A response to Martel’s ‘ Amo: Volu ut sis : Love,willing,and Arendt’s reluctant embrace of sovereignty’

I. Martel’s reading of Arendt: some disagreements

Martel begins with a questionable premise: ‘In her attempt to reconcile the Christian will with the classical orientation towards action, Arendt turns to Augustine, essentially adopting his concept of the will as her own’ (Martel, 2008: 289). While Arendt’s understanding of the will is essentially Augustinian, I am not sure that she is attempting, nor needs to attempt, to reconcile the Christian will with the classical understanding of freedom. As Roy Tsao has argued, it may be a mistake to read Arendt as uncritically adopting the Greek conception of politics and action, and thus to the extent that Arendt would be interested in reconciling the Christian will with the Greek concept of action, one would first have to fully explicate what Arendt takes, and does not take, from the Greeks (Tsao, 2002). The importance of Martel’s premise to his whole argument will become evident when we turn to the relationship between the I-can and the I-will. But even if we assume the validity of the premise, the un-Arendtian language he uses to describe the features and attributes of the will in regards to perception, memory, imagination, and intellect lead him into thornier problems when the terms are employed to account for Arendt’s theory of action.

Martel writes: ‘For both thinkers [Arendt and Augustine], the power of the will stems in part from the fact that it is the will that mediates between the inner life of the mind (of which the will itself is a part) and our sensory perceptions about the outside world. Thus the will is the interior faculty that has the most to do with representing exteriority to ourselves' (Martel, 2008: 289). In this passage we are already led to the central opposition which structures Martel’s reading of Arendt: the inner and the outer, interiority and exteriority. Although I understand the sense of Martel’s claim here, I am unclear as to what is meant by ‘mediates' and ‘representing’, terms which are not found in Arendt’s own descriptions of the will. How can the will mediate, and thereby greatly contribute to representing exteriority when, as Arendt writes of the Augustinian will, ‘it is in the nature of the will to command and demand obedience’? (Arendt, 1978b: 95). The will doesn’t quite mediate; it commands the other passive faculties of the mind – memory and intellect – as well as the sense organs and the imagination. According to Arendt, ‘The Will tells the memory what to retain and what to forget; it tells the intellect what to choose for its understanding’ (Arendt, 1978b: 99). I suppose that this can be construed as mediation, but it is certainly not what Hegel has in mind by mediation, nor does it metaphorically connote the figure of a mediator, one who assesses the interests of competing parties; the will, as Arendt describes it, is more a dictator than mediator.

As Martel notes, the will also plays a role in sensory perception. Again, however, its task is best defined not by mediation or representation; rather, the will’s role is to focus the sense organs upon an object, thus transforming meaningless sense impressions (which we can have even when we are not really seeing or hearing) into perceptions (which become meaningful in the attention we pay to them; Arendt, 1978b: 100). When Martel cites Arendt’s claim that

the immense power that the mind has, for example, to ‘arouse the genital organs' through a sheer act of imagination is ‘due not to the Intellect and not to Memory but only to the Will that unites the mind’s inwardness with the outward world’. (Martel, 2008: 289)

While I would not use Martel’s language for describing the will, the terms Martel employs, as well as the broader framework of the inner/outer distinction, become more problematic when they are used to describe action. Martel’s reading of the will in the context of the inner and the outer authorizes the idea that Arendt ‘seeks to free us, as it were… and through action allow the will to experience its own (externalized) spontaneity and thereby truly achieve the willing subject’s freedom’ (Martel, 2008: 291). How can the will ‘experience’ its own freedom outside itself if, as Arendt writes, ‘the will, addressing itself to itself, arouses the counter-will because the exchange is entirely mental’? (Arendt, 1978b: 95). If the will experiences anything, in both Augustine and Arendt, it is its own impotence, its own incapacity to fully will or nill any particular action; yet this impotence is not the impotence of an ‘I-will but I-cannot,’; that is, the relationship between the will to do something and the lack of power to actualize that desire. The conflict is solely within the will. What redeems the will is not anything mental but action, because ‘the Will is redeemed by ceasing to will and starting to act, and the cessation cannot originate in an act of the will-not-to-will because this would be but another volition’ (Arendt, 1978b: 102). In other words, where there is action, there is no longer will.

