Late Arendt and the Politics of Imagination

8/13/2019 Late Arendt and the Politics of Imagination

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R. Gustafson1

Late Arendt and the Politics of Imagination

Introduction

Hannah Arendts unfinishedfinal book (whose fragments were published posthumously,

in two volumes, as The Life of the Mind andLectures on Kants Political Philosophy) has not

failed to provoke the speculation of her commentators, and many have attempted to reconstruct

from it a theoryof mental life. Although this effort has produced several different hypotheses,

beginning with Ronald Beiners influentialInterpretive Essay(which was appended to the

Lectures), a consensus seems to have been established concerning one basic premise: Arendts

preoccupation with the life of the mind can be understood as an account of what she called the

vita contemplativa(the contemplative life of philosophy) and her earlier writings as an

elaboration of the vita activa(the active life of politics): Arendts work The Human Condition

is misleadingly named, since it actually only deals with half of the human condition, the vita

activa. Indeed, Arendt herself titled this work vita activa, reserving the other half of the human

condition, the vita contemplativa, for later treatment (Beiner 128).

Unfortunately, this rather tidy interpretation implies that Arendtslater writings on the

life of the mind are of little political relevance; according to this story, early Arendt is about the

political actor and late Arendt is about the philosophical spectator.1However, there are a number

of reasons to reject categorizing Arendtsdevelopment with this terminology in the first place,

the most obvious being that she herself invokes the activa/contemplativadyad precisely in order

to underminethe distortive and hierarchical opposition between philosophy and politics that it

1In this vein, John McGowan claims that Arendt dreamed of the day when she could abandon her political writing

(called forth by the political disasters of the age) and return to philosophy (13), categorizing her work from 1958-

63 as political philosophy (9) and her work following the Eichmann trial as a turn toward mainly moral and

philosophical concerns. In particular, this leads him to conclude that Arendts statements about the imagination in

her writings, although containing political implications, are ultimately over-determined by her emphasis on morality.


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presupposes.2Moreover, classifying Arendts discussions of thinking, willing, and judging under

the heading contemplativais problematic because she always conceptualized these as mental

activities, explicitly dissociating them, at least in their pure form, from philosophical

contemplation.3

More significantly, however, this simplistic division of Arendts oeuvreignores several

statementsboth in the book that she was preparing in her late phase, as well as in

contemporaneously published articleswhich suggest that she was beginning to conceptualize

politics in terms of mental life. Notably, in her essay Lying in Politics,Arendt even claims that

the source(5) of our capacity to act is the faculty of imagination. If we are to take this and

other statements from her late phase seriously, it would thus be at best problematic to dissociate

Arendts reflections on mental activity from her earlier reflections on the nature of political

action. Rather, Arendtstendency in her later work to ground action in mental life represents, not

so much a simple supplementation, but rather a rupturewithin the theory of action presented in

The Human Condition. Whereas in that text, the origin of our capacity to act, or to initiate the

new, is ontologically rooted in the mentally inaccessible, unique being of the agent, Lying in

Politics suggests that our ability to enact the new is determined by whether or not we choose to

exercise a mental capacity: imagination.

Thus the aim of this paper, which attempts to offer a more nuanced account of Arendts

development in her later work, is twofold: (1) negatively, to problematize the prevailing

scholarly commonsense about Arendts later work (i.e.: the neat division of her oeuvre into the

2In the section of The Human Conditiontitled The Term Vita Activa, Arendt in fact begins by distancing herself

from any sort of facile use of these terms, pointing out that they are loaded and overloaded with tradition (12)

indeed, overloaded with the assumptions of the very political-philosophical tradition that she believes herself to be

countering. For Arendt the notion of an active life, in contrast with a contemplative life, problematically has

always receive[d] its meaning from the vitacontemplativa.3For instance, in the Prologue of The Human Condition, she insists that thinking is the highest and perhaps

purest activityof which men are capable (5; italics mine). Later, she explicitly insists that the contemplation (vita

contemplativa) esteemed by philosophers is distinctly different from thought and reasoning (16).


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discreet phases of activaand contemplativa), and (2)positively, to argue that Arendts thematic

treatment of mental life should be understood as, notmerely the innocuous sequel to The Human

Condition, but as in fact growing out of an ambivalence in that work, which in fact implies the

need for a substantial revision of its theory of action.

