Polytropy

Index to this series

CHAPTER V Action [3]

31 the traditional substitution of making for acting

¶ 31.1

The modern age, in its early concern with tangible products and demonstrable profits or its later obsession with smooth functioning and sociability, was not the first to denounce the idle uselessness of action and speech in particular and of politics in general.⁵⁶ Exasper­ation with the threefold frustration of action—

1. the unpredictability of its outcome,
2. the irreversibility of the process, and
3. the anonymity of its authors

—is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsi­bility inherent in a plurality of agents. The remarkable monotony of the proposed solutions throughout our recorded history testifies to the elemental simplicity of the matter. Generally speaking, they always amount to seeking shelter from action’s calamities in an activity where one man, isolated from all others, remains master of his doings from beginning to end. This attempt to replace acting with making is manifest in the whole body of argument against “democracy,” which, the more consistently and better reasoned it is, will turn into an argument against the essentials of politics.

¶ 31.2

The calamities of action all arise from the human condition of plurality, which is the condition sine qua non for that space of ap­pearance which is the public realm. Hence the attempt to do away with this plurality is always tantamount to the abolition of the pub­lic realm itself. The most obvious salvation from the dangers of [220] plurality is mon-archy, or one-man-rule, in its many varieties, from outright tyranny of one against all to benevolent despotism and to those forms of democracy in which the many form a collective body so that the people “is many in one” and constitute themselves as a “monarch.”⁵⁷ Plato’s solution of the philosopher-king, whose “wisdom” solves the perplexities of action as though they were solvable problems of cognition, is only one—and by no means the least tyrannical—variety of one-man rule. The trouble with these forms of government is not that they are cruel, which often they are not, but rather that they work too well. Tyrants, if they know their business, may well be “kindly and mild in everything,” like Peisistratus, whose rule even in antiquity was compared to “the Golden Age of Cronos”;⁵⁸ their measures may sound very “un­tyrannical” and beneficial to modern ears, especially when we hear that the only—albeit unsuccessful—attempt to abolish slavery in antiquity was made by Periandros, tyrant of Corinth.⁵⁹ But they all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while only “the ruler should attend to public affairs.”⁶⁰ This, to be sure, [221] was tantamount to furthering private industry and industriousness, but the citizens could see in this policy nothing but the attempt to deprive them of the time necessary for participation in common matters. It is the obvious short-range advantages of tyranny, the advantages of stability, security, and productivity, that one should beware, if only because they pave the way to an inevitable loss of power, even though the actual disaster may occur in a relatively distant future.

¶ 31.3

Escape from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet and order has in fact so much to recommend it that the greater part of political philosophy since Plato could easily be interpreted as various attempts to find theoretical foundations and practical ways for an escape from politics altogether. The hallmark of all such escapes is the concept of rule, that is, the notion that men can law­fully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and the others forced to obey. The commonplace notion already to be found in Plato and Aristotle that every political com­munity consists of those who rule and those who are ruled (on which assumption in turn are based the current definitions of forms of government—rule by one or monarchy, rule by few or oli­garchy, rule by many or democracy) rests on a suspicion of action rather than on a contempt for men, and arose from the earnest desire to find a substitute for action rather than from any irrespon­sible or tyrannical will to power.

¶ 31.4

Theoretically, the most brief and most fundamental version of the escape from action into rule occurs in the Statesman, where Plato opens a gulf between the two modes of action, archein and prattein (“beginning” and “achieving”), which according to Greek understanding were interconnected. The problem, as Plato saw it, was to make sure that the beginner would remain the complete master of what he had begun, not needing the help of others to carry it through. In the realm of action, this isolated mastership can be achieved only

• if the others are no longer needed to join the enterprise of their own accord, with their own motives and aims, but are used to execute orders, and
• if, on the other hand, the be­ginner who took the initiative does not permit himself to get in­volved in the action itself.

To begin (archein) and to act (prattein) thus can become two altogether different activities, and the begin- [222] ner has become a ruler (an archōn in the twofold sense of the word) who “does not have to act at all (prattein), but rules (archein) over those who are capable of execution.” Under these circumstances, the essence of politics is “to know how to begin and to rule in the gravest matters with regard to timeliness and untimeliness”; action as such is entirely eliminated and has become the mere “execution of orders.”⁶¹ Plato was the first to introduce the division between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know, instead of the old articulation of action into beginning and achiev­ing, so that knowing what to do and doing it became two alto­gether different performances.