Although it is true that in action ‘we surprise ourselves,’ it is not the case that in action ‘the will “learns” what it really willed; our action represents to our interiority what we “really” felt or wanted’ (Martel, 2008: 290). This explanation – granting the importance of the inverted commas – almost suggests psychoanalysis, and a too quickly terminable therapy. It makes of our actions not so much symptoms which require interpretation but confirmations of what we apparently, but obscurely (or unknowingly), always wanted. But why do we have any reason to think – and does Arendt’s theory of action require us to think – that our actions testify to what we unknowingly willed? Is it the case, for example, that Paul’s description of he who wills the good yet nonetheless sins is necessarily mistaken, for the sinful act proves that he really wanted to sin? To think so seems to entail that there are no accidents, no contingencies that traverse the inner and the outer, no actions which do not in some way spring from the will as the (responsible) origin of each action. Such a view is highly amenable to many thinkers (Kant, for example) who see the collapse of morality without such a view, and it is for this reason, amongst others, that Kant locates spontaneity not in the phenomenal world but in the noumenal self, saving freedom only by exiling it to a world which never appears, and which we cannot, by definition, experience. But is Arendt such a thinker? Isn’t she the one who thinks responsibility and evil beyond intention and will, beyond Paul and Augustine, for example in Eichmann in Jerusalem? Martel’s explanation, and the questions it raises, seem forced upon him by the inner/outer opposition, as well as the description of the will as mediating and representing. If the will is not best defined in terms of representing and mediating, then the claim that action externally represents the interior will – whereas in perception the will is crucial in representing the exterior internally – suggests a false problem.

Far from hedging her earlier claims about the relationship of the will to free action, the later Arendt is consistent with what she wrote in ‘What is Freedom?’. There, Arendt writes that ‘Action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other;’ and further, ‘Action, insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will – although it needs both for the execution of any particular goal’ (Arendt, 1968: 151–2). It is not the case that the will is unrelated to (the description of) action; but it is only insofar as action is free of the will (and the intellect) that it is, in fact, free. That our actions surprise us does not reveal that we wanted something other than what we thought we wanted; the surprise of our own action reveals that what we want, and why we want it is, once we act, very often irrelevant to what happens, to what appears in the world. We are surprised, in other words, because our actions may very well disclose both ourselves and the world without any reference to, or control by, the ‘inner’ self at all.

These problems come to a head when Martel, in the context of his discussion of sovereignty, imposes the difference between the inner and the outer onto the distinction between the ‘I-will’ and the ‘I-can.’ For Martel’s Arendt, on the one hand the ‘I-can’ is a ‘perfect and classical exteriority’, a ‘pure externality… entirely dictated by spontaneous actions, actions which reflect and are oriented towards their public context’ (Martel, 2008: 295). The ‘I-will’ on the other hand has to do with, as we have seen, the inner world of the mental, a ‘Christian interiority’ (Martel, 2008: 295). Yet the ‘I-can’ is not something ‘outside’ or exterior to the individual, even if freedom, for Arendt, is thought in terms of publicity and the world of appearances. The proper context for thinking about the ‘I-can’ is the Aristotelian distinction between dynamis and energeia, potentiality and actuality, found in Book Theta of the Metaphysics. ¹ The ‘I-can’ is a potential-to-do which the actor possesses. Like the builder who can build even when he is not building; and the musician who can play even when he is not playing; the actor can be free even when he is not acting. But, Arendt stresses, ‘Men are free – as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom – as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same’ (Arendt, 1968: 153). And if, as Arendt claims early in Thinking in The Life of the Mind, ‘Being and Appearing coincide,’ then being free is appearing free; that is, freedom is to be ascribed to actors who are acting, to actors who appear as actors. (Arendt, 1978a: 19). Thus, the ‘externality’ or ‘exteriority’ of action lies in the act itself, in the actuality of action in the world of appearances; the ‘I-can,’ however, is a capacity of each individual by virtue, as Arendt repeatedly tells us, of being born. When Arendt writes that if ancient philosophy had been aware at all of the Augustinian conflict between the ‘I-will’ and the ‘I-can’ it would have understood freedom as belonging to the ‘I-can’ or to the coincidence of the two, I do not take her to be claiming that freedom is in fact the coincidence of the two (Arendt, 1968: 159). I may, after all, very well act, in the Arendtian sense, without willing to act at all (I may just be refusing to stand up on a bus because I am tired, or giving what I think and intend as a typical funeral oration on a battlefield). Crucial to action is publicity, to the spectators who make of my action something meaningful, who in fact co-constitute my action insofar as action, in order to be action, requires a pre-existing web of relationships in which it finds a place. To see the distinction between the ‘I-can’ and the ‘I-will’ as a distinction between the outer and the inner is to once again pose a false problem. It is this false problem that, I believe, puts into question Martel’s attempt to rescue the will from Arendt’s banishment of it from the political.

