Between thinking and action

Introduction

Within contemporary debates on civil disobedience, Arendt’s work offers an alternative to both moral and legal approaches by offering a political view of disobedience based on what she terms a principle of dissent at the heart of constitutional democracies. Accordingly, she separates disobedience from the moral claims of individual conscience as well as the restrictions imposed by legalistic conceptions. In this respect, Arendt’s work on conscience is significant due to the separations she makes between thinking, conscience and civil disobedience. In the end, it is not conscience that Arendt privileges but thinking; and thinking is conceived in relation to what she posits as its opposite, that is, action and civil disobedience. As I will discuss, although Arendt views conscience as crucial to a form of reflexivity – or more properly as the outcome of thinking – which resists cooption or habituation, she also argues against a direct connection between conscience and action and emphatically wants to maintain their separation. As we will see, this differentiates Arendt’s conception both from legalistic responses, such as those advocated by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and William Scheuerman, and from moral responses based on the idea that civil disobedience derives from individual moral conscience, such as those proposed by Kimberley Brownlee. ¹

In order to examine this set of issues, in this article I first consider Arendt’s views on conscience and the arguments she makes for a Socratic notion of conscience understood as a by-product of thinking, as well as her arguments against conscience-based versions of disobedience such as those developed by Brownlee, which generally attempt to make a direct connection or at least indicate a movement from claims of individual moral conscience to political action. ² Second, I consider Arendt’s defence of a political notion of disobedience and her arguments against legal approaches such as those advocated by Rawls and Scheuerman.

I Problematizing conscience: The space between thinking and action

Arendt first considered the issue of ‘conscience’ in her doctoral dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine written in the late 1920s, but she reconsidered the issue of conscience after reporting on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and subsequently in her posthumously published work, The Life of the Mind. In her late work, significantly, the model of conscience changes from an Augustinian one to her own version of a Socratic model. Whereas the Augustinian version is based on a confessional model, one that is vertical and indicates a hierarchical relation with God or a form of self-relation based on divine law, the Socratic one in her later work represents a ‘dialogic’ model based on friendship; one that is horizontal rather than vertical. It is not confessional in the manner of facing the ‘divine law’ within oneself but rather is an inner dialogue based on the attempt to avoid self-contradiction. It appears then that, for Arendt, conventional notions of conscience, including the Augustinian one, remain too singular and monological and too closely link morality with legality or duty. ³ Instead, in her later work, Arendt wants to maintain a clear separation between law, duty and morality and to develop a dialogic and non-hierarchical model.

As Arendt makes clear in ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, her renewed reflections about ‘conscience’ were set in motion by her report on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. ⁴ What Arendt found most striking about Eichmann is not so much that he did not have a conscience but that his conscience had apparently become an instrument of absolute conformity and normalization or habituation. This set of perplexities arose during Eichmann’s own testimony, when he made it clear that he considered himself to have followed his conscience in fulfilling his ‘duty’ in regard to executing the ‘Final Solution’. It is also within this context that Arendt considers the relation between evil and conscience and employs the term the ‘banality of evil’, which became synonymous with that period of her work.

In the context of her ruminations on the ‘banality of evil’, Arendt asks the question: ‘[M]ight the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?’ ⁵ For Arendt, it was Eichmann’s lack of independent thought that was most problematic, and this inspires her to examine the relation between ‘thinking’ and conscience. It was the way in which he relied on stock phrases and clichés even when they made no sense that suggested utter conformity and the inability to think for himself, and it was this lack of thinking that, in Arendt’s opinion, was also ‘responsible … for his inability to judge in those circumstances when judgement was most needed’. ⁶ Arendt is concerned with the way in which conscience – in Eichmann’s sense of the term – represented merely indoctrination or unthinking adherence to custom or duty, not morality or judgement. It is Eichmann’s appeal to the notion of ‘conscience’ in executing and remaining dutiful to the laws of the Führer that leads Arendt to conclude: ‘[T]he sad and very uncomfortable truth of the matter probably was that it was not fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war.’ ⁷ In this sense, Eichmann claims to understand conscience as ‘the call of duty’, and it is this set of issues that urges Arendt to rethink the notion of conscience and its relation to action.

