adding a single useful object to it; the life of an exploiter or slave-
holder and the life of a parasite may be unjust, but they certainly
are human. A life without speech and without action, on the other
hand—and this is the only way of life that in earnest has re-
nounced all appearance and all vanity in the biblical sense of the
word—is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human
life because it is no longer lived among men.
With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world,
and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and
take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical ap-
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Action
pearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like
labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be
stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish
to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs
from the beginning which came into the world when we were
born and to which we respond by beginning something new on
our own initiative.1 To act, in its most general sense, means to
take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin,"
"to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere).
Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of
birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. [Initium] ergo
ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quern nullus fuit ("that there be a
beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody"),
said Augustine in his political philosophy.2 This beginning is not
the same as the beginning of the world;3 it is not the beginning of
something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the
creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world
itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the
principle of freedom was created when man was created but not
before.
It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started
1. This description is supported by recent findings in psychology and biology
which also stress the inner affinity between speech and action, their spontaneity
and practical purposelessness. See especially Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch: Seine
Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (1955), which gives an excellent summary of the results and interpretations of current scientific research and contains a wealth of valuable insights. That Gehlen, like the scientists upon whose results he bases
his own theories, believes that these specifically human capabilities are also a
"biological necessity," that is, necessary for a biologically weak and ill-fitted organism such as man, is another matter and need not concern us here.
2. De civitate Dei xii. 20.
3. According to Augustine, the two were so different that he used a different
word to indicate the beginning which is man (initium), designating the beginning of the world by principium, which is the standard translation for the first Bible verse. As can be seen from De civitate Dei xi. 32, the word principium carried for Augustine a much less radical meaning; the beginning of the world "does not
mean that nothing was made before (for the angels were)," whereas he adds
explicitly in the phrase quoted above with reference to man that nobody was
before him.
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The Human Condition
which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened
before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in
all beginnings and in all origins. Thus, the origin of life from
inorganic matter is an infinite improbability of inorganic proc-
esses, as is the coming into being of the earth viewed from the
standpoint of processes in the universe, or the evolution of human
out of animal life. The new always happens against the over-
whelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for
all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new
therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that
man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected
from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.
And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so
that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the
world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be
truly said that nobody was there before. If action as beginning
corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the
human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact
of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of
plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among
equals.
Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial
and specifically human act must at the same time contain the
answer to the question asked of every newcomer: "Who are
you?" This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his
words and his deeds; yet obviously the affinity between speech
and revelation is much closer than that between action and reve-
lation,4 just as the affinity between action and beginning is closer
than that between speech and beginning, although many, and even
most acts, are performed in the manner of speech. Without the
accompaniment of speech, at any rate, action would not only lose
its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose
its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots
would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incompre-
hensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because
there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of
4. This is the reason why Plato says that lexis ("speech") adheres more closely to truth than praxis.
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Action
deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of
words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word,
and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appear-
ance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only
through the spoken word in wrhich he identifies himself as the
actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do.
No other human performance requires speech to the same
extent as action. In all other performances speech plays a subordi-
nate role, as a means of communication or a mere accompaniment
to something that could also be achieved in silence. It is true that
speech is extremely useful as a means of communication and in-
formation, but as such it could be replaced by a sign language,
which then might prove to be even more useful and expedient to
convey certain meanings, as in mathematics and other scientific
disciplines or in certain forms of teamwork. Thus, it is also true
that man's capacity to act, and especially to act in concert, is
extremely useful for purposes of self-defense or of pursuit of
interests; but if nothing more were at stake here than to use action
as a means to an end, it is obvious that the same end could be
much more easily attained in mute violence, so that action seems
a not very efficient substitute for violence, just as speech, from
the viewpoint of sheer utility, seems an awkward substitute for
sign language.
In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively
their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in
the human world, while their physical identities appear without
any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and
sound of the voice. This disclosure of "who" in contradistinction
to "what" somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and short-
comings, which he may display or hide—is implicit in everything
somebody says and does. It can be hidden only in complete silence
and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be
achieved as a wilful purpose, as though one possessed and could
dispose of this "who" in the same manner he has and can dispose
of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the
"who," which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others,
remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek
religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always
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The Human Condition
looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those
he encounters.
This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore
where people are with others and neither for nor against them—
that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although nobody knows
whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he
must be willing to risk the disclosure, and this neither the doer of
good works, who must be without self and preserve complete
anonymity, nor the criminal, who must hide himself from others,
can take upon themselves. Both are lonely figures, the one being
for, the other against, all men; they, therefore, remain outside the
pale of human intercourse and are, politically, marginal figures
who usually enter the historical scene in times of corruption, dis-
integration, and political bankruptcy. Because of its inherent
tendency to disclose the agent together with the act, action needs
for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory,
and which is possible only in the public realm.