¶ 31.5

Since Plato himself immediately identified the dividing line be­tween thought and action with the gulf which separates the rulers from those over whom they rule, it is obvious that the experiences on which the Platonic division rests are those of the household, where nothing would ever be done if the master did not know what to do and did not give orders to the slaves who executed them with­out knowing. Here indeed, he who knows does not have to do and he who does needs no thought or knowledge. Plato was still quite aware that he proposed a revolutionary transformation of the polis when he applied to its administration the currently recognized maxims for a well-ordered household.⁶² (It is a common error to interpret Plato as though he wanted to abolish the family and the household; he wanted, on the contrary, to extend this type of life until one family embraced every citizen. In other words, he wanted to eliminate from the household community its private character, and it is for this purpose that he recommended the abolition of pri­vate property and individual marital status.)⁶³ According to Greek understanding, the relationship between ruling and being ruled, [223] between command and obedience, was by definition identical with the relationship between master and slaves and therefore precluded all possibility of action. Plato’s contention, therefore, that the rules of behavior in public matters should be derived from the master-slave relationship in a well-ordered household actually meant that action should not play any part in human affairs.

¶ 31.6

It is obvious that Plato’s scheme offers much greater chances for a permanent order in human affairs than the tyrant’s efforts to eliminate everybody but himself from the public realm. Although each citizen would retain some part in the handling of public af­fairs, they would indeed “act” like one man without even the pos­sibility of internal dissension, let alone factional strife: through tule, “the many become one in every respect” except bodily ap­pearance.⁶⁴ Historically, the concept of rule, though originating in the household and family realm, has played its most decisive part in the organization of public matters and is for us invariably con­nected with politics. This should not make us overlook the fact that for Plato it was a much more general category. He saw in it the chief device for ordering and judging human affairs in every respect. This is not only evident from his insistence that the city-state must be considered to be “man writ large” and from his con­struction of a psychological order which actually follows the pub­lic order of his utopian city, but is even more manifest in the grandiose consistency with which he introduced the principle of domination into the intercourse of man with himself. The supreme criterion of fitness for ruling others is, in Plato and in the aristocrat­ic tradition of the West, the capacity to rule one’s self. Just as the philosopher-king commands the city, the soul commands the body and reason commands the passions. In Plato himself, the legitimacy of this tyranny in everything pertaining to man, his conduct toward himself no less than his conduct toward others, is still firmly rooted in the equivocal significance of the word archein, which means both beginning and ruling; it is decisive for Plato, as he says expressly at the end of the Laws, that only the beginning (archē) is entitled to rule (archein). In the tradition of Platonic thought, this original, linguistically predetermined identity of ruling and begin­ning had the consequence that all beginning was understood as the [224] legitimation for rulership, until, finally, the element of beginning disappeared altogether from the concept of rulership. With it the most elementary and authentic understanding of human freedom disappeared from political philosophy.

¶ 31.7

The Platonic separation of knowing and doing has remained at the root of all theories of domination which are not mere justifica­tions of an irreducible and irresponsible will to power. By sheer force of conceptualization and philosophical clarification, the Pla­tonic identification

• of knowledge with command and rulership and
• of action with obedience and execution

overruled all earlier experi­ences and articulations in the political realm and became authorita­tive for the whole tradition of political thought, even after the roots of experience from which Plato derived his concepts had long been forgotten. Apart from the unique Platonic mixture of depth and beauty, whose weight was bound to carry his thoughts through the centuries, the reason for the longevity of this particular part of his work is that he strengthened his substitution of rulership for action through an even more plausible interpretation in terms of making and fabrication. It is indeed true—and Plato, who had taken the key word of his philosophy, the term “idea,” from ex­periences in the realm of fabrication, must have been the first to notice it—that the division between knowing and doing, so alien to the realm of action, whose validity and meaningfulness are de­stroyed the moment thought and action part company, is an every­day experience in fabrication, whose processes obviously fall into two parts:

1. first, perceiving the image or shape (eidos) of the prod­uct-to-be, and
2. then organizing the means and starting the execu­tion.

¶ 31.8

The Platonic wish to substitute making for acting in order to bestow upon the realm of human affairs the solidity inherent in work and fabrication becomes most apparent where it touches the very center of his philosophy, the doctrine of ideas.

