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Responsibility
Annabel Herzog
In her article of January 1943, ‘We Refugees,’ Arendt outlines the main fea-
tures of a non-political condition. The refugees’ condition can certainly be
recounted only negatively. Their loss is absolute: ‘We lost our home … We
lost our occupation … We lost our language … We left our relatives … and
our best friends have been killed in concentration camps’ (Arendt, 1978a: 55-
7). The only place they can dwell in is a nowhere, a camp; the only thing they
can do is remember people who are no more. In The Origins of Totalitarianism,
first published in 1951, Arendt once again describes the de-politicisation of
‘dark times’ as the loss of all framework and fellowship. She compares the
condition of stateless peoples with that of ancient slaves dwelling in the pri-
vate sphere and who despite their oppression belonged to a community. She
demonstrates that the development of the ‘rightless’ condition of stateless
people, meaning a ‘loss of a polity itself,’ resulted from the conjunction of
two distinct processes, that of anti-Semitic rejection and imperialist expan-
sion (1979: 297). The calamity of the rightless condition, she explains, lies in
‘the deprivation of a place in the world, which makes opinions significant and
actions effective.’ She concludes that ‘[i]nnocence, in the sense of complete
lack of responsibility’ is the seal of such a complete loss of political status
(1979: 295; see also Parvikko, 1996).
Arendt resists the Kantian morality of law … and she resists any meta-
physics that gives singular priority to foundational authority, law, reg-
ularity, routine or the unworldly. Arendt, indeed, is impressed by the
extent to which the morality of law was impotent under the onslaught
of totalitarianism; she is even, perhaps, wary of the degree to which
the vaunted simplicity of morality carries with it a disposition to obe-
dience. (1997: 15)
However, in The Human Condition and in later works, Arendt repeatedly argued
that a political status is defined, or even created, by actions. One does not
acquire a political presence and then begins to act. It is through actions that
one reveals oneself as a political agent. It follows logically that an agent is
someone who acts, and no one can be considered a political agent before act-
ing. According to Honig, ‘[t]he unique political action, in Arendt’s account, is
… the performative utterance, a speech act that in itself brings “something
into being that did not exist before’” (1993: 99, see also Arendt, 1998: 178).
The public sphere is created by performance-like speeches (or actions) (1993:
153-154), and the essence of an action does not exist before the action is
realised (Arendt, 1953: 81). Arendt emphasises the performative mechanism
of actions, that is, the fact that actions are not predetermined or precondi-
tioned, by alleging that they depend neither on general laws nor on personal
interest but appear with their own principles such as glory, honour, excel-
Therefore: on the one hand, responsibility is assigned to the doer who already
belongs. S/he is responsible for acts that s/he did not commit, or for her
actions that are determined by her fellowship. However, Arendt’s theory of
action makes it clear that actions are ungrounded, and as a result responsibil-
ity, action, and publicity emerge together, out of nowhere. In Kateb's words,
‘[i]t approaches the miracle’ (1984: 33).8
To say that others are present means that they too are acting and making
themselves present to others. As a result, my action enters a chain reaction of
plural presence, or, more precisely, it initiates a chain reaction of presence and
plurality:
but this responsibility for my actions is carried on into the future and makes
me appear ‘much more the victim and the sufferer than the author and doer’
of what I have done (1998: 234). I am responsible for the endless conse-
quences of my acts because they will happen in a world that I will be sharing
and experiencing with others, both actively and passively: I am responsible
for the consequences of my acts because I do not disappear after I act, and
I also participate in the web of relationships. Put differently, my responsibil-
ity for the consequences of my own acts is a kind of collective responsibili-
ty that I now endure like any other fellow citizen. For example, if I partici-
pate in the election of a particular government, I am responsible for my
doing, that is, for influencing a given political situation. Subsequently, I will
be responsible for the policy of this government not because I voted for it,
but because it reflects the chosen policy of my community. From this point
forward, there will be no difference between me, who voted for this govern-
ment, and my neighbour who voted for other candidates. Confronted by a
political situation, it will not help me or my neighbour to ‘shift from the world
and its public space to an interior life, or else simply ignore that world in favor
of an imaginary world “as it ought to be” or as it once upon a time had been,
that is, to choose “inner emigration”’ (1968: 19). My collective responsibility
that follows my acts, like that of my neighbour, is completely independent of
these acts.