Without the disclosure of the agent in the act, action loses its
specific character and becomes one form of achievement among
others. It is then indeed no less a means to an end than making is
a means to produce an object. This happens whenever human
togetherness is lost, that is, when people are only for or against
other people, as for instance in modern warfare, where men go
into action and use means of violence in order to achieve certain
objectives for their own side and against the enemy. In these
instances, which of course have always existed, speech becomes
indeed "mere talk," simply one more means toward the end,
whether it serves to deceive the enemy or to dazzle everybody
with propaganda; here words reveal nothing, disclosure comes
only from the deed itself, and this achievement, like all other
achievements, cannot disclose the "who," the unique and distinct
identity of the agent.
In these instances action has lost the quality through which it
transcends mere productive activity, which, from the humble
making of use objects to the inspired creation of art works, has
no more meaning than is revealed in the finished product and does
not intend to show more than is plainly visible at the end of the
production process. Action without a name, a "who" attached to
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Action
it, is meaningless, whereas an art work retains its relevance
whether or not we know the master's name. The monuments to
the "Unknown Soldier" after World War I bear testimony to the
then still existing need for glorification, for finding a "who," an
identifiable somebody whom four years of mass slaughter should
have revealed. The frustration of this wish and the unwillingness
to resign oneself to the brutal fact that the agent of the war was
actually nobody inspired the erection of the monuments to the
"unknown," to all those whom the war had failed to make known
and had robbed thereby, not of their achievement, but of their
human dignity.8
25
T H E W E B O F R E L A T I O N S H I P S A N D
T H E E N A C T E D S T O R I E S
The manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably
is, though it is plainly visible, retains a curious intangibility that
confounds all efforts toward unequivocal verbal expression. The
moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary
leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a de-
scription of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him;
we begin to describe a type or a "character" in the old meaning
of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us.
This frustration has the closest affinity with the well-known
philosophic impossibility to arrive at a definition of man, all defi-
nitions being determinations or interpretations of what man is, of
qualities, therefore, which he could possibly share with other
living beings, whereas his specific difference would be found in
a determination of what kind of a "who" he is. Yet apart from
this philosophic perplexity, the impossibility, as it were, to
solidify in words the living essence of the person as it shows
itself in the flux of action and speech, has great bearing upon the
whole realm of human affairs, where we exist primarily as acting
and speaking beings. It excludes in principle our ever being able
to handle these affairs as we handle things whose nature is at our
5. William Faulkner's A Fable (1954) surpasses almost all of World War I
literature in perceptivcness and clarity because its hero is the Unknown Soldier.
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The Human Condition
disposal because we can name them. The point is that the manifes-
tation of the "who" comes to pass in the same manner as the no-
toriously unreliable manifestations of ancient oracles, which, ac-
cording to Heraclitus, "neither reveal nor hide in words, but give
manifest signs."6 This is a basic factor in the equally notorious
uncertainty not only of all political matters, but of all affairs that
go on between men directly, without the intermediary, stabilizing,
and solidifying influence of things.7
This is only the first of many frustrations by which action, and
consequently the togetherness and intercourse of men, are ridden.
It is perhaps the most fundamental of those we shall deal with, in
so far as it does not rise out of comparisons with more reliable
and productive activities, such as fabrication or contemplation or
cognition or even labor, but indicates something that frustrates
action in terms of its own purposes. What is at stake is the revela-
tory character without which action and speech would lose all
human relevance.
Action and speech go on between men, as they are directed
toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even
if their content is exclusively "objective," concerned with the
matters of the world of things in which men move, which physi-
cally lies between them and out of which arise their specific, ob-
jective, worldly interests. These interests constitute, in the word's
most literal significance, something which inter-est, which lies be-
tween people and therefore can relate and bind them together.
Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which
varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds
are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a
disclosure of the acting and speaking agent. Since this disclosure
of the subject is an integral part of all, even the most "objective"
intercourse, the physical, worldy in-between along with its inter-
6. Oute legei oute kryptei alia semainei (Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [4th ed., 1922], frag. B93).
7. Socrates used the same word as Heraclitus, semainein ("to show and give signs"), for the manifestation of his daimonion (Xenophon Memorabilia I. 1. 2, 4).
If we are to trust Xenophon, Socrates likened his daimonion to the oracles and insisted that both should be used only for human affairs, where nothing is certain,
and not for problems of the arts and crafts, where everything is predictable
(ibid. 7-9).
