never happen.Footnote 36
Once historical questions are framed in these terms (process, cause, means, end), it is hard even to ask about the meaning of events in their singularity. Instead of focusing on words and actions and asking what they reveal about a situation and about the people involved, we are led to focus on the underlying causes of a process and to ask about the significance of actions and words within this process as a whole. This focus on historical significance is liable to blind us to the revelatory power of what was actually said and done. “The historian, by gazing backward into the historical process, has been so accustomed to discovering an ‘objective’ meaning, independent of the aims and awareness of the actors, that he is liable to overlook what actually happened in his attempt to discern some objective trend.”Footnote 37 The result is that modern philosophies of history tend to de-emphasize or neglect the words, actions, and events that constitute the sphere of politics: “the single deeds and acts constituting the realm of politics, properly speaking, were left in limbo.”Footnote 38
In her own thought, Arendt looked to the example of classical historians, who focused on events, and the words and deeds of those who lived through them. “What is difficult for us to realize is that [in classical historiography] the great deeds and works of which mortals are capable, and which become the topic of historical narrative, are not seen as parts of either an encompassing whole or a process; on the contrary, the stress is always on single instances and single gestures.”Footnote 39 This focus on the singular, contingent, and ephemeral was guided by the assumption that events could be meaningful in themselves, in the sense that they had the power to reveal the situations in which they occurred and to show what human beings were capable of.
Greek and Roman historiography, much as they differ from each other, both take it for granted that the meaning or, as the Romans would say, the lesson of each event, deed, or occurrence is revealed in and by itself … Everything that was done or happened contained and disclosed its share of “general” meaning within the confines of its individual shape and did not need a developing and engulfing process to become significant.Footnote 40
If classical historians focused on events and actions, it was not because they were unaware of historical causality and context. The task of the historian was not to explain events in light of their causes and context, but to understand their causes and context in light of the events: “causality and context were seen in a light provided by the event itself, illuminating a specific segment of human affairs; they were not envisaged as having an independent existence of which the event would be only the more or less accidental though adequate expression.”Footnote 41 This approach to history, for Arendt, was born of the experience of action and of involvement in human affairs. Among its key assumptions is that events themselves have an illuminating power, the power to illuminate not just the time in which they occur but the possibilities of human existence. We allude to this power when we say that something has become clear “in light of” recent events. This idiom implies that the events can reveal what was not apparent before they took place. At the same time, events have the power to confront us with something that exceeds established forms of understanding, surpasses our power of imagination, and transcends the horizon of what we had believed possible, either because it is radically new or else because it has long been distorted or concealed. The task of the historian is precisely to understand the singular essence of the event – what happened – and to grasp what it reveals.
Just as in our personal lives our worst fears and best hopes will never adequately prepare us for what actually happens … so each event in human history reveals an unexpected landscape of human deeds, sufferings, and new possibilities which together transcend the sum total of all willed intentions and the significance of all origins. It is the task of the historian to detect this unexpected new with all its implications in any given period and to bring out the full power of its significance.Footnote 42
To think of an event in narrative is to construct a story that illuminates what happened. Narrative thought is a form of construction – one tries to select the most illuminating facts and to arrange them in a sequence that brings out their inner connections and contradictions. But at its best narrative thought does not just impose order on chaos, but brings out the meaning (the revelatory character) of events themselves. Historical narrative aims to construct stories that not only fit the facts but that let us see “the inner truth of the event.”Footnote 43 Thinking in stories aims at a kind of essential truth.
So historical truth is complex. Narratives may be true in the sense that they are factually correct, but untrue in a deeper sense if they lay out facts in a way that distorts or conceals the nature of what happened. Historical thought must aim not just to get the facts right, but also to reveal the nature of situations and the meaning of events. The most revealing events may be minor incidents that are utterly insignificant from a causal point of view. In a 1966 report on the trial of Nazis charged with murder at Auschwitz, for example, Arendt emphasized that the most illuminating moments in the trial often took the form of anecdotes: “Instead of the truth, however, the reader will find moments of truth, and these moments are actually the only means of articulating this chaos of viciousness and evil. The moments arise unexpectedly, like oases in the desert. They are anecdotes, and they tell in utter brevity what it was all about.”Footnote 44 To understand the truth of historical narratives we have to conceive truth not only as factual correctness but also as disclosure or unconcealment of the meaning of the past.