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his
inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think,
namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No commu-
nication was possible with him, not because he lied, but because he
was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the
words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such
(1994: 49).
These sentences acquire their full meaning only when read in comparison to
the following paragraph of ‘Truth and Politics,’ the essay that was written in
response to the Eichmann controversy:
And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to
share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of
other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to
determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find
that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected
to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason;
you must hang. (1994b: 279)
- taking others into account as human beings - is, therefore, related to the
past, to the vanishing in time of others' actions and opinions. 15
In forming political opinions, I act while, at the same time, I take others into
account. I re-present absent people in creating a new presence. In making
myself present, I represent others; by representing others, I make myself pre-
sent. This process, in which ‘we try to reconcile ourselves to what we do and
what we suffer’ (1994a: 309), is a catharsis or ‘reconciliation with reality’
which, Arendt recalls, according to Aristotle and Hegel, respectively, is the
essence of Greek tragedy (1993: 45, 1968: 20). Tragedies reach their dramat-
ic climax at the moment when their heroes acknowledge their responsibility,
that is, they reconcile their deeds with the gods’ will and accept ‘things as they
are’ (1993: 262). Responsibility is tragic in that it consists of that vanishing
moment when one is ‘able to say how one came to an opinion’ (1982: 41);
that is, when one recollects the given otherness.
I am responsible when my free doing stands for other others; when I accept
my link to a particular community, to its traditions; when my acts are the con-
tinuation of the fate of members of that community. All attempts at cutting
the relationships with what is given to me are ideological: Ideologies are ‘the
logic inherent to their respective ideas,’ that is cut off from opinions and real-
ity. Ideologies, therefore, are ‘never interested in the miracle of being’ (1979:
469). However, I am responsible only when I change the given, which I also
accept, thereby possibly risking my own life for the transformation and con-
tinuity of the miracle of being. I am responsible only when, through my ini-
tiative, I challenge my specific community and its traditions, because such
challenges affect the whole humanity. My responsibility fills the gap between
my community and the world.
Notes
1. The question of presence in Arendt's political theory has been raised sev-
eral times and authoritatively by Susan Bickford (1988). However, presence
has been defined mostly in the context of the visibility of the public realm,
usually becoming part of arguments about theatricality or communication.
As I am recalling here, Arendt refers to two different senses of presence.
4. In the latter example, this was helping the Zionist organization in order
to help the Jewish people, to which she belonged. As early as January 1933,
she had explained to Jaspers that she did not belong to the German people
but to the Jewish people. See their exchange of letters (Kohler and Saner
1992: 16-8). In December 1946, Arendt wrote to Jaspers: ‘Politically, I will
always speak in the name of the Jews whenever circumstances force me to
give my nationality … I never felt myself, either spontaneously or at my
own insistence, to “be a German”’ (1994: 70).
5. I therefore cannot agree with Lilian Alweiss who recently argued that, in
‘Collective Responsibility’, Arendt distinguishes moral and political respon-
sibility. Arendt makes it extremely clear that her distinction is between guilt
and responsibility. See Alweiss (2003).
7. It could be argued that Jaspers was not a political actor and that Arendt
does not assign equivalent responsibility to the philosopher/writer/artist
and the political actor/citizen. As I said above, at this point, I only focus on
the responsibility of the political actor. However, Jaspers’s case is relevant
because Arendt refers to him as ‘a public figure in the full sense of the
13. We have therefore moved from moral harmony (I give myself my own
law) to political plurality (I take into account other standpoints). See also
Benhabib (2001: 198).
14. Antonia Grunenberg has recently argued that ‘[f]or Arendt, responsibili-
ty was tantamount to the concept of ethics in its authentic meaning. It is
identical with paying attention to the world’ (2002: 376).
15. This point solves the apparent discrepancy between Arendt’s concern
for actual action and freedom and her interest in tradition and foundations.
Dark times are indeed characterized by a ‘gap between past and future’
(1993: 3), that is, by the absence of a link between tradition and the future.
The public realm of actual presence collapses not because there are no
more actions, but because there is no more responsibility that links the
given past to the future. This also explains Arendt’s interest in narrative and
her own use of a somewhat un-orthodox genealogical method. See
Guaraldo (2001) and Herzog (2001).
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