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Action
ests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether dif-
ferent in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes
its origin exclusively to men's acting and speaking directly to one
another. This second, subjective in-between is not tangible, since
there are no tangible objects into which it could solidify; the
process of acting and speaking can leave behind no such results
and end products. But for all its intangibility, this in-between is
no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common.
We call this reality the "web" of human relationships, indicating
by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality.
To be sure, this web is no less bound to the objective world of
things than speech is to the existence of a living body, but the rela-
tionship is not like that of a facade or, in Marxian terminology,
of an essentially superfluous superstructure affixed to the useful
structure of the building itself. The basic error of all materialism
in politics—and this materialism is not Marxian and not even
modern in origin, but as old as our history of political theory8—
is to overlook the inevitability with which men disclose them-
selves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they
wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material
object. To dispense with this disclosure, if indeed it could ever be
done, would mean to transform men into something they are not;
to deny, on the other hand, that this disclosure is real and has
consequences of its own is simply unrealistic.
The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the
8. Materialism in political theory is at least as old as the Platonic-Aristotelian
assumption that political communities (poleis)—and not only family life or the coexistence of several households (oikiai)—owe their existence to material necessity. (For Plato see Republic 369, where the polis' origin is seen in our wants and lack of self-sufficiency. For Aristotle, who here as elsewhere is closer to current
Greek opinion than Plato, see Politics 1252b29: "The. polis comes into existence for the sake of living, but remains in existence for the sake of living well.") The Aristotelian concept of sympheron, which we later encounter in Cicero's utilitas, must be understood in this context. Both, in turn, are forerunners of the later
interest theory which is fully developed as early as Bodin—as kings rule over
peoples, Interest rules over kings. In the modern development, Marx is outstand-
ing not because of his materialism, but because he is the only political thinker who was consistent enough to base his theory of material interest on a demonstrably
material human activity, on laboring—that is, on the metabolism of the human
body with matter.
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The Human Condition
web of human relationships which exists wherever men live to-
gether. The disclosure of the "who" through speech, and the
setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an
already existing web where their immediate consequences can be
felt. Together they start a new process which eventually emerges
as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the
life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact. It is
because of this already existing web of human relationships, with
its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action al-
most never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of this
medium, in which action alone is real, that it "produces" stories
with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces
tangible things. These stories may then be recorded in documents
and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works,
they may be told and retold and worked into all kinds of material.
They themselves, in their living reality, are of an altogether dif-
ferent nature than these reifications. They tell us more about their
subjects, the "hero" in the center of each story, than any product
of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it,
and yet they are not products, properly speaking. Although
everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human
world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer
of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of
action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author
or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold
sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is
its author.
That every individual life between birth and death can even-
tually be told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical
and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without
beginning and end. But the reason why each human life tells its
story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of man-
kind, with many actors and speakers and yet without any tangible
authors, is that both are the outcome of action. For the great
unknown in history, that has baffled the philosophy of history in
the modern age, arises not only when one considers history as a
whole and finds that its subject, mankind, is an abstraction which
never can become an active agent; the same unknown has baffled
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Action
political philosophy from its beginning in antiquity and contrib-
uted to the general contempt in which philosophers since Plato
have held the realm of human affairs. The perplexity is that in
any series of events that together form a story with a unique mean-
ing we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into
motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject,
the "hero" of the story, we never can point unequivocally to him
as the author of its eventual outcome.
It is for this reason that Plato thought that human affairs (ta ton
anthropon pragmatd), the outcome of action (praxis), should not be
treated with great seriousness; the actions of men appear like the
gestures of puppets led by an invisible hand behind the scene, so
that man seems to be a kind of plaything of a god.9 It is note-
worthy that Plato, who had no inkling of the modern concept of
history, should have been the first to invent the metaphor of an
actor behind the scenes who, behind the backs of acting men, pulls
the strings and is responsible for the story. The Platonic god is
but a symbol for the fact that real stories, in distinction from those
we invent, have no author; as such, he is the true forerunner of
Providence, the "invisible hand," Nature, the "world spirit,"
class interest, and the like, with which Christian and modern
philosophers of history tried to solve the perplexing problem that
although history owes its existence to men, it is still obviously
not "made" by them. (Nothing in fact indicates more clearly the
political nature of history—its being a story of action and deeds
rather than of trends and forces or ideas—than the introduction of
an invisible actor behind the scenes whom we find in all philoso-
phies of history, which for this reason alone can be recognized as
political philosophies in disguise. By the same token, the simple
fact that Adam Smith needed an "invisible hand" to guide econom-
ic dealings on the exchange market shows plainly that more than
sheer economic activity is involved