Arendt And Individualism.pdf

Arendt and Individualism Author(s): GEORGE KATEB Source: Social Research, Vol. 61, No. 4, Sixtieth Anniversary 1934-1994: The Legacy of Our Past (WINTER 1994), pp. 765-794 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971059 Accessed: 27-03-2019 05:04 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Arendt and Individualism .

' BY GEORGE KATEB

1 he recent publication of hitherto unpublish

by Hannah Arendt must have some effec understand her contribution to political theory. archive some of the specimens that have been

the power, in their richness, both to re-orient u

us as we seek to come to terms with one of the gr

theorists of the century. One effect of these writ

us back with new eyes to the Arendt books we

and thought we understood, while another effect

wonder at the apparent discrepancy between published and what she withheld (either kept confined to those who heard her presentation) theoretical issues.

I experienced both these effects in reading the part of "Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought After the French Revolution" (1954) that Jerome Kohn edited and published in Social Research (in Spring 1990), under the title "Philosophy and Politics" (Arendt, 1990).1 (The whole manuscript was publicly delivered but never published by Arendt.) Thanks to Professor Kohn, I have been able to read the full manuscript, and it is continuously absorbing. But it is especially the printed part that helps as it were to re-open the pages of earlier essays and such works as Rahel Varnhagen and

The Human Condition; and on the specific matter of the

connection between citizenship and Socratic examination and self-examination, it establishes a large gap between itself and later work Arendt chose to publish, especially "Civil Disobedience," "Thinking and Moral Considerations," and The Life of SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 1994)

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766 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the Mind. Just by itself, the pri

invites us to go beyond the s citizenship and begin to recon

Arendt's relation to individuali

Politics" helps to sensitize us to th said and done, is a stalwart advocate of a certain kind of individualism. Yet the kind she advocates in work she

published, powerful as it is, may strike us as unduly limit whereas the unpublished contributions to alternative, m insistent individualisms do not always fit with her publis version, even apart from the specific matter of Socra citizenship, and are richly suggestive.

"Philosophy and Politics" is a marvelous fragment. It is rich in thought about Socrates. Arendt seems to be unreservedly his side, not only as a model thinker but as a model citizen. I the course of saying why he was a great citizen, Arendt mak a fine contribution to conceptualizing a kind of individualism The trouble is that the Socrates of "Philosophy and Politics"

substantially unlike the Socrates presented in Arendt's pu

lished work. This means, in turn, that the kind of individua

ism found in "Philosophy and Politics" is, in some ma

respects, at odds with Arendt's characteristic kind of individ

alism. There is some common ground, but the discrepanc are noteworthy. If Arendt's characteristic individualism agonistic, the individualism of "Philosophy and Politics" closer to modern democratic individuality.

Arendt takes up Socrates in the last part of the long

manuscript, which deals throughout with the antagonism of

displayed by philosophy towards political life. In the earl part of the manuscript, Arendt stakes out a claim. If won instigates philosophy in most of its endeavors, which "a connected and remain inspired by one original wonder bef

and gratitude for the miracles of man and earth and

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 767

Universe" (Arendt, 1954, p. 3), politica

originates in antagonism towards its ver

Philosophers crave "stability, perman (Arendt, 1954, p. 4). But the realm of

constituted by the opposite of these deside

futile deeds in a helplessly changing wor bestow contemplation on such confusion a radically separates thought and action, an

have followed his example. Whatever Aristotle's teaching, he at least stays

unphilosophical Greek opinion in praising

restates Aristotle's position, however, she a

does not appear in her published work. S say merely that thought may precede, g

justify action, she also holds that thought a

by their common dependence on speech.

that action and thought (not only, not espe thought) are closer to each other than eith

in the whole range of human activities consummately human. When properly im

action, thought is not merely instrumental "truth" (Arendt, 1954, p. 6). "To be aware I can disclose thought and through thinkin both move in the essentially human medium

to be aware of being human in an articu (Arendt, 1954, p. ad 6).

Among the Greeks, then, was "this extrao

speech as harboring in itself the human existence" (Arendt, 1954, phy's influence, we have become antagonism between thought and

whole p. 10). used to action,

thinking ... to acting" (Arendt, 1954, p. 11). In her manuscript, Arendt dwells on the historical varieties of

philosophical diminishment or denaturing of action. At the very end (in the printed part on Socrates), Arendt urges the appearance of a "true political philosophy" (Arendt, 1990, p.

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768 SOCIAL RESEARCH

103), a project that she was to d

reached its greatest and most orig Condition, published four years lat

She means, in her closing rema reconciliation between philosophy doubtful that she in fact remained committed to that ideal.

Her famous work is a philosophy that wars on philosophy (as distinct from the activity of thinking) in the name of action,

as if the opposition of philosophy to action were inveterate.

Be that as it may, she makes it clear that political life is deserving of wonder every bit as much as all the other

aspects of existence. She says: "If philosophers, despite their necessary estrangement from the everyday life of human affairs, were ever to arrive at a true political philosophy they would have to make the plurality of man, out of which arises

the whole realm of human affairs- in its grandeur and

misery- the object of their thaumadzein" (Arendt, 1990, p. 103).

