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Contingency, History and Narration in Hannah Arendt

Fina Birulés

Professor for philosophy at the

Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

‘Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.’

Karen Blixen1

Hannah Arendt’s thinking was always far from what Agnes Heller later called the ‘redemptive paradigm’ of politics –the belief that human emancipation requires the radical surmounting of all contradictions in a homogenous community of justice, liberty and perfectly realised equality. Arendt’s thoughts regarding history, the past, memory and stories are marked by different elements derived from a clear acknowledgement of the fragility and contingency of human affairs. Among these elements we can highlight three significant reflections:

1. Her awareness of the fact that throughout modernity the thread of tradition is broken and that this rupture became irrevocable after the emergence of totalitarian regimes. From this moment on, the loss of tradition could not be viewed as something only belonging to the speculative field of ideas –as the philosophers who proclaimed the death of metaphysics throughout the 20^th century seemed to think– but, rather, to political history. Thus, Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:2 ‘We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.’3 

Moreover, Arendt4 stresses that, the disappearance of tradition does not entail an immediate loss of the past, but that it is even possible that in this situation we find ourselves before the ‘great chance to look upon the past with eyes not distracted by any tradition’.5 What has been lost is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be passed on from one generation to another. ‘What you then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation’.6 And once the past has shown itself without any common thread with the present, we must look for another kind of relationship with it.

To avoid losing the present together with tradition, Arendt thinks a kind of relationship with the past that does not lead us to an absolute historical present and that does not situate us in a world which can be maintained but not rejuvenated must be found, as characterised by Ágnes Heller.7

2. Her preoccupation with finding a kind of historiographic narrative that does not mean a justification of the emergence of totalitarian regimes. In 1953, in relation to her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she wrote: ‘The problem originally confronting me was simple and baffling at the same time: all historiography is necessarily salvation and frequently justification; it is due to man’s fear that he may forget and to his striving for something which is even more than remembrance. These impulses are already implicit in the mere observation of chronological order and they are not likely to be overcome through the interference of value-judgments which usually interrupt the narrative and make the account appear biased and “unscientific”’.8

In her reply to Eric Voegelin, Arendt declared: ‘my first problem was how to write historically about something –totalitarianism– which I did not want to conserve but, on the contrary, felt engaged to destroy’.9 She continued by stating that describing concentration camps sine ira does not mean being objective but, rather, condemning them. Moral indignation is an essential ingredient if you want to describe the totalitarian model occurring in the midst of human society and not on the moon. However, this need not entail an observation of the facts only from the victims’ point of view, since doing so means ending with an apology, which by no means is history.

Moreover, for Arendt, the emergence of totalitarian regimes didn’t only involve a political crisis, but also a problem of understanding, given that it wasn’t understandable in terms of the conceptual categories of the Western political tradition. In the cited reply to Voegelin, she recognised that one of the difficulties of The Origins of Totalitarianism is that it does not belong to any school, nor does it cover any officially recognised or orthodox tools.10 Thus, she understood that totalitarian terror should be analysed from its ‘unprecedented’ character and far from the tendency, too easy, of historians to draw analogies.

3.  Her conception of human action and the specificity of the experience of political liberty. In placing the emphasis on natality, Arendt provides a way to account for the specificity of human action: to be born is to become part of a world that already existed before we arrived and that will continue to be after we leave; to be born is to appear, burst in and interrupt. In the same sense, the action is beginning, freedom; it brings out the new and is distinguished by its constituent freedom, by its unpredictability. Every action occurs in a plural context and in a web of already-existing relationships and references; it always goes further and puts in relation and motion more than the agent can predict. Thus, actions are significant or initiate something to the extent that they exceed the mutual expectations that constitute human relationships. As opposed to fabrication and work, they are not governed by the means-end logic and their results are not calculable or limited, characterising themselves by their contingency. ‘The real history in which we are committed to while we are living does not have any visible or invisible creator, because it is not made.’11 It is because of this that one of the fundamental questions of Arendt’s treatment of history and understanding is: how to account for the moments of human freedom in history without eliminating contingency or opting for predictability, as philosophy has been doing? Arendt’s point of view is characterised by taking seriously the fact that when we act, we never know the results of our actions; if we knew, we would not be free. In acting, a relationship with the unknown is established so that in a way, ‘somebody’ does not know what is he/she doing, the temporality and contingency of being with others are, to a certain extent, the imposed conditions to be able to disclose his/her  identity, to be able to say the ‘who of somebody’. Arendt thus understands that there is no immediate knowledge of oneself but, rather, continuous appropriations through of stories. Perhaps, in answering the question ‘Who are you?’ one would have to respond with some lines from one of Isak Dinesen’s characters: ‘in the classic manner, and to tell you a story’12

