LITMIR.BIZ

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thought: the concept of sovereignty. The notion of non-sovereign freedom takes its bearings from Arendt’s insight that political action is misconceived when it is articulated in terms of the sovereign engagement of a unified and unconditioned will.¹³³ She insisted that this understanding of political action inevitably leads to the identification of political action with violence, since, in her view, only violence could unilaterally enact the intentions of a unified will.¹³⁴ It was this sovereign understanding of action that led to the tradition of political thought’s fabricative model of political judgment, which imagines the relationship between thought and action to involve the execution by those who are ruled of a preconceived idea produced by a ruler. Arendt believed that the moment action is conceived in unilateral terms of willful execution, it has lost contact with the phenomenal evidence associated with action, which always involves the creation of new realities and moves within a human web of relationships that responds to and creates a new, unintended set of circumstances other than what the actor intended. Arendt’s insights into the non-sovereign conditions of human agency have inspired recent scholarship by Joan Cocks, Sharon Krause, Patchen Markell, Dana Villa, and Linda Zerilli.¹³⁵ These scholars have sought to explore how agency must be reconceived when such conditions as its essential relation to speech, plurality, worldliness, relational relativity, and unpredictability are taken into account. I want now to pause and explore this notion of non-sovereign agency, paying special attention to the unique insights I believe Arendt can offer it.

      It is vitally important to understand that—based as it is on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology—Arendtian action is not merely epiphenomenal. Each act of human agency carries tremendous potency. Arendtian agency asserts that action is not retroactively achieved through contemplative reflection or located outside phenomenal reality in a noumenal realm, but instead has the potential to monumentally impact the concrete human world. As such, action is incredibly rare, happening at best only a few times in any given human life. As the subject matter of the narrative of a human life, action forms the content—the acts, deeds, events—their stories recount. It is the specific, concrete, and sui generis actions an actor undertakes that reveals the “whoness” of the actor, their unique identity. Only that actor and that actor alone would have summoned up that unique, particular response to the circumstances that were presented to them in the world. The action is something completely original to the actor, something that could never have been predicted on the basis of antecedent causes. Arendt argues that action is exclusively characterized by its extraordinariness, and thus human historical reality is the story of events enacted by human agents.¹³⁶

      Arendt’s notion of action has both inspired and perplexed her readers. Many struggle with how her account of human agency can be intelligible once our ability to predict the outcome of our acts becomes so ambiguous. If we have no control over the outcome of our actions, does this not render our agency moot? I want to argue here that this is not necessarily so. Instead, it only significantly attenuates and complicates it, that the actor’s agency involves trying to, in Arendt’s words, “force things into a certain direction.”¹³⁷ Because action is something that is essentially intersubjective, it appears as if any description of the causality of action could never be characterized in terms of a simplistic cause/effect logic.¹³⁸ Thus, the first presumption that has to be abandoned is any easy understanding of the causality occurring in human agency in terms of fabrication—of an effect achieved by our acts that is the result of an antecedent mechanical or efficient cause.

      If human ontology truly is at its basis a narrative or story that conditions our epistemological and historical frameworks in the way Heidegger suggests, then the sense of causality associated with it has to be reconceived in a much more sophisticated manner. Contemporary philosophers such as Charles Taylor, for instance, have noted the likely impossibility of ever performing a complete reduction of historical phenomena to physical mechanism.¹³⁹ But even beyond the metaphysically contested nature of causality, our phenomenal conception of causality has always been marked by much more sophistication than the mechanistic conception of cause and effect. Aristotle, for instance, famously theorized a fourfold phenomenology of causality, none of which—not even causa efficiens—coheres exactly with the modern mechanistic conception of causality. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger embraced this conception of causality, arguing that authentic human causality is never sovereign causality: it recognizes that human action never truly enacts its will, but instead has the sense of cultivating and abetting that which proceeds out of physis or Being, for example, in parenting, advising, or farming.¹⁴⁰ Arendt, however, developed a more dynamic notion of the causality of human agency. Unlike Heidegger and Aristotle, Arendtian action does not just abet what is already proceeding out of Being; it is itself natal. It is the beginning of something new.

      In order to conceptualize this dynamic conception of causality, we might preliminarily refer to Kant’s discussions of causality in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant understood mechanism (cause and effect) to be only one category of a threefold categorical account that included both “substantia et accidens” and what he calls “community” or “interaction.”¹⁴¹ This last category of interaction is much closer to the kind of causality Arendt understands human action to have, although her version is much more dynamic and potent. Kant refers to it as the notion of “a dynamic community,” that is, the fact that within a given community of phenomena they all are reciprocally interacting and determining each other and this interaction has to be understood dynamically and not successively.¹⁴² Kant illustrates the idea by pointing to gravitation, the fact that it makes no sense to understand the relation between the earth and the moon solely in terms of the earth exerting a force on the moon or vice versa; rather, they interact by exerting a common force on each other. In other words, the notion of causality involved here is, as Kant says, “not successive but instantaneous.”¹⁴³ The notion of causality that I believe Arendt had in mind in her notion of non-sovereign action should be understood much more in terms of this sort of dynamic interaction than in the fabricative (i.e., sovereign) conception of cause and effect that arises out of causality’s mechanistic aspect.

      It is easy to find examples of dynamic causality in human life. Team sports are an obvious case of dynamic causality. A good quarterback or point guard can never sovereignly and unilaterally enact his will. Rather, his leadership and decision-making abilities in fluid situations enable the team to execute together. There is an interaction and dynamism among the players that seems impossible to reduce to cause and effect. Another example is found in the art of persuasion. People in sales often point out that skilled salespeople know when to stop selling their customers; they have to find the right moment to let customers choose for themselves to buy the product. These are, of course, necessarily simplistic examples geared toward illustration, but the basic idea is easily applied to our relationships in general. The point is that relationships are dynamic: any action requires a very subtle comprehension of the state of affairs the act will bring about between individuals affected by the action. When I relate to another person through action, I do not enact my will on them. Arendt insists throughout her work that the only effect action has is to establish relationships;¹⁴⁴ in other words, the moment I act in relation to another person, that person simultaneously reacts to me. What results is not an effect, but a new dynamic state of affairs. Something arises between us, a relationship, that is fundamentally dynamic—what Arendt calls “a space of appearance” that separates and relates us—whose ultimate meaning I could never have exactly predicted and whose outcome I can never be certain of. And that ultimate meaning can only be revealed by the story of the relationship. This is why, as we will see later, Arendt’s conception of practical reason in analogy to artistic judgment is so apposite. In a similar way to great art, the actor can never be completely certain of what their actions will ultimately mean. Yet, it is indicative of a skillful actor—an actor with what Machiavelli called virtù—to be capable of deliberating on a course of action that will end in a meaningful story, a story that reveals the actor’s “whoness,” just as skillful artists will almost always find their work meaning something other than they intended at the beginning.

      In truth, Arendt’s articulations of human agency are much closer to phenomenal reality than anything produced in traditional accounts. An action can be the most exhilarating experience

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