It is noteworthy, however, that in the same year, but on a different occasion ("Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought"), she indicates glancingly what one political source of wonder is. She says that speechless horror at political evil is "in many ways related to the speechless wonder of gratitude from which the questions of philosophy spring" (Arendt, 1994, p. 445). 2 The remark is tantalizing. How can horror and gratitude be related? Clearly she thought that genuine political action should instigate wonder as intensely as political evil does; that genuine political action, when properly philosophized, could inspire gratitude as much as anything else in existence. Still, she worked alone or almost alone when

she worked to reconcile philosophy and politics. Yet in the printed part of the manuscript- we should say, in the part at

last printed- Arendt pictures a philosopher (an unprofessional philosopher consumed by thinking) who tried, in the practice of his philosophy, to reconcile philosophy and politics. The hero is Socrates, the creature of speechless wonder trying

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 769

to share (let us call it) the possibility of wo

citizens. I would now like to go over som

Socrates whom Arendt presents only in thi she withheld from publication.

In "Philosophy and Politics," Arendt's em tially different from "Thinking and Mo

(Arendt, 1971). It is on Socrates as a midwif of others, performing the "maieutic" fun Socrates' gadfly qualities, but transforms

unforthcoming irritant into the one who wa more truthful; and she does not mention at all Socrates the

sting-ray, whose questioning paralyzes people and prevents them from going thoughtlessly through their motions. Instead she wants us to understand Socrates as engaged in the labor of helping his fellow citizens speak their mind and thus deliver themselves of what lies inside themselves, awaiting expressive birth and realization. Arendt see Socrates as committed to

releasing the opinion or doxa that every individual carries bu cannot quite send out without assistance. The city is thus mad

up of speakers learning to speak and helping one another

speak; the real city is a city in words. In "Philosophy a Politics," Arendt produces her loveliest utopia.

Socrates' method was dialogue, which Arendt makes

synonymous with dialetic (Arendt, 1990, p. 79). Unlike Pla

Socrates did not consider dialogue to be the opposite o

political persuasion or rhetoric. Actually, Arendt's Socrates w

trying to substitute dialogue for rhetoric, the voice o

friendship for the unpersonal and artificial voice of pub speakers. Socrates' aim was to spread the voice of friendsh

but his revised version of friendship- outward from

original personal place to public places. "Socrates tried to mak friends out of Athens's citizenry" (Arendt, 1990, p. 82). In untypical mood, Arendt is willing to entertain with sympath

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770 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the possibility that public life can absorbing the spirit of an essenti To be sure, she knows that Socrat

paid, or had to pay a price. Indee

on her admired teacher Karl Ja

(even if publicly delivered) p

"Philosophy and Politics," and r

has anything to do with poli anywhere else). She says:

'communication'- the term as we

ence-has its roots not in the public

personal encounter of I and Tho dialogue is closer to the original

dialogue of one with oneself in soli the same token, it contains less spe

than almost any relationship in (Arendt, 1994, p. 443).

But she does not make this crit Politics." The omission is all the is intent on applauding Socrates'

of Athens's citizenry." This p understandable

in a polis whose life consisted of an intense and uninterrupted

contest of all against all, of aei aristeuein, ceaselessly showing

oneself to be the best of all. In this agonal spirit, which

eventually was to bring the Greek city states to ruin because it made alliances between them well nigh impossible and poisoned the domestic life of the citizens with envy and mutual hatred (envy was the national vice of ancient Greece), the common-weal was constantly threatened (Arendt, 1990, p. 82).

The praise of Socrates' citizenly mission corresponds to a highly unusual (and unpublished) disparagement of the un-Socratized polis, and of the agon itself, which becomes odiously Hobbesian.

In an uncanny resemblance to Emerson's views, Arendt reads Socrates as closely linking the dialogue of friendship with

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 771

the attainment of truth. Truthful indi citizens. What is the truth involved? Arendt's answer seems

only partly Greek and mostly Nietzschean. (As Heidegge

does, Arendt often uses Greek things to advance existential ism.) She says, in a beautifully re- worked ideal of perspectiv-

ism, that Socrates endeavored, with the help of everyone to

whom he spoke, to uncover the particular truth that an person carries along with him or her in the form of that

person's opinion or doxa. Doxa derives from dokei moi, whic means "what appears to me," "the world as it opens itself to me." The world "opens up differently to every man, according

to his position in it" (Arendt, 1990, p. 80). A doxa is not

however, either "subjective fantasy" or "arbitrariness," even

though it is not "something absolute and valid for all" (Arendt,

1990, p. 85). The world becomes a common world when everyone acknowledges that it is the same world that opens up

differently to all, and further (and relatedly) acknowledges that both "you and I are human"- that is, that every doxa deserves to be spoken and heard. Being neither fantasy nor arbitrariness, one's doxa is what one is peculiarly fit or enabled to see and say. One's doxa i what one is, in one's individual uniqueness; and to be able to assert one's opinion is the reason to want an opportunity to

show oneself to others, while patiently allowing others to show themselves similarly. Arendt attributes to Socrates the convic-

tion that no one should presume to guess what another

person's doxa is, and that no one "can know by himself an

without further effort the inherent truth of his own opinion"

(Arendt, 1990, p. 81). Hence the need for the maieutic procedure. One needs help, as an adult, to individuate oneself. The problem is that citizens, as given, do not assist one another

in the mutual cause of eliciting truth. Arendt endorses Socrates' self-estimate that he is indispensable to the integrity of the city. She is careful to deny, however, that Socrates ever aspired to tell the truth, philosophical truth, to others, whether or not Socrates believed there was such. Sustaining Arendt is