• When Plato was not concerned with political philosophy (as in the Symposium and elsewhere), he describes the ideas as what “shines forth most” (ekphanestaton) and therefore as variations of the beautiful.
• Only in the Republic were the ideas transformed into standards, measure­ments, and rules of behavior, all of which are variations or deriva­tions of the idea of the “good” in the Greek sense of the word, that [225] is, of the “good for” or of fitness.⁶⁵

This transformation was neces­sary to apply the doctrine of ideas to politics, and it is essentially for a political purpose, the purpose of eliminating the character of frailty from human affairs, that Plato found it necessary to declare the good, and not the beautiful, to be the highest idea. But

• this idea of the good is not the highest idea of the philosopher, who wishes to contemplate the true essence of Being and therefore leaves the dark cave of human affairs for the bright sky of ideas; even in the Republic, the philosopher is still defined as a lover of beauty, not of goodness.
• The good is the highest idea of the philosopher-king, who wishes to be the ruler of human affairs because he must spend his life among men and cannot dwell forever under the sky of ideas.

It is only when he returns to the dark cave of human affairs to live once more with his fellow men that he needs the ideas for guidance as standards and rules by which to measure and under which to subsume the varied multitude of human deeds and words with the same absolute, “objective” certainty with which the craftsman can be guided in making and the layman in judging individual beds by using the unwavering ever-present model, the “idea” of bed in general.⁶⁶

¶ 31.9

Technically, the greatest advantage of this transformation and application of the doctrine of ideas to the political realm lay in the elimination of the personal element in the Platonic notion of ideal [226] rulership. Plato knew quite well that his favorite analogies taken from household life, such as the master-slave or the shepherd-flock relationship, would demand a quasi-divine quality in the ruler of men to distinguish him as sharply from his subjects as the slaves are distinguished from the master or the sheep from the shepherd.⁶⁷ The construction of the public space in the image of a fabricated object, on the contrary, carried with it only the implication of or­dinary mastership, experience in the art of politics as in all other arts, where the compelling factor lies not in the person of the artist or craftsman but in the impersonal object of his art or craft. In the Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standards; he “makes” his City as the sculptor makes a statue;⁶⁸ and in the final Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws which need only be executed.⁶⁹

¶ 31.10

Within this frame of reference, the emergence of a utopian political system which could be construed in accordance with a model by somebody who has mastered the techniques of human affairs becomes almost a matter of course; Plato, who was the first to design a blueprint for the making of political bodies, has re­mained the inspiration of all later utopias. And although none of these utopias ever came to play any noticeable role in history—for in the few instances where utopian schemes were realized, they broke down quickly under the weight of reality, not so much the reality of exterior circumstances as of the real human relationships they could not control—they were among the most efficient ve­hicles to conserve and develop a tradition of political thinking in [227] which, consciously or unconsciously, the concept of action was interpreted in terms of making and fabrication.

¶ 31.11

One thing, however, is noteworthy in the development of this tradition. It is true that violence, without which no fabrication could ever come to pass, has always played an important role in political schemes and thinking based upon an interpretation of ac­tion in terms of making; but up to the modern age, this element of violence remained strictly instrumental, a means that needed an end to justify and limit it, so that glorifications of violence as such are entirely absent from the tradition of political thought prior to the modern age. Generally speaking, they were impossible as long as contemplation and reason were supposed to be the highest capaci­ties of man, because under this assumption all articulations of the vita activa, fabrication no less than action and let alone labor, re­mained themselves secondary and instrumental. Within the nar­rower sphere of political theory, the consequence was that the notion of rule and the concomitant questions of legitimacy and rightful authority played a much more decisive role than the under­standing and interpretations of action itself. Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his al­legedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpreta­tions of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making. This has been particularly striking in the series of revolutions, characteristic of the modern age, all of which—with the exception of the Ameri­can Revolution—show the same combination of the old Roman enthusiasm for the foundation of a new body politic with the glorification of violence as the only means for “making” it. Marx’s dictum that “violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,” that is, of all change in history and politics,⁷⁰ only sums up the conviction of the whole modern age and draws the consequences of its innermost belief that history is “made” by men as nature is “made” by God. [228]

¶ 31.12

How persistent and successful the transformation of action into a mode of making has been is easily attested by the whole ter­minology of political theory and political thought, which indeed makes it almost impossible to discuss these matters without using the category of means and ends and thinking in terms of instrumen­tality. Perhaps even more convincing is the unanimity with which popular proverbs in all modern languages advise us

