Human Life and Politics in Arendt

By Kazue Koishikawa

“Without repeating life in imagination, you can never be fully alive. ‘Lack of imagination’ prevents people from ‘existing’… Be loyal to life, don’t create fiction but accept what life is giving you, show yourself worthy of whatever it may be by recollecting and pondering over it, thus repeating it in imagination; this is the way to remain alive.”

—Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

Karen Blixen (1885-1962), better known by her penname Isak Dinesen, was a Danish writer whose life in Kenya was related in the film, “Out of Africa” (1985). She was a matriarch of her beloved beautiful coffee farm 9000 feet above sea level outside of Nairobi where she was called “Titania” after the Queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Partly due to her desire to “design” or “create” her life, she experienced a number of failures over her many years. Her business failed, she lost both her kingdom and her lover, and she ultimately left , at which point she became a true storyteller.

[caption id="attachment_16158" align="alignleft" width="300"] Isak Dinesen (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)[/caption]

Dinesen’s ability to tell stories “saved her life after disaster had struck,” which echoes Arendt’s point that telling a story helps us understand what happened and allows us to reconcile with reality. Storytelling in her mind “reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.” This remark by Arendt is significant to the extent that it offers us some insights about her understanding of politics and its relation to human life.

Freedom is one of the most frequently discussed topics by those who are concerned with politics, and Arendt is no exception. For her, freedom is freedom to act, to express our opinions through speech and take action on certain issues accordingly if that is necessary, which brings something new to the world. By definition, freedom is spontaneous and autonomous, and in her view, it affirms that action cannot be understood with a means and ends model.

We as human beings often confuse meaning with purpose. To illustrate, we often hear people console someone who went through a difficult experience with the words, “Perhaps it has some meaning.” The implication of this statement is that the bad thing had to happen in order to learn something in the future, which actually invokes purpose and not meaning. As soon as an action is taken as a means to an end, as a way to achieve a purpose, it loses its spontaneous and autonomous character. It’s therefore no longer free but is constrained to a purpose.

This understanding is in contrast to the notion of meaning, which appears when we look back at what happened and seek to understand how it relates to later incidents in our lives. Regarding the latter, we might learn a lesson from our previous experiences that made us act differently later, or we might not have learned anything and thus might have made an undesirable choice again. Either way, it is our reflection, a backward glance that we use to connect our past actions, that allows meaning to be revealed.

Arendt thinks that if we are not free agents who act through our speeches and deeds, it is impossible to differentiate one another as unique individuals. In this view, human beings without individual uniqueness collectively constitute but a pool of genetic data.

Dinesen made a mistake by organizing her life’s course as if it were part of the same sequence as her father’s: she married a man who was related to her father’s unfulfilled first love, an unsuccessful marriage that eventually brought her to Africa and left her nothing other than syphilis and the title of Baroness. However, her bitter experiences taught her two important lessons with regards to becoming a true and excellent storyteller. First, she learned that telling or writing stories about life is not same as living life as if it were a work of art or a means to realize an “idea.” Second, she learned that “(a)ll sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story about them” because “in the repetition of imagination” the happenings have become what she would call a ‘destiny.’ “[S]torytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are(.)”

[caption id="attachment_16159" align="alignright" width="300"] (Source: Meltwater)[/caption]

What Arendt is pointing out here is echoed in the Aristotelian understanding of tragedy. That is, writing a tragedy is to construct a plot through which various actions of the main character are presented as elements of one action. By doing this, a spontaneous beginning (action) and many subsequent actions provide a context that is to be understood as a whole and which reveals its meaning without reducing itself to a means to an end. In action, end resides within the activity itself. When Arendt claims that human freedom is freedom to act, she shares the Aristotelian understanding that life is an activity. Tragedy, or the act of storytelling, makes manifest who the main character is through her action, i.e., how she judges and acts.

Judgment involved in tragedy and storytelling is twofold. The meaning of her action, which reveals her judgment, is different from reasoning and calculation. Yet at the same time, the essential criterion to judge the quality of a tragedy or story is whether it moves its audiences or readers, i.e. catharsis. Therefore, the communicability of the meaning of the main character’s action rests in the story’s spectators or readers. This in turn explains why Arendt believes that freedom and human plurality are inseparable conditions for political life. Action not only needs others to act together but it also needs them to manifest the meaning of one’s action. If one’s identity, the uniqueness of a person, is disclosed through action (her life story), then the human world is a great history book that contains all kinds of unique stories. In this sense, death for Arendt is a worldly event. This is in contrast to the view of Heidegger, who considers it an utterly individualistic experience in which one faces one’s ownmost possibility and, in so doing, reveals one’s authentic self apart from one’s relationships with others. For Arendt, death can be understood as the beginning of the telling of one’s life story. Those who know her repeat her life story again and again in their imagination so that they can say they knew her and reconcile their loss. To exist is synonymous with living among others, so even the end of one’s life remains with them.

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Featured Image Source: Fine Art America