Informed by these reflections, in her later work Arendt attempts to ‘unbuild’ the notion of conscience in order to clear the ground for the main topic, which for her is ‘thinking’. In opposition to Eichmann, Arendt then comes to define conscience as a ‘by-product of thinking’ and consequently it is then the activity (or faculty) of thinking that becomes the key to understanding her view of conscience.

Thinking, for Arendt, is that ‘peculiar soundless dialogue between me and myself’, what Socrates refers to as my being one’. It highlights the fact that I can think only by enacting the ‘two-in-one’ within me, without which it would make no sense to speak of my finding ‘harmony’ within myself. ⁸ In thinking, I always return to myself, since I am my own partner in this internal dialogue. The Socratic notion then suggests that ‘I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary’, and that no matter what I do in the external world, in the space where actions are performed, I always have to return home to myself each night (or to the ‘fellow’ waiting for me) to face myself. ⁹ Arendt suggests then that the only ‘criterion of Socratic thinking is agreement, to be consistent with oneself … its opposite, to be in contradiction with oneself … actually means becoming one’s own adversary’. ¹⁰

It is this view of thinking that provides the background for Arendt’s notion of conscience. For despite Socrates’ love of the marketplace, he must always go home each night where he will have to face ‘the other fellow’ that waits there for him. It is this inner dialogue partner – ‘the fellow who awaits Socrates at home’ – that defines ‘conscience’. Hence for Arendt: ‘Conscience’s criterion for action will not be the usual rules, recognized by multitudes and agreed upon by society, but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words.’ ¹¹ In this sense, Arendt is concerned to separate conscience from any sense of external values and mores, habituation or conformity.

Moreover, Arendt develops a dialogic model rather than a singular one. In this respect, she seems to suggest that in contrast to Socrates, Eichmann does not have an internal dialogic partner; there is no inner conflict, perplexity, or tension for him, no ‘other’ within. Rather he merely follows duty and believes in the singular truth and law determined by the Führer. ¹² Arendt is alerting us to an important issue here. The problem with the ideologue, she suggests, is that he does not think but rushes immediately into politics or action. As Berkowitz puts it, the ‘importance of thinking, and hence of solitude, is that thinking interrupts the oneness, certainty, and confidence that allows ideology to overwhelm thought’. ¹³ It disrupts the claim or illusion of sovereign mastery and monological closure to difference. As I shall discuss further below, this view of thinking as disruptive to ideology or totalitarian thinking also raises the question of how thinking and conscience are related to, or, more properly, separated from political action and civil disobedience in Arendt’s work.

For Arendt, then, conscience is largely divorced from action. It is rather an interior and reflexive space understood as the by-product of thinking, not one that directly leads to acting in public or to the outer world. She wants to clearly demarcate thinking and conscience from action and politics, or, at least, she wants to suggest that conscience has implications only for political action in times of emergency. Then it operates to ‘purge opinion’ or compels agents to pause before acting, and it is this destruction of opinion that opens up the space for the faculty of judgement and represents a critical intervention in the world or within the public realm.

II Thinking, civil disobedience and politics

Against this background, and with the distinction between thinking and politics in mind, it is instructive to consider Arendt’s views on conscience in relation to her work on civil disobedience and conscientious objection. In the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, she maintains that conscience does not lead directly to political acts and that conscientious objection is not a political act in the same way as civil disobedience. Rather, citing examples in regard to both Thoreau and Socrates, she argues that the acts of these two figures exemplify forms of individual conscience, but they are not directly involved with cases of injustice to others, nor are their acts world-changing. ¹⁴ In discussing Thoreau’s refusal to pay poll tax, for example, she argues that his actions must be understood as singular or subjective acts – not intersubjective – and therefore might be acts of conscience but not public political ones. In this sense, Arendt is at pains to avoid making a direct link between conscience and civil disobedience and denies that conscience can be generally considered the basis for political action. For her, conscience is too subjective to form the basis of politics or intersubjective action; in Arendt’s view it is concerned with the individual’s own integrity and represents a private ethical view that is not generalizable to others within pluralistic and diverse societies in which ethical notions of conscience are often incommensurable. ¹⁵

For Arendt, then, conscience is not directly translatable into political action or civil disobedience because the rules of conscience hinge on ‘subjective statements’ and self-interest. ¹⁶ As the case of Socrates demonstrates, the fear of facing oneself when one returns home may dissuade the individual from evildoing but by its very nature is unpersuasive of others. Conscience, says Arendt, is highly subjective and in order to be relevant to the subject must remain so – it cannot be generalized – as one conscience is not equivalent to another. ¹⁷

Where a number of consciences ‘happen to coincide’ and conscientious objectors enter the public sphere and ‘make their voices heard’, Arendt suggests, then we have already moved out of the individual or subjective realm of conscience and the inner dialogue with oneself to an exchange of opinions in the public sphere where opinions can be contested and where agreement and disagreement with others then occur. ¹⁸ This, however, is no longer an act of conscience but an opening out to public opinion, debate and action, and this she argues is the only defensible basis for civil disobedience.