• that “he who wants an end must also want the means” and
• that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

We are perhaps the first gen­eration which has become fully aware of the murderous conse­quences inherent in a line of thought that forces one to admit that all means, provided that they are efficient, are permissible and jus­tified to pursue something defined as an end. However, in order to escape these beaten paths of thought it is not enough to add some qualifications, such as that not all means are permissible or that under certain circumstances means may be more important than ends; these qualifications either take for granted a moral system which, as the very exhortations demonstrate, can hardly be taken for granted, or they are overpowered by the very language and analogies they use. For to make a statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means; and paradoxes al­ways indicate perplexities, they do not solve them and hence are never convincing. As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent any­body’s using all means to pursue recognized ends.

¶ 31.13

The substitution of making for acting and the concomitant deg­radation of politics into a means to obtain an allegedly “higher” end—

• in antiquity the protection of the good men from the rule of the bad in general, and the safety of the philosopher in particular,⁷¹
• in the Middle Ages the salvation of souls,
• in the modern age the productivity and progress of society

—is as old as the tradition of political philosophy. It is true that only the modern age defined man primarily as homo faber, a toolmaker and producer of things, [229] and therefore could overcome the deep-seated contempt and sus­picion in which the tradition had held the whole sphere of fabrica­tion. Yet, this same tradition, in so far as it also had turned against action—less openly, to be sure, but no less effectively—had been forced to interpret acting in terms of making, and thereby, its suspicion and contempt notwithstanding, had introduced into po­litical philosophy certain trends and patterns of thought upon which the modern age could fall back. In this respect, the modern age did not reverse the tradition but rather liberated it from the “preju­dices” which had prevented it from declaring openly that the work of the craftsman should rank higher than the “idle” opinions and doings which constitute the realm of human affairs. The point is that Plato and, to a lesser degree, Aristotle, who thought craftsmen not even worthy of full-fledged citizenship, were the first to pro­pose handling political matters and ruling political bodies in the mode of fabrication. This seeming contradiction clearly indicates the depth of the authentic perplexities inherent in the human capac­ity for action and the strength of the temptation to eliminate its risks and dangers by introducing into the web of human relation­ships the much more reliable and solid categories inherent in activi­ties with which we confront nature and build the world of the human artifice.

32 the process character of action

¶ 32.1

The instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else has of course never really suc­ceeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being one of the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether. We saw before that in our world the seeming elimination of labor, as the painful effort to which all human life is bound, had first of all the consequence that work is now performed in the mode of laboring, and the products of work, objects for use, are consumed as though they were mere consumer goods. Simi­larly, the attempt to eliminate action because of its uncertainty and to save human affairs from their frailty by dealing with them as though they were or could become the planned products of human making has first of all resulted in channeling the human capacity [230] for action, for beginning new and spontaneous processes which without men never would come into existence, into an attitude toward nature which up to the latest stage of the modern age had been one of exploring natural laws and fabricating objects out of natural material. To what an extent we have begun to act into nature, in the literal sense of the word, is perhaps best il­lustrated by a recent, casual remark of a scientist who quite seri­ously suggested that “basic research is when I am doing what I don’t know what I am doing.”⁷²

¶ 32.2

This started harmlessly enough with the experiment in which men were no longer content to observe, to register, and contem­plate whatever nature was willing to yield in her own appearance, but began to prescribe conditions and to provoke natural processes. What then developed into an ever-increasing skill in unchaining elemental processes, which, without the interference of men, would have lain dormant and perhaps never have come to pass, has finally ended in a veritable art of “making” nature, that is, of creating “natural” processes which without men would never exist and which earthly nature by herself seems incapable of ac­complishing, although similar or identical processes may be com­monplace phenomena in the universe surrounding the earth. Through the introduction of the experiment, in which we pre­scribed man-thought conditions to natural processes and forced them to fall into man-made patterns, we eventually learned how to “repeat the process that goes on in the sun,” that is, how to win from natural processes on the earth those energies which without us develop only in the universe.

¶ 32.3

The very fact that natural sciences have become exclusively sci­ences of process and, in their last stage, sciences of potentially ir­reversible, irremediable “processes of no return” is a clear indica­tion that, whatever the brain power necessary to start them, the actual underlying human capacity which alone could bring about this development is no “theoretical” capacity, neither contempla­tion nor reason, but the human ability to act—to start new unprece­dented processes whose outcome remains uncertain and unpre- [231] dictable whether they are let loose in the human or the natural realm.