Here I will claim that Arendtsthematization of mental activities in her later works

actually stems from an unresolved conflict implicit in her earlier writings about the activity of

thinkingand, in particular, its relation to political action.4Specifically, we can understand

Arendts exclusion of any account of the mental life of political agents from the theory of action

in The Human Conditionlargely in terms of that books programmatic interpretation of thinking:

it is understood to be an elite activity, which only a few human beings (e.g.: philosophers and

poetsnotpolitical agents) are capable of performing. However, as we will also see, even at this

point in her development, Arendt chaffs at such an interpretation of thinking and its implicit

dissociation of mental life from political agency; somewhat symptomatically, she contradicts

herself, suggesting in the closing lines of The Human Conditionthat as a living experience

thought might be a much more universal constituent of human life.

The project of The Life of the Mind, which was to provide a phenomenological

description of those mental activities which are accessible to allhuman beings, thus cannot be

understood outside the context of Arendtsambivalence about her earlier view of thinking as an

elite faculty reserved only for afewhuman beings; the project of her later years is an attempt to

resolve this ambivalence. Explicitly contradicting her earlier view of thinking, Arendt will say in

The Life of the Mindthat for human beings thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-

4Richard Bernstein has already observed that the more closely one examines her writings, the more striking it

becomes that thinking is a pervasive theme of her entire corpus (277). Bernstein has catalogued several references

to thinking in her earlier works. He has also already pointed out that the entire book [of The Human Condition] is

framed by her critical references to thinking (282), although he does not emphasize (as we will see below) how this

framing is structured specifically as an ambivalence or contradiction in Arendts thinking on thinking.


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materialized quintessence of being alive (191). The implication of this radical view of thinking

is that her earlier view about the origin of actionpremised as it was on an entirely different

interpretation of mental activityis no longer tenable. The revolution in Arendts views on

thinking suggests the need for a revolution in her concept of political action; it points to the need

to give a much more substantial account of the mental life of political agents and an account of

how action is enacted imaginatively.

Specifically, in saying that the imagination is the source of our capacity to act, Arendt,

I want to claim, had begun to recognize this need. However, because she never lived to fully

develop such a revision, or to elucidate the relationship between The Life of the Mindand The

Human Condition, the attempt to understand what her re-interpretation of action might have

looked like can only take the form of a tentative reconstruction. Thus, in what follows, I will

ground Arendts sporadic and unsystematic statements about the politics of imagination in a

genealogy of her more developed statements about thinking. I will conclude by reflecting on how

this new vision of politics improves upon Arendtsearlier theory of action, while also indicating

some of its more underdeveloped and still problematic aspects.

I. Towards a Politics of the Imagination: Arendts Evolving Views on Thinking

The Human Condition(1958)

Before examining how Arendts conceptualization of action might in fact be related to

her understanding of the activity of thinking, we should begin by considering her account of

action on its own terms, as it is developed most fully in The Human Condition. While I will not

be able to fully do justice to Arendts discussion there, for present purposes the most important

feature of it will be her account of the originor source of our capacity to act, since it is this

component of her theory that will be contested in her later writings on the imagination.


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Action, which corresponds to the human condition of pluralityto the fact that men and

not man in the singular inhabit the earthis defined in contrast with other activities by the fact

that it always involves the disclosure or appearance of an agentsunique distinctness (176)in

the presence of others. Though it may be directed at material ends, all genuine action also makes

manifest the irreducibly singular essencethe who as opposed to the what of the agent

performing the deed. In this sense, politics is understood by Arendt, rather idiosyncratically, to

notconsist (at least essentially) in the ruling of subjects, the contest for power among social

cliques, or the administration of needs. Unlike other human activities (e.g.: labor, which is

imposed by biological necessity; work, which always corresponds to the value of utility) action

is distinguished by the fact that it springs from an impulse (177) latentin the being of every

human being to appear in the presence of others. Action always presupposes a world.

Now, the origin or source of our capacity to actthe name that Arendt gives to this

impulse is the fact of natality: this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that

with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world [] action as beginning

corresponds to the fact of birth [] it is the actualization of the human condition of natality

[] (178).That is, the capacity to begin something new is latent in all human beings insofar as

the birth of a new human being always brings something uniquely new into the world; action

corresponds to, and is ultimately the fulfillment of, the novelty inherent in each birth. With

respect to the political realm, the condition for the possibility of novel political deeds and

processes is, therefore, the novelty that is latent, by virtue of his birth, in the being of the doer

who initiates the deed. In this sense, Arendtian politics is grounded in an ontological

interpretation of human birth as the source of all human differentiation and new beginnings.5

5At the end of the Action chapter of The Human ConditionArendt explicitly specifies the ontological character of

her explanation: The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, natural ruin is