The inner/outer distinction continues to manifest itself, and make problematic, Martel’s attempt to reread and limit Arendt’s categorical rejection of sovereignty. The central text which Martel employs to restrict Arendt’s rejection is from The Human Condition, where Arendt tells us that, through the force of mutual promising, ‘Sovereignty, which is always spurious if claimed by an isolated single entity, be it the individual entity of the person or the collective identity of a nation, assumes, in the case of many men bound by promises, a certain limited reality’ (Arendt, 1998: 245). Arendt goes on: ‘The sovereignty resides in the resulting, limited independence from the incalculability of the future, and its limits are the same as those inherent in the faculty itself of making and keeping promises’ (Arendt, 1998: 245, emphasis added). Martel takes this passage to indicate an admission of a very limited form of sovereignty back into Arendt’s political thought. But what are we to make of the reintroduction of the word ‘sovereignty’ in this passage? The citation occurs near the end of the chapter ‘Action’, in the context of a discussion first about forgiveness as a response to the irreversibility of action, and second about promising as a response to action’s unpredictability. Arendt turns to forgiveness and promising because both are themselves unpredictable, both examples of action, both, as Arendt says, explicitly of forgiveness, actions which do not merely re-act but act anew (Arendt, 1998: 241). Sovereignty, when claimed by either an individual (as seems to be the case in Hobbes) or a collective generalized single will (as in Rousseau) is ‘bad’ because it employs the will to command and dominate others, and thus makes both the sovereign and the subject unfree (Arendt, 1968: 164). Promising achieves the ‘limited reality’ of ‘sovereignty’ precisely because it is, as Arendt importantly adds, mutual promising. In other words, Arendt’s discussion of promising has to be understood as a commitment to the very (radical) spontaneity, publicity, and plurality of freedom, and not, as Martel writes, to a freedom that ‘to be acceptable,’ requires ‘that the future be incalculable, but not too incalculable’ and freedom ‘spontaneous, but not too spontaneous' (Martel, 2008: 302). ² Promising is an act of freedom, and thus the limits of the ‘sovereignty’ introduced by promising are nothing more, as Arendt herself claims, than the limits of promising itself. What are those limits? Promises, in order not to become ‘bad’ forms of sovereignty, must both remain ‘isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty,’ and relative to ‘an agreed purpose for which alone the promises are valid and binding’ (Arendt, 1998: 244–5). What happens if the members of the polis no longer agree to the purpose? The promises are no longer morally valid and binding, precisely because

in so far as morality is more than the sum total of mores… it has, at least politically, no more to support itself than the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them. (Arendt, 1998: 245)