¶ 32.4

In this aspect of action—all-important to the modern age, to its enormous enlargement of human capabilities as well as to its unprecedented concept and consciousness of history—processes are started whose outcome is unpredictable, so that uncertainty rather than frailty becomes the decisive character of human affairs. This property of action had escaped the attention of antiquity, by and large, and had, to say the least, hardly found adequate articula­tion in ancient philosophy, to which the very concept of history as we know it is altogether alien. The central concept of the two entirely new sciences of the modern age, natural science no less than historical, is the concept of process, and the actual human ex­perience underlying it is action. Only because we are capable of acting, of starting processes of our own, can we conceive of both nature and history as systems of processes. It is true that this char­acter of modern thinking first came to the fore in the science of history, which, since Vico, has been consciously presented as a “new science,” while the natural sciences needed several centuries before they were forced by the very results of their triumphal achievements to exchange an obsolete conceptual framework for a vocabulary that is strikingly similar to the one used in the historical sciences.

¶ 32.5

However that may be, only under certain historical circum­stances does frailty appear to be the chief characteristic of human affairs.

• The Greeks measured them against the ever-presence or eternal recurrence of all natural things, and the chief Greek con­cern was to measure up to and become worthy of an immortality which surrounds men but which mortals do not possess.

• To people who are not possessed by this concern with immortality, the realm of human affairs is bound to show an altogether different, even somehow contradictory aspect, namely, an extraordinary resili­ency whose force of persistence and continuity in time is far su­perior to the stable durability of the solid world of things.

Whereas men have always been capable of destroying whatever was the product of human hands and have become capable today even of the potential destruction of what man did not make—the earth and earthly nature—

• men never have been and never will be able to undo [232] or even to control reliably any of the processes they start through action. Not even oblivion and confusion, which can cover up so efficiently the origin and the responsibility for every single deed, are able to undo a deed or prevent its consequences.
• And this in­capacity to undo what has been done is matched by an almost equally complete incapacity to foretell the consequences of any deed or even to have reliable knowledge of its motives.⁷³

¶ 32.6

While the strength of the production process is entirely absorbed in and exhausted by the end product, the strength of the action process is never exhausted in a single deed but, on the contrary, can grow while its consequences multiply; what endures in the realm of human affairs are these processes, and their endurance is as unlimited, as independent of the perishability of material and the mortality of men as the endurance of humanity itself. The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until man­kind itself has come to an end.

¶ 32.7

That deeds possess such an enormous capacity for endurance, superior to every other man-made product, could be a matter of pride if men were able to bear its burden, the burden of irreversi­bility and unpredictability, from which the action process draws its very strength. That this is impossible, men have always known. They have known

• that he who acts never quite knows what he is doing,
• that he always becomes “guilty” of consequences he never intended or even foresaw,
• that no matter how disastrous and unex­pected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it,
• that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and
• that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act.

All this is reason enough to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom, which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its producer to such an ex- [233] tent that he appears much more the victim and the sufferer than the author and doer of what he has done. Nowhere, in other words, neither in labor, subject to the necessity of life, nor in fabrication, dependent upon given material, does man appear to be less free than in those capacities whose very essence is freedom and in that realm which owes its existence to nobody and nothing but man.

¶ 32.8

It is in accordance with the great tradition of Western thought to think along these lines:

• to accuse freedom of luring man into neces­sity,
• to condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relation­ships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who seems to for­feit his freedom the very moment he makes use of it.

The only salvation from this kind of freedom seems to lie in non-acting, in abstention from the whole realm of human affairs as the only means to safeguard one’s sovereignty and integrity as a person. If we leave aside the disastrous consequences of these recommenda­tions (which materialized into a consistent system of human be­havior only in Stoicism), their basic error seems to lie in that identification of sovereignty with freedom which has always been taken for granted by political as well as philosophic thought. If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same, then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of uncom­promising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth—and not, as the tradition since Plato holds, because of man’s limited strength, which makes him depend upon the help of others. All the recommendations the tradi­tion has to offer to overcome the condition of non-sovereignty and win an untouchable integrity of the human person amount to a compensation for the intrinsic “weakness” of plurality. Yet, if these recommendations were followed and this attempt to over­come the consequences of plurality were successful, the result would be not so much sovereign domination of one’s self as ar­bitrary domination of all others, or, as in Stoicism, the exchange of the real world for an imaginary one where these others would simply not exist.