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One of the by-products of her decision to root action in this ontology of birth is that

Arendt also insists that the genuinely novel deed will be cut off, at least during its inception,

from the conscious mental life of the doer. Since specifically the originof action for Arendt is

ontologically sourced to the unique distinctness of the agent, and since this unique distinctness is

inaccessibleto his mental disposalits disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful

purpose (179) the deed per se cannot be imagined, prepared for mentally, or represented in

advance. If an action could be planned for, determined by empirical calculations, etc. it would

not be new in Arendts radical sense of novelty as the actualization of a unique distinctness

which, by virtue of this strict ontological definition, precisely cannot be anticipated or directed

by mental means.

Arendts exclusion of mental life from the inception of the deed obviously presupposes a

very particular understanding of mental activity. Most basically, it assumes that mental activity

will only hinder the emergence of the radically new and thus is not itself capable of this kind of

creation. In The Human Conditionwe find evidence of this conceptualization of mental life in

two places: (1) Arendtscritique of Platos political philosophy and (2) her statements about the

activity of thinking in the prologue of the book.

With respect to the former, we can understand Arendtsrestriction of mental content from

the origin of action largely in terms of her critique of politics as sovereignty. In this vein, Arendt

identifies Platos political philosophy as the chief culprit. According to Arendt, Plato and most of

the political-philosophical tradition have always wanted to substitute the dangers and

ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically 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. (247; italics m ine). It is

also evident in her epigraphic citation of Dante at the beginning of the chapter: For in every action what is

primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, is the disclosure of his own

image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing, since everything that is

desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows

[] Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self (175).


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unreliability inherent in genuinely novel actionits unpredictability, irreversibility, and

intangibilityfor the assurances of making: Generally speaking, they always amount to

seeking shelter from actions calamities in an activity where one man, isolated from all others,

remains master of his doings from beginning to end (220).Under this model, politics came to be

interpreted as a kind of sovereign mental craftsmanship: the body-politic is understood to be the

matter that the ruler shapes in accordance with a model or mental image, assuring the states

maximum proficiency and proper behavior.

Significantly, although Arendt critiques the Platonic separation of knowing and doing

(225) in an effort to recover the specificity of action, she never calls into question, and in fact in

the prologue even accepts, the interpretation of thinking and mental life assumed by this

separation. There, rather strangely, she insists on calling thinking an activity distinct from

contemplation, but also justifies the exclusion of any discussion of this activity on the grounds

that her book deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with

those activities that traditionally, as well as according to current opinion, are within the range of

every human being(5; italics mine). In other words, in accordance with the tradition, Arendt

maintains that not all human beings can think. Thus, for this and other reasons, she says,

without ever specifying what the other reasons are, the highest and perhaps purest activity of

which men are capable, the activity of thinking, is left out of these present considerations.That

is, Arendt contains but simultaneously marginalizes thinking and mental activity within the vita

activa.

As we can already see from these peculiar passages, Arendts enunciation of her

thematic position on thinking was rather ambivalent at this point in her work.6She adheres to her

6One explanation for the source of this ambivalence, which would require an essay in its own right to explain,

would be the relationship of Arendt to Heidegger. Arendt had attended the lectures that would become the book


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thematic position (i.e.: thinking qua elite activity)and this explains why her account of the

origin of action needs to exclude the life of the mindbut she does not do so without

disturbance; a close examination of the rest of The Human Conditionreveals that Arendts

exclusion of thinking and mental life was in fact far from complete. While I cannot discuss all of

the moments in the book which are at variance with her programmatic position on thinking,7by

far the most important one occurs at the end of the book, in which Arendt explicitly contradicts

the interpretation of thinking found in the prologue: As a living experience, thought has been

assumed perhaps wrongly, to be known only to the few (324-5; italics mine). I place emphasis

on the phrases living experienceand the few, because it is in on the basis of Arendts

interpretation of these terms in The Life of the Mind that she will elaborate an understanding of

thinking as a universal and ever-present human capacity. By treating thinking as a living activity,

as opposed to a specialized one known only to the few,Arendt will elaborate a conception of

mental life that cannot be contained on the margins of the political realm. As we are about to see,

the aim of her later work will be the undoing of this troubling theoretical exclusion of thought

from action.

