Arendt's Judgment. Jonathan Peter Schwartz

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СКАЧАТЬ the problem with more aesthetic interpretations of Arendtian political action discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The problem that seems to infect these interpretations is that they seem determined to assume a strict dichotomy between activities that are telos and a-telos, between an activity performed for some higher goal or purpose and an activity that was an end in itself. Of course, this is to some extent understandable: Arendt, after all, had clearly distinguished between work, which operates under conditions of means and ends, and action, which has no finished product, but is an end in itself. Thus, the logic runs that any instrumental or teleological activity occurring in politics must, according to Arendt, have an activity outside it that “redeems” it, and this redeeming activity is what true political action must therefore be. All elements of instrumentality should thus be kept out of political activity. The implication seems to be that most of what we consider to be the concrete concerns of politics, such as public policy or social justice, must be relegated merely to administration, so that politics can be free to engage in a deliberative and performative-disclosive activity of individual identity. This dichotomous understanding of the relationship between action and instrumentality is based on the fundamental assumption that there are only two, mutually exclusive ways of conceiving of activities, that is, they are either telos or a-telos.

      However, it is possible there is a third option, an option suggested by none other than Plato himself. At the beginning of book 2 of the Republic, Plato proposes a sophisticated, threefold division of human goods.¹⁸⁵ He has Glaucon suggest that there are things that are good for their own sake, such as joy; things that are only good for their consequences, such as physical training; and things that are both good for their consequences and good for their own sake, one of which, Glaucon suspects, might be justice. This third option, in other words, was an activity that was both telos and a-telos. In essence, I suggest that this distinction between action and work should be understood not on a logical level but instead at an ontological level. Mirroring their dynamic versus instrumental modes of causality, action and work should not necessarily be seen as mutually exclusive activities, but instead could potentially be the very same activity grasped at two distinct ontological levels. Does Arendt ever provide examples of political actions that are ontologically both telos and a-telos? There are in fact a number of such examples, but the clearest might be her acknowledgment, as Patchen Markell has argued elsewhere,¹⁸⁶ that instances of work, which are teleologically governed by means/ends logic and always involving doing violence to something given, can also at the same time be instances of action. In “The Concept of History,” she points out that “insofar as the end product of fabrication is incorporated into the human world … its use and eventual ‘history’ can never be predicted.… This means only that man is never exclusively homo faber, that even the fabricator remains at the same time an acting being.”¹⁸⁷ The most well-known instance of this is given in The Human Condition, when she pointed to the invention of the telescope, clearly an instance of the activity of work, as an exemplary “event”: an action whose unforeseeable consequences established a new state of affairs in the world, altering the Western world irrevocably and ushering in modernity through its initiation of modern science.¹⁸⁸ In other words, I would argue that what Arendtian political action might involve in concrete terms is much broader than has often been assumed. Since fabrication is her fundamental category for dealing with the question of violence, it is then evident that she did not reject all instances of violence as possible instances of political action. After all, she repeatedly points to the French Resistance as an exemplary political action, which obviously involved quite a lot of violent activities,¹⁸⁹ not to mention, as we will see in Chapter 2, the empire-building activities of Romans.

      When we understand the special sense in which Arendtian political action is ateleological, the occasional accusation that it is aestheticized or narcissistic evaporates. Arendt continually noted that political action is essentially always concerned with maintaining and preserving the world.¹⁹⁰ In the 1963 “Introduction into Politics” course, she refers to political action as having amor mundi, and writes, “What do I mean by ‘politically minded’? … Very generally, I mean by it to care more for the world, which was before we appeared and which will be after we disappear, than for ourselves, for our immediate interests and for our life.”¹⁹¹ Only political action is capable of changing the world, and it therefore is the only kind of action that is capable of preserving and maintaining the world when necessary.¹⁹² She writes that “the world … is irrevocably delivered up to the ruin of time unless human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to create what is new.… Because the world is made by mortals, it wears out, and because it continuously changes its inhabitants it runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world … it must be constantly set right anew.”¹⁹³ Political action, in other words, has to somehow change the world by beginning new initiatives, and yet it also must affirm and maintain that same world. This is why Arendt argues that politics is never concerned with our individual interests: to act politically is always to act for the sake of a common world that separates and relates the individual actors within it, always with the goal of preserving and affirming that world while also changing it in the hope that our action will leave behind a mark of some kind in that world.

      True political actors, then are always acting both for the opportunity to achieve immortality and to maintain and preserve the common world.¹⁹⁴ In Arendt’s view, only action geared toward caring for the world was action worthy of political athanatizein. Some of Arendt’s most articulate discussions of this dual-natured sense of the ateleology of political action come in a 1955 set of lectures on Machiavelli. Given that these lectures occur during the same time she was researching The Human Condition and anticipate many themes discussed in later essays such as “What Is Freedom?” we can be sure that the ideas in the Machiavelli lectures were foundational for her more apparently “aesthetic” account of political action in The Human Condition. Consider this passage:

      [The] greatness of this world is constituted through virtù and fortuna. Fortuna is a constellation in the world which is visible only for virtù; fortuna is the appearing of the world, the shining up of the world, the smiling of the world. It invites man to show his excellence.… World and man are bound together like man and wife: action fits man into the world like eyes fit us to see the sun.… Action shows the world’s fortuna and man’s virtù at one and the same time.¹⁹⁵

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