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772 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the thought she published earlie Existential Philosophy?" In appare she says: "For Jaspers, any ontolog

Being really is is a falling awa

individual categories of being. Th

such a falling away would be that i

which can only be maintained if

Being really is" (Arendt, 1994, p. 1 Truth, which, in any case, can nev that the Truth can never be known

Socrates "wanted to make the

delivering each of the citizens of th

81). His dialectic- the dialogue bet equals- is at the service of the p Socrates, not Arendt) would call

tion, oddly, consists in the coexist each in some sense true. Rather th

Arendt retains the concept of tr

desirability of coexistent and diver

means that in speaking truthfully,

say what is really on one's mind

and events and conditions in the co

barely or incompletely) oneself. D

multiply the world and make it m was Socrates' constant aim. Arendt makes no room for citizens

who try to influence one another: her concept of doxa implies such a close tie between one's opinion and one's person that it is difficult to imagine breaking out of oneself, except falsely. More precisely, only when citizens are not true to themselves, are not trying to deliver themselves of their respective truths, can they affect one another. That is, they can corrupt but not

improve one another doctrinally. What citizens truly learn

from one another is how much difference exists in their world.

Of course, Arendt does not explicitly say what I have just said. But I do not see what else could follow from what she does

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 773

explicitly say. No wonder she withheld

Politics."

Yet bearing diverse doxai, citizens can become friends. Each person is a world, but worlds can understand each other and want to live together. Seeing the world from the other person's point of view is what friends do for each other. "This kind of understanding ... is the political kind of insight par excellence"

(Arendt, 1990, p. 84). Without censure, even without scepticism, Arendt attributes to Socrates the thought, the hope,

that "the political function of the philosopher was to help

establish this kind of common world, built on the understand-

ing of friendship, in which no rulership is needed" (Arendt, 1990, p. 84). Thoreau, whom she later ("Civil Disobedience," 1970) tries to exclude from the pantheon of citizens, did not express it better. Arendt says that Socrates relied on two "insights" in carrying out his maieutic function: know thyself, and the need to be in

agreement with oneself (Arendt, 1990, p. 84). In subsequent published writings, Arendt is preoccupied with the latter insight, but it plays an important role in "Philosophy and Politics" as well. In this work, first of all, she equates knowing oneself with "knowing what appears to me." "For mortals the important thing is to make doxa truthful, to see in every doxa truth and to speak in such a way that the truth of one's opinion

reveals itself to oneself and to others" (Arendt, 1990, pp. 84-5). Thus, one's truth is the only truth for oneself. With the friend-philosopher's help, each can aspire to know himself or herself and then be truthfully disclosed. But if one needs help from a friend to know oneself, one must also go inside oneself.

One must submit to examination, but one must also practice self-examination. Of course, the world affords many routes of

escape from self-examination, but sooner or later even the most active or the most villainous person will have at least a moment's solitude. Arendt sees Socrates as encouraging a taste for solitude among his fellow citizens so that one may want to live with oneself and also be able to do so.

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774 SOCIAL RESEARCH

In Arendt's view, the chief cr speaks truthfully is to be in ag contradict oneself. The fear of from the ability to "talk with

two" (Arendt, 1990, p. 85). In

Arendt refers to the developme of a practiced internal dialogue not kill, even under conditions that you cannot possibly want to (Arendt, 1990, p. 87). After all, from whom I cannot depart, who I am welded together" (Arendt,

If these thoughts are famil subsequent published writings, The possibility of developing a

"Philosophy and Politics," is " politics." Ordinarily, Arendt margins of political life, to

emergency or extremity. Even in

and Politics," in a publicly deliv

she says that "for man- insofar a essential but nevertheless margin

p. 443). Why, then, is secular

relevance?" The reason is that the Greeks understood the

public-political realm as the scene in which "men attain their full humanity, their full reality as men, because they not only

are (as in the privacy of the household) but appear" (Arendt,

1990, p. 87). Appearance is reality; it is the model or intelligible face of reality. Therefore, each should follow Socrates' advice: "Be as you would like to appear to others," which Arendt renders as "appear to yourself as you would

want to appear if seen by others" (Arendt, 1990, p. 87). Learn to know yourself so that you may learn to live with yourself.

Solitude is as indispensable as conscience and is the source of conscience. So far from being "antipolitical," solitude, just because it is the precondition of conscience, is "the necessary

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 775

condition for the good functioning of the p

p. 89).

Though an end in itself, learning to speak one's doxa truthfully, without self-contradiction, is also, and at the same time, a precondition of acting decently. In Arendt's formula-

tion: "Only someone who has had the experience of talking with himself is capable of being a friend, of acquiring another self. The condition is that he be of one mind with himself, in agreement with himself . . . because somebody who contradicts

himself is unreliable" (Arendt, 1990, p. 85). Arendt thus conflates the delight of a society of truthful friends and the decency of a society of conscientious citizens. The elevation of the centrality of conscience in "Philosophy and Politics" is striking in the context of Arendt's whole work.