What is Called Thinking?and we know that she paid careful attention to Heideggers elaboration of a notion of

thinking [denken] as a task different from and coming after the end of philosophy. One might argue that Arendts

early position on thinking (as an elite activity only available to the few; for her as well as Heidegger this means the

philosopher and the poet) is one largely still under the influence of Heidegger; her late position, which

associates thinking with life and assumes it to be an innate possibility of allhuman life as such (not just thinkers

per se and poets), would surely have troubled Heidegger.7Firstly, there is a contradiction inherent in the very practice of Arendts writing in the prologue. Precisely as she

justifies the exclusion of thinking from the conceptual content of the book, she tells us that the substance of the book

itself is a matter of thought [] What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to thinkwhat we

are doing (4; italics mine). In other words, despite the fact that Arendt excludes thinking from the explicitly defined

content of her book, the entire work itself is understood by her to be an artifact of her own thought; in the very act ofseparating thinking from doing conceptually, her own writing brings the two together.

Secondly, Arendt contradicts her stated plan of excluding thought from the book in the section titled 23. The

Permanence of the World and the Work of Art. Significantly, there Arendt introduces the crucial distinction

between thought and cognition, which will effectively become the first premise of the Introduction to The Life of

the Mind: Cognition always pursues a definite aim, which can be set by practical considerations as well as by idle

curiosity; but once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end. Thought, on the contrary, has

neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not even produce result (170). In other words, despite her stated

intensions, Arendt in fact does do significant conceptual work on the concept of thinking in The Human Condition

indeed, conceptual work that forms the presuppositions of her later work.


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Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

However, before turning to those texts in which Arendt gave a more systematic re-

interpretation of thinking and mental activities, it will be important to address the other major

influence that led her to reconsider her position about the relation of mental life to political

action. Now, the reason I have emphasized the presence of this ambivalence about thinking in

Arendts most explicit work of political theory is to underscore that her concern with this and

other mental activities was always embedded, albeit implicitly, in the structure of her political

concepts. Nonetheless, in contrast to this approach, many commentators have focused on

Arendts experience of Eichmann and in particular her diagnosis of his thoughtlessness as

the sole basis of her explicit discussion of the life of the mind. The result of this interpretation is

a problematic dismissal of her later work as politically irrelevant, or at least as not being relevant

to the question of the political actor, and instead a kind of misguided foray into questions of

morality and evil.8

Suffice it to say, my presentation of The Human Conditionshould make it clear that

thinking, thoughtlessness, etc. were already ambivalent terms, and in fact implicitly part of

Arendts conceptualization of action, independently of and prior to her encounter with

Eichmann. However, this is not to say that the Eichmann trial plays no role in Arendts evolution

from interpreting thinking as a concern of specialists to thinking as a need of all human lifethe

life of political agents too. Indeed, in the introduction to The Life of the Mind, Arendt identifies

Eichmann as the factual impulsewhich spurred this reversal. However, we should not forget

8For instance, McGowan: Problematically, Arendt steps away from action at this point to focus instead on

thinking. Thus, in allher post-Eichmann work, she seems to abandon the political per se, the realm of

intersubjective interactions in favor of meditating on the solitary thinker; To be schematic about it, Arendt

becomes obsessedwith the question of how some individuals manage to take a moral stand against a ruthless regime

[] (8, 9; italics mine).


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that Arendt also speaks in the very same introduction of there being a second impulse: doubts

that had been plaguing me ever since I had finished a study of what my publisher wisely called

The Human Condition (6).9

The point then is not that we should simply forget the influence that Eichmann had on

Arendts development, or, conversely, to ascribe the trajectory of her later writings on thinking

solely to it (a tendency that has afflicted both Arendtian and anti-Arendtian readers alike), but

rather Eichmann can best be understood as the factual trigger which led Arendt to resolve an

ambivalent conceptual presuppositionher interpretation of thinkingunderlying her account

of political action. The encounter with Eichmann is the first instance which reveals how Arendts

recognition of an insufficiency in her programmatic interpretation of thinking would require a

different understanding of actionone that could countenance the relationship between mental

activity and political deeds.

In this vein, commentators have passed over one of the most obvious and crucial facts

about Arendts interpretationof Eichmanns inability to think: his thoughtlessness is first and

foremost salient because he is such a terribly effective actor. Arendts Eichmann can best be

understood as the extreme case of an actor who, to echo the words of The Human Condition,

does not think what he is doing.Indeed, the rhetoric of her analysis of Eichmann mirrors the

conceptual terminology found in The Human Conditionon action: On trial are his deeds, not the

sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism or racism (5;

italics mine); A trial resembles a play in that both begin and with the doer, not with the victim

(9; italics mine); He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing

9If we need any confirmation that these doubts concerned precisely the question of thinking, it is rather telling that

the last two paragraphs of The Human Condition, in which Arendt begins to pose this problem, are cited in the

epigraph of The Life of the Mind(the quotation from Cato, which views thinking as the most active activity and

precisely not a solitary one in the typical sense of the word). That is, the closing lines of the last two paragraphs of

The Human Conditionare literally the beginning of The Life of the Mind.