¶ 32.9

In other words, the issue here is not strength or weakness in the sense of self-sufficiency. In polytheist systems, for instance, even a [234] god, no matter how powerful, cannot be sovereign; only under the assumption of one god (“One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so”) can sovereignty and freedom be the same. Under all other circumstances, sovereignty is possible only in imagination, paid for by the price of reality. Just as

• Epicureanism rests on the illusion of happiness when one is roasted alive in the Phaleric Bull,
• Stoicism rests on the illusion of freedom when one is enslaved.

Both illusions testify to the psychological power of imagination, but this power can exert itself only as long as the reality of the world and the living, where one is and appears to be cither happy or unhappy, either free or slave, are eliminated to such an extent that they are not even admitted as spectators to the spectacle of self-delusion.

¶ 32.10

If we look upon freedom with the eyes of the tradition, identi­fying freedom with sovereignty, the 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.⁷⁴ In view of human reality and its phenomenal evidence, it is indeed as spurious to deny human freedom to act because the actor never remains the master of his acts as it is to maintain that human sovereignty is possible because of the incontestable fact of human freedom.⁷⁵ The question which then arises is whether our notion that freedom and non-sovereignty are mutually exclusive is [235] not defeated by reality, or to put it another way, whether the capacity for action does not harbor within itself certain potentiali­ties which enable it to survive the disabilities of non-sovereignty.

33 irreversibility and the power to forgive

¶ 33.1

• We have seen that the animal laborans could be redeemed from its predicament of imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process, of being forever subject to the necessity of labor and consumption, only through the mobilization of another human ca­pacity, the capacity for making, fabricating, and producing of homo faber, who as a toolmaker not only eases the pain and trouble of laboring but also erects a world of durability. The redemption of life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication.
• We saw furthermore that homo faber could be re­deemed from his predicament of meaninglessness, the “devaluation of all values,” and the impossibility of finding valid standards in a world determined by the category of means and ends, only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech, which produce meaningful stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects.
• If it were not outside the scope of these considerations, one could add the predicament of thought to these instances; for thought, too, is unable to “think itself” out of the predicaments which the very activity of thinking engenders.

What in each of these instances saves man—man qua animal laborans, qua homo faber, qua thinker—is something altogether different; it comes from the outside—not, to be sure, outside of man, but outside of each of the respective activities.

• From the viewpoint of the animal laborans, it is like a miracle that it is also a being which knows of and inhabits a world;
• from the viewpoint of homo faber, it is like a miracle, like the revelation of divinity, that meaning should have a place in this world.

¶ 33.2

The case of action and action’s predicaments is altogether dif­ferent. Here, the remedy against the irreversibility and unpre­dictability of the process started by acting does not arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the potentialities [236] of action itself.

• The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility—of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing—is the faculty of forgiving.
• The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.

The two faculties belong together in so far as

• one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose “sins” hang like Damocles’ sword over every new genera­tion; and
• the other, 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 alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships be­tween men.

¶ 33.3

• 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.
• Without being bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities—a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfils, can dispel.

Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for

forgiving and promising en­acted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self.

¶ 33.4

Since these faculties correspond so closely to the human condi­tion of plurality, their role in politics establishes a diametrically different set of guiding principles from the “moral” standards in­herent in the Platonic notion of rule. For

• Platonic rulership, whose legitimacy rested upon the domination of the self, draws its guiding principles—those which at the same time justify and limit power over others—from a relationship established between me and my­self, so that the right and wrong of relationships with others are [237] determined by attitudes toward one’s self, until the whole of the public realm is seen in the image of “man writ large,” of the right order between man’s individual capacities of mind, soul, and body.
• The moral code, on the other hand, inferred from the faculties of forgiving and of making promises, rests on experiences which no­body could ever have with himself, which, on the contrary, are entirely based on the presence of others.

And

• just as the extent and modes of self-rule justify and determine rule over others—how one rules himself, he will rule others—
• thus the extent and modes of being forgiven and being promised determine the extent and modes in which one may be able to forgive himself or keep promises concerned only with himself.

¶ 33.5

Because the remedies against the enormous strength and resili­ency inherent in action processes can function only under the con­dition of plurality, it is very dangerous to use this faculty in any but the realm of human affairs.