Yet more striking is the espousal of solitude- not for philosophers alone, but for everyone. The fact is that Arendt delivers in this unpublished piece an espousal of solitude that is not confined to its good conscientious effects, just as her espousal of speaking one's doxa truthfully is not confined to its citizenly effects but also generously accommodates its individualist significance. Solitude is the opening into human plurality

as such. Arendt announces the theme: "even if I were to live

entirely by myself I would, as long as I am alive, live in the

condition of plurality" (Arendt, 1990, p. 86). The more absolute the solitude, the more delivered is the person to inner

plurality. In "Philosophy and Politics," however, Arendt

identifies this plurality solely with the dialogue "between the two who I am." In another unpublished work, "On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding," dating from no later than 1954, she articulates a richer conception of inner

plurality, even if it is less directly relevant to secular

conscience.

Now, Arendt does say in "On the Nature of Totalitarianism" that in solitude "we are always two-in-one" (Arendt, 1994, p. 358), but there are more resonant formulations as well. Inner plurality seems to become inner multiplicity. I cannot insist on

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776 SOCIAL RESEARCH

this point; Arendt does not elabor alone, one is "therefore potential

(Arendt, 1994, p. 359); "being tog therefore being "with everybod

would like to think that Arendt is idea, intrinsic to democratic indiv inwardly various, full of though

desires, reveries, insights, and o

come from one center, but from t oneself, in Whitman's word from

wants such multiplicity to serve

others and other things: we must to some extent, of that which sur

too disposed to ignore or cond

Whitman thought that inner mu tudes, had perforce to be a cond

Actual persons "contradict" on realization of desires and insig

dominate all the rest of that perso

one's inner multiplicity, one does not so much enact contradiction as admit that one is capable, or almost capable, of

being or doing just about anything. Such an admission may create connection. The connectedness sung by Whitman is one

of the greatest of all visions of connectedness, and it is intensely individualistic and intensely dependent on the practices of solitude. Arendt remains devoted, in the writings she did not publish, to the idea that the true inner life is a dialogue between me and myself. Of course, she is perfectly aware that the silent mind encloses far more elements than two voices conversing. But she

wants the inner life to be moving outward, not dwelling in itself and exploring itself, not sounding itself to its depths. It is not clear to me to what extent Arendt's whole view of the best

inner life is shaped by Socrates' inner voice of negation and prohibition; but that Socrates' daimonion contributes a general tendency to Arendt's conceptualization is likely. Socrates could

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 777

say that his inner voice came to him from that it was a divine guide. On the other han

give us a phenomenology of inwardness, passivities, and of the sameness of its app well as the abrupt occurrences in it of fo

ingredients. But restricting ourselves to her dialogue of the two-in-one, we are led to as

am, how do I identify the one other tha

converse with me? Is the other a gift or a t something even more mysterious? Arendt does not take her theory of solitud direction. In "On the Nature of Totalitarianism," she has another way of praising it. The gift she says solitude confers is that it "prepares us for certain outstanding forms of human

rapport, such as friendship and love, that is for all rapport

which transcends the established channels of human commu-

nication" (Arendt, 1994, pp. 358-59). If one learns to bear one's own company, one is equipped for companionship. Arendt's suggestions are tonally and substantively different

from those she makes concerning the relation between speaking one's doxa truthfully (thanks in part to solitary

self-examination) and being a citizenly friend in "Philosophy and Politics." The two writings share, however, a praise for solitude as part of everyone's life, and therefore say something missing from Arendt's published work. In such praise is found,

I think, some aspects of Arendt's later and uncompleted attempts to produce a theory of judging, where judging is taken to be the capacity to anticipate what others will think on some public matter and try to see why they think as they do and also to see whether in their place one would think, or have to think, as they do. Judging facilitates either agreement or

mutual respect among those who disagree. (The faculty of judgment never dares to claim knowledge of what it is like to be someone else.) Arendt's unpublished thought about solitude opens a rich line of inquiry.

Nevertheless, I am persuaded that at its most suggestive,

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778 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Arendt's defense of solitude

examination is deliberately limite

is that solitude will prove too

maintained as an inner fortress w hostile world. "Self- thinking," a book, Rahel Varnhagen (dating fr can make a person think that sol tion" can re-create the world an own mind, or save oneself from

conditions by providing a sel sanctuary. Only late in life d

Jewishness as an unalterable fac solidarity with other Jews. Until a lie, the lie of denial. One main

in constant introspection, looking bore none of the characteristics for which the world

condemned Jews, the self that could also re-arrange the wor by continually trying to anticipate it or by re-describing an

re-interpreting it so that its reality is dissolved in men constructions. Whether animated by pleasure or fear- or

painfully transforming itself into the semblance of pleasure "introspection and its hybrids engender mendacity" (Aren

1974, p. 11). (In The Human Condition, Arendt renews h

indictment of introspection by yoking it to a loss of comm

sense and a common world [Arendt, 1958, pp. 280-94, 29

Arendt wants Rahel "to consent to herself," as Arendt want

everyone to consent to himself or herself (Arendt, 1974, p.