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[]It was precisely [] lack of imagination []He was not stupid. It was sheer

thoughtlessness (287).

In this sense, we should read Arendts encounter with Eichmann as an encounter of

Arendt with her own understanding of the relationship between action and thoughta

relationship which, as we saw, was already quite fraught. Arendts writing on Eichmannis thus

not discrete from her concern with action, first enunciated in The Human Condition; rather, the

experience of Eichmann brings this earlier texts implicit, problematic presuppositions about

thinking front-and-center. This leads Arendt to continue undoing the theoretical exclusion and

containment of thinking from within the vita activa, which was first suggested at the end of The

Human Condition. As we will see in the next two sections, this leads her to both re-interpret the

nature of thinking itself, as well as to revise her account of the origin of action (i.e.: the

ontological interpretation of birth as the source of new beginnings), in favor of an account that

roots action in merely human mental capacities.

The Life of the Mind

As we saw in the last section, it was Eichmanns lack of imaginationand

thoughtlessness that troubled Arendt so muchhis inability to think from the standpoint of

another person. Although she used the terms thinking and imaginationinterchangeably in

Eichmann in Jerusalem, in The Life of the Mindshe clarifies the distinctions and also the

relationship between imagination and thinking. Turning first to thinking, Arendts thematic

concern, it is worth noting that in the introduction to The Life of the MindArendt explicitly

echoes the language of the prologue of The Human Conditionin order to invertits claim.

Since philosophys beginning, (13)she says, thought has been described as the world of the

few, and there has been an age-old distinction between the many and the professional


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thinkers specializing in what was supposedly the highest activity human beings could attain to.

However, now Arendt says that thinking in its non-cognitive, non-specialized sense as a natural

need of human life[] is not the prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty in

everybody (191; italics mine).

It is thus on the basis of an interpretation of thinking as specifically a living experience

(The Human Condition) or a need of human life (The Life of the Mind)as opposed to a

technique of cognition for the sake of useful results (science) or a preparation for the

contemplation of eternal being (philosophy)that Arendt will stake a claim for mental life as a

categorical constituent of what it is to be human. This universal potentiality of thinking is

grounded in an understanding of human life as being fundamentally a quest for a sense of

meaningfulness in ones world: The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by

the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same (15).While it is possible for

human beings to not thinka life without thinking is quite possible [] it is not merely

meaninglessit is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers (191) it is still a

possibility of human beings to think insofar as thinking always accompanies life and is itself the

de-materialized quintessence of being alive (191).

While I will not get into a detailed description of the mechanics of Arendtian thinking

here, by far the most salient point for present purposes is that Arendt understands this activity to

be constituted as a withdrawalfrom the world as it appears and a bending back toward the self

(22). That is, thinking, in contrast with simple perception, presupposes the establishment of a

critical distance from the phenomenal world, which allows for human beings to engage in a

reflective, inner dialogue about the significance of that worldscontent. In this sense, thinking

can be best understood as the actualization of a critical relationship with ones reality. It is


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because of this critical distance that mental activities like thinking possess autonomy (70).

Now, in order to explain the condition for the possibility of this critical withdrawal, or

mental autonomy, Arendt is led for the first time in her writing to postulate a robust theory of the

imagination.10

She is most explicit on this point in the following passage from The Life of the

Mind: Every mental act rests on the minds faculty of having present to itself what is absent

from the senses. Re-presentation, making present what is actually absent, is the minds unique

gift, and since our whole mental terminology is based on metaphors draw from visions

experience, this gift is called imagination (76).11

Arendts use of the term re-presentation requires some explanation here. By this she

does not mean that the imagination is merely reproductive in the sense of Kants second edition

of the Critique of Pure Reason. Presentationof the world is understood by Arendt to be merely

the experience of the world as a series of disorganized and meaningless sense perceptions (think

of the sleepwalker from the earlier passage); conversely, re-presentationis understood as an

activeengagement with the de-sensed contents of the sensible world. It is only on the basis of

this view that Arendt would be able to say that thinking accompanies life as an ever-present

possibility. Specifically, because the imagination is the condition sine quanon (77) of all

thought processes, if thought is to be an ever-present possibility for all human beings requires

that the work of the imagination be always already underway. Thus this imaginative work of re-