Arendt is not inclined to give in to the idea according to which, in taking into account human events it is necessary to ignore the concrete and particular and, in the same stroke, eliminate the aspect of plurality and unpredictability of the action. She wrote in her Denktagebuch: ‘Sobald man der Beliebigkeit und Kontingenz des Konkreten entrinnen will, fällt man in die Beliebigkeit und Kontingenz des Abstrakten, die sich Darin äussert, dass das Konkrete bereit ist, sich von jeglicher gedanklichen Notwendigkeit beherrschen zu lassen’.13

Facing this, Arendt tries to illuminate the world as a scene of action and not as a place for the development of social processes. Hence, she backs reflective judgement and imagination, and also thinking of the particular, since after the loss of tradition, understanding has the mission of ‘anchoring man in the world that, without judgement, would not have meaning or existential reality…’14 When we say: we cannot understand now, we want to say: we cannot send out roots, we are condemned to the surface. 15

Thinking and Narrating the Particular

To assume contingency does not mean a renunciation of thinking or submission to the accidental but, rather,

 a clear and firm willingness for responsibility toward the world. Understanding the event does not mean ‘denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and consciously bearing the burden that our century has placed on us –neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality –whatever it may be’.16 Reconciling oneself to what happened does not mean discovering the Hegelian ruse of reason in history but, rather, overcoming our estrangement and maintaining contact with our world. ‘Who says what is –λέγει τά έόυτα- always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning’.17

As Melvyn Hill underlined, storytelling gives an account of what happens in terms of initiatives, more than abstract chains of causes and effects that obscure the interaction between people.18 Action always produces stories, intentionally or unintentionally. For Arendt, the perpetuation of memory in the story is the remedy for the frailty in acting, since the narrative imitates the unpredictability of the human condition and poetically reproduces contingency,19 without cancelling it. As we have said, the agent cannot control the results of his/her actions. Only when it's too late he/she will know what he/she has done: ‘the light that illuminates processes of action, and therefore all historical processes, appears only at their end’.20 What distinguishes the meaning of an act can only be revealed when the action itself has been completed and has become a story susceptible to being told.

Arendt emphasises the unifying character of the story: in the narrative we make sense of the heterogeneous –actions, passions, circumstances, the blows of fortune– without cancelling it or defining it. As Simona Forti has written: ‘the narrative is essentially a linguistic device that reconstructs that which has happened in history through a plot that privileges human agents more than impersonal processes and that no longer derives its meaning of the particular from the general’.21 We find ourselves far, then, from the teleology of philosophers of history and the causal explanations derived from the desire to make a science of historiography. What is more, unlike philosophers, Arendt understands the continuist conception of history is not defensible; there is no single story that establishes the meaning of actions. There is not a single spectator or a single author: ‘history is a story which has many beginnings but no end’22 and an account must be given of how much escapes to closed rationality which does not contemplate ruptures or the unexpected. This is ‘zu urteilen ohne den Anspruch, das Ganze in der Hand zu haben, uns sogar ohne etwas Dahinter-stehendes, Verborgenes zu verurteilen’. 23 Although the story does not solve any problems and does not master anything once and for all, it adds an element more to the repertoire of the world, it enables us to endure, not as a species but as a plurality of whos.

Although Arendt would be in total harmony with the idea that the work of narrating history never ends, there is no profession of relativism there at all but, rather, a gesture to recognize the unstable and provisional quality of historical truth. The emphasis on retrospective narration and backing the fragment are connected to her strong concern for the importance of factual truths. Arendt is aware –and has experience of it– that, before the onslaught of political power, facts and events are much more fragile than axioms or theories and that, once lost, no rational effort can recover them.

Likewise, in referring to the vulnerability of factual truths in history, Arendt does not allude to the variety of predicates that actions support but, rather, to the dangers of the contemporary attitude of dealing with facts as if they were mere opinions. Despite the fact that generations of historians and philosophers of history have shown that there are no facts without interpretations, Arendt understands that this does not constitute an argument against the existence of the objective question, nor can it justify the elimination of dividing lines between fact, opinion and interpretation.24 Facts are beyond consensus and agreements, they have to do with common reality itself. Factual truth is always tied to other people. It refers to events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by direct testimony, by records, documents and monuments and depends on statements: it only exists when talking about it. Its opposite is not, therefore, error, or illusion, or opinion, but deliberate falsehood or deceit, that is, the flight from reality.

Storytelling: Notes on Benjamin and Karen Blixen

There are many texts by Arendt to which we could refer to account for her conception of the story and the role of storytelling in history. Years ago, André Enegren made a list: the living history of the Eichmann trial, the reflective history of The Origins, the counter-philosophy of history of On Revolution, the biography on Rahel Varnhagen and some texts from Hidden Tradition, the stories from Men in Dark Times and a long etcetera. 25 In general, we can say that in all these texts the emphasis is, on the one hand, on the fact that thought arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them in order to take its bearings26 and, on the other hand, on the role of retrospective storytelling and its ability to bring out the significance of the event in its particularity.

