Arendt and Hegel on the tragic nature of action

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 5, 2002, Pages 523-536

  Speight, Allen ^a  

^a USA   (United States)

Author keywords

action; agency; Arendt; forgiveness; Hegel; tragedy

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997907321     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453702028005663     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. According to Arendt, Hegel's view of history does not, to begin with, adequately distinguish a judgment of who was right from a judgment of who won, as the famous passage from her lectures on Kant indicates: ‘Either we can say with Hegel: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the ultimate judgment to Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into being’ (Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982], p. 5). Arendt further sees Hegel's concept of the World Spirit as but one moment in a larger Western philosophical tradition of necessitarianism, under which individual human agency and its potential for new beginning is rendered inconsequential.
2. George Kateb has noted the importance of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for Arendt's philosophy of action — as well as a (similarly unexplored) debt to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil [Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983], p. 44, n. 2).
3. See also J. M. Bernstein, ‘Conscience and Transgression: The Persistence of Misrecognition’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 29 (Spring/Summer 1994): 63–4
4. Robert Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001).
5. Hegel's rehabilitation as a political philosopher who shares important concerns with the liberal tradition was underway even at the end of Arendt's life, particularly in the work of Shlomo Avineri (Hegel's Theory of the Modern State [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972]).
6. With the emergence of a ‘non-metaphysical’ Hegel in the last generation of scholarship, there has also been a renewed questioning about how to view his concept of historical ‘necessity’: see, among others, M. Theunissen, Sein und Schein. Die kritische Funktion der Hegelschen Logik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978)
7. H. Fulda, ‘Unzulaengliche Bemerkungen zu Dialektik’, in R.-P. Horstmann, Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978)
8. H. Brockard, Subjekt: Versuch zur Ontologie bei Hegel (Munich: Pustet, 1970)
9. Klaus Hartmann, ‘Hegel: a Non-Metaphysical View’, in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1976)
10. Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
11. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 191, n. 3
12. Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 59.
13. This and all further quotations from this work given in the text are by page number from The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958); hereafter HC.
14. As Kateb remarks, Arendt has no patience with conventional notions of ‘self-expression’, but rather wants to show how action, as an uncertain initiative, reveals latent strengths in an agent (Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, p. 10)
15. for her, action at the deepest level is disclosive both of an agent and of the meaning or principle that is instantiated in that action see Bernstein, ‘Conscience and Transgression’, pp. 63–4
16. Kateb, Hannah Arendt, pp. 11–12.
17. In Latin, the last sentence is Nihil igitur agit nisi tale existens quale patiens fieri debet; Arendt notes that the sentence, ‘though quite clear and simple in the Latin original, defies translation’ (HC 208, n. 41). Dante's discussion draws on an Aristotelian point (that ‘whatever is changed from potentiality into act is changed by something which actually exists in the form to which it is changed’) and is part of a larger argument about a somewhat different issue of political rule: that ‘whoever is himself best disposed to rule can best dispose others’ (Dante, On World Government or De Monarchia, trans. Herbert W. Schneider [New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1949]).
18. Another point of contact between Arendt's and Hegel's views is precisely this criticism of the false promise of Stoic ‘freedom’ (see Phenomenology of Spirit, §197–201).
19. This retrospective view requires a narrative ability which the agent himself or herself cannot acquire in his or her own case: ‘Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants … What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences’ (HC 192). Benhabib claims that, in trying to avoid narrative structures that enforce a scheme of necessitarianism, Arendt attempts an approach to recounting action that praises the storyteller as opposed to the poet. (Seyla Benhabib, ‘Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative’, in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman [Albany: State University Press of New York, 1994]). Arendt's concern for storytelling is an important counter-element to the discussion of action that I present here, since Arendt's own phenomenological method in HC employs in a self-conscious way, the narrative mode of the tragic dramatist.
20. On the relation between action and narrativity in Arendt, see also Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
21. On the issue of an agent's and a spectator's judgments in Arendt, see Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 221–37.
22. Arendt's library, now held at Bard College, includes several editions of the Phenomenology of Spirit; two of these in particular have extensive underlining, as well as some marginal annotation. In the earlier of these two editions, Lasson's Jubilaeumsausgabe of 1907, the markings in the ‘Spirit’ chapter are concentrated in the initial section concerning ‘ethical action’ and the final section on morality — in both cases, where the question of ‘action’ (Handlung or Tun) is at issue. The markings in the later of the two editions, edited by Hoffmeister and published in 1952, are more extensive within the ‘Spirit’ chapter itself, but again the sections on ‘ethical action’ and ‘morality’ seem of particular interest. Underscored in both the early and the late editions, for example, is Hegel's description of the necessary guilt involved in such actions as Antigone's burial of her brother, which opens up the conflicts within the ethical world: ‘Guiltless is therefore only non-action, like the being of a stone, not even that of a child’ (Unschuldig ist daher nur das Nichtthun wie das Sein eines Steines, nicht einmal eines Kindes); see Phaenomenologie des Giestes, ed. Georg Lasson [Leipzig: Durrschen Buchhandlung, 1907], p. 304
23. Phaenomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister [Hamburg: Meiner, 1952], p. 334.