10Up until this point, when Arendt speaks of imagination and thinking (or other correlates: understanding,

comprehension, etc.), she usually uses the terms interchangeably. See, for instance, the description of imagination as

the understanding heart (322) or Reason in its most exalted mood (323) in the 1952 essay Understanding and

Politics. It is only in The Life of the Mindthat we find a conceptual distinction clearly drawn between the two, suchthat the imagination is the condition of the possibility for thinking and the other mental activities.11There are a number of other passages in The Life of the Mindthat echo this point: Imagination, therefore, which

transforms a visible object into an invisible image, fit to be stored in the mind, is the condition sine qua non for

providing the mind with suitable thought-objects (77); Not sense perception, in which we experience things

directly, and close at hand, but imagination, coming after it, prepares the objects of our thought (86); To say it

again, every thought is an after-thought. By repeating in imagination we de-sense whatever had been given to our

senses. And only in this immaterial form can our thinking faculty now begin to concern itself with these data []

All thought arises out of experience, but no experience yields any meaning or even coherence without undergoing

the operations of imagining and thinking (87).


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presenting or de-sensing is not merely a matter of recombiningso-called real experiences

and perceptions in order to construct unreal or fantasticalmental products; rather, this

imaginative working on the world, since it is constitutive of human experience as such (i.e.: is

prior to any division between real or fantasied worlds), founds the possibility of adopting a

critical mode of attunement to the realvia the activity of thinking.

II. Reconstructing Arendts Politics of the Imagination

Lying in Politics

What this complete reversal of Arendts position on mental lifeand, in particular

thinking, should make clear, is that while it is certainly possible in her conception for action to

be cut off from reflective, critical mental activity, in her late work this is also clearly no longer

desirable. In fact, in The Life of the Mind, she gives her first indication of going one step further,

saying that although [mental activities] can never directly change reality [] the principles by

which we act and the criteria by which we judge and conduct our livesdepend ultimately upon

the life of the mind (71; italics mine). In other words, the interpretation of thinking qua living

experience leads Arendt to acknowledge that the origins of action cannot be completely purified

of mental influence or content. To act without principles developed in thought, or without the

criteria given to one by virtue of the exercise of judgment, is to act thoughtlessly, to be a

sleepwalker.

While Arendt did not live to systematically develop how this revolution in her thinking

on thinking would imply the need for a revolution in her thinking of action, several passages

from her work during this phase seem to recognize such an exigency. The most explicit passage

is to be found in the article Lying in Politics:

A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this doesnot mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo. In order to make


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room for ones own action, something that was therebefore must be removed or

destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be

impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselvesfrom where we physically arelocated and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually

are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truththe ability to lieand the

capacity to change factsthe ability to actare interconnected; they owe theirexistence to the same source: imagination [] Without the mental freedom to deny oraffirm existence [] no action would be possible; and action of course is the very

stuff politics is made of (5-6; italics mine).

This passage represents a revolution in Arendts conceptualization of action in that it establishes

a mentalcondition for it that is entirely absent from The Human Condition: the imagination.

Significantly, the imagination, insofar as it is (as we saw previously in The Life of the Mind) the

source of our mental autonomy, is also the source of our political autonomy; if we could not

grant ourselves the mental freedom to treat the world of appearances as thecontingent stuff

produced by human deedsand thus also subject to change by other deedswe would not be

able to act in order to bring forth something new. It was only on the basis of her re-interpretation

of thinking, and the positing of imagination as playing a primarily constitutive role in our

experience as human beings, that Arendt would be able to claim here that the imagination is the

source of action.

In this sense, Arendt in her later works can be seen as revising her earlier, ontological,

non-mental account of the origin of action, in favor of an account that roots such an origin in the

life of the agents mind. This newaccount is more desirable in that it brings Arendtian natality

back down from the certainty of an ontological principle to the contingency of merely human

mental capacities. By locating the source of action in the imagination, Arendt thus not only

offers a more plausible account of how the new comes about in the political realm, but also one

that is freed from an implicit heteronomy; no longer grounded (at least in any absolute sense) in


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the onto-theological principle of birth,12

and no longer understood to be inaccessible to our

conscious disposal, action is acknowledged in its essentialprecarity. Whether or not we actor

more importantly, the mannerin which we act (whether by principles or as sleepwalkers)is not

determined by some ontological factum (the unique distinctnessof the being of every human

being) but rather by a mental decisionand imaginative engagement with the world as it is given.