Such consent is refused when one chooses to live one's real life

with oneself, inside oneself. One suffers the illusion of

individual infinitude (to use an Emersonian word). "Man's autonomy becomes hegemony over all possibilities" (Arendt,

1974, p. 10). Arendt says: "For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated

oneself, there are no longer any particular choices. There is only one aim: always, at any given moment, to be different

from what one is; never to assert oneself, but with infinite

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 779

pliancy to become anything else, so long (Arendt, 1974, p. 13). Arendt even manag way in which the detachment that intros

may lead to an indefinite receptivity: freedom from all bias was translated i

virtually everything; everything became dom from ties was expressed in a senseles (Arendt, 1974, p. 34). Such receptivity indic particular historically conditioned world 34). We should notice nevertheless that in a published essay from 1954, "Understanding and Politics" (which formed the first part of the manuscript, "On the Nature of Totalitarianism"), Arendt writes a memorable tribute to the power of the solitary imagination. This is a rare theme in Arendt, as rare as the practice of it by Arendt is abundant. Imagination is understanding, "the gift of the "understanding heart," and consists in the effort to penetrate the "particular darkness of the

human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds

everything that is real" (Arendt, 1994, p. 322). Understanding does not tire because it trusts that imagination "will catch at

least a glimpse of the always frightening light of truth" (Arendt, 1994, p. 322). In words that seem to carry with them

an at least implicit rejection of the more extreme aspersions

cast on introspection in Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt calls

imagination "the only moral compass we have" and triumphantly concludes:

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 and 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 (Arendt, 1994, p. 323).

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780 SOCIAL RESEARCH

The essay ends, however, not wit of receptivity as made possible b some deepened understanding of

to confine imagination and burden it with an almost superhuman task: "We are contemporaries only so far as our understanding reaches. If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of

totalitarianism" (Arendt, 1994, p. 323). She had already discharged this duty of imagination in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and was to undertake it again in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

The praise of imagination, for which solitude is indispens-

able, is even less characteristic of Arendt than praise of solitude for everyone, not just philosophers. Arendt feels constrained to limit the role of solitude in the attempt at self-acquaintance, and the role of solitude in fostering the imaginative understanding of otherness. I have been assuming that these uses of solitude are not only some of the principal

hallmarks of many kinds of individualism but are, in the theory of democratic individuality as taught by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman (with Socrates as a major ancestor), the reason for being, or trying to be or become, an individual. As I have said, Arendt may be seen in her main work as a theorist

and exponent of a certain kind of individualism- namely, agonisitic individualism. The reflections found in some of the

writings I have discussed, whether published or withheld by her, go quite far in a different direction from the agon as the

source and scene of becoming an individual. These writings

value solitude as a preparation for communicating one's opinion and attending to the opinions of one's fellows and friends. But they do not value solitude for the transactions whereby one looks into oneself for the sake of oneself first; but if for oneself, in the Emersonian spirit, then necessarily for the

sake of the world. The Emersonian teaching is that one is kindred to all externality. Self-understanding and the under-

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 781

standing of the world mutually intensify ea content to understand and be understood by and friends, who do not comprise the whole

imaginative understanding. Nor is unders

trators of systematic evil the sole extraordi imagination should set itself, great as that t If the agon is not explicitly at stake in the

can find Arendt's sympathy for solitude,

and imaginative understanding of othe

sympathy nevertheless limited? Why not ce does, inner multiplicity even to the point o contradiction? The reason, as we have seen, is that Arendt insists that a good friend and citizen must be in agreement with himself; otherwise he is unreliable. He must fear the

reproaches of conscience if he is to act decently. But surely a cultivated awareness of one's inner contradiction, one's inner multiplicity, is not a preparation for acting out contradictory desires and reveries. Actually, it may act to inhibit anything ungenerous or destructive. Arendt's comprehensive fear is that a retreat inside oneself will issue from a practiced introspection. It certainly may, under Stoic auspices. But there are other

auspices- say, the Emersonian ones- and hence other possible consequences. Arendt goes so far as to say that we become individual not in solitude (where we are always two-in-one) but "through and only through the company of others" (Arendt, 1994, p. 358). Each is one only when called out of inwardness

and compelled to cohere and be integral in response to the presence of others. I want to say, yes and no. We must present a united front so as to function. But a good deal more is kept back than is ever expressed; and what is expressed is often not

one's truth, but one's obedience to or interpretation of the requirements of one's role or position. Much of the time, when

one acts, one is not acting as oneself. As her book on Rahel Varnhagen and other writings show, Arendt seems to believe that each of us has an essence; that is what it means to be an

individual. To be sure, "who somebody essentially is, we know

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782 SOCIAL RESEARCH

only after he is dead" (Arendt,

thinks each has a core and that th action, especially political action. one is: only others know oneself, a all this as incident to action. Kn mean, for Arendt, absolute self-k

she is not intent to defend ag nevertheless has action in the w

Alternatively, we can surmise that mystery that inheres in each indiv potency to self-exploration is to ma

To attribute too much potency to in the form of an empathy that they know themselves (or wish to them directly in dialogue, is not wicked. It effaces the finally una

persons. It is world-destroying

imaginary for the obdurately actua Solitude may prepare us for "cer

human rapport, such as friendsh rapport which transcends the est communication" (Arendt, 1994, p say, however, that superior to "perhaps even more primary rela

the realm they constitute, springin

human plurality" (Arendt, 1994 unagonistic writings, the politi

transendence. "Relationships and co

aspects, are as irrevocable as nat The lesson is driven home by Ar

danger in solitude is of losing one's

being together with everybody,

everybody. This has been the

philosopher . . . who needs solitu

condition . . . this interest has natu

with tyrannies where action is

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 783

(Arendt, 1994, pp. 359-60). We can answ

greatest philosophers have sympathized wi many of the greatest have detested them.

human inconsistency between favoring solitu everybody else and being ready to extend a w who proceed to crush public life. Those who

general human achievement are often am

protest or resist or at least find ways of not the tyrant, even if they normally abstain fr

of course I am only repeating what Arend implies in her praise of Socrates.