24. The underlinings in the 1907 edition stop at the beginning of the subsection of ‘Morality’ devoted to the ‘beautiful soul’, before the forgiveness scene, but those in the 1952 edition continue through that scene, including the sentences ‘the wounds of the spirit heal, without leaving scars behind’ (Die Wunden des Geistes heilen, ohne dass Narben bleiben [Hoffmeister, p. 470]
25. ‘The forgiveness which [the first consciousness] extends to the other is the renunciation of itself, of its unreal essential being’ (Die Verzeihung die es dem ersten widerfahren lässt, ist die Verzichtleistung auf sich, auf sein unwirkliches Wesen [Hoffmeister, p. 471]). A particular mediating influence on Arendt's reading of Hegel was likely her friend Glenn Gray, whose classes on the Phenomenology Arendt regularly attended. (I am grateful to Jerry Kohn for this piece of information and for the suggestion to consult her editions of the Phenomenology.)
26. The retrospectivity inherent in the Phenomenology of Spirit's view of action can be seen as well in Hegel's later official philosophy of the drama in the Lectures on Aesthetics: ‘Action [Handlung] in its original Greek sense is a stepping-forth [Heraustreten] from an undivided consciousness’; AS's translation (emphasis added) from Hegel: Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 15: 543.
27. This and all future references in the text to the Phenomenology of Spirit are by paragraph number to the translation of A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); hereafter PhG.
28. Although Antigone does not appear in Arendt's discussion in the chapter on action in the HC, there are references to her elsewhere in Arendt's writings: Margaret Canovan mentions Arendt's manuscript ‘Nature of Totalitarianism’, where the example of Antigone comes up in a discussion of the public and the private (Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], p. 175).
29. A more literal translation of Sophocles' lines would run as follows: ‘Should the gods think that this is righteousness, / in suffering I'll see my error clear. / But if it is the others who are wrong / I wish them no greater punishment than mine’ (I use here the translation of Elizabeth Wyckoff in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (eds) Sophocles I [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1954]).
30. For an account of Hegel's reading of Antigone's famous retrospective speech (lines 906–14), in which she claims that she should never have acted to bury a child or a husband as she has buried her brother, see Allen Speight, Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 50–67.
31. See Andreas Grossmann, ‘“Im Anfang liegt alles beschlossen”: Hannah Arendts politisches Denken im Schatten eines Heideggerschen problems’, Man and World 30(1) (1997): 35–47.
32. Compare her remark in the essay ‘What Is Freedom?’: ‘[U]nlike the judgment of the intellect which precedes action, and unlike the command of the will which initiates it, the inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself’ (Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought [New York: Viking, 1954], p. 152).
33. The underlying view here of the inseparability of intention and action owes much to Aristotle. See Charles Taylor, ‘Hegel and the Philosophy of Action’, in Hegel's Philosophy of Action, ed. Lawrence Stepelevich and David Lamb (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), pp. 1–18.
34. For a discussion of Hegel's concern with moral luck in his philosophy of agency, see Allen Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 142–4, 191–2.
35. The issue of retrospectivity of content is discussed more widely in Michael Quante, Hegels Begriff der Handlung (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993), pp. 104–8.
36. Among the occasions for forgiveness often discussed in the literature are the presence of a mitigating excuse, old times' sake, the agent's ‘good intentions’, and a change in the agent due to repentance or suffering. The latter three obviously all concern a specific relationship between the forgiver and the forgiven agent. With respect to the first, the issue might be thought of in terms of the judge's discernment or acceptance of something in the action that ‘wasn't (really) the agent’. For a discussion of what emotions are at issue in forgiveness, see the different views of Norvin Richards (Ethics 99 [October 1988]: 77–97), who insists that forgiveness is the overcoming of all negative emotions, and Jeffrie Murphy, who, like most of the tradition which follows Bishop Butler, connects forgiveness more closely with the specific emotion of resentment
37. (Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]).
38. For other accounts in the recent literature concerning the appropriate occasions of forgiveness, see Aurel Kolnai, ‘Forgiveness’, in Ethics, Values and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), pp. 211–24
39. David Novitz, ‘Forgiveness and Self-Respect’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58(2) (June 1998): 299–315
40. R. J. O'Shaughnessy, ‘Forgiveness’, Philosophy 42 (Oct. 1967): 336–52
41. H. J. N. Horsbrugh, ‘Forgiveness’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1974): 269–82
42. Martin P. Golding, ‘Forgiveness and Regret’, Philosophical Forum 16 (Fall-Winter 1984–5): 121–37
43. Elizabeth Beardsley, ‘Understanding and Forgiveness’, in The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1980), pp. 247–57
44. Joram Graf Haber, Forgiveness (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
45. The notion of the ‘beautiful soul’, which appears in 18th-century works such as Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise and Wieland's Agathon, comes to be of particular concern to the Romantic generation which Hegel wishes to portray in the final section of the ‘Spirit’ chapter of the PhG: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Schlegel's Lucinde and particularly Jacobi's Woldemar and Allwill are important to the PhG's sketch here. For a discussion of the various ‘beautiful soul’ figures, see Robert Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)
46. for Hegel's appropriation of them, see Speight, Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency, pp. 94–121.
47. See Michael Gendre, ‘Transcendence and Judgment in Arendt's Phenomenology of Action’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 18(2) (1992): 29–50.
48. For the move in this scene to a speculative stance beyond agency, see H. S. Harris, Hegel's Ladder (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), Vol. II, p. 503.
49. Cf. also the claim of Robert Bernasconi that there is a more resistant moment of transcendence in Hegel's account (‘Hegel and Levinas: The Possibility of Forgiveness and Reconciliation’, Archivio di Filosofia 54 [1986]: 325–46).