In her controversial book on Eichmann, Arendt simulates a distant and non-partisan observation point, while assuming the voice of a fictitious moving observer who would also be involved in the voice of the observed murderer. As we have seen, Arendt does not usually try to reflect reality objectively but, rather, accurately describe a phenomenon, to look at it from forgotten perspectives: confronting experiences or problems we are always surprised when she shines the light where we hadn’t looked and shows them to us from an unexpected perspective. As Ágnes Heller wrote, 27Arendt usually knows in advance what she is looking for in the stories she tells, despite (sometimes) finding or discovering something unexpected. ‘It was this strategy of letting Eichmann speak through –not in– her voice that many of her Jewish critics found most objectionable [....]. Arendt, however, was not concerned with cultural grieving but with understanding the quality of Eichmann’s guilt.’28 Her purpose ‘was not to commemorate the defeated and the dead, but to write from their standpoint and, hence, to display their absence, their invisibility’.29 She wrote from within the catastrophe, from the point of view of the defeated, making no apology for them. By using the resource of the oratio obliqua,30 Arendt allowed the voice of Eichmann to be heard and judged through the perspective provided by the context. She was thus inviting judgement and discussion, and proposed an indirect way of judging: the reader was allowed to enter the story, that not only combined and organised a large number of different details, but also allowed the reader to maintain a certain distance, address various issues as they happened and not be overwhelmed by the pain and suffering of victims.

Texts such as The Origins of Totalitarianism or On Revolution show us how Arendt confronted historical events or those of her present –the emergence of totalitarian regimes (‘Human history has known no story more difficult to tell’)31 and the modern revolutions– and wrote about them as unprecedented phenomena. To do this, Arendt turns to what, following to Judith N. Shklar,32 I have characterised as a kind of monumental history: a kind of history that teaches us to praise and condemn, and which is very similar to the songs of the epic poets.33

However, in her book on Rahel Varnhagen or in the silhouettes34 of Brecht, Benjamin, Broch, Dinesen or Luxemburg that she would include in Men in Dark Times actions, (perhaps exemplary ones), of the great Greek heroes35 are not written but, rather, the actions of the beaten, the antiheroes, the excluded; the actions of those who are aware of the opacity of their present.

We have seen that action without a name, without a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless, and that one of the ways through which the who can reveal is the retrospective story. To illustrate this point, in The Human Condition Arendt alludes to the Book VIII of the Odyssey, in which the hero finds himself face to face with the bard and, upon hearing the story of his own actions, deeds and sufferings, cannot hold back the tears; the story had converted a mere event in ‘history’.36 Arendt views this fragment of the Odyssey as the beginning, poetically speaking, of the category of history. Every story tells how a life has answered the call and care of the world, how it has been exposed, how it has decided to appear, so that to recite, to tell, is to witness what is experienced, to resist; it is giving voice to the defeated as the poet Homer did when decided to sing about the deeds of the winners Trojans no less than about those of the defeated.

Far from considering that an individual life is determined by a period, Arendt suggests that we should understand it as being able to illuminate it. Often, we know what has been given to us rather than chosen, what is common to us –in Arendt’s case, being a Jew–, through the ways of responding to it and, possibly, this is what Arendt attempts to show in essays like The Hidden Tradition or those in which she studied figures like Rosa Luxemburg, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht and Waldemar Gurian. At birth, everyone receives something contingent and not chosen, a political present, a particular configuration of the world. Every life begins at a definite moment in time, in a particular place, in the context of a particular community and with some particular physical or psychological characteristics, and this beginning is not voluntary. To be born is to join a world of relationships, discourses and norms that we have not decided and that, to some extent, constitutes us. What is given to us is not, however, a neutral fact but, rather, is presented as a display of differences that intertwine in each one of us. However, this that we are given imposes on us, it does not confer, in itself, any kind of singularity. This would be shaped in taking the differences as our own, in taking the initiative: re-present them, put them into play through words and actions.37

As noted by Young-Bruehl, despite the fact that what Arendt calls her old-fashioned storytelling38 has never been accurately characterized by the author and which we even find in various forms, I would like to dwell, at this point, on the importance that Walter Benjamin and Karen Blixen have. In fact, with respect to Benjamin, it has frequently been noted that Arendt inherited from him the conception that once the thread of tradition has been irreversibly broken, stories and tales have the ability to save the world. Benjamin, aware of the decline of the experience transmitted during the interwar period, backs the figure of the collector who collects fragments and fragments from the ruins of the past, emphasizes in his work the modern role of quotes, and writes from the conviction that while the idea of continuum destroys everything, discontinuum is the foundation of an authentic tradition. In Arendt we also find an attention to fragments that is not intended to reconstitute a whole, as well as a look at the past and at political freedom in terms of stoppage or possible interruption of the historical continuum, although she says that in each present breaks or gaps are always possible and natality, thinkable, while Benjamin’s breaks leave the Messianic hope vibrating.39

Continuation/Fortsetzung