And this is where I believe Martel is right, and is once again – see his Love is a Sweet Chain – helping us understand and emphasize the importance of love in Arendt’s thought. Although I disagree with some points in his reading of Arendtian love, it is love of, and care for, the world which sustains politics without sovereignty. Whether one agrees with Martel that ‘Amo: volo ut sis’ should be read as ‘I wish to want you to be’ (and hence to make it a willful promise), that it is love – an affect and desire which wants nothing more than to praise, and keep in existence, that which is loved – which engenders, and ‘stabilizes' the political seems to me to be where, in Arendt’s work, her spade is turned. As anyone who has loved knows, however, love can be as fickle, as contingent, as undesired and as un-willful as anything else. It is not much to hold on to. But this is what is at stake in affirming our natality, the sheer fact of human freedom; and when Arendt raises the possibility, at the end of Willing, that it is up to Judgment to help us understand what pleasure there might be in being natal (and thus whether we can affirm, even love, our natality), we are once again led back, at the end of her work, to natality. It is in the context of natality, of what it means in Arendt’s work, that Arendt’s rejection of the will and of sovereignty achieves its most powerful expression. I would now like to briefly offer the suggestion that natality is the best context within which to understand Arendt’s rejection of the will and sovereignty.

Natality is, however central to Arendt’s thought, given little exhaustive analysis. We know that Arendt defines human beings as natals as well as mortals, and that natality is, amongst all the human conditions, the condition most deeply linked to the capacity to act. What the philosophical status of natality is (metaphysical, ontological, or as I would argue, phenomenological) remains unclear. To provide an exhaustive account of natality would require a very long essay, if not a book. It would have to note the meanings of natality in Arendt’s essay on education; the link between natality and what Arendt calls the ‘paradoxical plurality of unique beings,’; that is, the co-primordality of plurality, singularity, and relationality; and, of course, the relationship of natality to action. But in order to suggest why I think Arendt’s rejection of the will and sovereignty is best understood in the context of natality, I would like to offer the briefest phenomenological description of birth.

‘I cannot will my own birth.’ This statement, I would argue, is biologically, logically, and phenomenologically true. Our birth cannot be willed by the newborn because it is biologically produced by two other human beings; it cannot be willed logically because, one must presume (without getting into deep metaphysical and theological difficulties), the willing subject cannot logically precede its existence; and it is phenomenologically true because, amongst other reasons, the wisdom of Silenus Arendt often mentions – the best is to never have been born, the second best to die quickly – would make little to no sense unless our birth is something we cannot control, cannot choose. Now, recall the citation above from ‘What is Freedom?’ in which Arendt claims that action, in order to be free, must transcend the will (and the intellect). Also recall that action, as Arendt writes in The Human Condition

is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance… 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. (Arendt, 1998: 177)

Thus, Arendt’s rejection of sovereignty as the political form which willfully oppresses emerges from natality as well. Sovereignty is rejected because it puts in danger what can always be eliminated, namely one of the human conditions – natality – and the capacity which springs from natality: action. For this reason, even the limited form of ‘sovereignty’ which is based on mutual promises is given no other foundation than action itself, of which promising is but one instantiation. The political, as the realm of action, cannot be guaranteed by anything, because natality – the condition of action – is non-willful, the will being the faculty which attempts to control. That this creates an unstable situation is obvious. Natality is not some savior, some element of human existence to which we can always turn for salvation: natality is not a theological concept. As Arendt writes in ‘The Crisis of Education,’ the fact that it is the newborns who will renew a world out of joint does not mean that ‘the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation’ (Arendt, 1968: 186). The new that natals bring through action does not necessarily save; it may destroy that which it aims to preserve (totalitarianism was new; the nuclear bomb is action into nature). For this reason, once again, we can depend on nothing but the ‘good will’ of all of us to save the world from the destruction the new may bring by enacting promises, forgiving, and educating. Natality is a pharmakon.

Arendt’s dive into the depths of the tradition has offered to us the question: can we affirm natality, can we affirm that which is – most acutely seen in our modernity – the cure and the disease? Ought we to reject the will and sovereignty as principles of the political? Arendt, as I read her – and of course, as I think she ought to be read – says yes to both questions. I am unsure whether Martel would say yes to the first (I have a sense he would), but it is clear that, through his reading of Arendt, he says no to the second. I would like to know Martel’s answer to the first question, and whether his answer would put into question, or support, his answer to the second. I am thankful for and to his essay, which has helped me, and I’m sure other readers of Arendt, to pose these questions, to clarify to ourselves just what we think Arendt has given us to read.