Judging

If in Arendts later workthe origin of our capacity to act is no longer understood to be (at

least only) the disclosure of the agents unique distinctness, but rather an imaginatively

constructed, critical relationship to the real, then this also should have forced her to develop a

much richer understanding of the relationship of an agents deedsto other human beings. Now,

while it is true that the inter-subjective character of action was always implied in Arendts theory

as she emphasizes in The Human Condition: Here it seems as though action were divided into

two parts, the beginning made by a single person and the achievement in which many join by

bearing and finishing the enterprise (189) it is also true that this aspect of Arendts theory

was incredibly underdeveloped. For instance, it is not very clear in The Human Conditionhow

she conceptualized the movement from the first to the second part of action. Moreover, if the

first part of actionthe origininvolves a moment of imagination (as it does, as we have seen,

in her late theory), this would seem to also suggest that the transition to the second partthe

achievementwould involve an imaginative act as well.

12

The earlier account of the origin of action is not only a kind of ontology, but also often more specifically an onto-theology. It is no accident that in her elaboration of it in The Origins of Totalitarianismand The Human Condition,

Arendts two major sources are St. Augustine and the Gospels. For example: Beginning, before it becomes a

historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically it is identical with mans freedom. Initium ut esset homo

creates estthat a beginning be made man was created said Augustine (Origins of Totalitarianism479); Only

the full experience of this capacity [of natality] can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential

characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether [] It is 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 is borne unto us (247).


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Here I will contend that Arendts unwritten final chapter of The Life of the Mind,

Judging, mighthave provided an answer to this problem. If Arendt came to (1) understand the

imagination as the primary capacity of the mind to adopt a critical distance from the world as it is

given, and (2) thinking as the reflective engagement enabled by this distance, and (3) action as

the realization of such an engagement in the world through deeds, then judging was to have

bridged the mental removal of the singular agent with the plurality of others required to bring

about the acts achievement. As Arendt wrote in Thinking and Moral Considerations (1972),

the essay which best prefigures the totalproject of The Life of the Mind, insofar as it is the one

single work in which she treats thinking and judging together: judging, the by-product of the

liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances,

where I am never alone and always much too busy to be able to think (189).

The trouble, however, is that while Arendt lived to write several hundred pages on

thinking, owing to her untimely death we have literally zero pages of the material from

Judging. This claim might sound controversial in the light of all the scholarly discourse on the

topic of Arendts theory of judgment. The truth, however, is that when people speak of such a

theory,what they are actually referring to is theLectures on Kants Political Philosophya

series of lectures given by Arendt at the New School in the fall of 1970, published under the

editorship of Beiner. It is largely owing to Beiners Interpretive Essay that these texts have

assumed such a preeminent role in shaping discussion of Arendts views on judging. Under his

interpretation, the latent theory of political judging found by Arendt in Kants third critique

would have essentially been the same as her own theory of judging. The trouble with this claim,

however, is that the theory of political judgment that Arendt found in Kant kept judging

completely separate from any determination of action. Rather, judgmentaccording to this


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reconstruction of Kantmust always come after the act, and is only performed by spectators,

who, by judging and speaking about actions, are able to constitute a common or community

sense for the polity. In equating this theory of judging that Arendt found in Kant with Arendts

uncompleted final theory, Beiner is able to conclude that Arendt was forced to expel judging

from the world of the vita activa (140).That is, judging is not a concern of political agents in

Arendts mature theory, but solely within the purview of contemplative spectators.

Now, I have already mentioned in the introduction some of the problematic assumptions

of Beinersessay, and it should be clear, based on the argument that I have presented so far, that

his claim about there being a transition in Arendts writingfrom a concern with activato

contemplativais problematic at best. Without denying that the aspect of judging underscored by

Beiners account couldcertainly have formed apartof her final theory, what my presentation of

Arendts development up this point should demonstrate is that this isat the very least not the

entirestory about judging.

