most aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence
of everyday life. The second function of the polls, again closely
connected with the hazards of action as experienced before its
coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the futility of action
and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not
be forgotten, that it actually would become "immortal," were not
very good. Homer was not only a shining example of the poet's
political function, and therefore the "educator of all Hellas"; the
very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have
been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred
years later offered only too good an example of what could happen
to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its
permanence.
We are not concerned here with the historical causes for the
rise of the Greek city-state; what the Greeks themselves thought
of it and its ralson d'etre, they have made unmistakably clear. The
polls-—if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral
Oration—gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and
land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without
witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows
how to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others,
those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting
remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in
the present and in future ages.27 In other words, men's life to-
gether in the form of the polls seemed to assure that the most
26. Logan kaipragmaton koinmein, as Aristotle once put it {ibid. 1126bl2).
27. Thucydides ii. 41.
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The Human Condition
futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible
and most ephemeral of man-made "products," the deeds and
stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable. The
organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around
the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws—lest the
succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition-
is a kind of organized remembrance. It assures the mortal actor
that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack
the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, gener-
ally, appearing before an audience of fellow men, who outside the
polis could attend only the short duration of the performance and
therefore needed Homer and "others of his craft" in order to be
presented to those who were not there.
According to this self-interpretation, the political realm rises
directly out of acting together, the "sharing of words and deeds."
Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public
part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which
constitutes it. It is as though the wall of the polis and the bound-
aries of the law were drawn around an already existing public
space which, however, without such stabilizing protection could
not endure, could not survive the moment of action and speech
itself. Not historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and
theoretically, it is as though the men who returned from the
Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action
which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its
perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated home-
steads.
The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical
location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of
acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between
people living together for this purpose, no matter where they
happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these
famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek
colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech
create a space between the participants which can find its proper
location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appear-
ance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I
appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not
[ M ]
Action
merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appear-
ance explicitly.
This space does not always exist, and although all men are
capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the for-
eigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or crafts-
man prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our
world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the
time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which,
humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To
men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others,
by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call
Being,"28 and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes
away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without
reality.29
28
P O W E R A N D T H E S P A C E
O F A P P E A R A N C E
The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are
together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore pre-
dates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and
the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in
which the public realm can be organized. Its peculiarity is that,
unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not sur-
vive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being,
but disappears not only with the dispersal of men—as in the case
of great catastrophes when the body politic of a people is de-
stroyed—but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities
themselves. Wherever people gather together, it is potentially
there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever. That
civilizations can rise and fall, that mighty empires and great cul-
tures can decline and pass away without external catastrophes—
and more often than not such external "causes" are preceded by a
28. Aristotle Nkomachean Ethics 1172b36 ff.
29. Heraclitus' statement that the world is one and common to those who are
awake, but that everybody who is asleep turns away to his own (Diels, op. cit.,
B89), says essentially the same as Aristotle's remark just quoted.
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The Human Condition
less visible internal decay that invites disaster—is due to this
peculiarity of the public realm, which, because it ultimately re-
sides on action and speech, never altogether loses its potential
character. What first undermines and then kills political com-
munities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot
be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instru-
ments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where
power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of ex-
amples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for
this loss. Power is actualized only where word and deed have not
parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal,
where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose reali-
ties, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish
relations and create new realities.
Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of
appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence. The
word itself, its Greek equivalent dynamis, like the Latin potentia
with its various modern dervatives or the German Macht (which
derives from mogen and moglich, not from machen), indicates its
"potential" character. Power is always, as we would say, a power
potential and not an unchangeable, measurable, and reliable entity
like force or strength. While strength is the natural quality of an
individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when
they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse. Because
of this peculiarity, which power shares with all potentialities that
can only be actualized but never fully materialized, power is to
an astonishing degree independent of material factors, either of
numbers or means. A comparatively small but well-organized
group of men can rule almost indefinitely over large and populous
empires, and it is not infrequent in history that small and poor
countries get the better of great and rich nations. (The story of
David and Goliath is only metaphorically true; the power of a
few can be greater than the power of many, but in a contest be-
tween two men not power but strength decides, and cleverness,
that is, brain power, contributes materially to the outcome on the
same level as muscular force.) Popular revolt against materially
strong rulers, on the other hand, may engender an almost irresist-
ible power even if it foregoes the use of violence in the face of
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Action
materially vastly superior forces. To call this "passive resistance"
is certainly an ironic idea; it is one of the most active and efficient
ways of action ever devised, because it cannot be countered by
righting, where there may be defeat or victory, but only by mass
slaughter in which even the victor is defeated, cheated of his prize,
since nobody can rule over dead men.
