Arendt’s only significant published discussion of her theory of history comes in her essay “The Concept of History.” While the essay contains a clear indication that politics was essentially related to history, Arendt makes much more explicit statements about the relationship in her 1969 lecture course “Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?”; in what follows, I want to use the 1969 course to supplement “The Concept of History” in order to better understand how she related politics and history. In the 1969 course, Arendt suggested that a fundamental tension exists in each human being between the faculty for thought and the faculty for action. It is, of course, relatively common in the modern era to understand there to be a gap of sorts between theory and practice, which must be bridged or reconciled. The idea that there is an essential tension between them is much more perplexing. However, Arendt argued this was not a flaw in humanity; in her view, it made human beings intensely interesting creatures, capable of combining faculties and engaging in activities that, from a phenomenological perspective, appear to have almost nothing in common.
This tension between thought and action arises out of their respective predominance in two fundamentally distinct and mutually exclusive spheres of experience. While action’s sphere of experience was our engaged activity in the world, thought’s sphere of experience took place in a mysterious gap in time between past and future that was utterly and existentially withdrawn from the common world. These spheres of experience gave rise to two authentic ways of life, each directed toward the realization of either thought or action. The vita activa sought to actualize action, and the activity it developed to do this was politics. The vita contemplativa sought to actualize thought, and the activity it developed was philosophy. These pursuits were anchored in competing conceptions of the Greeks’ highest aspiration, captured in the mysterious Greek word athanatizein. In the 1969 course, Arendt notes that athanatizein was virtually impossible to adequately translate, as it was open to multivocal interpretations and took in a variety of disparate practices, but settles for rendering it as “to immortalize.”91 “The common root of politics and philosophy is immortality … not in the sense that the philosophers finally defined it, but only in the sense that both endeavors spring from the same desire of mortals to become or, since that is impossible, to partake in immortality, to get their share of it.”92
Arendt asserts that a kind of competition developed among the Greeks over the best path to athanatizein.93 For the philosophers, athanatizein meant contemplation, “to dwell in the neighborhood of those things which are forever.”94 Philosophy was oriented by the condition of mortality, since it pursued the things that exist beyond human life and its world, “the things which are eternal.”95 This philosophical orientation, she claimed, begins as far back as Plato’s argument in the Phaedo for the immortality of the soul. Since death was the separation of the soul and body, and the philosophers pursued the eternal, the philosophers were therefore in love with death: “the philosopher qua philosopher will wish to die … those who hold fast to philosophy will pursue only dying and having died.”96 According to Arendt, the philosophers sought to live their lives in this gap between past and future and to realize the activities of the gap without reference to human affairs. And from out of this pursuit of immortality, the philosophers found a kind freedom all their own, a “philosophical freedom,”97 which was elevated far beyond the activities of the world of acting women and men. Thus, in this respect Heidegger’s contemplative account of human action and identity, far from distancing him from the philosophical tradition, was what bound him most closely to it.98
In competition with the philosophers, the Greek political actors pursued a very different kind of athanatizein. The tradition of political thought was formulated and structured by the philosophers, and Arendt therefore believed that their contemplative approach to immortalizing had in one way or another framed Western political theories. The problem with this, she argued, was that politics had its own unique and foundational practice of athanatizein, which had nothing to do with contemplation, but instead had to do with action, with free activity in the concrete circumstances of the human world.99 Political actors did not strive to immortalize themselves through contemplation but instead through the performance of great deeds in a public realm where their peers could judge the acts, deciding whether those deeds deserved to become the content of history.100 Thus, the essential characteristic of political action was its concern with the specific kind of immortality that comes from historical greatness in the human world.
However, the historical problem with this uniquely political form of athanatizein was that those who actually lived and took part in this activity—the “men of action,” as she called them—rarely took the time to theorize about it. As a result, most of Western political thought was done by philosophers who disdained the political form of immortalizing and the activities of the men of action.101 Philosophers could not grasp the actors’ obsession with fame and power, since in their view it was “absurd” to think that humans could ever live up to what was highest in the cosmos,102 and came to view political theory, in the words of Pascal, as like “laying down rules for a lunatic asylum.”103 “Hence,” she writes, “the old paradox was resolved by the philosophers by denying to man not the capacity to ‘immortalize,’ but the capacity of measuring himself and his own deeds against the everlasting greatness of the cosmos.”104 Arendt’s political writings were an attempt to provide the fullest articulation yet given of what the Western men of action had actually been doing in their pursuit of immortality.105 To do this, she focused on what she believed were the three originary attempts to achieve political athanatizein in Western politics: the Greeks, the Romans, and the modern revolutionaries.106 Each instance displayed a unique version of political action, contributing formative elements and ideals to Western politics and culture that continue on in our political language.107 Chapter 2 will examine these three different instances of political action. Presently, however, I want to provide a general account of what Arendt understood this political version of athanatizein to involve.
Politics and the Human Condition
What does it mean to be a narrative—to live a life as a story? If humans are “whos” and not “whats,” they can therefore never be given labels, never meaningfully be placed in conceptual boxes. They are too interesting, too dynamic. Unlike the animals, who remain members of species that revolve eternally in the cycle of the cosmos, humans are “‘the mortals,’” according to Arendt, “the only mortal things there are … individual life, a bios with a recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life … [and] is distinguished from other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movements of biological life.”108 The only way of coming to terms with the “whoness” of a human being is by learning their story, which always transcends any definition that we use to try to capture them with.
Any narrative must have a setting. When we read a novel, we take the setting as simply given: the setting is the condition of the novel. Human life is narrative because it enters a setting that is simply given: just like the stories we tell that derive from it, human experience can describe the setting—the human condition—but it cannot ever get beyond that condition, for we are not gods who live eternally but beings whose existence unfolds in time as a story. As we have seen, Arendt’s claim about the narrative character of human existence grows out of her understanding of the conditioned nature of human beings. To say that humans are essentially conditioned beings means that they are creatures who have limits, and that these limits are essential to what and who they are. Humans can never get beyond them, just like they cannot jump over their own shadows. What we can do is articulate those limits, try to take their measure, and attempt to understand how they structure and condition our experience. Human life is conditioned by such existential structures as temporality, mortality, embodiment, scarcity, language, natality, plurality, earth-boundedness, historicality, and even its own technology.109 These are not objective facts, in the