Arendt’s historical studies are exercises in this kind of thought. They aimed not just to present facts but to answer essential questions: What is totalitarianism? What is revolution? What does revolution reveal about the nature of power? Who was Adolph Eichmann? What does Eichmann’s life show about the nature of evil? Stories may answer such questions without trying to grasp the essential in precise and definite concepts: “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”Footnote 45 Narrative thought illuminates the darkness of human affairs, but in a light more intense and revealing than the clarity of conceptual thought: “No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.”Footnote 46
Representative Thought
Opinion, imagination, and judgment make possible another way of thinking. Opinion is perspectival, in the sense that my unexamined opinions are simply the way things appear to me from my own standpoint. But we are not bound to our standpoint and the limited view it allows. We are able to refine our opinions by imagining the world from other points of view, and this ability strengthens our powers of judgment. Arendt followed Kant in calling this mode of thought an “enlarged way of thinking” (eine erweiterte Denkungsart),Footnote 47 or more simply “representative thought.”Footnote 48 This enlarged way of thinking is central to political thought.
Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from a number of different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority, but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.Footnote 49
Thinking in politics is primarily a matter of forming judicious opinions by considering many different viewpoints.
We cannot think this way on our own, according to Arendt. To transcend the limits of our unexamined opinions we have to expose our views to others and to be exposed to other points of view. This need for others helps explain the power of common deliberation. People who know how to deliberate together can reach more judicious decisions than any one of them could reach in isolation.
Since opinions are formed and tested in the process of exchange of opinion against opinion, their differences can be mediated only by passing them through the medium of a body of men, chosen for the purpose; these men, taken by themselves, are not wise, and yet their common purpose is wisdom – wisdom under the conditions of the fallibility and frailty of the human mind.Footnote 50
To deliberate together is to weigh different opinions in order to work toward insights that no one possesses in advance. This means to articulate my views in order to persuade others, but also to expose my views to criticism in order to see their limitations. It means to consider other opinions in order to expose their weaknesses or errors, but also to see the grains of truth in other points of view.
We can see things from other perspectives only if we detach ourselves from our given point of view, and this detachment from our own standpoint is possible only if we are impartial. So an essential virtue of political thought is impartiality.
The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for the exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests. Hence even if I shun all company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together only with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in this world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the representative of everybody else. Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge. But the very quality of an opinion, as of a judgment, depends on the degree of its impartiality.Footnote 51
To be partial is to identify with one party and so to confine oneself to one particular point of view. Partisanship is rarely a matter of consciously elevating party over country, or particular interests over the common good. More often it comes from an inability to acknowledge that our views are partial rather than comprehensive, that our vision of the common good is framed by our place in the community. The hallmark of partisans is typically not the naked assertion of particular interests over the common good, but the inability to see any difference between the good of their party and the good of the community as a whole. For the true partisan, other parties are not parts of the whole but enemies of the whole, not partners in the political process but traitors or subversives who must be defeated at all costs. Hence the rhetoric of partisanship: only our faction are true believers; only our party are true patriots; only our country represents the interests of humanity as a whole. To be impartial is not to stand outside the play of perspectives, but to detach ourselves from our place in the world and so to free ourselves from the limitations of any one point of view: “Impartiality is obtained by taking the viewpoints of others into account; impartiality is not the result of some higher standpoint that would then actually settle the dispute by being above the melée.”Footnote 52 For Arendt the exemplar of impartiality is Homer, who praised both the Trojans and Achaeans without taking sides, and who told the story of the Trojan War without confining himself to the perspective of either camp.Footnote 53
Impartiality makes possible a kind of objectivity. But the objectivity of political thought is not the same as the objectivity of modern science. In both cases the basic meaning of objectivity is the same: to be objective is to see things for what they are. In modern science this means to see things as they are in themselves, independent of the human mind and apart from human opinions and judgments. Modern science objectifies the world in the sense that it subtracts from things the meaning they have for us and reduces them to the bare elements that are clear and distinct to everyone. This objectification is achieved largely through the use of measure; by devising common measures and by focusing only on what is measurable, we can achieve a knowledge of the world that is the same for everyone and that transcends the differences of judgment and opinion tied to different perspectives. But this objectification also entails a reduction of meaning: modern science aims to master a world that it empties of meaning and value.