• Modern natural science and tech­nology, which no longer observe or take material from or imitate processes of nature but seem actually to act into it, seem, by the same token, to have carried irreversibility and human unpredicta­bility into the natural realm, where no remedy can be found to undo what has been done.
• Similarly, it seems that one of the great dangers of acting in the mode of making and within its categorical framework of means and ends lies in the concomitant self-depriva­tion of the remedies inherent only in action, so that one is bound not only
  • to do with the means of violence necessary for all fabrica­tion, but also
  • to undo what he has done as he undoes an unsuccessful object, by means of destruction.

Nothing appears more manifest in these attempts than the greatness of human power, whose source lies in the capacity to act, and which without action’s inherent remedies inevitably begins to overpower and destroy not man himself but the conditions under which life was given to him.

¶ 33.6

The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense. It has been in the nature of our tradition of political thought (and for reasons we cannot explore here) to be highly selective and to ex­clude from articulate conceptualization a great variety of authentic [238] political experiences, among which we need not be surprised to find some of an even elementary nature. Certain aspects of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth which are not primarily related to the Christian religious message but sprang from experiences in the small and closely knit community of his followers, bent on chal­lenging the public authorities in Israel, certainly belong among them, even though they have been neglected because of their al­legedly exclusively religious nature. The only rudimentary sign of an awareness that forgiveness may be the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages resulting from action may be seen

• in the Roman principle to spare the vanquished (parcere subiectis)—a wis­dom entirely unknown to the Greeks—or
• in the right to commute the death sentence, probably also of Roman origin, which is the prerogative of nearly all Western heads of state.

¶ 33.7

It is decisive in our context that Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees”

• first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive,⁷⁶ and
• second that this power does not derive from God—as though God, not men, would forgive through the medium of human beings—but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also.

Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Man in the gospel is not supposed to forgive because God forgives and he must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.”⁷⁷ The reason for the insistence on a duty to forgive is clearly “for they know not what they do” and it does not apply to the extremity of crime and willed evil, for then it would not have been necessary to teach: “And if he trespass [239] against thee seven times a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.”⁷⁸ Crime and willed evil are rare, even rarer perhaps than good deeds; according to Jesus, they will be taken care of by God in the Last Judgment, which plays no role whatsoever in life on earth, and the Last Judg­ment is not characterized by forgiveness but by just retribution (apodounai).⁷⁹ But trespassing is an everyday occurrence 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.⁸⁰ 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.

¶ 33.8

In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered [240] course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic re­action to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, some­thing of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teach­ings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

¶ 33.9

The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs,

• that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and
• that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.

This is the true hallmark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call “radical evil” and about whose nature so little is known, even to us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance. Here, where the deed itself dispossesses us of all power, we can indeed only repeat with Jesus: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea.”

¶ 33.10

Perhaps the most plausible argument that forgiving and acting are as closely connected as destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. This, too, was clearly recognized by Jesus (“Her sins which are many are for- [241] given; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little”), and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives,⁸¹ indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is uncon­cerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved per­son may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and sepa­rates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love’s own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world.⁸² Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the pos­sible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together. Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.

¶ 33.11

If it were true, therefore, as Christianity assumed, that only love can forgive because only love is fully receptive to who somebody [242] is, to the point of being always willing to forgive him whatever he may have done, forgiving would have to remain altogether outside our considerations. Yet what love is in its own, narrowly circum­scribed sphere, respect is in the larger domain of human affairs. Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politikē, is a kind of “friendship” without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem. Thus, the modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that re­spect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life. Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person. But the fact that the same who, revealed in action and speech, remains also the subject of forgiving is the deep­est reason why nobody can forgive himself; here, as in action and speech generally, we are dependent upon others, to whom we ap­pear in a distinctness which we ourselves are unable to perceive. Closed within ourselves, we would never be able to forgive our­selves any failing or transgression because we would lack the ex­perience of the person for the sake of whom one can forgive.

34 unpredictability and the power of promise

¶ 34.1

In contrast to forgiving, which—perhaps because of its religious context, perhaps because of the connection with love attending its discovery—has always been deemed unrealistic and inadmissible in the public realm, the power of stabilization inherent in the fac­ulty of making promises has been known throughout our tradition.

• We may trace it back to the Roman legal system, the inviolability of agreements and treaties (pacta sunt servanda); or
• we may see its discoverer in Abraham, the man from Ur, whose whole story, as the Bible tells it, shows such a passionate drive toward making covenants that it is as though he departed from his country for no other reason than to try out the power of mutual promise in the [243] wilderness of the world, until eventually God himself agreed to make a Covenant with him.