Even in the writing she withheld, then, the untypical views she offers. The pro political philosophy, crystallized in The H

guides her modifications and sets her limits. we ask why there is a discrepancy between

her unpublished views, we must first say lished views are not unequivocal. Solitud self-acquaintance is praised but kept unde imagination, one of the products of solitu circumscribed. Then we can go on to say theoretical wish is to make political life a

thoughtful audience, and to do so by t

urgently and so distinctively human as to be is no ulterior motive lying behind that wish

Arendt's philosophy, the manifestation of individuation) and the best form that an attachment to the world as home can take. of a certain kind of individualism, Arendt has to criticize or

praise only guardedly several features of other kinds of individualism, whether democratic or subjectivist or even existentialist. For all the criticism one can make of Arendt's contributions

to the idea of individualism and despite her permanent distance from the aspiration to democratic individuality, her

withheld writings together with some occasional (but not

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784 SOCIAL RESEARCH

salient) published pieces make a g about individualism in general, she could not endorse.

I have said that some of the writings Arendt chose not to publish contain ideas significantly different from any found in her published work. At the same time the unpublished writings may send us back to the work we already know with eyes made more sensitive. The interest of this paper, Arendt's relation to

individualism, would be served by a careful and thorough re-examination of her treatment of individualism in her main

works. I can offer here only a few remarks. The Human Condition gives the fullest account of agonistic individualism. Arendt works to show that the Greek city-state

was "the most individualistic and least conformable body politic known to us" (Arendt, 1958, p. 43). The citizen, by acting in the company of his peers, attains to worldly reality because he reveals himself to more than a few, each of whom

regards him from a different point of view. The life of intimacy or domesticity can never draw out one's identity because these settings cannot replace "the reality rising out of the sum total of aspects presented by one object to a multitude of spectators" (Arendt, 1958, p. 57). One is everything others

truthfully say about oneself, when one has been observed in circumstances that induced one to stand up and speak out on a matter common to all. The public realm was the only setting

"where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were"; it was "reserved for individuality." Hence, every citizen "had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was best of all"

(Arendt, 1958, p. 41). Arendt's individualism is agonistic because it is competitive; but unlike many other modes of competition, public political competition is public-spirited: it seeks a common good. One's

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 785

own good --ultimately, one's immortal f

able apart from that of the city. One's rew be secret or private. To outshine others is n Agonistic individualism is cooperative; its l of the setting that has allowed one to achie an individual. One can be oneself, howeve

group, amid a plurality; there one live unique being among equals" (Arendt, 195

no individuality without a pluralist equality in this connection is Arendt's stinging crit

"What Is Existential Philosophy?" (1948).

positing a Self in isolation whose "fall" is o

with his own kind in the world" (Arendt

Self in isolation is preoccupied with it

preoccupation guarantees "that all that m

myself." This Self is "the total opposite of "nothing but his own nothingness"; "being-

place of being human" (Arendt, 1994, 180 only in passing that anything good can

mindedness- as, for example, a greater love

susceptibility to the wonder of all thing precarious. She says that only Nietzsche

follower) affirm life or human existence as

as "a point of departure" (Arendt, 1994, But things are never simple with Arend

on individuality in The Human Condition in not easily contribute to the advocacy of ag if they contribute at all. I do not say that respects the individualist ideas found in th

,which I have already discussed. Rather, certain thoughts that are fundamenta course, peculiarly) Emersonian. What is Emerson's defense of solitude and introsp defense of sympathetic identification wit general Emersonian concern with each ind

The Human Condition has passages that are c

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786 SOCIAL RESEARCH

cordial to infinitude than Rahel than even the withheld writings.

Arendt powerfully imparts the greater than anything he or she qualities, gifts, or talents. The act and thus exceeds definition. We ca living essence of the person" (Aren than the person can exhaust his action. We can say "what" an ind or her capacities and attainments; is is either scarcely possible or imp of who the speaker and doer une plainly visible, retains a curious in efforts toward unequivocal verba p. 181). Arendt is driven to an o uses oracles as an analogy: "the m comes to pass in the same manner manifestations of ancient oracles,

tus, 'neither reveal nor hide in wor

(Arendt, 1958, p. 182). The "who" but the person's fellows and equa

intimates?) It is each person's uniq

residual and inextinguishable m

person's uniqueness transcends th (Arendt, 1958, p. 210). Each of u

by the repetition of theatrical mim play oneself properly. A writer ca

and perhaps distill one's essence.

story does not contain the truth f

acted: "What the storyteller na

hidden from the actor himself, at or caught in the consequences, bec

ness of his act is not in the stor

stories are the inevitable results of

the storyteller who perceives and 1958, p. 192). Shall we say that e

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 787

secret untold and intact? We self-ignorantly who are ignorant of us and also self-ignoran With these ideas, Arendt out-Emersons Em

it is open to a reader to think that by block essence, Arendt is offering yet another ind too much solitude and self-exploration, so t

world in which one can publicly appear to know oneself becomes, after a point, futi

also tends to the futile, it is at least a palpa beginning of something new whose outcome

in Malraux's concept (Arendt, 1994, p. 429 Arendt is being merely tactical. Though s

the world from abandonment, she also devotion to the individual as one, as a world itself, as a new

world, a perishable world that should not vanish without a trace. It is marvelous to see Arendt's profundity creating obstacles in the way of regarding political action (even at its ideal Greek best) as adequate to take the measure of humanity. It is hard, as well, to suppress the feeling that a good part of Arendt's profundity on the issues of identity and individualism is nourished not only by Augustine but by modern existentialism, rather than by Greek literature.