This last point raises a point of contrast with more recent views on the relation between conscience and civil disobedience. Some writers, such as Kimberley Brownlee, take an alternative route and argue that there is a need to move away from a privatization of conscience to one that is publicly defensible and communicable and moreover that we should understand moral claims as the basis for disobedience. ¹⁹ In this sense, Brownlee’s recent work queries privatized or what she terms subjectivistic notions of conscience such as the one seemingly advocated by Arendt. A question might therefore be posed about how to incorporate an intersubjective component into the notion of conscience, or to open conscience out to public accountability or intersubjective validity and therefore as the basis of generalizable acts of civil disobedience as Brownlee proposes, without falling into the problems Arendt was so concerned about in relation to Eichmann. Instead Arendt’s aim is to defend a space of contemplation or critical reflection in which the subject is able to critically separate from the unreliability of public opinion and judgement in ‘dark times’.

It must be remembered that it is due to her earlier work on totalitarianism, and especially her witnessing of the Eichmann trial, that Arendt is concerned with conformity and habituation, and this is why she moves to a solitary notion of thinking and conscience. It might be argued, though, that Arendt assumes that there can only be ‘good’ forms of thinking and does not consider the question of how, precisely, thinking and conscience prevent one from being a fanatic. What separates the conscience of the fanatic from that of the Socratic ideal type as a by-product of thinking? It can be argued that even annihilationist thinking is a form of reflexive thinking in this respect, or, to put it another way, that radical evil coheres around its own non-contradictory value position.

So, it seems there is a necessary background idea not fully articulated here by Arendt in relation to thinking and conscience; that is, an orientation of thinking and conscience around a core value that is not purely subjective. It appears as though there is need for a more explicit universalistic or context-transcending claim, an explicit appeal to a primary value such as freedom (as appears in her other work). The only glimpse we are given is the anthropological claim that Arendt makes when she bases thinking-conscience on a model of friendship and the ‘other’ within, and hence to an implicit kind of normative relationality. This solitary notion of reflection appears to be based on an model of dialogue and argumentation that belongs primarily to an intersubjective world, albeit one in which an individual also develops the capacity to reflect on her dialogue partners as well as herself even when the ‘chips are down’.

III Arendt’s political account of civil disobedience: The rejection of legal and moral conceptions

However, despite some missing pieces in Arendt’s account, she does provide some important arguments for why conscience should not be directly linked to political action. This is not only to avoid populist politics and ideological views becoming the basis for action but also to preserve a realm for reflexivity in contrast to a realm for politics. In this sense, Arendt’s views on civil disobedience are instructive. In contrast to thinkers such as Rawls, for example, who ties civil disobedience to forms of legality and legal responsibility, Arendt understands civil disobedience as an intersubjective act that is played out in the public political sphere. In this sense, although conscience is a solitary act, the reflections that arise from that act also inform the way one conducts oneself in public and how one’s actions affect others. However, instead of asserting a direct link between conscience and political action, Arendt argues for an important gap which provides a space in which one can move between thinking-conscience and political action without one being over-determined by the other. ²⁰

Concomitant with this view, Arendt also makes a strong claim that civil disobedience should be understood in thoroughly political terms. In this sense, she adopts an anti-legalistic position in regard to civil disobedience, arguing that it should not be juridified or viewed as an act punishable by law in the same manner as criminal acts. Specifically, she maintains that civil disobedience must be understood in intersubjective and public, political terms as a form of voluntary association and as collective action. For her, politics is based on dissensus rather than consensus, though it also involves participating in public argumentation with the aim of agreement. Consequently, she argues for a political response to civil disobedience, in that an institutional space might be opened up for civil disobedience within the realm of politics and government rather than being designated as an issue applicable only to the realm of law. ²¹

