Death, Interrupted

Our next and final (for now) chapter on Hannah Arendt's gospel -- for the New Year

The redemptive miracle of natality, a child being born, is the prospect of action, which is bringing something new into the world.

Action is the third activity in the human vita activa, and Arendt credits it with providing a miraculous meaningfulness that comes from outside human work, where work, the second activity in the vita activa, is inevitably subject to means-ends logic.

The Problem of Freedom & Non-Sovereignty

But action has its own problems, and they cannot be solved by any miraculous intervention from outside. These problems — Arendt calls them “disabilities” or “predicaments” — are irreversibility and unpredictability. Action is boundless in that it sets in motion an unstoppable process within the vast web of human relationships, a continuing series of reactions and further actions, reactions and actions. Human beings, while free in their miraculous ability to act, to set words and deeds in motion, are nevertheless not sovereign over what happens next, and next, and next. This is our reality under the human condition of plurality.

According to Arendt, various traditions and eras of Greek thought tried desperately to deal with non-sovereignty, this lack of control, self-sufficiency, personal integrity, self-mastery, and so on, and in so doing they unleashed all sorts of philosophical mischief. Plato and Aristotle end up trying to reverse the hierarchy of labor < work < action to return action (politics) to the realm of human work and fabrication, with dire consequences. The Stoics and Epicureans preferred rather to dwell in illusion!

Arendt thus sets up the discussion of sections 33 and 34 — the two sections that form the conclusion to Chapter V on “Action,” including the final “The miracle that saves the world…” — with the following:

If we look upon freedom with the eyes of the tradition, identifying freedom with sovereignty, the [actual] simultaneous presence of freedom and non-sovereignty, of being able to begin something new and of not being able to control or even foretell its consequences, seems almost to force us to the conclusion that human existence is absurd. [According to a footnote, this is the existentialist’s conclusion “though in a certain spirit of rebellion.”]

… The question which then arises is whether… the capacity for action does not harbor within itself certain potentialities which enable it to survive the disabilities of non-sovereignty.

(Source: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Ch. 5, sect. 32, p. 236)

Forgiveness

Since there is no other or “possibly higher faculty” beyond and outside action — as work lies beyond labor, and action lies beyond work — there has to be a potentiality (a power) within action itself. It turns out that the remedy for irreversibility, the inability to undo what has been done or to stop a process that has been set in motion, is the faculty of forgiving.

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.

(Source: sect. 33)

Jesus of Nazareth discovered this power according to Arendt. It originated in a religious context and formulation, but it is not necessarily religious. It does not, for example, rely upon the power of God. “Man in the gospel is not supposed to forgive because God forgives,” but quite the opposite: God forgives when humans do. Nor is there a duty to forgive any “extremity of crime and willed evil,” which only God will deal with at the Last Judgment beyond life on earth. Forgiveness is entirely available to human action, and it operates in the “everyday occurrence of trespass,”

which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

(Source: sect. 33)

Forgiveness is thus the remedy, not for radical evil, but for what happens all the time when humans “know not what they do,” when we cannot foresee the full fallout of our actions, when we cannot take back words and deeds, when in fact we need to keep on acting, initiating, speaking and doing within the complicated situation of our human condition.

Promises

“The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future,” according to Arendt, “is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.” Like forgiveness, promise-making and promise-keeping

depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self.

Promise-keeping in the presence of others allows us to keep our identity, and at least partially, to “dispel the darkness of the human heart.”

Binding oneself through promises serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let along durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.

(Source: sect. 33, p. 237)

Unlike forgiveness, discovered by Jesus, “the power of stabilization inherent in the faculty of making promises has been known throughout our tradition” (sect. 34). Arendt cites both the Roman legal system and Abraham’s penchant in the Bible toward making covenants. Contract theories of all kinds “attest to the fact that the power of making promises has occupied the center of political thought over the centuries.”

The faculty of promising also “corresponds exactly to the existence of a freedom which [is] given under the condition of non-sovereignty.” It is the only alternative to a [Greek philosophical] mastery which relies on domination of one’s self and rule over others.”

The danger and the advantage inherent in all bodies politic that rely on contracts and treaties is that they, unlike those that rely on rule and [traditional] sovereignty, leave the unpredictability of human affairs and the unreliability of men as they are, using them merely as the medium, as it were, into which certain islands of predictability are thrown and in which certain guideposts of reliability are erected.

(Source: sect. 34, p. 244)

They are “isolated islands of certainty” in an ocean of uncertainty. They in no way “cover the whole ground of the future [or try to] map out a path secured in all directions.”

The force of mutual promise or contract is what can validly hold a gathered people together so that they can “act in concert.” There can even be a “certain limited reality” assumed by a kind of sovereignty that occurs in the case of a body of people mutually bound to each other and kept together by promises for an agreed upon purpose. There is limited sovereignty — one that maintains freedom — in being able to act together, yet in plurality, and to partially mitigate future unknowns through the making and keeping of promises enacted over time.

Arendt contrasts such an “island” polity with the spurious sovereignty claimed by any “isolated single entity [no longer in plurality], be it the individual entity of the person [a tyrant, say] or the collective entity of a nation.” There is no “identical will which somehow magically inspires” everyone, as one would find, say, in a fascist nation. (I’m extrapolating beyond Arendt’s words here, as I try to grasp the kinds of danger she sees when a body politic goes beyond acting in concert in a plurality gathered through promise and contract.) The hope, and the miracle of promise-keeping that lies within the potentialities of action, not outside them, is for a “limited independence from the incalculability of the future” and a “capacity to dispose of the future [incline toward, array it] as though it were the present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective.”

There is power in a human gathering, and it can be miraculously enlarged if human beings orient themselves and act toward a hopeful future by consenting to ties of mutuality and extending forgiveness.

Death, Interrupted

Forgiveness and promises are moral precepts, but they are not laws. They arise “directly out of the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking… [and are] built into the very faculty to start new and unending processes.” Arising from within action, from within natality, they are equally “spontaneous” as we might say. And without them, we would be doomed! We could follow only the inexorable natural laws and processes of mortal beings in a human life spent between birth and death, slaving away for biological life, then working away some more in constant activities of production.

It is [only] the faculty of action that interferes with [the law of mortality] because it interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life, which in its turn interrupted and interfered with the cycle of the biological life process. The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.

… Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth… must have known very well when he likened the power of forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man.

(Source: sect. 34, p. 246)

The miracle that saves the world… is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”

As we finish celebrating the octave of the Nativity of the Christ child, and as we enter into a new calendar year, let us take the chance for yet further human beginning! We can be generous in forgiveness. We can create islands of security in an ocean of uncertainty through making and keeping promises. We can act together in plurality, agree on common purposes, and thereby interfere and interrupt the inexorability of the laws of death. We can bestow instead faith and hope on the world.