There is one other theme related to individualism on which

the withheld writings throw light. That is the theme of singularity, which figures in The Human Condition, but which is

treated perhaps even more interestingly in "Philosophy and

Politics." Singularity is an idea that is implicated in the philosophical questions that mattered most to Arendt. The contrasting term is plurality, Arendt's principal term and basic

synecdoche for political life. Singularity is thus nonpolitical; maybe it is even antipolitical. It refers to the condition of thinking that one is alone in the world, but not in the kind of self-absorbed isolation that she claims Heidegger favors. One is

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788 SOCIAL RESEARCH

alone in the sense that one raises oneself above the world and

beholds it in its entirety. One experiences the shock of wonder that there is a world at all. The shock of wonder is selfless,

impersonal; and just as it disregards self, so it escapes all confinement in particulars and localities that concern the self. Wonder also goes beyond receptivity to all particulars, and the attempt to see each as it is. In "Philosophy and Politics," Arendt says: The philosophical shock, moreover, strikes man in his singular-

ity, that is, neither in his equality with all others nor in his

absolute distinctness from them. In this shock, man in the singular, as it were, is for one fleeting moment confronted with the whole of the universe, as he will be confronted again only at

the moment of his death. He is to an extent alienated from the

city of men, which can only look with suspicion on everything that concerns man in the singular (Arendt, 1990, p. 100).

These words are reminiscent of those moments in Emerson,

Thoreau, and Whitman where the consummation of demo-

cratic individuality is described as an impersonal ecstasy occasioned by the shock of wonder at being. The Emersonians

labor to encourage all individuals to have impersonal

moments. The resemblance is all the more interesting because Arendt strikes a rare note in this essay. She seems to accept a notion she reads in Plato's parable of the cave; namely, that all persons, staring, as they must, at shadows on the wall, are potential philosophers because they "love seeing for its own sake" (Arendt, 1990, p. 96). Arendt thus makes a move in the direction of democratizing wonder on a radically individual (singular) basis. She is also much closer to the Emersonians than to Plato when she chides Plato for thinking that there

could be an indefinite prolongation of the experience of wonder, rather than contenting himself with the admission

that this experience could only be momentary, even if recurrent. One cannot "develop into a way of life . . . what can

be only a fleeting moment or ... the flying spark of fire between two flintstones" (Arendt, 1990, p. 101).

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 789

Wherever in her work they appear, Aren

wonder at existence in its entirety, wo

something rather than nothing at all, are ing. Still, they are as it were slightly emba

a concern that wonder cannot supply fo

requisite attachment to the world that issues the world is one's home. Arendt wants to overcome alienation

from the world. If for a few philosophers there can be no

better attachment, no better sense of home, than the wonder

of gratitude that there is a world rather than none at all, most people need some other kind of attachment.

To side with philosophy against politics is to side with singularity against not only plurality but also individuality. It is

to side with the world as such against a local and particular home. But Arendt will not side with philosophy, unless it be Socrates 'philosophical anti-philosophy.' Whatever Arendt's own personal path, she expends her talent in the service of theorizing the end of alienation for ordinary persons and their coming to individuation agonistically among their equals. She must defend politics; that is her contribution to the recovery of human sanity.

As far as Arendt can ascertain, most people could never

transform wonder into a new attachment to the world. The

reason is best elaborated in "Philosophy and Politics." Following Plato, she calls the shock of wonder at existence a pathos, "something which is endured" (Arendt, 1990, p. 97). The mass of ordinary persons (and most philosophers, too) may know the shock, may feel it, but refuse to endure it (Arendt, 1990, p. 99). It is scarcely endurable. It renders speechless anyone who feels it deeply. How can a city go on if everyone is transported, or on the verge? People crave speech;

which is to say, they crave doctrines, fixed and settled

meanings. But the only true words of speechless wonder are questions, the unanswerable questions of cosmology, meta-

physics, and the human condition, not to mention the

unanswerable questions of identity. A few philosophers can

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790 SOCIAL RESEARCH

live on a diet of questions, on inc unsatisfactory thinking. But even doctrines. The real thinker is unl he or she is in possession of speci "he remains always ready to endur

thereby avoids the dogmatism

(Arendt, 1990, p. 101). If the experience of singularity,

the shock of wonder, is not de persons, many philosophers cov

wonder and hence refuse to endu Cartesian revolution of doubt, ne

the tactic of subjectivist philosoph

their senses, retreat inwardly in existence. Existential thinkers, li that Being is Nothing or Nothing arbitrarily proceed to create ex n Fury grows out of the passion of

alienation. Even Kierkegaard in

never relates to any particular th no-thing, of nothingness" (Aren retains wonder as he converts th

into nothingness; but his wonder i admiration and affirmation, but

nausea (Arendt, 1978, pp. 147-4

philosophies, which theorize or dis do so only because they claim to the universe. As for Plato, his won contemplation of an invisible world existentialist individuality, in the

regularly compromised. If philo

profess it without gratitude or ecs ordinary persons? I do not say that in her early postto Heidegger. I believe that in him wonder is most genuine when it is

