Time for Arendt

08-02-2019

By Katherine Bermingham

“In the last analysis, the human world is always the product of man’s amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of those who come to live in it.”^[i]

— Hannah Arendt

            When she was interviewed in 1964 by Günter Gaus, a prominent German journalist, Hannah Arendt had only recently joined the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, having held numerous temporary academic and journalistic positions since arriving in the United States in 1941.^[ii] At the outset of their conversation, now known as “What Remains? The Language Remains,”^[iii] Arendt rejected Gaus’s attempt to label her a philosopher. “My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory.”^[iv] Scholars of Arendt’s work often cite this part of the interview in order to punctuate the distinction she makes between thinking philosophically and thinking politically.^[v] Despite her capacious knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition and her continuous engagement with philosophers from the pre-Socratics to her contemporaries, Arendt did not consider herself to be one of them. “As you know, I studied philosophy,” Arendt remarked to Gaus, “but that does not mean that I stayed with it.”^[vi]
            Later in the interview, Gaus invited Arendt to expand on what prompted her apostasy from philosophy, asking: “Is there a definite event in your memory that dates your turn to the political?” Arendt answered with characteristic decisiveness: “I would say February 27, 1933, the burning of the Reichstag, and the illegal arrests that followed during the same night.”^[vii] Though her upbringing was fairly secular, Arendt’s effort to understand politics, her primary subject, was bound up from the first with the persecution of the Jewish people in mid-twentieth century Europe.^[viii] “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew,” Arendt told Gaus in the interview.^[ix]
            In addition to demonstrating the significance of the fate of the Jewish people in Arendt’s intellectual trajectory (might she have “stayed with” philosophy if the rise of National Socialism had been thwarted?), the specificity of her reply to Gaus also attests to the primacy of discrete moments in time in Arendt’s political theory. Per Jonathan Schell: “it was events that set her mind in motion, and philosophy that had to adjust,”^[x] a view corroborated by Arendt’s own reflections on how the horrific events of a particular day prompted her to reorient the course of her intellectual and professional life, to devote her attention to the political rather than the philosophical realm. Events—temporal happenings—are the basic unit of Arendt’s thought, the point from which her tentative and provisional analyses depart.^[xi] In other words, Arendt locates the significance of politics not in static transhistorical forms, but in transitory, historical, and contingent occurrences.
            Embedded in the contradistinction between the “potential immortality” of the world and “the mortality of those who build it” is temporal relationship fundamental to Arendt’s thought.^[xii] While subjects such as memory and history have been extensively canvassed by Arendt scholars, little work has been done specifically on Arendt’s concept of time, which informs memory and history—and the relationship between them. The deficit of scholarly attention to time in Arendt’s work is rather surprising given her intellectual debt not only to Heidegger, for whom time was constitutive of Being and therefore inseparable from meaning, but also to Nietzsche, postulator of the eternal return and other nontraditional temporalities.^[xiii]                   
            Time is not finitude for Arendt, which is to say, time is not subject to the laws of inevitability or reducible to unidirectional flow. The boundlessness she ascribes to action is not only spatial, but temporal. In fact, political time—in contrast to both physical and historical time—can be restored, reborn, and possibly redeemed. Arendt’s time concept should be understood as a significant and conscious departure from Being and Time. Whereas Heidegger’s project attempts to question the centering of the present (and of presence) that he says characterizes metaphysics from Aristotle through the French philosopher of time Henri Bergson,^[xiv] Arendt returns to the present—that which lies between past and future—but not as a point of hypostasized fixity or stasis (like the metaphysicians Heidegger abjured), but as a “gap”, a site of possibility. Far from being an inversion of Heidegger, Arendt’s work proposes a dramatic rethinking of human beings’ relationship to time—specifically, by considering how individual mortality and subjective time experience intersect with existence in an artificially constructed entity: a political body. If the crudest summation of Heidegger is the image of life’s time flowing like sand through the proverbial hourglass, Arendt’s time concept resembles the Orloj—an intricate and extraordinary Czech timepiece from the Middle Ages, constructed to render many different temporalities at once.^[xv]
            In a 1977 article “Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time”, Sheldon Wolin wrote: “the corruptibility of politics formed a constant theme in Hannah Arendt’s thought and it served as the basis for a vision of politics that was radical and critical.”^[xvi] Yet, it is not only the vulnerability and fragility of political freedom to corruption and degradation, not only the propensity of what she terms “the social” to overtake the political, burying revolutionary treasures in the oblivion of automation—but the ever-present possibility of recovery, rebirth—and even redemption of a peculiar variety—that are constant Arendtian themes. “So long as the human condition itself is not changed” Arendt comments in the Prologue of The Human Condition, “those general human capacities which grow out of the human condition and are permanent…cannot be irretrievably lost.”^[xvii]
             Like Machiavelli,^[xviii] whom she greatly admired, Arendt suggests that political bodies—unlike human bodies—can be reborn precisely because politics is not subject to the laws of mortality that govern organic existence. Politics is artifice, not nature. The initiatory moment or “birth” of the political community can only exert its rejuvenating potential by being prized out of linear time, by occupying an extra-temporal standpoint. Indeed, the capability of a political body to be reborn via ritual is no mere turn of phrase or whimsical metaphor. Rather, for Arendt this integral political capacity is undergirded by a theory of time that is unique to politics. Whereas for Benjamin (and first-generation critical theorists like Adorno) temporal disruption is intellectually and aesthetically fecund, for Arendt the power unleashed by a nonlinear encounters with history and memory is integral to her institutional theory of republican politics.
            Among many reasons, Arendt’s political theory remains of interest to political philosophers and political actors alike, especially in the dark times of our present, because of her rejection of fatalism and the time concept it employs. Against those preaching fire and brimstone about the inevitability of our ever-nearing political rapture, Arendt would argue that we can step back from the brink, in part by acting in concert with peers and exercising judgment (confronting and bringing about the novel), and in part by retrieving lost capacities and conceptual understandings that facilitate on-going care for the common world. By acting in concert—that is, at the same time—we create new spheres of freedom. And while it may not be possible to “turn back time” it is possible to carry parts of the past with you, like an Aeneas leaving behind the smoldering Trojan ruins with an Anchises slung over your shoulder.