The only indispensable material factor in the generation of
power is the living together of people. Only where men Jive so
close together that the potentialities of action are always present
can power remain with them, and the foundation of cities, which
as city-states have remained paradigmatic for all Western political
organization, is therefore indeed the most important material pre-
requisite for power. What keeps people together after the fleeting
moment of action has passed (what we today call "organization")
and what, at the same time, they keep alive through remaining to-
gether is power. And whoever, for whatever reasons, isolates
himself and does not partake in such being together, forfeits power
and becomes impotent, no matter how great his strength and how
valid his reasons.
If power were more than this potentiality in being together, if
it could be possessed like strength or applied like force instead of
being dependent upon the unreliable and only temporary agree-
ment of many wills and intentions, omnipotence would be a con-
crete human possibility. For power, like action, is boundless; it
has no physical limitation in human nature, in the bodily existence
of man, like strength. Its only limitation is the existence of other
people, but this limitation is not accidental, because human power
corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin with. For the
same reason, power can be divided without decreasing it, and the
interplay of powers with their checks and balances is even liable
to generate more power, so long, at least, as the interplay is alive
and has not resulted in a stalemate. Strength, on the contrary, is
indivisible, and while it, too, is checked and balanced by the pres-
ence of others, the interplay of plurality in this case spells a defi-
nite limitation on the strength of the individual, which is kept in
bounds and may be overpowered by the power potential of the
many. An identification of the strength necessary for the produc-
tion of things with the power necessary for action is conceivable
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The Human Condition
only as the divine attribute of one god. Omnipotence therefore is
never an attribute of gods in polytheism, no matter how superior
the strength of the gods may be to the forces of men. Conversely,
aspiration toward omnipotence always implies—apart from its
Utopian hubris— the destruction of plurality.
Under the conditions of human life, the only alternative to
power is not strength-—which is helpless against power-—but
force, which indeed one man alone can exert against his fellow
men and of which one or a few can possess a monopoly by acquir-
ing the means of violence. But while violence can destroy power,
it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the by
no means infrequent political combination of force and powerless-
ness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves, often
spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind
neither monuments nor stories, hardly enough memory to enter
into history at all. In historical experience and traditional theory,
this combination, even if it is not recognized as such, is known as
tyranny, and the time-honored fear of this form of government is
not exclusively inspired by its cruelty, which-—as the long series
of benevolent tyrants and enlightened despots attests—is not
among its inevitable features, but by the impotence and futility
to which it condemns the rulers as well as the ruled.
More important is a discovery made, as far as I know, only by
Montesquieu, the last political thinker to concern himself serious-
ly with the problem of forms of government. Montesquieu realized
that the outstanding characteristic of tyranny was that it rested
on isolation—on the isolation of the tyrant from his subjects and
the isolation of the subjects from each other through mutual fear
and suspicion—and hence that tyranny was not one form of gov-
ernment among others but contradicted the essential human con-
dition of plurality, the acting and speaking together, which is the
condition of all forms of political organization. Tyranny prevents
the development of power, not only in a particular segment of the
public realm but in its entirety; it generates, in other words, im-
potence as naturally as other bodies politic generate power. This,
in Montesquieu's interpretation, makes it necessary to assign it a
special position in the theory of political bodies: it alone is unable
to develop enough power to remain at all in the space of appear-
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Action
ance, the public realm; on the contrary, it develops the germs of
its own destruction the moment it comes into existence.30
Violence, curiously enough, can destroy power more easily
than it can destroy strength, and while a tyranny is always char-
acterized by the impotence of its subjects, who have lost their
human capacity to act and speak together, it is not necessarily
characterized by weakness and sterility; on the contrary, the
crafts and arts may flourish under these conditions if the ruler is
"benevolent" enough to leave his subjects alone in their isolation.
Strength, on the other hand, nature's gift to the individual which
cannot be shared with others, can cope with violence more success-
fully than with power—either heroically, by consenting to fight
and die, or stoically, by accepting suffering and challenging all
affliction through self-sufficiency and withdrawal from the world;
in either case, the integrity of the individual and his strength re-
main intact. Strength can actually be ruined only by power and is
therefore always in danger from the combined force of the many.
Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to
ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power, as the modem
age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it in glorification or
denunciation, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like
envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even
their most dangerous one.
If tyranny can be described as the always abortive attempt to
substitute violence for power, ochlocracy, or mob rule, which is
its exact counterpart, can be characterized by the much more
promising attempt to substitute power for strength. Power indeed
can ruin all strength and we know that where the main public
realm is society, there is always the danger that, through a per-
verted form of "acting together"-—by pull and pressure and the
tricks of cliques—those are brought to the fore who know nothing
and can do nothing. The vehement yearning for violence, so char-
30. In the words of Montesquieu, who ignores the difference between tyranny
and despotism: "Le principe du gouvernement despotique se corrompt sans cesse,
parcequ'il est corrompu par sa nature. Les autres gouvernements perissent,
parceque des accidents particuliers en violent le principe: celui-ci perit par son vice interieur, lorsque quelques causes accidentelles n'empechent point son principe de
se corrompre" (pp. ck., Book VIII, ch. 10).