For Arendt, this reduction of meaning differentiates scientific objectivity from the objectivity of political thought. Political thought deals with human action, and human action is irreducibly meaningful. We do not see actions for what they are if we bracket their human meanings and reduce them to elements that are clear and distinct to everyone; to objectify human actions in this way does not let us see them as they are in themselves – intrinsically meaningful – but instead impoverishes and distorts our understanding of them. To understand human actions is to understand their meaning, and meaning cannot be objectified – it cannot be made so clearly and distinctly present to thought that it appears the same to everyone. This is why Arendt said the realities of political life can only appear from the vantage of “innumerable perspectives … for which no common measure or denominator can ever be devised.”Footnote 54
But if political thought is necessarily caught in a play of perspectives, this does not mean that our understanding of political matters is necessarily “subjective” or that we cannot aspire to a kind of objectivity. To judge a situation well, we have to move beyond the limited perspective afforded by our own subjective perceptions and to learn to see things from different points of view. The more perspectives we can understand the more comprehensive will be our grasp of reality, and the more “objective” will be our opinion. (Arendt here is close to Nietzsche.)Footnote 55 Objectivity in political thought is not a matter of transcending the play of perspectives altogether, but of seeing things from many different points of view. For Arendt, the exemplar of this kind of objectivity is Thucydides, who in his history of the Peloponnesian War was able to articulate the standpoints and interests of all the different warring parties.Footnote 56
So political thought is different from philosophy. Philosophy has traditionally tried to illuminate the nature of what is general, necessary, and eternal; it has aspired to truths that are universal and timeless. Political thought is largely nontheoretical in that it tends to focus on what is unique and contingent, and it aims at truths that are limited and ephemeral. So political thought tends to rely on rational faculties (opinion, judgment, imagination) that are different from those central to philosophy.
Political Discourse
Just as political thought differs from philosophy, so political discourse differs from philosophical discourse. Philosophers have tended to see political discourse as simply a debased or defective version of philosophical discourse. But Arendt’s reflections on political thought help to clarify the distinctive nature of discourse in politics.
For Arendt, the specifically political form of discourse is persuasion. Persuasive discourse conveys not just ideas, but an attunement to and understanding of the world. When we speak we do more than communicate meanings; we also reveal (whether we intend to or not) our outlook, our disposition, our character, our stance toward others, the assumptions we take for granted, and the standpoint from which we see the world. When we listen to others we initially have to accept the terms in which they think, to attune ourselves to how they feel, to see things in light of their concerns, to expose ourselves to the force of their convictions, to understand where they are coming from, to follow their approach to a topic, and open ourselves to their point of view. Listening does not give us access to the mind of the speaker, but it does sometimes let us see things from the speaker’s perspective. We can never know for sure what others think of us, for example, but we can hear words that inadvertently show that the speaker sees us differently from the way we see ourselves, so that through the power of words we are suddenly able to see ourselves as though from the outside and, as it were, through the eyes of the other. This experience is just one example of what we go through every day. To listen to others is to open ourselves to their point of view, so that under the influence of their words reality appears differently to us. Words have the power to alter the way the world appears. The Greeks called this power peitho, persuasion.
To persuade someone in this sense is to change their opinion by changing the way things actually appear to them. I am open to persuasion when I am willing to listen, to be moved, to acquiesce to a movement that removes me from my previous point of view and makes visible aspects of a topic that were invisible to me before. This movement is unsettling. In the course of being persuaded I have to waver between two incompatible but plausible versions of reality. I am persuaded not when I agree to believe what someone says, but when under the influence of someone’s discourse reality actually appears to me to be what it is said to be, and when I relinquish my old perspective and accept this appearance as closer to the truth.
Persuasion is distinct from other forms of discourse. It is not a matter of coercion, since it is not possible to force others to see how things appear from a different point of view. It is not a matter of command, since we rely on persuasion precisely when we have no right to demand obedience. It is not a matter of proof, since it pertains to matters of opinion and not to matters that can be proved and known for sure.
Arendt’s reflections on political thought help to clarify the importance of free discourse in political life. Political thought is primarily concerned with what is unique, contingent, and ephemeral – singular individuals, shifting situations, unprecedented events – and so relies less on theory than on the faculties of opinion, imagination, and reflective judgment. These faculties do not work well in isolation. In order to refine our opinions and to make responsible judgments, we have to open ourselves to other points of view. For Arendt, the significance of public discourse lies in its power to free us from the limitations of a single perspective. “This is the meaning of public life … Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear.”Footnote 57 Our grasp of reality depends on our ability to see the same world from different points of view, according to Arendt. Her words are worth quoting again in full:
No one by himself and without his fellow man can grasp what objectively exists in an adequate way and in all its reality, because what exists does not show itself and appear to him except within a perspective that is relative to the position that he occupies and which belongs to him. If he wants to see the world, to experience it as it “really” is, he cannot do so unless he grasps it as something that is common to many people, which exists between them, which both separates and links them, which shows itself differently to each and which can only be understood to the extent that many people talk about it and mutually exchange their opinions and their perspectives. It is only through freedom of discussion that the world appears … in its objectivity, visible in all its aspects. To-live-in-a-real-world and to-discuss-it-with-others are at bottom one and the same thing, and if private life seemed “idiotic” to the Greeks it was because private life was deprived of the many-sidedness that comes out in talking-about-things, and so was deprived of the experience of how things truly happen in the world.Footnote 58
Our grip on reality is weakened when we are deprived of other perspectives, either when we are isolated from others or when all others share our point of view. The privation of private life is just this deprivation of others who, because they view things from a different angle, allow us to see aspects of the world that are hidden from our given point of view.