In this vein, a few objections, based on the interpretation I have given thus far, can be

raised against Beiners pure equation of judging with spectatorship:(1) Arendt had already

elaborated the notion of the spectator more or less in The Human Conditionin the section on

The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art, in which she claimed that actors depend

upon spectators (e.g.: poets, monument-builders, historiographers, etc.) to preserve the

worldliness of their deedsif all Arendt had intended to do with Judging was to give a label to

this process that she had already articulated in 1958, this would not only be redundant, but also

completely disconnected from the concern with thoughtless deeds, which animated her re-

consideration of mental activities in the first place; (2) in particular, the factual impulse that

led her to consider thinking, willing, and judging was precisely the experience of an actor


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(Eichmann) who could not imagine, think, or judgenot a spectator; (3) although Kant was

clearly a source for Arendt in The Life of the Mind, at the outset of that text, she differentiates her

position from his: whereas he believed that he was making room only to think about god,

freedom, and immortality, she wants to interpret thinking more radically as a basic phenomenon

of human life; (4) statements from essays, such as Thinking and Moral Considerations (cited

above), which Beiner downplays, indicate that Arendt firmly believed that judging was part of

the active life; (5) most importantly, the imaginationwhich, as we are about to see, is, like

thinking and action, the basis of judginghad assumed an eminentlypoliticalsignificance in her

later writings, so it would be strange if Arendt were to de-politicize this capacity all of a sudden.

Contra Beiners reading, what the passage from Thinking and Moral Considerations

indicates is that Arendt understood judging as a particular modality of thinking, which, if my

genealogy in Part I of this paper has been convincing, can in no way be dissociated from her

evolving views on action. Namely, if the imagination is the condition sine qua non grounding the

reflective autonomy of thought, which in turn forms the basis of our freedom to act, then it is in

judging, in which we imagine the standpoint of others, that Arendt gives us a mental basisfor

how action would be achieved inter-subjectively. That is, Arendts new view of the imagination

as the origin of action should have also required an account of the mental processes that lead to

the action being adopted by and carried out with others. Arendt suggests as much when she calls

judging in the KantLecturescritical thinking, which, while still a solitary business, does not

cut itself off from all others. To be sure, it still goes on in isolation, but by the force of

imagination it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public []

To [thus] think with an enlarged mentality means to train ones imagination to go visiting.


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While thispassage is hardly the basis for a new theory ofthe inter-subjective character

of Arendtian action, it would not be implausible to argue that, when taken in the context of

Arendts evolving views on the relationship between mental activities and action, the concept of

judging as training ones imagination to go visitingmight have been the basis for such a theory.

Some of the questions that these fragments raise but ultimately fail to answer include: (1) How

might social context mediate the capacity of Arendts autonomous imagination to envision the

world otherwise? (2) How can Arendtsmental faculties, insofar as they are the basis of freedom,

be practiced and developed in a society. i.e.: what kind of models of human social and

psychological development would have to be employed, and what sorts of institutional structures

developed, in order to realize a world in which human beings would be capable of this critical

mental withdrawal?

The premise that this paper has attempted to demonstrate is that such questions, provoked

by Arendts thinking,but which also lead beyond her project, can best be carried out by

clarifying the underlying theoretical tensions which lead up to them. Hopefully, this close

reading of her development can point the way toward productively coupling Arendt, in what I

have tried to present as her most self-critical phase (The Life of the Mind), with other thinkers

and traditions that she herself would likely not have considered. For example, with regard to the

first question about context, the notion of a social imaginary, developed by Castoriadis, might be

one way of providing a richer picture of the social determinants that a politics of an autonomous

imagination would have to consider. In terms of the second question, which points to issues of

human mental development and how this can be institutionally fostered, Julia Kristevas work on

psychoanalysis and the polis particularly her rather ambitious attempt to couple Arendtian


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and psychoanalytic discourse in her intellectual biography of Arendtmight suggest new

directions to take the concepts of Arendts later work.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah.Eichmann in Jerusalem. London: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Arendt, Hannah.Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992.Print.

Arendt, Hannah. "Lying in Politics." Crises of the Republic. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1972. 1-

49. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Ed. Mary McCarthy. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1978.Print.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. "Thinking and Moral Considerations." Ed. Jerome Kohn.Responsibility and

Judgment. New York: Random House, 2003. 159-93. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. "Understanding and Politics." Ed. Jerome Kohn.Essays in Understanding. New

York: Schocken, 1994. 307-28. Print.

Beiner, Ronald. "Interpretive Essay."Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1992. 89-157. Print.

Bernstein, Richard. "Arendt on Thinking." Ed. Dana Villa. The Cambridge Companion to

Hannah Arendt. Camebridge: Camebridge UP, 2007. 277-93. Print.

McGowan, John.Hannah Arendt: an Introduction. Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1997.Print.

McGowan, John. "Imagination in Hannah Arendt." (Publication Forthcoming).

Documents

Late Arendt and the Politics of Imagination