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 791

doctrine of theology or metaphysics. At Nietzsche into an unsponsored world of d

Arendt's own reflections on wonder are, fro

indebted to Heidegger. Under the best

existence and the world, Being is, precise isn't nothing or nothingness.) The shock greater when one acknowledges no source f reason for it. Gratitude is felt but not to a real trouble is that the shock of wonder, non-theistic and non-metaphysical reaso posed to take seriously oneself as a person and desirous of finding or forging one's among equals. Anxiety marks Arendt's di

gerian Gelassenheit, the "Will-not-to-will," i

volume of The Life of the Mind. She is in "cannot be transformed into any activity

even the activity of thought, which goes on

means of words, is obviously not only ina but would interrupt and ruin the experie 1958, p. 20). Wonder can lead to an abdic intellectual wilfulness (the wilfulness of en subjectivism or existentialism) but of the v in glorious worldly political enterprises wit To praise the shock of wonder is somethin But she can praise it only with circumspe tion. She seems to avoid asking how wonder it as an always latent possibility that someh philosophers, here and there. Could it be th

by the thought that alienation from one's w

in the emergence of wonder? She certain associate wonder with alienation because s

derives alienation from resentment at the human condition.

Resentment at the world's constitution could never lead to the

shock of wonder. Alienation, however, may derive from something altogether different- sad disappointment with

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792 SOCIAL RESEARCH

oneself and one's society. This sort

as distinct from the moderate al individuals in response to the un everyday life, and that should n alienation knows that neither self all it could or should be. One retreats into oneself in order to

heal oneself, and to disperse the Silenian thoughts that it would have been best never to be born. Searching for

consolation, for reconciliation, one cannot find it in oneself or

one's society. One may find it, if one finds it at all, first in the

beauty of appearances, of surfaces, and, then, at last, in the fact of "mere being" (to use Santayana's phrase from The Sense of Beauty). One progresses from being an alienated individual

to being, in moments, an impersonal and deindividualized singularity. The fact of mere being (the being of being) registers as a shock, the shock of wonder. Disappointed (not resentful) alienation can turn into gratitude for the world in its entirety.

I suspect that the persons most likely to feel this shock are

those who have first determined to think of themselves as

individuals- as sufficiently detached to judge and to find things badly wanting; and who then may proceed from disappointment to alienation and then to wonder. Praising wonder may entail praising alienation of a certain kind. Perhaps Arendt thought so. Towards the end of the unpublished "On the Nature of Totalitarianism," she says: "Nothing is more difficult and rarer than [the experience of] people who, out of the desperate need of loneliness, find the strength to escape into solitude, into company with themselves,

thereby mending the broken ties which link them to other men" (Arendt, 1994, p. 359). Arendt instances Nietzsche at a particular moment in his life. Of course, the pattern I have just

mentioned is not exactly the same as the one Arendt sees in Nietzsche and a few others (probably including herself). But there are similarities. In any case, Arendt does praise the shock

of wonder- she has done as much as anyone except for

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ARENDT AND INDIVIDUALISM 793

Heidegger, in this century, to keep it alive-

guardedly, as I have said.

Here we reach the most important lim

openness to any sort of individualism ot individualism, whether in writings she ch withhold. Any individualism that dimini

action or that finds a good word to say for

under suspicion. The dangers of nihili misunderstanding, are too great (Aren Ordinary persons must not be dissuaded

philosophy, not even by wonder, from a co citizenship, should they be lucky enough to position to begin it. Most of us, to love the w

allowed to love just our part of it, our

struggle between the best and the good, Ar

good. Notes:

1 I am grateful to Professor Kohn for making "Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought After the French Revolution" available to me. Some themes of this paper are discussed in Canovan, 1990. For a different kind of discrepancy from those I discuss in this paper, see Canovan, 1992, pp. 135-38. Canovan shows

that in some unpublished work before and after The Human

Condition, Arendt rejected the idea that the daily political life of the polis was a true case of political action. In thinking about Arendt and individualism I learned much from

conversations with Dana Villa and from his book, The Fate of the

Political (forthcoming). 2 Students of Arendt are greatly indebted to Professor Kohn for his editorial work in publishing this volume, as well as for initially publishing "Philosophy and Politics."

Bibliography: Arendt, Hannah, "Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought After the French Revolution" (unpublished, 1954).

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794 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Cond Chicago Press, 1958). Arendt, Hannah, "Thinking and Research 38:3 (1971): 417-446.

Arendt, Hannah, Rahel Varnhagen: Th

York: Harcourt, Brace, 1974).

Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind Harcourt Brace Tovanovich, 1978).

Arendt, Hannah, "Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (1990): 73-103.

Arendt, Hannah, Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, Jerome Kohn,

ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).

Canovan, Margaret, "Socrates or Heidegger? Hannah Arendt's Reflections on Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (1990): 135-165.

Canovan, Margaret, Hannah Arendt: A Remterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Villa, Dana, The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

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