However, contrary to conventional opinion, Verity Smith has demonstrated that civil disobedience is in fact central to Arendt’s version of constitutionalism one that is understood as a ‘constitutionally regenerative practice’ rather than one that dismisses the rule of law as such. Civil disobedience is, then, foundational for constitutional democracy and can be understood as an activity of ‘reconstitution’ or ‘refounding’. ²² As Jay Bernstein suggests, civil disobedience represents or evokes a constitutional ‘refounding’ – it is ‘the dissent proper to democratic consent’. ²³ It is for this reason that Arendt takes an anti-legalistic view of civil disobedience, arguing that it should be understood in political terms, or, more significantly, that a political space or ‘constitutional niche’ should be opened up for acts of civil disobedience rather than it being treated as a juridical issue in the narrow sense. Although both Habermas and Rawls also view civil disobedience as amenable to constitutionality, they do not countenance a political space for civil disobedience, instead advocating tolerance and reduced legal punishment while still maintaining that civil disobedients be prepared to take legal responsibility for their actions. In contrast, Arendt advocates not merely tolerating civil disobedience but bringing it into the realm of institutional politics where civil disobedients have the opportunity to influence government by means of ‘persuasion’ and ‘qualified opinion’. ²⁴ As William Smith suggests, this proposal has a double significance, for it not only fosters governmental engagement with the claims of civil disobedients but in turn enables such claims, opinions and arguments to be scrutinized and publicly debated. ²⁵

For Arendt: ‘political institutions, no matter how well or badly designed, depend for their existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being’. In this sense, as Verity Smith enumerates, Arendt deliberately advocates a seemingly ‘paradoxical’ notion of civil disobedience, which preserves ‘a constitutional framework [only] by disrupting it, dissenting from it, and contesting it’. ²⁶ This is also why, for Arendt, it is absurd to adopt a legalistic attitude or response to civil disobedience, just as it would not make sense to accept legal responsibility for acts of civil disobedience. Rather, for her, such acts are thoroughly constitutional; in fact they are crucial for maintaining the health and openness of constitutional democracies.

Bernstein writes that for Arendt, ‘civil disobedience and revolution are structurally the same; civil disobedience is the analogue of revolutionary founding that occurs within the ordinary world of representative, constitutional democracies’. ²⁷ Rather than being considered an illegal act, civil disobedience is therefore a manifestation of the democratic power held by the people and enacted when government neglects or no longer upholds the principles necessary for its own legitimacy. In contrast to conscience, ‘acts of civil disobedience are efforts of both political argumentation and world-disclosure, that is … the revelation of the world in which the argument is to have its place’. ²⁸ Civil disobedience is then a form of ‘acting-in-concert’ and requires the basic conditions of human plurality, of speech and action in the public sphere. Such a form of action ‘springs up between [people] when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse’ and is based on ongoing speech and argumentation rather than a principle of individual non-contradiction. ²⁹ Civil disobedience is, therefore, an action within the ‘polis’ understood in the broadest sense of the term, for ‘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’. ³⁰ In this sense, like revolution, civil disobedience is a form of natality and collective creativity that re-creates anew constitutional legitimacy at the same time as it institutes constitutional change.

Arendt objects to the way in which legalistic and moral approaches attempt to justify civil disobedience by drawing on the image of the conscientious objector whose motivations are based on subjective reasons of conscience, or the constitutional testing of individuals who violate the law in order to test a particular statute or policy. ³¹ For Arendt, real change takes place in the public political realm by dissenting citizens who do not base their actions on subjective reasons nor the ‘voice of conscience’ but on debate and agreement, and ‘it is this agreement that lends credence and conviction to their opinion’. ³² As such, although Arendt acknowledges the importance of the stabilizing function of law, she also draws attention to its ‘retaining and conservative character’. ³³ For Arendt, civil disobedience is aimed at a deeper level, that of changing public opinion more generally, which provides legitimacy for the law in the first place, and only in a second step might this result in constitutional and juridical measures and changes.

