Kateb

THE DEFICIENCY OF MOST OF LIFE'S ACTIVITIES 

Freedom and worldliness can serve as the terms that stand for what Arendt prizes most. She regularly connects them; she sees them as dependent on each other. Freedom exists only when men engage in political action. Political action can take place only where there is a common commitment to the reality, beauty, and sufficiency of the world - of the world "out there." Political action looks to the creation or conservation or augmentation of a suitable world for itself, a polis or other entity, which is the scene and inspiration and source of meaning for political action. Put negatively, all the other activities of life, with the ambiguous exceptions of thinking (understanding), and contemplation, are not free, but done in bondage to one or another kind of master or done in unredeemable futility or impotence. All these activities, including thinking and contemplation, but with the exception of fabrication, artisanship, craftsmanship, artistic creation, and organized science, are not worldly, but private, either in the sense of being done in private or for private purposes, or in the sense of taking place inside oneself. Arendt covers unworldly activities with her distaste or scorn, or she acknowledges their necessity grudgingly and sometimes with shame, or she praises them in a way that at times keeps one off balance, so strained or unusual are the terms of her praise. She makes these things seem unreal or too real. To say, therefore, that political action alone is equal to the task of  challenging Silenian wisdom is to say that freedom and worldliness are the values that alone make life worth living. Our condition is such that one of the highest tasks of philosophy is to make believable, to those who love philosophy, a view in which something other than philosophy - namely, political action - could present itself as worthy of perhaps an equal devotion. Arendt's mission as a philosopher should be recognized as the recovery of the idea of political action, in a culture which she thinks has lost the practice of it, and in which almost all philosophy is united, if in nothing else, in denying intrinsic value to it. At best, where there is not aversion, there is reluctance or condescension or indifference. The mere right understanding of political action-the understanding which men of action in the past had of what they were doing - is now, for the most part, absent. We can approach Arendt's defense of the primacy of political action by noticing, in a little detail, the judgments she makes of some nonpolitical things. The power of her thought to shock and alienate is shown vividly in these judgments. It is not that political action is simply the sole pale survivor of her work of criticizing and depreciating nonpolitical things - as if, provoked to deny what everybody else affirms, she at last finds one thing no one else praises and chooses to praise it. It is, instead, that her praise of political action derives some of its energy from the radical reevaluation of nonpolitical things. Which is to say that her commitment to the values of freedom and worldliness is basic: her double passion is to differentiate man from nature and save man from phantasm. Given this passion, her judgments about nonpolitical things and political action follow with equal necessity and equal force.

George Kateb