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The Human Condition
acteristic of some of the best modern creative artists, thinkers,
scholars, and craftsmen, is a natural reaction of those whom
society has tried to cheat of their strength.31
Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance,
and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which,
unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human
affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks
its ultimate raison d'etre. Without being talked about by men and
without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice
but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual
was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice
to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and
vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes. The melancholy wisdom
of Ecclesiastes—"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. . . . There is no
new thing under the sun, . . . there is no remembrance of former
things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are
to come with those that shall come after"—does not necessarily
arise from specifically religious experience; but it is certainly un-
avoidable wherever and whenever trust in the world as a place fit
for human appearance, for action and speech, is gone. Without
action to bring into the play of the world the new beginning of
which each man is capable by virtue of being born, "there is no
new thing under the sun"; without speech to materialize and
memorialize, however tentatively, the "new things" that appear
and shine forth, "there is no remembrance"; without the enduring
permanence of a human artifact, there cannot "be any remem-
brance of things that are to come with those that shall come after."
And without power, the space of appearance brought forth through
action and speech in public will fade away as rapidly as the living
deed and the living word.
Perhaps nothing in our history has been so short-lived as trust
in power, nothing more lasting than the Platonic and Christian
distrust of the splendor attending its space of appearance, nothing
31. The extent to which Nietzsche's glorification of the will to power was
inspired by such experiences of the modern intellectual may be surmised from the
following side remark: "Denn die Ohnmacht gegen Menschen, nicht die Ohn-
macht gegen die Natur, erzeugt die desperateste Verbitterung gegen das Dasein"
(Wille zur Macht, No. 55).
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Action
—finally in the modern age—more common than the conviction
that "power corrupts." The words of Pericles, as Thucydides
reports them, are perhaps unique in their supreme confidence that
men can enact and save their greatness at the same time and, as it
were, by one and the same gesture, and that the performance as
such will be enough to generate dynamis and not need the trans-
forming reification of homo faber to keep it in reality.82 Pericles'
speech, though it certainly corresponded to and articulated the
innermost convictions of the people of Athens, has always been
read with the sad wisdom of hindsight by men who knew that his
words were spoken at the beginning of the end. Yet short-lived as
this faith in dynamis (and consequently in politics) may have been
—and it had already come to an end when the first political phi-
losophies were formulated—its bare existence has sufficed to ele-
vate action to the highest rank in the hierarchy of the vita activa
and to single out speech as the decisive distinction between human
and animal life, both of which bestowed upon politics a dignity
which even today has not altogether disappeared.
What is outstandingly clear in Pericles' formulations—and, in-
cidentally, no less transparent in Homer's poems—is that the
innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is inde-
pendent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any
eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse.
Unlike human behavior—which the Greeks, like all civilized
people, judged according to "moral standards," taking into ac-
count motives and intentions on the one hand and aims and conse-
quences on the other—action can be judged only by the criterion
of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the com-
monly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever
is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because
everything that exists is unique and sui generis.™ Thucydides, or
32. In the above-mentioned paragraph in the Funeral Oration (n. 27) Pericles
deliberately contrasts the dynamis of the polis with the craftsmanship of the poets.
3 3. The reason why Aristotle in his Poetics finds that greatness (megethos) is a prerequisite of the dramatic plot is that the drama imitates acting and acting is
judged by greatness, by its distinction from the commonplace (145Ob25). The
same, incidentally, is true for the beautiful, which resides in greatness and taxis, the joining together of the parts (1450b34 S.).
r i o 5 i
The Human Condition
Pericles, knew full well that he had broken with the normal stand-
ards for everyday behavior when he found the glory of Athens in
having left behind "everywhere everlasting remembrance [mne-
me'ta aidia] of their good and their evil deeds." The art of politics
teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant— ta
megala kai lampra, in the words of Democritus; as long as the polls
is there to inspire men to dare the extraordinary, all things are
safe; if it perishes, everything is lost.34 Motives and aims, no
matter how pure or how grandiose, are never unique; like psycho-
logical qualities, they are typical, characteristic of different types
of persons. Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each
deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its
motivation nor its achievement.
It is this insistence on the living deed and the spoken word as
the greatest achievements of which human beings are capable that
was conceptualized in Aristotle's notion of energeia ("actuality"), with which he designated all activities that do not pursue