In contrast to conscience, which is concerned with the self and protecting a space for thinking, reflexivity and non-contradiction, civil disobedience like revolution is ‘world-changing’, and, as Arendt remarks, the changes wrought by public, political acts ‘can be drastic indeed’. They can usher in something entirely new, something new that at the same time preserves the value of freedom and the well-being of constitutional democracies. ³⁴ In this sense, Arendt makes important arguments for maintaining a gap between conscience and civil disobedience. She privileges neither the solitary activity of the ‘life of the mind’ nor the persuasion of public opinion by others in the public sphere, but instead wants to maintain a space for each and an ongoing movement between them, without one being overdetermined or dominated by the other.

From a theorist who is more commonly associated with the prioritization of politics, Arendt’s analysis is instructive, particularly her suggestion that not everything is political or can be converted to politics. This is not to support the distinction Arendt makes, for example, in The Human Condition, between the public and private or political and social spheres, but to suggest that there remain good reasons for matters of individual conscience to be considered precisely as such – as matters of conscience not politics. However, her steadfast distinction between conscience and civil disobedience may prevent Arendt from considering other ways of conceptualizing their relation. For Arendt, as we have seen, civil disobedience requires not a subjective claim of conscience but debate, agreement and action with others in public resulting in a form of collective action, in contrast to an individual moral act of disobedience or objection to political authority, such as that taken by Thoreau. It seems, then, that Arendt did not countenance the notion that matters of conscience might be brought to the public sphere to be publicly discussed and debated, potentially opening them up to public scrutiny and contestation as well as developing into forms of collective action. Rather, for her, thinking (and its by-product conscience) remains an inner dialogue with oneself, and once issues are brought into the public sphere where they are open to public opinion, judgement and debate they become political acts around which collective action forms, which, for Arendt, is the only credible basis for civil disobedience.

In conclusion, then, there are at least three major points Arendt makes which it can be argued enhance contemporary debates on matters of conscience and civil disobedience. (1) First, via her discussion of Eichmann, she raises important arguments regarding the unreliability of conscience in ‘dark times’ that signal a cautionary note about conscience being viewed as the basis of political action. This cautionary note is well taken in contemporary politics where matters of conviction or conscience appear incommensurable or where politics (especially in its populist form) is based on a heightened moralistic stance or rhetoric. (2) Second, she therefore not only makes an important argument about the plurality of matters of conscience and their incompatibility but also suggests that not all matters are translatable to public debate or to forms of collective action. (3) Third, Arendt makes very persuasive claims as to why we should consider disobedience in political terms rather than in moral or legal ones, and to my mind, her position on disobedience remains preferable to those alternatives.

Arendt’s view of disobedience is not founded on a set of moral rights or duties but rather on political ones. In contrast to Brownlee, for example, who describes conscience-based civil disobedience as a moral right, for Arendt, the ‘right’ of civil disobedience is foundational only in the sense that it is constantly re-enacted and refounded anew. As Balibar suggests, as a form of collective action, disobedience for Arendt ‘institutes’ or even ‘invents’ values anew, and they ‘do not therefore derive from a foundation and do not derive their legitimacy from their universal, a priori character; rather they introduce the universal into history’. In this sense, there is a double move in Arendt’s work, for while constitutional democracies are considered to protect pre-existing rights she also argues that such forms of action do not aim at the ‘restoration’ of ‘an originary state of freedom or equality’; rather they are based on the openness of natality. In this sense, as discussed above, Arendt also questions any legalistic understanding of rights or legal approach to disobedience and instead positions disobedience at the ‘heart of obedience’ as a democratic principle. ³⁵

As we have seen, Arendt’s questioning of the assumption of legal positivism, the notion that the ‘law is the law’, can be traced back to her ruminations on the Eichmann trial discussed in the first part of this article, in which the entire question of duty towards the law (and duty to the law based on conscience) is thrown into relief. ³⁶ As Balibar points out, this kind of legalistic view is problematic. It assumes either that individuals have an ongoing sense of conviction and duty to the law even under the conditions of totalitarianism, when they are not only dutiful law-abiding citizens but also collaborators, or instead that a right to disobey is foundational to democracy, in which case it carries all the risks associated with the freedom that this entails. ³⁷ As Arendt identifies, however, this is a political rather than a moral or legal risk, one identified by de Tocqueville as a ‘dangerous freedom’ and a risk worth taking, as it is the means by which freedom and democracy are constantly remade. For as Arendt reminds us, here quoting de Tocqueville: ‘[I]t is by the enjoyment of dangerous freedom that [we] learn the art of rendering the dangers of freedom less formidable.’ ³⁸