At any rate, the great variety of con­tract theories since the Romans attests to the fact that the power of making promises has occupied the center of political thought over the centuries.

¶ 34.2

The unpredictability which the act of making promises at least partially dispels is of a twofold nature: it arises simultaneously

• out of the “darkness of the human heart,” that is, the basic unreliability of men who never can guarantee today who they will be tomorrow, and
• out of the impossibility of foretelling the consequences of an act within a community of equals where everybody has the same capacity to act.

• Man’s inability to rely upon himself or to have complete faith in himself (which is the same thing) is the price human beings pay for freedom; and
• the impossibility of remaining unique masters of what they do, of knowing its consequences and relying upon the future, is the price they pay for plurality and reality, for the joy of inhabiting together with others a world whose reality is guaranteed for each by the presence of all.

¶ 34.3

The function of the faculty of promising is to master this two­fold darkness of human affairs and is, as such, the only alternative to a mastery which relies on domination of one’s self and rule over others; it corresponds exactly to the existence of a freedom which was given under the condition of non-sovereignty. 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 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. The moment promises lose their character as isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty, that is, when this faculty is misused to cover the whole ground of the future and to map out a path secured in all directions, they lose their binding power and the whole enterprise becomes self-defeating.

¶ 34.4

We mentioned before the power generated when people gather together and “act in concert,” which disappears the moment they depart. The force that keeps them together, as distinguished from the space of appearances in which they gather and the power which [244] keeps this public space in existence, is the force of mutual promise or contract. Sovereignty, which

• is always spurious if claimed by an isolated single entity, be it the individual entity of the person or the collective entity of a nation,
• assumes, in the case of many men mutually bound by promises, a certain limited reality.

The sov­ereignty resides in the resulting, limited independence from the incalculability of the future, and its limits are the same as those inherent in the faculty itself of making and keeping promises. The sovereignty of a body of people bound and kept together, not by an identical will which somehow magically inspires them all, but by an agreed purpose for which alone the promises are valid and bind­ing, shows itself quite clearly in its unquestioned superiority over those who are completely free, unbound by any promises and unkept by any purpose. This superiority derives from the capacity to dispose of the future as though it were the present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective. Nietzsche, in his extraordinary sensibility to moral phenomena, and despite his modern prejudice to see the source of all power in the will power of the isolated indi­vidual, saw in the faculty of promises (the “memory of the will,” as he called it) the very distinction which marks off human from ani­mal life.⁸³ If sovereignty is in the realm of action and human affairs what mastership is in the realm of making and the world of things, then their chief distinction is that

• the one can only be achieved by the many bound together, whereas
• the other is conceivable only in isolation.

¶ 34.5

In so far as morality is more than the sum total of mores, of cus­toms and standards of behavior solidified through tradition and valid on the ground of agreements, both of which change with time, it has, at least politically, no more to support itself than the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness

These moral precepts are the only ones that are not applied to ac­tion from the outside, from some supposedly higher faculty or from experiences outside action’s own reach. They arise, on the con­trary, directly out of the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking, and thus they are like control mecha­nisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending proc­esses. If

we would be doomed to swing forever in the ever-recur­ring cycle of becoming, then without the faculty to undo what we have done and to control at least partially the processes we have let loose, we would be the victims of an automatic necessity bear­ing all the marks of the inexorable laws which, according to the natural sciences before our time, were supposed to constitute the outstanding characteristic of natural processes. We have seen be­fore that to mortal beings this natural fatality, though it swings in itself and may be eternal, can only spell doom.

• If it were true that fatality is the inalienable mark of historical processes,
• then it would indeed be equally true that everything done in history is doomed.

¶ 34.6

And to a certain extent this is true. If left to themselves, human affairs can only follow the law of mortality, which is the most cer­tain and the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death. It is the faculty of action that interferes with this law be­cause it interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life, which in its turn, as we saw, 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. Yet just as, from the stand­point of nature, the rectilinear movement of man’s life-span be­tween birth and death looks like a peculiar deviation from the com­mon natural rule of cyclical movement, thus action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle. In the language of natural science, it is the “infinite improbability which occurs regularly.” Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus [246] of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of per­forming miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man.⁸⁴

¶ 34.7

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is 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. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether,

• discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and
• counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box.

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.” [247]