Discourse does not just express representative thinking; according to Arendt, it makes representative thinking possible. Our capacity for representative thought – our ability to look at things from many sides in order to more clearly see them for what they are – depends on our ability to talk with others.
This enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its own individual limitations … cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose place” it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all.Footnote 59
Thinking requires a public realm in which we can expose our thoughts to the test of free and open examination. This is especially clear in the case of representative thought. In order to be able to consider things from a number of different points of view, there has to be a public realm in which we can freely exchange opinions.
Kant’s notion of representative thought thus led Arendt to rethink common notions of free speech. Free speech is commonly understood as a way to let people advocate their particular points of view. Arendt argued that free speech is better understood as a way to let us transcend our particular points of view. Freedom of speech makes possible freedom of thought.
Freedom of speech and thought, as we understand it, is the right of an individual to express himself and his opinion in order to be able to persuade others to share his viewpoint. This presupposes that I am capable of making up my mind all by myself and that the claim I have on the government is to permit me to propagandize whatever I have already fixed in my mind. Kant’s view of this matter is very different. He believes that the very faculty of thinking depends on its public use; without the “test of free and open examination,” no thinking and no opinion-forming are possible.Footnote 60
The principle of free speech does not just delimit a private sphere where we can say whatever we want; it also institutes a public sphere in which we can air and refine our views. Without free speech, the right to freedom of thought is meaningless. Free and open debate is the condition of judicious political thought.
As it first emerged in the Greek polis, political speech at its best is simply the forceful exchange of views necessary for citizens to be able to see their situation from many different perspectives and so to come to judicious decisions on how to act.
Polis-life … to an incredibly large extent consisted of citizens talking with one another. In this incessant talk the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond the most diverse points of view. In a sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments … the Greek learned to exchange his own view point, his own ‘opinion’–the way the world appeared and opened up to him (dokei moi, “it appears to me,” from which comes doxa, or “opinion”) – with those of his fellow citizens. Greeks learned to understand – not to understand one another as individual persons, but to look upon the same world from one another’s standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects.Footnote 61
For this to happen, citizens have to transcend their personal interests and their unformed opinions – to recognize a common or overlapping interest that outweighs their private interests, and not only to try to persuade others to share their point of view but also to be willing to be persuaded by others. The Greek estimation of the political life was based in part on the belief that, for questions about how to live together, the opinions of any one ruler are bound to be limited and one-sided, and that through common deliberation a group of thoughtful and judicious citizens will reliably make better decisions than any one person could on his own.Footnote 62
One might object that this account of political speech is utterly unrealistic. Anyone who has spent time in politics knows that, for the most part, political discourse is a miasma of platitudes, clichés, distortions, spin, propaganda, demagoguery, polemic, ad hominem attacks, bullshit, and outright lies. This was as true in classical Athens as it is true today. Why did Arendt insist that “debate constitutes the very essence of political life” when real debate is actually so rare?
Arendt assumed that to understand the nature of political discourse we have to focus on what distinguishes public discourse in political and nonpolitical communities. While real debate is rare in political life, it is nonexistent in nonpolitical regimes. Anyone who has lived under a nonpolitical form of government – where public discourse is dominated by official propaganda, sermons from leaders, masses chanting slogans, and where expressing the wrong opinion in public can lead to prison, abduction, or assassination – knows that real debate in such conditions is practically impossible. Public discourse in political and nonpolitical regimes are both afflicted by platitudes, spin, polemics, bullshit, and lies. What distinguishes political discourse is the possibility of open debate and common deliberation. We recognize this possibility when we complain that it is so rarely realized. This complaint is based on the insight that political discourse has the potential to be more than the debased sophistries of politicians in their endless struggle for power – that at its best political discourse is a way for citizens to talk things through in order to reach considered decisions about what to do and how to live together.
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